Defying Expectations: Serialization in Comic Books and TV

Comics are for children. Simple stories designed to draw your attention in for five minutes to fill up some time. The same has been said about television. But making those assumptions takes away from all that those mediums have worked towards in their eighty-odd years of commercial success. That success may have started off simplistic due to the growing pains that come with creating two new forms of entertainment, but the development that came as they found their footing has led to two of the more complex American art forms. However, this complexity did not come overnight. Rather, years of hard work and experimentation in both crafts has helped creators in these two worlds to work off of each other’s creations and realize the perfect way to tell interesting and powerful stories: serialization.

Serialization involves the weaving of a long story over the course of multiple installments. While not unique to comics and TV, the weekly and monthly availability of episodic installments makes these forms particularly suited to serialized stories told over the course of many years. Both creative outlets had crude forms of story arcs throughout the mid-twentieth century, but neither began to fully utilize the storytelling opportunities of the practice until the 1980s. Though TV is considered by a wider audience to have pushed the boundaries of storytelling, I would argue that it was the parallel development of both TV and comic books over the years that have propelled the two art forms into the cultural staples they are to this day. One of the defining works that elevated the serialized format into its common usage today is Chris Claremont’s run with a large number of artists on the X-Men series of comics released from 1975 to 1991. While certainly not the only creator that defined this approach, in terms of examining the impact of comic books on the serialized format, analyzing Claremont’s sixteen year stint as the lead writer on the books is a great way to advocate for the medium’s importance and progressive growth.

In the 1960s, comic books were becoming more complex. Sure, the stories were still impossible, focusing on superheroes defending Earth from aliens and monsters and other crazy threats. But the personal elements of those behind the masks were becoming somewhat more interesting than their powers. Spider-Man was more concerned with graduating college than stopping Doc Ock. Green Arrow had to figure out how his sidekick became a heroin junkie. As these story elements began to become more prominent, Chris Claremont started writing X-Men, a boring series cancelled for being about a private school of teenage mutants. This lackluster premise allowed him to start from scratch and make something new, following the relaunch of the series by writer Len Wein and penciller Dave Cockrum in Giant-Size X-Men #1. The seeds of the changes he would bring to comics were planted fairly early on. In his second issue on the job, he killed off one of the new lead characters. Death was something that barely touched comics, as characters tended to live to be around 20-30 years old in-perpetuity. This move, though overused as it may be today, helped ground the characters in the real world in a way that hadn’t been felt before. In the issue following this, X-Men #96, he began to let a subplot marinate that would stretch out for the next five years. Working with Cockrum and John Byrne, Cockrum’s successor on pencilling, the trio began what became known as “The Phoenix Saga,” a sprawling space opera that redefined the boundaries of comic books. Instead of each issue existing independently of one another, the stories were chapters in a book, integral to an overarching narrative that required every piece to work with each other. This was unheard of at the time, as publishers didn’t think the audience would appreciate such a drawn out story like this. However, the story sold like crazy and readers wanted more. Marvel editorial leaned into it and gave Claremont and Co. power to do almost anything they wanted.

Giving in to X-Men allowed it to expand beyond what was previously thought possible for a comic book series. Women, who had previously been relegated to a supporting role in any comics they were in, now had top billing in X-Men. Jean Grey, the “housemaid” and sole woman on the team in the 1960s, developed into the Phoenix, gaining the power to rearrange molecules and devour entire solar systems. Storm, a weather manipulating mutant from Africa, slowly evolved from a stereotypical damsel-in-distress into a confident brawler, eventually taking over as leader of the team after a few years. Claremont made these changes because of his (true) belief that “women tend to get very short shrift in comics… they are either portrayed as wallflowers or as super-macho insensitive men,” begging the question, “can you not have a woman who is ruthless and capable and courageous and articulate” (Sanderson 23-24)? The book later developed to have the number of women on the team equal to or outnumbering the men, both while Claremont was writing and after he left. This not only helped to improve the popularity of the series, but drew in more women to comics over the years. This included both readers and creators, like Marjorie Liu and Jill Thompson, both of whom have been able to have shots working on the franchise themselves. In a statistical sense, this progressive move helped issues of the series to pass the Bechdel Test (a measurement of the minimum for representing women in media) 82% of the time, beating other Marvel books published in the 80s by between 30-82%. 

Now, while all of this is largely positive, there are a few things to remember. Firstly, Chris Claremont is a man. He has the privilege of writing comics and winds up making certain assumptions about his characters all because of his gender. Secondly, the Bechdel Test is a minimum requirement for writing female characters. All one needs to do is write at least one conversation between two women about something other than men and that qualifies. It is an incredibly low bar to pass. Finally, what’s important to note is that Claremont did not make these changes alone. Two of the most influential voices in X-Men during the 1980s were Louise Simonson and Ann Nocenti, Claremont’s editors on the line of books from 1980 until 1988. Without their input and dedication, the stories would not have been as forward thinking or dedicated to the women of the series as they turned out to be. It would be irresponsible to discuss the evolution of the X-Men without mentioning them or their impact. 

Outside of these more social progressive changes, Simonson and Nocenti should also be credited with helping to evolve the storytelling methods by further encouraging Claremont’s use of subplots in stories. When those subplots flew out of control and the stories became messier, his editors would tell him “you have this plot thread and this plot thread, pick something and run with it.” Though they both eventually left their jobs as editors to start writing their own books, it was Simonson who stayed with the franchise. Her books were even more comparable to soap operas than the main X-Men book, as her opinion was that it was the “character interactions and the emotions behind it, how they feel about things that really matter …. the physical conflict for me has to externalize an interpersonal conflict” (Edidin and Stokes 2018). This approach to her writing wasn’t started by her or Claremont, as romance comics were rather prominent in the 1950s. However, it was the way the two of them introduced this idea to mainstream superhero comics in the mid 80s that boosted these comics to new heights, inspiring other series to implement the same formula. Combined with the use of interconnected “crossovers” of characters and stories between the books, X-Men comics became the highest selling comics in the entire industry for the rest of the decade.

Other comics from around the industry began to carve out their own success, both drawing from the success of serialization in X-Men and carving their own paths with new ideas. British writer Alan Moore revolutionized what could be told in comics, introducing existentialism and promoting social themes, with stories at DC Comics like Swamp Thing and Watchmen. Comics veterans Marv Wolfman and George Perez also teamed up at DC to create The New Teen Titans, the Distinguished Competition’s answer to X-Men, which became almost as popular through its similar soap opera focus. Outside of the two biggest comics companies, independent publishers started to gain a bigger presence with books like Cerebus, a three-hundred issue saga about an irreverent aardvark, and Love and Rockets, one of the first comics focused on straightforward queer stories, rather than subtextual ones. X-Men was not the pinnacle of comics in the 80s, but rather, just one of the seeds that allowed for comics to become something more than just recyclable newspaper reprints.

Simultaneously to all of this development, some of the same story changes in these books had begun to affect television. Just like most comic issues, stories in TV shows of the first half of the twentieth century rarely continued from episode to episode. Though it did occasionally happen, “the continuing story line [was sparingly utilized] anywhere but in the soap opera” until the end of the 1970s (Thompson and Allen 2019). Networks hadn’t seen the feasibility in this idea, as TV was meant to be light and breezy, something to do when there was nothing else going on. But creators wanted to take risks. Stephen Bochco, a TV writer who had written many one off episodes in the 1970s, combined the dramatic tendencies of soap operas with the idea of a police procedural to co-create Hill Street Blues for NBC in 1981. One of the first “quality dramas,” the show helped to elevate the world of TV by introducing long-running story arcs told throughout the course of a series, rather than self-contained arcs in single episodes. Characters were able to grow and develop over the course of the show, giving it a deep sense of the passage of time in the six years it was on the air. Network TV saw promise in the idea, but it would take a different form of TV to allow this form of storytelling to truly see success.

Although comics had been able to apply the serial idea to books fairly instantaneously, TV had problems with this. For one, shows take much more time to produce than comic books. Television executives needed to be convinced that something was a sure bet before implementing it on a wider scale. Comics made very little money, so their executives jumped on any good idea and beat it to death until people were sick of it. Instead, it took the development of cable TV and its commercial viability for executives to start to move towards green-lighting more complicated shows. It became much more “feasible to craft a successful program by appealing to a smaller, more demographically uniform subset of viewers” through cable, allowing for more opportunities for experimentation with the form of TV (Mittell 2015). The emphasis on strong characterization and overarching subplots, coupled with a dedication to more specific audiences, has allowed for TV to grow into what it has become today. However, this took much longer to take root in TV than in comics, since TV episodes ran once and then they’d never air again. This stopped shows from being able to become as big as they are today until home video became available in the late 1990s.

 This same issue occurred with more forward thinking and progressive ideas. Once again, comic books had the upper hand here, since the outlets for releasing content could be through both a major publisher or a smaller independent one. Creators like Alison Bechdel (Dykes to Watch Out For) and Kyle Baker (The Cowboy Wally Show) were able to find great success, even though they were very different people from the straight white men that had typically dominated comics. TV faced tremendous struggle with this concept, due to a number of difficulties. For one, network TV was incredibly reticent to show diversity until the late 60s and early 70s, with Norman Lear’s All in the Family becoming one of the first shows to feature “a host of other previously forbidden topics” (Thompson and Allen 2019). Even then, creators of different backgrounds were few and far between. TV shows didn’t have the ability to just show up like comics could. They had to be approved by powerful executives, whether on network or cable. Though shows with much bigger budgets were beginning to be made, TV executives didn’t feel like it was worth their money to hire diverse creators and possibly lose money. Nothing changed until the mid-90s, when TV ratings codes were instituted by the FCC. The codes, with ratings from “TV-Y” to “TV-MA,” let TV expand into new territories that were far from the simplistic stories from decades before. Money was eventually allocated to shows like The Wayans Bros. and Will & Grace, with diverse creators and progressive ideas that would more accurately represent the real world, though it took way too long to do so. 

Back in the world of comics, Claremont and Simonson were forced off all of their comics in 1991, due to editorial pressures and the increased impact artists were having on how stories were plotted. As they left, the industry began to blow up with success, but like a bubble, was vulnerable to popping soon down the line. Just as TV shows began to be released on home video for the public in the late 90s and “was set free to use long-form continuity-based storytelling,” the comics industry imploded, losing massive amounts of money and talent in the process (Deman 2019). X-Men was included in this, with the franchise floundering and failing to attract the same success as it had just ten years earlier. It wasn’t until the early 2000s that comics began to bounce back again, with contributions from some of the biggest writers in movies and TV jumping over to comic books. In 2004, after the X-Men had been rejuvenated with New X-Men by Grant Morrison, TV writer Joss Whedon joined the franchise, bringing with him a combined knowledge of both X-Men and writing for TV. Whedon was the creator of Firefly and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, two popular shows released before his venture into comic books. The latter of these two shows draws direct inspiration from Kitty Pryde, a member of the X-Men who Whedon calls “the mother of Buffy,” the main character of the show (Rogers 2012). Pryde is a teenage addition to the team who quickly learns that she has to grow up from being a kid in order to cope with the tough world she’s becoming a part of. Using this template, he created a character whose arc ran through a long-running TV show and comic book series, helping to show the influence that the X-Men have been able to have on the state of modern TV. 

Reaching the twenty-first century, both TV and comics have become wound up in a sort of symbiotic relationship with each other. Television shows have entered a so-called “Golden Age” due to serialization, with many series feeling almost akin to mini-movies, stretched out over eight or twelve hours. The care that goes into crafting rich, character driven shows is unprecedented, owing greatly to the writers of the past that dedicated their lives to pushing the medium forward. Along with that, the success of streaming services, such as Netflix and Hulu, has allowed for the further narrowing in of audiences and the increased diversification of those working on productions. Comics, asides from aping many creators from movies and television to bolster their ranks, have adapted the “season” approach of TV. Every year or so, the major publishers revamp their titles and relaunch them after about twelve issues. While these fresh number ones bring in some new readers, the sustainability of comics has only fallen lower in the years since the industry crashed in the 90s. However, a more decompressed style of storytelling, while derided by some, has allowed story arcs to stretch out longer in a sense, with comics moving from an issue by issue method of storytelling to a more trade paperback by trade paperback approach. This has gotten some comics into physical bookstores, and while those are few and far between, it is a large step towards legitimizing the craft that has tended to be looked down upon for being too childish.

There is no doubt that both TV and comics have grown from the novelties they were once thought of as. With all of this change, comics are even beginning to get the credit they really deserve. More and more TV showrunners are looking to comics for their next big hit. The Walking Dead, Preacher, and Watchmen are just some of the more recent shows based on serialized comic books. X-Men has also led to critically acclaimed TV shows, like Legion and The Gifted, clearly showing the influence that the books have had. With the work of numerous dedicated creators in both worlds, people have begun to really care about the success of each form of art. Though they started as mindless entertainment, the two mediums have become some of the most creative outlets in modern culture, not just in the US, but beyond as well.

Works Cited

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Claremont, Chris, Cockrum, Dave, Mantlo, Bill, and Wolfman, Marv. “Night of the Demon.” X-Men #96, Dec. 1975.

Deman, J. Andrew. “How an X-Men Writer Inspired Binge-Worthy, Character-Driven TV from Buffy to Game of Thrones.” The Conversation, 28 Apr. 2020, theconversation.com/how-an-x-men-writer-inspired-binge-worthy-character-driven-tv-from-buffy-to-game-of-thrones-110764.

Jonathan Deman. “X-Women to Watch Out For.” YouTube, 2 Nov. 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HpwNiD4IQhU

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Mittell, Jason. Complex TV: the Poetics of Contemporary Television Storytelling. New York University Press, 2015.

Mittell, Jason. “Why Has TV Storytelling Become so Complex?” The Conversation, 4 May 2020, theconversation.com/why-has-tv-storytelling-become-so-complex-37442.

Rogers, Adam. “Joss Whedon on Comic Books, Abusing Language and the Joys of Genre.” Wired, Conde Nast, 15 Jan. 2018, www.wired.com/2012/05/joss-whedon/.

Thompson, Robert J., and Steve Allen. “Television in the United States.” Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., 1 July 2019, www.britannica.com/art/television-in-the-United-States.