Also, your comment on the hour long format intrigues me. I would like to know more if you don't mind explaining it?
I wouldn't have brought it up if I didn't intend to explain it, if pressed!
I seriously don't know why but I just have problems paying attention. It's not that I can't actively sit for extended periods of time and watch A Thing, because I'll watch several unrelated films right in a row with no problem, or half a season of a half-hour format show (Community, Archer, Louie, numerous animu and cartoons) in one go. I think it's just that the extended length of the episodes is just in a very weird spot for me--they're not short enough that I can watch the whole plotline play out and (presumably) resolve before my mind goes off the rails, but they aren't long enough that my brain engages into my "extended range" of paying attention, like it does with a longer film.
Two Christmases ago, a coworker got my the first season of the old Highlander show, which I used to watch reruns of on Spike TV when it came out. Once I tried actually sitting down to watch them, though, I had problems paying attention and staying invested--about halfway through I would stop caring and start checking my email and Facebook and crap, and then start paying attention again when I heard dudes about to swordfight. It could just be that I don't have enough experience with the format (I can count the shows I've actually cared about that were in it on one hand) but it's just hard for me to stay invested as much. (It's also worth noting that I haven't really watched any television shows aired on actual TV for the last maybe 3-4 years, so most of my adult watching experience is with DVDs or things I downloaded--maybe commercials break things up?)
It's also a quick excuse for why I can't be fucked watching things everyone else jizzes over that I have no interest in, like Game of Thrones or The Walking Dead. If you try to tell them you're not interested, they'll just talk to you about how that's not a good excuse and you should watch it anyway...if you say you don't like hour-long TV dramas, they understand more.
Dom wrote:If a writer is working on multiple thematically related books, then I expect a certain amount of crossing over.
Hey, I expect that too. But here's the thing--the initial issues of Animal Man established that he was fighting against this supernatural force called The Rot, and they established that pretty well in its own book. And they mentioned that, eventually, he was going to need the help of Swamp Thing. I'm fine with both of those things. What I'm not fine with is when they go off for literally six months to Go Find Swamp Thing and the story slows to a crawl and all but says "Seriously why aren't you reading Swamp Thing yet?" Because I don't want to read Swamp Thing! I want to read Animal Man!
I mean, even in your GI Joe example--GI Joe and Cobra might even be written by different writers, but they presumably have a little bit of thematic crossover and you can reasonably be expected to be interested in both books. I didn't start reading Animal Man because I wanted to read Reboots Of Characters Great Writers Made Famous Monthly--I started reading it because A) It was a New 52 book with a superhero who had a canonical family that wasn't completely killed off, backwritten or otherwise destroyed by the reboot and B) It was almost universally praised as one of the best books of the New 52 (and especially because it's got the Grant Morrison legacy to stack up against
and was doing just fine), and C) He was a superhero that I didn't already know a lot about, and I wanted to take a shot at reading something that would be really fresh to me. (I never read Morrison's run, aside from the "famous" issue.)
It's like, the reason I started reading Animal Man in the first place are probably different from the reasons other people were reading it. I was reading it because it had a superhero with an actual family life that he was struggling to keep together, and because it was Legitimately Good and something new and interesting for me. (Not unlike how Anderson started reading Daredevil without really knowing much about him, come to think!) I didn't start reading it because I was interested in the supernatural metaplot running through all the other books. So when it became about that, instead of the things I started reading it for, I jumped off.
(The fact that it was also basically requiring me to spend an extra $4+/month, a few months after I had just gotten fired, was an extra incentive. It came down to, "Hm, I can spend $4 more to read a book I don't care about and get some minor insight on Animal Man, or I can stop reading Animal Man and have $4 extra every month. I wonder which I'm going to do?")
Then why do you care about the non-"Animal Man" chapters? If you want to see Buddy Baker doing stuff, you get that in the book you are reading. If he shows up in other books, then hey, more Buddy Baker.
Because the book was all but giving me a big neon sign that said "YOU SHOULD BE READING SWAMP THING!"