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Yes, I do. Maybe that's why BC is home to so many of them and such good ones. Who doesn't want their daily or weekly dose of their favorite serial? Well...
I think that's why there aren't many young comic book fans now. It's all continued stories, months long story arcs that go across three or six or twenty different titles. Comics are aimed at adults now and not at kids who can't control whether they get the next issue reliably. I used to walk eight miles from our house on the edge of the desert to get the new comics that came out on Thursday, then I'd get a ride home with my dad. Yes, that's right, I would walk eight miles for an issue of Jimmy Olsen. :)
But comics back then had three or more stories in each issue, mostly complete. Action Comics featured Superman in the first story, 10 or 12 pages and it was a complete story. The first back-up was probably Tommy Tomorrow, six or eight pages complete story, about a spaceman who wore a cute purple jumpsuit with short pants. LOL. And the second backup, eight or ten pages, was Congo Bill who looked like Errol Flynn. The Congo Bill strip was a rarity in that it was sometimes a continued story from one issue to the next, but usually not more than two issues long.
Besides the features, there were featurettes, one-half, one or two page stories, usually humorous, featuring Super-Turtle, or Harold Teen, or a sad sack hobo whose name I don't remember. And a one or two page text story. In Action, this was usually Robin Hood or Hercules or even Joshua from the Bible. Postal regulations required magazines to have at least one page of mostly text. That left two to four pages for ads, besides the inside and back covers.
The ads were for things like bicycles, cap pistols, army men, sea monkeys, bb-guns, or recruiting ads for things like selling Cloverleaf Salve or Grit Magazine door to door. One of the ads was almost sure to be for the famous Charles Atlas exercise book with the little cartoon about the 97 pound weakling. :) Another page would be full of little tiny ads, 30 or 40 of them on the page. These might be for things like X-Ray Specs or back issue comic books or high heel boots. (!)
Okay, that was a bit off the point, but much as I love good serials, good stand alone stories are good, too. And just because there is a continuing character does not mean that stories cannot be standalone. One problem is that I don't have a way here to mark standalone stories featuring a continuing character as different from serials or solos.
So, I'm asking you writers out there to make a note in the Other Keywords field if a series story is a complete in one episode story. That will help some of our readers maybe get into the more addictive serial stuff. LOL.
Hugs,
Erin
Comments
I love serials too
and there are some good ones going on here right now. By the time I got seriously into comics, most of the back-up feature stories were gone, but there were the occasional featurette that covered everything from a retelling of a character's origin, to "Flash facts" that were science-based. I do recall them putting short features that went from one comic to another, so you had to track down the others to find out what happened.
Dorothycolleen
Can a stand alone
have 1300 parts - you know a long stand? Um...
Angharad ;)
Angharad
I love serials!
And there were a few of them that were T.G. Earth-349: http://www.tgfa.org/
May Your Light Forever Shine
May Your Light Forever Shine
Good anytime of the day
Hot, off the press, or with boiling water, in bread or beer, they have a roll in life but to create them I'll have to learn to spell, wand please
serial
just finished one a few days ago...still have the edit process to do but for now at least it's three parts ...two could maybe stand a alone if the reader had a really good imagination.
Thanks BC....hope I got it right this time...lol
I love cereals too. Lucky
I love cereals too. Lucky Charms, Wheaties, and now that I am older, Special K and the various brans. I think Cheerios was my favorite for a looonnng time, and I notice they are still around.
Oh, I see. Never mind. (;=)
CaroL
CaroL
When I bought comics ...
... which was a very long time ago, I used to go for the ones with few pictures and lots of print. Being tight-fisted even then I reckoned lots of print was much better value for my meagre pocket money. At that time comics like Rover, Wizard, Hotspur and Champion were meat and drink to me.
My heroes were Wilson, a super athlete of great age who wore a black tracksuit, Alf Tupper, another athlete who lived in the railway arches and trained on fish and chips, and Rockfist Rogan. It was either them or Biggles books until I moved on to Leslie Charteris (Saint), Dornford Yates or my dad's stash of racy (for the time) Hank Jansens :)
Not very keen on either serials, comic books or superheroes now so I'm finding the pickings a bit thin on BC these days. I don't count 'Bike' as a serial - it's a never ending soap and a continuing delight. Serials aren't too bad if there are regular updates but if there are big gaps I forget what's already happened (old age?) Not complaining, after all the serials and comic retcon etc aren't displacing anything. They're just not my scene.
Robi
Serialisis
I don't know if I can...I find I get so much into a character I want to flesh them out as much as I can, and they take on their own life. I started Cold Feet as an experiment, and Sarah went off to eighty six parts. The current one is at 65. Just prolix, I suppose.
I never liked comics. Mostly
I never liked comics. Mostly since the stories never have an end and I don't like characters that just can't "die". Not that there's anything wrong with that type of story though... it's also rather why I've stopped reading many of stories here since it's mostly serials and comic books.
Oh well! There are some gems that I find a couple times a month and it's always worth coming back to find more.
Jimmy Olsen et al.
Always enjoyed the mid-50s to late-60s style of DC artwork, with Jimmy Olsen (pre-Kirby) definitely part of it.
Hadn't thought of Congo Bill (who was already Congorilla part-time, by the time I got to him) in decades. Not sure whether I encountered him in Action or Adventure Comics -- probably the latter.
I really enjoyed Henry Boltinoff's comic half-pagers, especially Super-Turtle: only place I ever saw (or was able to recognize) an heroic character being parodied in his own magazine. Boltinoff's byline is still in the Sunday comics, for the Hocus-Focus find-six-differences-between-these-pictures, though Wikipedia says he died a decade ago.
Interesting, the way things turn up. Back in 1997 I was putting together a collection of 50-year old news for my parents' golden anniversary, and I came across a half-page illustrated strip (in Popular Science, I think) about future fax machines, and how they'd change our lives -- newspapers delivered electronically, police cars getting wanted bulletins, etc. The cartoony artwork looked familiar: sure enough, it was signed "H.B.".
Eric
Oh, about the real subject: there are more serials here than even I have time for, so I'm usually glad to see a stand-alone story. I certainly read the one-parters attached to serials that I am reading, e.g., Zoe's "Becoming Trina" and Saless's various introductions to the Kittyhawk recruits. Not sure how eager I'd be to read one-shots for things I'm not presently following, like the Center and Comics Retcon. (That's an entirely separate point: with multiple authors loosely if at all following a set chronology, things like those two (and Whately) tend to lose my focus and interest. No idea, though, how typical I am in that regard.)