Broken Frontier

It's amazing the things you can find in the comics section of the library. Just the other day, I was reading through a collection of Dan Dare, the science fiction adventurer who a few decades ago had been prominently featured in both the Eagle, a British comic magazine for young boys, and 2000AD, a British comic magazine for older boys. Reading through one of Dare's serials, with every two pages a separate instalment, reminded me that Britain follows quite a different model for comic books than North America does.

With most North American comic books, each issue is an individual character's story. You buy an issue of Amazing Spider-Man, and get a story about Spider-Man; you buy an issue of Hellblazer and get a story about John Constantine. With British comics, it is usually different. 2000AD, Eagle, Warrior, Beano, Dandy, even Daredevils, which was Marvel UK's primary comic for a while, are all weekly magazines that contain a whole series of comic stories, many of them instalments in longer serials. You buy an issue of, say, 2000AD and get a five page Judge Dredd story, maybe a five page “Future Shock,” and then an instalment of three or four serials. This is a very different experience than picking up a monthly comic book about a single character. You're getting less of each story, but you're getting more stories more frequently.

The experience is not unlike reading an extended version of a newspaper's comic strip page. In both circumstances, you are getting a series of comics pretty frequently and you are experiencing one after another after another. On a newspaper page, you move from “Dilbert” to “Doonesbury” to “Garfield,” in an issue of 2000AD, you move from “Judge Dredd” to “Nikolai Dante” to “Robo-Tales.” You are reading many comic stories together, as opposed to just one, which means you encounter a wider variety of stories than you otherwise would read and can experience numerous perspectives at once.

I'm not certain why Britain took to this kind of comic book model in a way that North America didn't. Perhaps because comics were an import, they ended-up adapting the medium to a model more similar to newspaper strips, an environment Britain was already familiar with. Perhaps it was something else. Whatever motivated them, the weekly serialized anthologies remain their favored format, one very engaging in its own way. I love to flip through an issue of 2000AD and see a wide variety of stories, all there for me to experience.