So, one of the things that’s been keeping me from you, oh faithful readers, is Stronghold, my webcomic. It’s required a lot of my attention, not just in the administrative aspect of things (as much as that’s a giant headache), but as I start to think more and more about story.

You see, today we went ahead and launched issue 3. This is the last bit of backlog we’re uploading; everything from issue 4 onward will be new material created specifically for the web version. The original issue, didn’t escape criticism; one crit I received a lot for the last two issues is that “the fight scene just went on forever.” Well, it’s true. It did. It did because that was my first full-length comic script and I had felt like writing a big fight scene, some big splashy entrance that would attract attention, and it got a tad out of hand. That’s on me. When we put that book together in 2006, the vision of what the comic, then called Sanctuary, would be was very different; the intention was for an ongoing serialized story. Part of that — most of that — was due to my love for those sort of epic sci-fi serials, particular Battlestar Galactica and Lost, in which individual episodes blend together to an extent, dominated as they are by the ongoing narrative. But quite a bit of it was laziness on my part.

You see, writing stories is hard. Writing concise, thirty-page tales with beginnings, middles, and ends isn’t particularly easy when compared to endless To Be Continued’s and eternally-hanging plot threads that can be resolved at the writer’s leisure. That first story — issues 1 and 2 — were made, though, over three years ago, and in the intervening time, I’ve come to appreciate episodic storytelling, and to understand the weaknesses such a format would impose upon the comic: it would devolve into either endless fight scenes or a relationshippy soap opera, and while both of these are valid ways to tell a story, I think both of them are to an extent weaker. As I’ve spent the last few months doing the Great Deep Space Nine Run-Through, I’ve realized that there is a profound strength to the single episode story.

The writer in such stories is freer. It becomes possible to craft your tale around a specific theme instead of vague overtones. It lets you derive your drama from the tension created by thirty pages, and forces creativity. I think back on the best episodes of Deep Space Nine, and they’re the most self-contained. As much as the arc-driven episodes like the six-episode suite that opens season six can be brilliant, they never achieve the elegant simplicity of “The Visitor,” “It’s Only a Paper Moon,” “Children of Time,” or “Duet.” Each of them factors in in some way to the larger narrative, but each of them is best when considered separate. “Duet” doesn’t rely on the historical experience of Bajor and Cardassia, but you could tell that story about any war criminal. “The Visitor” is ultimately, for all its technobabble, about the unconquerable love of a son for his father. The power hangs there because it’s universal.

I’ve been paying a lot of attention to folk tales lately, too, from the classic Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark (which is oddly scholarly for a series of campfire tales for kids) to Italo Calvino’s Fiabe italiane, and the beautiful thing about them is that they’re short, concise, and entirely within themselves, and yet still pack some sort of emotional punch, even if it’s just a sudden, startled fright. They’re almost schools of storytelling in themselves; a status quo is established, subverted, and the consequences dealt with. A butcher likes to make sausage for his wife. When he accidentally kills a man in his shop, he disposes of the body by putting it in the grinder and then feeding his wife the sausage. So she’s merrily kicking along, full to the teeth with manslaughter sausage. And then, of course, the poor man’s ghost comes to torment the unfortunate wife, killing her for that consumption. It’s simple, really.

That’s the direction I want to take this series in. Not the horror angle, but in treating each issue as a single, coherent story. I’m honestly not sure if I’m up to the task, but I hope the exercise of writing helps make me a better writer. This issue takes the first tentative steps in that direction, and issue 4, “The Professional,” and issue 5, (tentatively “The Flower of Carnage”) will begin that process in earnest. Till then, issue 3 is a great story that draws the previous two issues to, I hope, a satisfying conclusion and completing our bloated introduction to our heroine.