What do you think about the whole idea of basing all your stories on one group of characters and setting, instead of starting with new ones in every new stories?
Or do you think about that at all? Most of us don’t. For most of us, serial comic comes naturally with the comic medium, so we hardly ever think of another form. Other forms, however, are not to neglect, so let’s start by defining a few terms to avoid later mix-up:
Ok, if you have a comic that follows the same group of characters in their setting, from one story to another, we’ll call that series.
If each of your stories features different characters and setting, without a reoccurring set of main characters, we’ll call that graphic novel; Or rather, just novel, because later I’m going to span out of comic reign. Now, if you have a novel that is short (which really depends on circumstances, but with current volume standards, I’d say under 30 pages), we’ll call it a short story.
On a slippery terrain between series and a novel, juggles a kind of comic that I’ll call epic series – a comic that follows characters, not through multiple stories, but through one long story, that surpasses novels in size and spans to years. Of course, the term “epic” is used here freely, addressing its size (that surpasses size of average novel by far) and its epic time span. What defines content of a comic as epic – let’s leave that for some other time. I’ll add that epic series are often divided into chapters that constitute as storylines which, apart from size, sets them closer to series.
Now, as far as freaky inbreeds go, there’s a cross between series and epic series, where, basically, the author applies continuity to a regular series, so that, unlike in tv series, every story includes aftermaths of previous stories; But it goes further from there, to spanning to one epic story with time. We could say that it is an epic story disguised as a common story. This is the form widely accepted by webcomic authors, who don’t want to give up on continuity as easy as on-order scriptwriters do.

Browsing through various narrative mediums, we see that the form of the novel is widely accepted by literature and film. Of course, there are many examples of novels within comics too: After the end of “golden age” of American comics, authors, trying to find alternative forms, stumbled to novels and conveniently called the new form (new to comics) “graphic novel”, in order to to distance it from monthly comic books and newspaper comics (but the real reason was, “comics” sounded too dismissive to ambitious authors). In European comics, this form of novel is rare as well; The only widely popular comic author who actually never had a series on his own is Enki Bilal. There are even fewer examples of novels within webcomics.
The reason of acceptance of novel is because the form of the novel grants independence to particular comics. This fits the needs of commercial and “industry” authors within their distribution system; But also, it fits ambitious authors who want their work to rely solely on itself, with sets of ideas that require completely different setups. The inconvenience of novels is that they require characterization and introduction all over again, while a series story just continues from previous stories. Novels also require a proper conclusion to the story and it’s much more sensitive to bad structure within story. Therefore, I don't think I'd be wrong to say that it is the harder way of telling stories.

On the other side, the form of the series is readily accepted in comics (including webcomics) and TV series. Examples include movie series like horror series (“Halloween”, “Nightmare in Elm Street”) or detective series (“Dirty Harry”, “Shaft”). The problem with film series is, they’re usually motivated by the cash income that the first movie made, instead of being planned that way from the beginning. The result is usually that sequels are by far inferior to the first part; But bad examples aren’t enough to assume that series aren’t compliant with the entire film medium.
Literature delves into the series idea at times as well (I’ll skip LoTR trilogy because I’m not sure whether a trilogy could really be called series), but if we look at given examples, we’ll notice that most series within literature fall under the label of “pulp literature”. With that, we have to keep in mind that books are often labeled as pulp unjustified. For instance, series are very often in science fiction (“Legacy”, Isaac Asimov; “Ekumen”, Ursula Le Guin...); Even though it’s very often unjustified, it’s a fact that SF is dismissed as pulp by official literature establishment. Is there a connection between bad reputation of the genre and it’s fondness of series?
My guess is that both occurrences come from the fact that most of early science fiction indeed is pulp; With respect to Verne, Wells and as the earliest masters, the generation of writers that followed them, writers to whom SF owes it’s wide appeal, were mindless pulp writers without question. On one hand, modern writers inherited a fondness of series from them. On the other hand , the genre as well as it’s critics never managed to get over the disrespect from the beginning of 20th century.

If you've followed the article closely so far, an idea that series are genuinely a pulp form probably came through your mind. Then, are they? I've already said that this is the easier path to consider, as it saves you from going through probably the most painful part every time; it grants you significant shortcuts and gives you more space. On the other hand, if the character is appealing, the reader wants to see more of him. He wants to get into his life, perhaps see him in some situations that wouldn’t normaly appear in a comic if it was a novel. If the concept is interesting, we want to see as many stories as we can come from the base idea; In webcomics, we often see many pieces of character’s everyday life before we see something that could be considered the main story. We don’t mind, as long as things we read are interesting.
There certainly is something in it that seems cheap; On the other hand, the form of the series definitely rules 20th century entertainment; I am never the one to believe in signs of apocalypse, of cultural decline of humanity in 20th century; Rather, I believe that, given the modern lifestyle, it’s simply the form that fits the need of a modern man, that gives him a way of receiving information that suits his needs more. Of course, art adjusts to the real world, because art, in its nature, is a mirror of the real world.
Why did the form of the series become so widely accepted on TV? In short, because TV programming is commercial crap; Thus, it relies on easy techniques of attracting audience. In all honesty, the form of the series grants it several of those techniques (starting with the steady character cast; If characters are appealing enough, quality of writing doesn’t really matter to the casual viewer).
If we stick with the definition of epic series given above, it is the continuity that differentiates it from common series. Now, most webcomics, literature series, film series, traditional comics, and even some TV series stick to continuity. It’s lack of continuity that makes TV series unappealing. The need to freeze characters in time so that they could be appealing as long as it’s possible with no character development and definitely little tolerance to risk are usually characteristics of no-continuity series. It is rare that this approach works. To get away from the bland impression non-continuity TV and comic series give, many webauthors reach toward the epic stories.

It’s not exaggerating to say that the form of the short story rules modern literature. It Seems like the days of big, 600-page novels have passed. Of course, great novels (in size and significance) will always be written, and some of them have been written in past century (I’ll just mention James Joyce and Thomas Man) but short stories are modern literature mainstream and their flourishing is a modern literature phenomenon. It’s a consensus that this trend is a direct effect of our modern lifestyle, fast and demanding; A short read without continuity obligations is really what a busy, modern man wants.

On the other hand, the short story is perhaps the hardest form to make. To fit the entire story structure in so little place, it’s tricky. Of course, an author can (and should) skip on many parts of usual story structure and work a lot along the way, but many short stories that choke on their own exposition show that this is not easy. Even worse, the sheer amount of pointless short comics that exist today show that authors like to keep better ideas for longer forms; Short stories are based on expendable ideas, which shows that for most artists, short form is a cop-out.

The Vast majority of comics run in series Lots of them remain unfinished; Is it more logical plan to start with a shorter form, with a higher probability of finishing it? Is reader going to return for another story by the same artist, even though it doesn’t feature old characters? For some questions, the logical answer seems to be ‘yes’, but people just keep answering it with ‘no’.

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