Seriality

In the realm of comics, seriality is easily understood as stories published in installments or successive parts arranged in a series—an approach common to television shows, films, and Victorian novels. This sequential accretion of issues and volumes of particular series of comic books or strips (especially in, but not limited to, superhero story publication), however, highlights the complex range of possibilities that exist for ordering and understanding the narratives broken up and reimagined along that sequence. Seriality has four primary aspects that pervade comics and that can be put to use in conceptualizing how they are organized, arranged, and understood. These include how seriality influences the shape of the narrative, its relation to capital and industrial production, the “openness” of a serial format that fosters ongoing reader engagement, and seriality as a metanarrative, or overarching long-form account, of the publishing history of a title or character.