If it takes too long to think of a title, I'll just crank out something like this and move on. Now you know.

I just finished the very long first step of my "History project."  Maybe someday I'll be able to describe it.  Now I'm talking a few minutes off to put down notes I made while continuing Secret Wars last night.

First of all, it's annoying that more and more pages each issue keep getting taken up by repeating 'the story so far' which is already done on the top of the first page *and* footnotes that tell us what issue had something being mentioned at the moment.  That's just annoying.  Even in the early 80s, comics didn't sell more with every new issue so there wouldn't be a lot of new readers partway through the series.  This has always annoyed me.  Even if there are new readers, the point is to make what they're reading now interesting.

I'll cite my favorite example which I don't think I've used here, but the first issue of Preacher that I read was in the final storyline before the climax.  In this issue, there's an interaction between two minor characters, Hoover and Featherstone.  In a three page sequence, Hoover breaks up over how much he's always loved Featherstone but has been scared to tell her.  He gives a long speech that is rather goofy and entertaining but is obviously part of his character even if this was the first time I'd ever seen him.  Then she looks up from her desk and says she hadn't been listening, what did he say?  It's very hilarious, especially his shocked appearance and the last panel has him in a liquor store.  "I've come to find out about drinking."  "You've come to the right place."  It was a great scene and a good example of what interested me in that comic and made me want to read more.

So I started enjoying Preacher.  As the series was over by this point, I picked up the collections but had a specific intention to pick them up out of order and save the final book for when I had read the rest of the series.  Soon before I got that final book, I decided to read this issue again just to see how it looked now that I knew Hoover and Featherstone worked for the main badguy, Herr Starr.  Hoover had obviously carried out his puppy love of Featherstone and she had done the same thing for Starr.  So as I read this issue again, it was obvious that Featherstone was staring at a picture of Starr and that's why she wasn't paying any attention to Hoover.  A scene that I had already enjoyed became more meaningful after I had become familiar with the series and the characters.

Then I read the final collection and it turned out that just before this scene, in the previous issue Featherstone had made a similar speech to Herr Starr who had shot her down brutally and that's why she had been focusing on Starr's picture so much.  All of this enriched the one single comedy scene which didn't require footnotes to explain on first reading.

Preacher also had a similar event in the Salvation storyline where main character Jesse is spending some time as sheriff in a small Texas town and is stopped by his deputy from using his superpowers against the storyline's badguy.  Afterwards she has to give him a lecture on how a police officer should behave and ends it with 'and what the hell was that you were doing?' about his power.  He tells a completely blatant lie about his powers before going on to apologize, she's totally right, he'll try to do better, and so on.  The scene ends with her laughing about the blatant lie and how ridiculous it was but that power and its sources is the main plotpoint for the entire series!!!  That's not an explanation, he's just covering for himself in that scene, but it's all that's needed to get through where the characters are now and what they're doing.  There's no way that including the truth would help the story, much less the characters and Jesse having to make up to Cindy for what he had been about to do.

This is how storytelling works.  Focus on the story, not needless intervening details to explain everything immediately!

I will say that Shooter was coming from a different place than Garth Ennis and I don't just mean England.  Comics were almost 50 years old at that point and for most of their history, they had been about explaining everything in as short a manner as possible.  Preacher had gone on for around 2000 pages before the place I started reading and that would have been almost unthinkable before.  Shooter came from a field where maintaining the established characters was the priority and it had to be taken for granted that even the shortest story in some book was the first for some readers so they needed to be told everything.  I don't think kids were that stupid but the people making comics did.  They had been stupid enough to think that no kid dreamed of being Batman, they only dreamed of being Batman's sidekick, which basically explains where their minds were at but I won't get into that now, I'd rather get back to, uh, notes on Secret Wars...

There's just no sense of believability on these characters.  They're always being stated as hundreds if not thousands of miles apart, yet they can cross these distances instantly without effort.  Volcana has mindlessly fallen in love with the Molecule Man for no reason, I really think Shooter was trying to do something but I can't imagine what or why.

The villains are basically useless.  I think I've mentioned that, but now I've realized that only two of them, Doom and Ultron, can even fly.  Wasp, Captain Marvel, Thor, Iron Man, Storm, Rogue and the Human Torch can all do that, and Rogue's the only one of them who doesn't have long-distance powers.  Spidey can swing, Hulk can jump long high distances.  For long distance, Cap can throw his shield, Hawkeye and Cyclops can shoot from a distance, Xavier has his telepathic powers, then there's Magneto...  The villains mostly have strong fists, nothing more.  Doc Ock stands out by having longer cybernetic arms.  There is no sense of competition so all that's left is personality and Shooter isn't good at that.

We see that with how he treats the X-Men, throwing away everything Claremont had brought to them.  If Storm and Cyclops argued who should run the X-Men at the moment, it would make sense, but Xavier says he's doing it and he's working with Magneto, their arch-nemesis.  Are they taking this conflict seriously or not?

I will admit that I liked Rogue's bit of self-doubt.  She was still new to being a hero and that's actually a good thing to do with a character.  She's contributed nothing else to the story but at least there's that so in a sense, she's handled better than most of the others.  But that's how low the standards are here.

At the moment, that's all I have to say.  I'll see if there's more tonight.