One of the things I picked up in London while I was there was issue #3 of Neil Gaiman’s Eternals. The more I see of these six-issue mini-series, the more I’m coming to dislike the format. Neverwhere worked OK, in part because it was 9 issues rather than 6, and in part because it was a precis of an existing novel rather than worked up from scratch. Albion and Eternals, however, both seem to me to have had to spend far too much time in set-up for the length of the entire work. They are both great series, but when I got to the end of #3, which is half-way through, in both cases I felt, “this can’t possibly end in another three issues, it is too good to get truncated like that.” I’ll buy Paul Cornell’s Pete Wisdom series, because Paul is a mate and I’m keen to see what he does with the character, but I’m not sure about future such works. I’d like to see the creators given more space.
Meanwhile Eternals is very good. I particularly like Neil’s treatment of Tony Stark, and John Romita Jr.’s depictions of the devastation left in Iron Man’s wake. Want more, want more.
Another sale! Ker-ching! I’m doing this one by one. I had a journo who called me for an interview last night promising to buy it too. The pacing of the six issue miniseries is an interesting topic. Myself, I’m doing three one-off stories that then turn out to be important to the arc of the last three issues. Coming from British comics, 22 pages seems a huge space in which to tell a story, even though I like doing splash pages. (You can get a lot done on one splash page.) I’m loving the way that Eternals feels paced differently to almost everything else out there, mainly because it feels like Sersi’s story, and so the action stuff can resolve itself at whatever speed it likes.
Six can also be too much sometimes.
There are several examples of a miniseries (or a miniseries-within-series) that would have worked very well as a three or four-issue story, but was padded out to six instead.
I blame writing for the six-issue-trade that seems to be the norm nowadays.