FORMAT VS. FUNCTION? Comics-y stuff. So there’s been a lot of discussion lately about floppies (monthly comics, magazine-format) vs. trade paperbacks (comics collections). Here’s a good link–I comment there.

I can’t stand floppies. This despite having spent most of high school creating and reading zines–so it’s not that I don’t appreciate the cool stuff you can do within the monthly, magazine-y format. What follows is a very personal take; the more theoretical points are the ones I’m least sure of.

Why I Hate Floppies:

1) I read everywhere. I am never spotted without something to read–you never know when you might get a chance! I read on the bus. On the subway. Waiting on line. While walking (I’m hardcore). In the tub. I would read in the shower if I thought I could get away with it! Floppies are flimsy, unwieldy, and unforgiving. I need a format that can take serious abuse without the pages falling out or the ink smudging. (I haven’t gotten very far in From Hell in large part because the paper quality doesn’t line up well with the size of the book–I’m really worried that if I handle FH the way I handle most of my books, I’ll rip the pages. I was quite grateful that big ol’ honkers like Blankets and Jinx were printed on thick, punishable paper.)

In the link above, Laura says (in comments) that you can mistreat floppies too. I haven’t really found that to be true–maybe I’m just more gorillalike than she is? I really do tend to schlep books around until they’re hurtin’, and magazine-format items get mangled much more easily than book-format items. My old zine collection is a disaster; my magazine collection, ditto; my very tiny floppy comics collection is only in decentish shape because I’d learned my lesson by that time, and tried to be nice to them! …Did I mention that I’m one of the lousy people who keep track of where I am in a book by turning it upside-down and open on the table? And then forgetting it’s there and piling other books on top of it? So maybe this is just me, the Book Ape….

2) THOSE $#@! $#@! %$#@! ADS! Seriously, I can’t stand them. Big garish full-page ads interrupting my story! This is why people pay cable price to see movies without commercials. I just–can’t–deal–with having my story interrupted by ads. (“But it’s OK to have your story interrupted because the checkout line finally got your groceries up to the front?” That’s different. Don’t ask me why, it just is.) This criticism only applies to comics that have the ads–thus not, say, Cuckoo, or (I think) Love & Rockets.

3) (Very speculative:) Floppies are disposable. I suspect people write more disposably for a disposable medium. (The counter to this argument is that nobody could afford to publish trade paperbacks for all the many comics out there, so there’d be [even!] less experimentation and variety without the audition-like, bet-hedging monthly format. I don’t know enough about the industry to comment on that.)

4) I’m just not good at short stuff. Even though I write short stories myself, the only short story writers I really, really like are Yukio Mishima and Angela Carter. So I like the longer-term plotting that TPB’s (maybe?) encourage.