The Negative Zone: THE ISSUE #3 BONER-KILL EFFECT

Something that's obsessed me about comics, especially over the past year as my weekly comics intake's gone out of control--and especially because a lot of good or at least promising series have begun--is how many series I've dumped at issue #3: Kick-Ass, Final Crisis, the "Old Man Logan" storyline, "Batman R.I.P", Glamourpuss, Haunted Tank, probably some others too (interesting that there's two by Millar and two by Morrison on that list...).

The third issue's the make-or-break issue because a writer can rely on the pretty-much-always-interesting first issue and can usually, if they've set the first issue up passably well, ride that wave into the end of #2. By #3, stuff's gotta start happening or ideas gotta start flowing or something, anything. And usually what a third issue does is too-much or too-little. The leisurely pace punctuated by a few "what the fuck" moments is what made "Old Man Logan" and Kick-Ass, and then the third issue of each respectably, stumbled into some sub-plot about Spiderwoman or threw in a little girl who chopped heads and said "Cunt". Okay.

Final Crisis and "Batman R.I.P" suffered for the opposite reasons as they did nothing at all and fumbled further into themselves. You felt all the narrative pieces moving around, being set-up for that big "Woahholycrap" moment but that was the problem...you could feel the moves being made, each weird sub-plot or new character/concept to pay-off later. And the pay-off might be worth it, but I don't read comics for the pay-off, I read them for the evolving, temporal-ness of the narrative that ideally, builds to something actually worth it. I need to feel like I'm in good hands and I'm not in good hands whether the writer decides on a total tone-change in issue 3 or to just continue setting-up fort for some forever-delayed "payoff". Series' like Haunted Tank and Glamourpuss expose themselves by their third-issue for just sort of coasting along, with little interest in changing or even complicating previous issues. They're too confident and as a result, feel obsessively planned-out. No room for complexity or fun or anything to leak in.

That's why Cable is the best series going on right now. It's heavy in continuity and it's circling around itself in terms of time-travel weirdness, but every issue works on its own. The most recent issue, which is essentially Cable and Hope in empty space talking about time-travel continuity shit I register but couldn't regurgitate to a new reader, works because stripping the action comic of its vague action comic connections unravelled deeper things about Cable and Hope's relationship.

That the issue ends with (spoiler-not-spoiler alert) Cable collapsing, both matters and doesn't matter. Matters because the series' bad is gonna go to worse, but doesn't matter because the issue wasn't building up to that "shocker" ending. Of course, it was kinda inevitable that a food-less, water-less Cable would collapse, but you forgot about it because the human interaction was so fascinating in and of itself. Basically, the comic put you in Hope's shoes, so caught-up in the immediate that you forgot about essentials like food and water and as a result, Cable's collapse is as shocking and desperate to you as it is to her.

That's of course what the best "keep-you-reading" or even "twist" ending stories do. They don't pull some tricky bullshit out of their ass two pages before it ends, they wrap you up in the story itself, distract you from greater, scarier issues at-hand, all the while making them pretty obvious and then...BOOM, it's got you. An odd, hard-to-describe mix of in-the-moment storytelling and obsessive story-planning. Giving you more of the same and knowing how and when to subtly flip it too.