Bear with me. Trying to articulate thoughts that have been running through my head is always kind of difficult.

As I'm laying out plans to get the final three chapters of Other Sleep finished this year, I'm slowly beginning to sketch out the basics of my next graphic novel idea. It's going to be an entirely different beast. Some things will be similar to OS I guess, sci-fi with a female protagonist, but I want to tackle it in a different manner. I'm thinking about story structure, most specifically.

This week, I blasted through the entire first season of the new Hannibal TV show. Which is weird, I never go through an entire season of ANY TV show that quickly, unless it's the Tim and Eric Awesome Show or something equally ridiculous and short, you know? But yeah, I watched all 13 episodes.

Airing on NBC, Hannibal definitely has its roots in network television and the standard episodic structure that most shows follow, but it's the way it subverts that structure which I was really keen on. Like Law & Order, CSI, all those other shows, it was a "villain of the week" kind of thing, where each episode had our intrepid team of FBI agents hunting down a different serial killer. But unlike those other shows, the killers were hardly the focus at all. Part of the appeal was definitely seeing the crime scenes, the incredible and gruesome ways the victims were mutilated and placed, but beyond that? The killers hardly mattered. They didn't get into harrowing chase scenes with the killers, deal with crazy hostage situations, nothing like that, half the time catching the bad guy was just...anticlimactic. You don't get that cathartic moment of victory when they snag them. That's not what's important.
What's important to the show is Will Graham and his relationship with Hannibal Lector. The serial killers are just there as foils, seeing how they relate to Will and Hannibal. And, well, even if you made a totem pole of mutilated bodies, sorry, you're STILL not as fucking horrible as Hannibal is. If Mad Mikkelsen had facial hair, he'd be twirling and stroking it every second while trying not to let out a Dick Dastardly laugh. Dude's just an incredible villain. Will's downward slide into insanity, Hannibal's manipulations, those are the focus. The drama isn't in catching the guy who cuts his victims backs into wings and poses them as angels, the drama is in watching Hannibal and Will sitting and talking. I love that.

So again, episodic nature, but the episodic stuff is completely secondary to what's developing over the course of the entire season, which is Hannibal getting inside Will's head, pushing him further and further into darkness. The last two or three episodes cast off the episodic stuff in favor of pushing Will over the edge and tying everything up. The finale was kinda sloppy and disappointing, but still, it was a great show to power through.

And then we have the Japanese TV show Super Robot Red Baron, from the 1970's. Yes, I'm about to compare Hannibal to a show that's entirely about robots punching each other. Feel free to stop reading at any point.
I got Super Robot Red Baron on DVD just before going to HeroesCon, and started watching it around the same time I started watching Hannibal. The entire series is 39 episodes long, and I'm not even 10 episodes in because, well, I was also watching Hannibal, and um, watching more than two episodes of Red Baron at a time would probably leave me catatonic.

The first few episodes of this show are INCREDIBLE. Okay, it's given that this is a tokusatsu (special effects) show, all about giant robots fighting, aimed at kids, but there's still a story there, and the way it handles that story is insane. Character development? There really isn't any. In Hannibal, you're watching Will slowly lose his damn mind, episode by episode, dramatic tension building until everything snaps in the finale. In Red Baron, the main protagonist's brother, the scientist who built Red Baron, is killed just a few minutes into the SECOND FUCKING EPISODE.

And I MISSED it. It happened so fast. I turned my head to look at a text message or something, and when I turned back, shit was exploding and robots were fighting, and it didn't even occur to me until the end of the episode that anything had happened to the brother. This show is so dedicated to putting giant robots onscreen punching each other that it speeds through plot relentlessly. I mean, dude's brother was strapped to a fucking crucifix with a bomb tied to his neck, which just went off. That's a hell of a way to watch a family member die, especially since they briefly mentioned in the first episode how their parents and ANOTHER brother went missing after a car accident! Ken, our hero, doesn't have time to mourn, he's gotta pilot Red Baron and BARON PUNCH the fuck out of the Iron Alliance!
 

Then the villains make an android double of the dead brother and send him out to fuck with Ken. This happens in THE VERY NEXT EPISODE. There is no time given over to Ken coming to grips with his brother's death, with his new responsibility of piloting a giant robot or any of that. Any other TV show would have waited until mid-season or something before pulling a move like that, but the writers of Super Robot Red Baron give no fucks, nor do the villains that they write.

In any other kind of show, that would be terrible writing, but for some reason, with this show, I can't help but actually ADMIRE it for being so dedicated. They waste no time blasting through dramatic developments and plot twists to get to shit exploding. A single 20-minute episode feels like its half its length.

See, there are plenty of examples of storytelling where a plot development or dramatic twist is rushed through, and it feels sloppy and wrong, or shoehorned in because it doesn't fit in with the rest of the story, but Super Robot Red Baron does it so goddamn consistently that I can't help but be in awe of it. It's not like Power Rangers, Ultraman, or your standard Godzilla movie, where you're sitting through bad jokes and boring crap before you get to the robots and monsters fighting. This show just cuts to the chase and gives you more action than you know what to do with. You have no choice but to roll with shit as it happens, and I love it for that.

An example of abandoning the episodic structure almost completely would be the new season of Arrested Development on Netflix, the episodes of which you could technically watch in whatever order you wanted if you so choose, due to its labyrinthian style of jumping through time from character to character. Then there's the Wire and Mad Men, which are less like TV shows and more like novels in the way the story unfolds in each. What I love about the Wire is that it's one or two related cases developing over an entire season in a more realistic fashion, completely bucking the standard cop show routine where each episode is a different case.

So what does any of this have to do with my new graphic novel that I'm slowly plotting? I have no idea right now. The storytelling in Other Sleep is so straightforward because I just sat down and wrote it beginning to end, picking out dramatic moments to end each chapter on and then working with the page count from there. I want a more solid structure for this next graphic novel, and I feel like some sort of episodic structure would work really well for it. For years before I started Other Sleep, I was constantly tinkering with a comic that would've been structured like an old-school videogame, but that's a subject for an entirely different blog entry, yep.

Anyways, I've rambled enough now. Go watch Hannibal. And Super Robot Red Baron! BOTH.

[Brett]