"The important information you need at the beginning of an issue. Like way they did the old Frank Miller Daredevil issues in the first five pages he always had to state his origins and how he got his powers"
About this Quote
Kirkman is defending a kind of comic-book throat-clearing that modern storytelling loves to pretend it has outgrown: the recap, the origin blurb, the “previously on” that lets a reader jump in without homework. He points to Frank Miller’s Daredevil not as nostalgia bait, but as a pragmatic model of reader-first craft. Those first five pages weren’t just summary; they were onboarding. They turned continuity from a gatekeeping mechanism into a welcome mat.
The subtext is a quiet rebuke to prestige-era narrative smugness, the idea that explanation is inherently lowbrow and that confusion equals sophistication. Kirkman’s work (and his audience) lives in the churn of monthly issues, trade paperbacks, binge reading, and adaptations. In that ecosystem, clarity is not a compromise; it’s distribution strategy. “Important information” isn’t about spoon-feeding, it’s about acknowledging how people actually consume serialized stories: sporadically, out of order, on a lunch break, after a long gap.
Invoking Miller also smuggles in a reminder that even the edgy, auteur-driven comics we mythologize were built on structural discipline. The origin recap functioned like a ritual: it reinforced character identity, reset stakes, and re-armed the emotional premise (Catholic guilt, vigilantism, loss) before the plot started throwing punches. Kirkman’s intent is almost bluntly democratic: don’t punish new readers for arriving late. Make the door easy to find, then hit them with the good stuff.
The subtext is a quiet rebuke to prestige-era narrative smugness, the idea that explanation is inherently lowbrow and that confusion equals sophistication. Kirkman’s work (and his audience) lives in the churn of monthly issues, trade paperbacks, binge reading, and adaptations. In that ecosystem, clarity is not a compromise; it’s distribution strategy. “Important information” isn’t about spoon-feeding, it’s about acknowledging how people actually consume serialized stories: sporadically, out of order, on a lunch break, after a long gap.
Invoking Miller also smuggles in a reminder that even the edgy, auteur-driven comics we mythologize were built on structural discipline. The origin recap functioned like a ritual: it reinforced character identity, reset stakes, and re-armed the emotional premise (Catholic guilt, vigilantism, loss) before the plot started throwing punches. Kirkman’s intent is almost bluntly democratic: don’t punish new readers for arriving late. Make the door easy to find, then hit them with the good stuff.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
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