As the comics industry continues to drift towards the bookstores, it doesn't take a genius to see that the days of the pamphlet format are likely to be numbered.

And to be honest, good riddance. Awful things. Dreadful value for money. If they're from the major publishers, they're generally packed with adverts specifically designed to distract you from the actual story. They're a nightmare to store, especially if you don't have enough cupboard space to house 25 boxes in an aesthetically pleasing manner. Half the stories aren't even paced for serialisation any more - the pamphlet version only exists as a cashflow device.

These days, their only real advantage is that they come out before the trade. Not much of a selling point, unless you're a hardcore devotee. All of which suggests that we're heading towards the glorious day - some years away, to be sure, but visible on the horizon - when ongoing titles bite the dust and the original graphic novel becomes the standard way of doing things. The way things ought to be, in a grown up medium.

But then again...

Ongoing series and the pamphlet format are not necessarily the same thing. The major direct market publishers may be moving into the bookstores, but the product they're currently offering is still serialised. The X-MEN and SPIDER-MAN trade paperbacks remain an alternate format for an ongoing series, and could quite happily continue in that format even if the pamphlet version of the book disappeared altogether. In fact, in the Epic pitching guide, Bill Jemas comments that four-to-six issues is Marvel's preferred length for storylines. Any less, and the trade paperback will be too thin. Any more, and the gap between trades will be too long.

'What makes a self-contained story superior to an ongoing format?' DC is a bit more erratic, and seemingly less inclined to encourage the "wait for the trade" mentality. But SANDMAN and TRANSMETROPOLITAN, for example, remain clearly serialised stories even in trade paperback format. By the end of those series, both writers were admittedly writing primarily with the trade paperback format in mind. Nonetheless, what they were producing was still a serial, albeit a serial comprised of trade paperbacks. Both stories are far too long for the entirety to be sensibly considered as "original graphic novels" in their own right.

The manga books that are doing so well in the bookstores are equally keen on serialisation. The new market they're building is not necessarily one of original graphic novels, but rather a bookstore audience trained to enjoy relatively open-ended serials. Even if the death of the direct market and the rise of the bookstores goes through as scheduled, then it's far from clear that this means the death of the ongoing series. It may just mean a change in format and venue.

Of course, the bookstore market clearly provides a much more receptive market for the original graphic novel in its purest form - the completely self-contained, free-standing comic. It can only help to encourage that format. And that's to be welcomed; there's plenty to be done with the OGN that hasn't been done yet. But I'm not entirely sold on the idea that OGNs are an inherently superior format to the ongoing title.

What, exactly, makes a self-contained story superior to an ongoing, open-ended format? The classical answer would be that a self-contained story is the way a story is Meant To Be. It's how we were taught to write at school, when we were relentlessly instructed that a Proper Story has a beginning, a middle and an end. The self-contained graphic novel meets these requirements. It's a Proper Story.

The ongoing series, traditionally, does not match this format and is Not a Proper Story. It has a beginning, it ends for economic reasons, and the middle consists of everything in between, usually making for a haphazard journey of varying styles and themes that thoroughly fails to amount to a single unified story.

'I'm not sold that OGNs are inherently superior to the ongoing title.' Comics have made a speciality of this sort of open-ended serialisation, and not just in the superhero genre. It's something that derived from the publishing set-up of the industry, emerging from periodical magazines, and that's just the way it is. Its closest cousin in other media is television soap opera. Next in line is the twenty-seven-volume epic fantasy novel read exclusively by geeks with beards. In short, the ongoing format is not just Not a Proper Story, it is Crap.

But does it have to be?

Open-ended storytelling may have been pushed heavily by segments of the media that were least inclined to care about quality, but that doesn't necessarily mean that it's not a valid approach to storytelling. Of course, some of the most acclaimed "ongoing" series of the last decade haven't really been open-ended at all; they've partially adopted the closed structure of traditional storytelling.

SANDMAN, taken as a whole, does present a single dominant character arc for the lead character. But it doesn't entirely surrender to the traditional format; it's a series full of single-issue diversions, sometimes only tenuously related to the overall plot. That's an element much more clearly drawn from the ongoing serial. You don't generally get prose novels pausing every third chapter to present a selection of short stories; at least, not unless the writer is deliberately pushing the boundaries.

On the other hand, mainstream television moved the open-ended serial format beyond mere soap operas years ago. There was a time when open-ended sitcoms and dramas didn't really have ongoing storylines and could be watched happily in any order - something that producers were quite keen on, because it meant the show could live a happy and profitable afterlife being shown out of sequence in syndication. But that no longer seems to be such a concern. It's easy to reel off a list of highly successful and critically well-received TV shows, which have operated on an open-ended, serial format. MOONLIGHTING, ER, BUFFY, SIX FEET UNDER, THE SOPRANOS, and so on. Even FRIENDS, really. In the context of TV, they've imported the serial structure of soap operas.

'A more open-ended approach can be seen as more honest.' Certainly most of them have soap elements. And undoubtedly, they're produced in that format in large part because that's the sort of format that the stations will pay for. But they do illustrate that it's possible to produce popular and critically acclaimed work in the context of an open-ended format. The classical self-contained story structure is not the only way of doing things in the context of modern media.

The open-ended format can have decided advantages. The self-contained story, in which protagonists enjoy permanent change followed by neat closure, is arguably a rather artificial way of presenting things. It hammers the story into a structure a degree or so removed from reality. Many storytellers with artistic aspirations have been trying to move away from neat closure for years in favour of something more open-ended.

The ongoing serial, providing closure for individual arcs but never really resolving the whole, can be seen from a certain perspective as an extension of that. Rather than purporting to identify a single period as the important bit, with the characters apparently doing not much of interest before or after, a more open-ended approach can be seen as more honest.

Of course, the creator still needs to know when to draw the line - even if you don't have a single story you want to tell, that doesn't mean there's an infinity of good ideas to be drawn from a set-up or that the series can continue indefinitely. Television has always been notably poor at spotting that point. Comics have traditionally been entirely oblivious to it and will just keep the damn book going with one creative team or another until economics dictates cancellation.

A few books have been allowed to conclude because their overreaching single story was finished; very few have simply thrown in the towel without having a such a plot, simply because they knew it was time to call it a day. HITMAN, I suppose. Arguably ULTIMATE MARVEL TEAM-UP.

But between droning on infinitely, and existing in a self-contained book, there's an eminently viable middle ground. It's a way of telling stories that's traditionally been looked down on and seen as second-rate... but then, you could say that about all of comics, couldn't you?

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

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