Geek Syndicate Issue 6 | Page 6

Geek Syndicate
Comics Have The Pitch Factor
I don’t know about you but I love comics. I really do. I love everything about them. But of late there has become a troubling craze amongst creators that I will refer to as “the Pitch Factor”. The Pitch Factor is something that I think is linked heavily with the move to reading comics in a collected, Graphic Novel format rather than in the traditional single-issue manner. Although they are essentially the same thing (in my opinion anyway), the development of the two forms must take a different path. The beats to the comic book are different with the reader expecting an exciting twist or something of intrigue at the end of every issue to bring them back for more, whereas a graphic novel can happily build to something slowly and then have the final act serve as the pay off. You might be reading this and thinking that I am worrying about spilt milk, but I’m not. There is a big and yet subtle difference between the comic book issue and the graphic novel and why the slower pacing works so well in one form but not the other: with the graphic novel you have the whole story in your hands, the comic book issue you have what is effectively a chapter in an ongoing story. Why is this a problem you ask? Say, I have bought a graphic novel for about £15. I have read the blurb on the back and I’m interested and invested enough to spend a sizeable
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amount of money (especially when comparing to a traditional prose novel) for the story. I am probably going to at least read the majority of it to give it a chance. Whereas the comic book issue, costing £3 (a fifth of the graphic novel is quite a lot) has to hook me in those twenty-two pages. If they don’t succeed why would I bother coming back next month? Herein lies the game and herein lies the problem that I think creators have started to have: they are writing comic book issues as if they are the opening chapter to a graphic novel and expecting us still to want to carry on even if there is little to hook us. In this article, I will be discussing how I think this has come from the pitch. Lets take Mark Millar, Nick Spencer and Marvel NOW! as examples. When Mark Millar announced Supercrooks, I thought it sounded a really intriguing idea. Millar’s pitch

was to the point, simple and made us all know exactly what he was talking about from the get go: Supercrooks is Ocean’s 11 meets X-Men. This was the perfect pitch: we knew it was about: supervillians who were going to pull a con on someone. Great! So I waited anxiously for Issue One to arrive on our shelves and when it did I was terribly disappointed. Don’t get me wrong, issue one of Supercrooks isn’t overtly bad: it is just predictable. “What happens in issue one?” You might well ask. A collection of supervillains plan a con. So basically all we got in issue one was the pitch. That one sentence stretched across twenty-two pages. Any twist? Not really. Cool concept, yes but not really enough to keep me coming back month in, month out. From the master of the cliffhanger, I thought I would get more from the issue. Conversely, if I had waited for this to be collected as a trade

Ocean’s 11 meets X-Men in Millar’s Supercrooks

Image © Marvel 2013