"One of the fatal things in all suspense is to have a mind that is confused. Otherwise the audience won't emote. Clarify, clarify, clarify. Don't let them say, 'I don't know which woman that is, who's that?'" -- Alfred Hitchcock

Judging from the reviews, one thing that last week's AUTOMATIC KAFKA #1 generated in abundance was confused minds.

Now, to be honest, that surprises me. It does have one or two narrative clangers in there, but for the most part I found it comparatively straightforward. Still, this column isn't a review of AUTOMATIC KAFKA. (This one is.)

Books like AUTOMATIC KAFKA inevitably divide audiences. Nobody seriously expects them to achieve mass appeal, nor is that the point of them. Many of the readers who like the book, however, seem to regard the fact that so many people Just Didn't Get It as a positively good thing - almost a selling point in its own right.

They have a point. There is something to be said for the marketing value of being hated by people who are seen by the target audience as having wildly different tastes. It's not a novel approach. Nor is it an automatic badge of credibility. The Milligan/Allred X-FORCE filled several letters pages with appalled hate mail from readers. PEARL HARBOR tried to turn negative reviews to its advantage by arguing that they showed how out of touch the critics were. Even the ageing Christian MOR singer Cliff Richard has taken to celebrating his own bad reviews and omission from radio playlists on the basis that it 'proves' the critics are wrong. (Non-UK readers may not be familiar with Sir Cliff's work. This should give you the general idea.)

'One thing AUTOMATIC KAFKA #1 generated in abundance was confused minds.' From a marketing perspective, they all have a point. It just means they were playing to that part of their audience which likes feeling superior to people. It doesn't necessarily mean the product is any good.

In the case of titles like KAFKA, one aspect of that seems to be to celebrate the perceived inaccessibility of the book. The fact that other people don't even understand it, let alone like it, is almost seen in a positive light. They like the division and they like the feeling of being in the secret club that got the joke.

Well, at least they're happier than the readers of THE MONARCHY, a book that was also widely panned by many readers and critics (including me) for being impenetrable. That book's fanbase seemed amazed that so many other people didn't understand the series and took to a more defensive approach, bitterly complaining that people weren't giving the book a chance and weren't prepared to invest the proper amount of effort.

Both cases have certain similarities - the readers of a relatively arty comic (and being 'relatively arty' doesn't take much compared to the industry average, let's be blunt) rallying around it when it's widely dismissed as impenetrable junk. KAFKA's readers are in aggressive celebration, MONARCHY's were in defensive siege mode. Both are minority audiences defending their territory from a hostile mainstream.

Of course, we all know what happened to MONARCHY.

It's pretty much inarguable that inaccessibility isn't an end in itself. The point of telling stories - at least for publication - is to communicate something to the audience, and provoke some kind of reaction from them. As a general rule, the desired reaction will not be complete bemusement.

Having said that, although creators would presumably prefer their work to be comprehensible, all else being equal, that doesn't necessarily mean that it will or should be their top priority. There are no absolute rules in storytelling, only general principles that will often pull in different directions. And many creators will sacrifice accessibility in order to make room for things they consider more important - say, a more complex storytelling technique that might allow more subtle forms of expression at the cost of being heavy going for readers unfamiliar with comics.

'KAFKA's readers are in celebration, MONARCHY's were in siege mode.' Some stories are inaccessible due to their subject matter - Grant Morrison's ANIMAL MAN run deconstructing the nature of comic book continuity is inherently inaccessible to any reader who doesn't already have a reasonable grounding in the subject. And that's over 99% of the human race out of the running right there. Inaccessibility is relative to the reader's general knowledge and his understanding of narrative conventions.

There is a line between comics that have adopted a difficult but more rewarding storytelling technique, and those that are just badly told stories (or in some cases, more charitably, failed experiments). Unfortunately, it's a very hazy line, and often it won't be apparent for some time where a particular story falls. Is it hopelessly incomprehensible, or is it just exceptionally dense and complex, on a slow and frustrating build to a magnificent payoff down the line? At the stage of a first issue it's only possible to guess, based on how much faith you have in the creators and whether they seem to know what they're doing. But those impressions won't always be right.

So long as creators are working in a serial medium, commercial realities dictate that they don't have unlimited freedom to sacrifice accessibility. An audience that is confused will not emote. Worse yet, it won't buy the next issue. Audiences are greedy bastards and they want their entertainment now. They aren't prepared to sit patiently waiting for the payoff if they aren't being drip-fed entertainment along the way. This is the reality that creators and publishers have to live with - at least so long as they insist on serialisation.

Of course, if a creator really wants to write a comic that will only be enjoyed by readers who are familiar with unusual and complex sequential storytelling techniques, who are likely to stick with him for eight months of painstaking and initially incomprehensible set-up, and who have a reasonable knowledge of quantum mechanics and the political structure of Pakistan, then by all means he should do so. There is no creative reason not to make such a comic, even though its audience isn't so much narrow as vanishingly small. It's inevitably going to be cancelled in less than a year, that's all.

'Commercial realities dictate that creators don't have unlimited freedom.' Audiences aren't completely averse to putting in some effort, though - they just need to be given an incentive. Although Grant Morrison has also been criticised for writing excessively oblique stories, for the most part he tends to hammer his bizarre and unusual ideas into fairly conventional plots. Audiences are given something to hold on to, while the real meat of the work is allowed to develop more slowly. Give them a hook which makes sense and they'll accept a surprising amount of material that might at first glance seem indigestible, bringing in more readers to comics that could easily struggle to find an audience.

For example, many of the people who hated David Lynch's LOST HIGHWAY were perfectly happy with his TWIN PEAKS, which had plenty of bizarre, cryptic material of its own. The difference is that the TV show shoved it within a conventional murder mystery and soap opera format, and viewers were prepared to play along and accept the insanity as just another question raised by the mystery plot. LOST HIGHWAY, in contrast, has a fundamentally irrational plot that wasn't so easy to get a handle on. Many viewers promptly dismissed it as incomprehensible. (Which it is, depending on how literally you'd like it to take it.)

Of course, this amounts to saying that you can get away with pretty much anything if you shove it into a genre-shaped box. Fine as far as it goes, but not much use to creators who are positively trying to escape genre-shaped boxes. And they're the sort of people who tend to produce this sort of material in the first place. Then again, MONARCHY was nominally a superhero book, and if it had been clear enough about some of its plot elements to get a conventional action story up and running as a framework, who knows, maybe it would still be around today. In some form.

AUTOMATIC KAFKA #1, on the other hand, does in fact take this approach to some extent. It does set up a relatively straightforward core plot - "journey of self-discovery through narcotics." That may turn out to be only a very minor part of the overall storyline, but that isn't the point - audiences have been given a fairly commonplace story arc to hold onto for the time being. The book is more concerned about accessibility and entertaining its readers than it might at first appear.

Given how vociferously it has divided opinion, AUTOMATIC KAFKA seems to me more like a book with a narrow audience than a badly told story. Then again, maybe I'm just saying that because I understood this one - unlike MONARCHY, which I couldn't make head or tail of, and which was therefore clearly a bad comic. Either way, if it doesn't find a large enough audience to survive, we already know what people will blame.

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

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