Yakkity Yak… Backwards comics, cliffhangers, climaxes and the big reveal
BY David Hine - JULY 2006

“My name is Peter Parker and I’ve been Spider-Man since I was 15 years old. Any questions?”

I don’t listen to Howard Stern or read the New York Post, but like half the comics reading public I had the ending of Civil War 2 spoiled for me in advance. In my case I saw an early draft of Mark Millar’s script months ago. It read well. Another great issue in what looks like becoming a classic Marvel series. The unmasking itself didn’t seem like such an earth-shattering event to my jaded eyes. Hasn’t everyone been unmasked at least once? I’m sure I’ve seen Spidey’s mask pulled off a few times in the past. But Marvel has carefully built this into something special this time round. The high profile spoilers, leaked in the hours before comic stores opened for business on June 14th were a publicity coup, masterfully handled and certainly had the desired effect. The story of the unmasking was picked up by radio, TV and newspapers across the USA and Britain. The book was a sell-out. I still haven’t managed to find a copy of Civil War 2.





There has been some controversy over the release of this much information in advance. The obvious question is: Doesn’t it ruin your enjoyment of the story to have the climax thrust in your face before you’ve even cracked the covers? Almost all comics run the last page of an issue on the left hand page. Most of my own scripts end with “Page turn to reveal…” The last page is usually a full-page spread. It’s intended to have impact.

There are a number of established ways to end an issue. There’s the Character Reveal, where an ‘unexpected’ hero or villain steps out of the shadows. This is the most trite, boring and predictable way to end an episode and is almost certainly editorially imposed. It’s intended to boost sales by getting fans of the revealed character on board. This one is usually trailered with “You’ll never guess who…”, and will occasionally be spoiled by having the character plastered all over the cover. (Okay, guilty as charged: see Bishop’s appearance on the last page of District X # 1). The least successful Character Reveals are where the character is so obscure, nobody knows who the hell they are anyway and could care less. A sub-category is the (Not Really) Dead Character Reveal. And lets not even talk about the sub-sub-category: The (Not Really) Dead Jean Grey Reveal.

Then there’s the Life Threatening Situation. A character is zapped, blown up, thrown off a building or lies semi-conscious at the feet of the evil villain, who cackles “Now at last I have you at my mercy.” This only creates tension if the endangered character is minor and therefore expendable, or if the next issue is trailered with “Next issue: Somebody dies!!!”

Next up is the Major Plot Twist. Usually along the lines of “You thought I was the good guy, but now I reveal my nefarious plan.” A sub-category of the Major Plot Twist is the Oh My God! moment: Character discloses they are pregnant/dying of cancer/an alien/a robot/Jesus Christ in a previous life.

There’s also what I’ll call the Anti-Cliffhanger: a self-contained moment that doesn’t progress the plot but has emotional resonance. It usually works because the reader learns something about a character that touches them deeply. Example: Daredevil # 49. Daredevil saves Mila from Bullseye. Mila says: “You saved me.” They hug. Zoom to close-up of Matt’s haunted blind eyes. All of Matt Murdock’s strength and vulnerability captured in one deceptively simple line and one image. The sense that his heroism, his ability to save her, the security she feels when he has his arms around her, all this is why she loves him. Then, set against that, the chill of knowing the terrible responsibility that loving Mila puts on him. The memory of the previous lovers he failed to save. The anti-cliffhanger is the toughest to pull off and it has its problems because it entails a kind of closure. There is no specific lead in to next issue.

Not a problem with the Someone’s About To Get Their Ass Kicked splash, usually involving clenched fists, big snarly-face close-up or foreshortened shot of Big Guns. Best exemplified in The Ultimates.

The last episode of an arc will usually be a Closure Moment: a Sunset Kiss or a Rain-Lashed Funeral, zooming to headstone.



But the big event crossover series needs something more than all the above. It requires the Nothing Will Ever Be The Same moment. Civil War has lots of these. We’ve seen the Stanford Incident, with the schoolyard full of kids blown to oblivion, and the Spidey Unmasked scene. I promise you, there are more to come. Now these are great moments but both were all over the internet, and in the case of the Stanford Incident, previewed in other comics before Civil War # 1 was released. Moments this big need big audiences and in this respect comics are following the path of TV and movies. Movie trailers used to be teasers, now they are plot summaries. TV betrayals, declarations of love and horrible deaths are flagged weeks in advance. The only way to make sure everyone’s watching, is to tell them what’s going to happen.

The crazy thing is that no one seems that bothered any more. The public has adapted very quickly to the new mass-media and collectively we have learned new ways of assimilating information. We skim newspapers and magazines, we channel hop, watching two, three or more programmes simultaneously, we surf internet, pulling out whatever nuggets catch our eye. In order to make any sense of this media overload, we have all learned to assimilate the non-linear narrative.

When I first started writing for Marvel comics, (and this is less than three years ago,) I was warned off using too many flashbacks because they can confuse readers. Apparently there was a whole period at Marvel when flashbacks were completely taboo. Look at any mainstream comic now and you’ll see: “Two weeks ago,” “Now,” “Five minutes ago”, “Ten years ago.” Narrative is being chopped, re-arranged, and turned on its head. This used to be the province of arty-farty, post-modern experimental writers like William Burroughs and Brion Gysin who invented the cut-up technique of breaking down their stories into bits and re-splicing them. It was exciting, stimulating and often confusing, but there was no perception that this was ever going to be mainstream. But gradually it happened. Kurt Vonnegut recounted the bombing of Dresden in reverse in “Slaughterhouse 5” so the bombing becomes a creative rather than a destructive act. A ruined city is rebuilt, the dead are brought to life, bombs are taken apart, reduced to their mineral components and buried safely in the earth. Later Martin Amis shamelessly ripped off the idea to write the entire Second World War in reverse in “Time’s Arrow”. More recently we’ve had the French movie “Irreversible”, which begins with a terrible, climactic explosion of violence and moves backwards through the day to an idyllic early morning scene in a park. Movies like “Memento” “The Usual Suspects” and even “Pulp Fiction” all use elements of the cut-up technique. Just this week I read reviews of two books which are told in reverse: Sarah Water’s “Night Watch” and Alexander Master’s “A Life Backwards”. The message is clear. We have all learned non-linear perception of narrative.

To demonstrate just how far this has progressed I’ll give a couple of examples. A friend recently borrowed the DVD collection of “24: series 3”. I had inadvertently put the disks in the wrong order, so she and her husband watched episodes 21-24 first. Did it make it harder to understand? “A little challenging, but not really a problem.” They were so used to American TV jumping backwards and forwards in the story that they literally hadn’t noticed until they reached that final twenty-fourth hour after only four episodes.

More extreme is the example of my son, who a couple years back, had his first exposure to manga, reading an entire 200-plus pages of Yu-gi-oh backwards. Now that’s not only the page order, but the speech bubbles, in reverse. Admittedly he enjoyed it more when he re-read it the right way round, but what was going on in his head? Presumably he was constantly re-structuring the narrative to make sense. I would suggest that such a thing would have been beyond the capabilities of an 8-year-old just one generation ago. We all seem to be evolving a new way of absorbing information. Obviously this is driven by new technology, particularly computers and the internet.




Most of us don’t dedicate the time to read slowly and with application. Net surfing has trained us to skip across the surface of media. How often do any of us read newspaper or magazine articles from beginning to end? I admit to reading the first couple of lines and the final paragraph of reviews to judge whether a book or comic is worth reading or a movie worth watching. (If I’m really pushed for time the star-rating will do it.)

So how long before we all make do with skipping to the highlights, reading the previews and the summaries and not bothering with the actual comic, book or movie? This is, after all, how we get to know people. We meet someone. We learn their name, their occupation, where they live. As we talk to them, and meet them in different environments, more of the background unfolds. Maybe over a meal, with a couple of drinks inside them, they will reveal a great tragedy, a loss in their life. Maybe if we really get to know someone, as an intimate friend or lover we will gradually learn something like the whole story, where they really came from, the child that grew into this wonderful messed-up adult. One thing is for certain: we will never get to know someone’s story in a straightforward linear fashion. That kind of structure only happens in fiction. And now we are living in a world where fiction is imitating life.

As a writer I have very little control over how my work will be read. Less every day. So here’s what I’m thinking. Comics should no longer be constructed as 22 pages with one to ten panels per page. Let’s write our stories as individual panels. An image and maybe some dialogue. All the panels are the same size. Each panel is printed the size of a postcard, or posted on the internet (digital is good too). The consumer shuffles the cards and reads the panels at random. This way everybody reads the same story but everyone perceives it differently. If you want you can take two or more comics by different creators and shuffle them together. Take everything apart and put it back the way you want. It makes sense. More or less.

But I’m going to miss those cliffhangers and climaxes.

Spider-Man steps forward to the microphone. The cameras flash. “As most of you probably know, I've guarded my secret identity carefully over the years…”

It's possible to exaggerate the extent to which the public has come to accept non-linear narrative. Some of the movies cited above, like "Memento," are more art-house pictures than popular films. The great majority of popular stories (the "Harry Potter" books and movies come to mind) still proceed very much in a linear manner. It is true that there is far more use of flashbacks than before. "Lost" is an extreme example of this. But even here, there is a main, linear narrative thread running through every episode.

I really wish someone would declare a moritorium on the rainy funeral cliche. I'm not sure right off I've EVER seen a comic-book funeral that didn't take place in the rain. It's a rather lazy form of shorthand to show that it's supposed to be a sad occasion. Funerals do take place in bright sunlight. The last two I attended certainly did! The only rainy funeral scene I ever liked appeared in a comic a few years back. The very brief funeral scene itself was a typical cliche, but the harrowing chase through the rain that occurred after it was very effective. At least the cliche was used to lead somewhere.