“Why Pete Doesn’t Love Saga As Much As Everyone Else: Part Whatever
Decompressed Storytelling
At the risk of being patronizing, a short explanation of terms:
Decompressed Storytelling is something we saw come into comics when, instead of telling an entire story in a book, story arcs stretched across multiple books. Maybe even a year or multiple years of books.
This is good because it can allow space for more epic tales, bigger stories, more in-depth stuff. But sometimes it’s bad because things become SO decompressed that there’s not a whole lot of story in a given issue.
I can’t imagine trying to read this book month to month. I’m not really sure why it’s published that way. It must take about 5 minutes to get through a single issue, especially when we’ve got an issue that involves a lot of narration, which tends to be something like a dozen words per panel. And with so little movement between lots of issues, how would you remember where you were last time?
That’s my main issue with the decompression in Saga. When I read volume 7, I don’t remember where we were, who’s alive and dead, and what’s happening by the time I pick up volume 8. Unless I wait for 4 or 5 volumes and read them all at once.
We see this on TV lately too. During the sort of second golden age of television, we saw shows like Mad Men and Breaking Bad, which seemed a little artificially lengthened at times. It’s not the world’s greatest sin, but it does feel like a little bit of a chore to sit down in front of something like Lost, and by the show’s end the plot or conflicts haven’t moved forward, or only advanced in the episode’s final moments (PS, Brian K. Vaughn was a writer and producer on Lost!).
If you’re like me and sometimes struggling to remember the last volume when jumping into the next, consider if that might be because, volume to volume, the story’s movement can be a little slow. “