Article 10: Intent To Solicit

Solicitation copy: It's the retailer's friend and the storyteller's enemy. In his latest column, Paul O'Brien looks at the inherent problems with publicity blurbs. We'd tell you more about it, but we don't want to give away the ending...
12 May 2003

I hate movie trailers.

It's not that I have a problem with them in principle. I just can't stand the bloody things in practice. They're adverts, and you would think they ought to benefit from the same level of imagination that you see in other advertising. But no, that's not the way it works. Generally, you get a synopsis of the first two thirds of the plot, coupled with highlights of all the good bits. And at the risk of sounding like a pensioner who writes letters of complaint to the Daily Mail, once you've seen the trailer, why bother with the film?

The studios are well aware of this complaint but they don't care. They maintain that trailers that give away the plot are in fact more effective at getting people to see a film. This sounds bizarre, but it's not like the studios have an incentive to get it wrong. One assumes that they've done their research.

And so for the foreseeable future, audiences will continue to go to see films with a working knowledge of the plot in advance. Filmmakers and audiences will just have to live with that, whether they like it or not.

The comics industry, particularly in serialisation, has long been plagued by the same problems. Of course, things aren't as bad as they were back in the dark, dismal days of the mid-1990s. In those days publishers would routinely issue press releases advising you of exactly when and how major characters were scheduled to die, many months before the fact. That sort of nonsense doesn't go on much any more.

But there is still an ongoing problem built into the way the industry works. The nature of the industry dictates that if you have a monthly title, then the solicitation information for chapter four will be out when the reader still hasn't seen chapters two and three. And the solicitations can't just be kept uninformative.

Yes, one of their functions is to serve as advertising and to drum up interest from the readers. But solicitation copy is also there to give the retailers something to base their orders on. From their point of view, the more information they get, the better. And if they don't get any information, they're likely to order conservatively.

A while back, Marvel made an interesting stab at overhauling their solicitations to get rid of all the plot details. This went down like a lead balloon with retailers. Although they never formally announced a change of policy, it's obvious from reading Marvel's solicitations that they've backed off from that approach.

There are some titles kept relatively sketchy, mostly those where the solicitation was never going to say anything much more than, "Yet another issue of this title. Much like all the other ones." But generally, if there's something interesting going on, they tend to tell you. Clearly the experiment didn't work out. Some level of information has to be released.

Besides which, even if you ignore the solicitations, it's a rare title that isn't preceded by a string of interviews for the usual raft of news sites. It's possible to avoid all of this material, of course, but it still leads to a market where audiences are likely to be fairly heavily informed about a comic before they pick it up.

So if you're a creator, what do you do? Inevitably a large chunk of your audience will be coming to the story with advance knowledge. How do you work with that?

You can't simply pretend that the audience doesn't know anything. That doesn't work. Last week's VENOM #1 is a textbook example of why not. If you haven't read it, here's what happens. The story takes place in the Arctic. Robertson, from the local military base, visits the neighbouring civilian base to return some borrowed videos. When she uses the intercom, a voice cries for help.

She goes in and finds lots of dead people. She rescues someone who was hiding and takes him back to the military base. Much creepiness around the edges but no villain is seen. At the military base, questions are asked: what caused the deaths? It looks like polar bears. But it can't be - because if there was only one survivor, who answered the intercom? (Um, somebody who was killed after answering the intercom. But let's allow the plot holes to slide for the moment.) Something is not right! Just then, the rescued man has a fit. The end. Venom, incidentally, never appears on panel.

Compare the solicitations, which read as follows.

Venom's back and has popped up near the Arctic Circle, leaving a trail of dead bodies in his wake. Now able to jump from host-to-host with the greatest of ease, Venom is on the run from mysterious forces, each with their own agenda for the elusive alien. But is this the same Venom that we've come to know and fear? A big budget, sci-fi/horror, rollercoaster ride that reintroduces one of Spider-Man's most deadly foes into the Marvel Universe.

To be honest, this story has gone wrong in several ways. For one thing it's a bad choice of plot structure. Keeping the killer off panel, never identifying him and having him in the shadows throughout is a device for building mystery. But there is no mystery. We know who killed them. Venom did. It's his comic, for god's sake.

Moreover, the writer is so busy trying to do a moody, slow burn start to the series that he hasn't even advanced the plot beyond the first sentence of the solicitations. It doesn't get on to the second and third sentences at all. You just can't do that. You can't spend the first issue taking twenty pages to establish that you're doing a slasher movie in the Arctic. It doesn't even establish the title character, or the premise of the series. What's the poor solicitation writer meant to do? The issue makes so little headway on the plot that saying almost anything will give away the story.

It would probably work as the opening twenty pages of a graphic novel, but you can't move that slowly in serialisation. The readers are way ahead of you. They know this stuff. You can't spend the first two issues telling them what they already know. They'll get bored.

Now admittedly, just because the reader knows what's coming, it's not necessarily fatal to the story. After all, all the best stories stand up to re-reading. You can only read a story for the first time once. There may be many happy hours of enjoyment in a story that carries no tension at all because you already know the ending. True enough. But reading a story for the first time without knowing what's coming next is still a big part. Take away that first experience and it's always going to be a bit muted.

Part of the knack of writing is to manipulate audience expectations. Any decent writer understands that readers do not approach the work in a vacuum. They understand genre conventions and they know how stories work; in building a successful story you have to allow for this, because it determines how the reader will react. Outside the realms of pre-school children's fiction, there are no readers out there who don't understand stories. Everyone has preconceptions and the writer needs to work with them.

The outer reaches of this are those occasional comics where the marketing is practically part of the work in itself. Paul Jenkins and Jae Lee's SENTRY would be the most obvious one. It was a comic about a supposedly lost Silver Age superhero returning from limbo, promoted by deadpan press releases and interviews claming that the Sentry was a genuine forgotten Stan Lee creation. Books like this set out to hijack the reader's expectations before they even get near the story, and retake the initiative. The story starts before you even know you're reading it. Clever, when it works.

But even without resorting to meta-fictional antics, there are other ways of making sure that the readers' knowledge is taken properly into account. In fact, this is less of a problem for books with higher artistic aspirations. Those are usually complex enough that they can be marketed without scratching the surface. The basic ideas of, say, PROMETHEA or 100% can be reduced to a soundbite and still leave the real content of the work more or less untouched for audiences to get to when they read the book. It's the more commercial and plot-driven books that can have problems.

If the commercial reality is that the reader will be coming to the work with preconceptions and foreknowledge of the plot and concepts, then that reality is something the writer has to live with and take into account - and which the marketing has to be sensitive to. It can't simply be ignored because it affects how readers react to the story; and generating a reaction is what it's all about.

Paul O'Brien is the author of the weekly X-AXIS comics review.

Ninth Art endorses the principle of Ideological Freeware. The author permits distribution of this article by private individuals, on condition that the author and source of the article are clearly shown, no charge is made, and the whole article is reproduced intact, including this notice.