I’ve been spending some time perusing reddit, specifically forums of people making comics and one thing that commonly crops up (and actually is a habit that cropped up a lot before the invention of online fora) is “I’ve written a series bible and written two issues and have the next 10 all planned out”. That’s what, 220 pages of story (plus bible). And if you’re paying someone even $100 per page it’s going to cost $2,200 in total and possibly take 5 years?
Last weekend I was at John McCrea’s house, and he has the new Steve Ditko spider-man artists edition and I was looking through that (slightly insane £175 for it over on amazon if you fancy buying it) and in it is the first spider-man strip.
Now I’ve read it before (as we all have I’m sure) and I’m fully aware of the story from the repeated origins in comics and film and tv, but one thing that really struck me on this occasion, is spider-man’s entire origin story – where we get the “with great power comes great responsibility”, Aunt May, Uncle Ben, the costume, the web spinner, the Pete as a lowly nebbish school kid who is transformed, not just into spider-man but into a funny quick witted spinner of webs and gags.
And it all happens in just 12 pages – story and series bible. Genuinely world changing, delivered in a compact dozen pages.
So my question to you – what story is so short that impacted so much?
You know what Stan I bet every one thought this was just the usual bullshit at the time you wrote it, but nope, you were pretty much proved right…
