Bottle stories and 1000-year epics
"There is great significance to the passage of time."
There is most likely never going to be a newsletter where we talk about politics in any shape or form, but I had to borrow the above Kamala Harris quote as a framing device for a topic I think about a lot when writing: the significance of the passage of time.
Unlike the comics in Marvel’s mainline 616 universe, where time is an amorphous sliding scale and there have been 3 annual Hellfire Galas in the same year,1 the titles in the Ultimate universe are all sequenced in real-time. For example, the events of the Ultimate Black Panther and Ultimate X-Men issues I read this week occurred in March (the month these issues came out), whereas the events in the latest issue of Ultimate Spider-Man occur in June. This is all leading up to The Maker breaking out of his temporal prison in a few months, after which it sounds like they are abandoning the strict real-time progression.
This forced real-time passage of time makes for some interesting story choices. For example, you really can’t use the final page-turn cliffhanger and then pick up from that exact scene in the next issue, because a month is supposed to go by between issues. USM got around this in a clever way for a set of recent issues, by specifically having the first issue take place on the last day of that month.
One of my pet peeves in superhero movies is when the entire movie takes place over the course of 2 weeks. The best (or worst) example of this that I can think of off the top of my head is X-Men: First Class, where you have a Xavier/Magneto bonding/training montage that fast-forwards through a week, before setting up their movie-ending schism. But they hadn’t even known each other for enough time for that schism to be super meaningful! Unfortunately, the movie’s overall conflict was not set up in a way to let Charles and Erik get to know each over years and years before things finally boiled over during the Cuban Missile Crisis. But what if it was???
This technique was implemented in One Piece, with a [redacted] inserted in between the end of the Paramount War and New World arcs. But when I complimented this pacing implement, and also how 10 years in the real world has passed between the time that Shanks left Luffy as a little kid and when they briefly “see” each other again, my friend explained that the entire journey up from volume 1 through 60 had taken place over only a few months!
I thought about the passage of time recently as I turned back to scripting issue 3 of Blood of Atlantis. Other than the introduction, all of issue 1 takes place in a single evening. For issue 2, almost an entire week passes on the first page:
This is to set up Svetlana’s frustration on page 2 that Beatrice has blown her off. We then have two storylines with the inferred passage of time: Beatrice and Svetlana go on an international trip, and Damon and Topo experience an extended training montage. This is all done in the service of adding space for the characters’ relationships to develop. As Kieron Gillen is fond of saying, space = meaning.
(And a friendly reminder that if you want to find out what happens in issue 2, you can still pre-order it through our BackerKit pre-order store to snag your copy ahead of the fall retail release!)
For NYC Questing Guild, I keep a fairly detailed timeline that tracks when each chapter takes place, sometimes down to the day. For example, Guild of Tokens takes place over the course of a year, whereas Guild of Magic takes place over two months. The Gauntlet will take place in the fall following the events of Guild of Magic, and Guild of Relics picks up at the end of that year. Meanwhile, Blood of Atlantis is threading its way between the chapters of The Gauntlet, and I am doing my best not to fracture time in the process.
That’s not to say that stories that take place over a short period of time can’t be great; in fact, that restriction often makes for really meaningful (and unique) stories. See, e.g. The Breakfast Club, Go, Clerks, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Empire Records, 24.
What do you prefer - bottle stories or long epics? Or something in between? Sound off in the comments!
In Marvel time math, as rejiggered by House of X/Powers of X, the beginning of the X-Men comics happened 10 years ago in comic book time, meaning roughly that for every 4 years that pass in the real world, 1 year passes in the comics.