Hanging on The Wire

Everything is Connected

by David Uzumeri of Funnybook Babylon

HBO’s The Wire, co-created by David Simon and Ed Burns, finishes up its five-season run on Sunday. For its small but incredibly devoted viewership, this provides closure to over five years’ worth of emotional investment in an intricate serialized story about countless people from all walks of society and how they mingle, relate, love and kill. Propelled by a single artistic vision, five seasons, each with their own theme, build on each other to form a single complex and unified tale, manipulating existing genre conventions to create something wholly new and different.

Sound familiar?

It’s no surprise that television and comics have become kissing cousins over the past few years, sharing talent, ideas, and sometimes whole properties – they’re both serialized visual media that extend a story over a long period of time, creating a natural back-and-forth between the creators and the fanbase/viewership. They can be open-ended or finite, deliberately paced or created one at a time, episodically self-contained or continuity-laden.

So what makes The Wire unique? Largely its ambition. Meticulously plotted and incredibly complex, The Wire engages the viewer eloquently, trusting him/her to stay alert, put together the pieces and follow the narrative without the consistent recapping and handholding that often permeates network television. Each season introduces a new cast of characters that supplements rather than replaces what was already there and exposes a new layer of the interrelated machinery that runs the city of Baltimore.

So what does any of this have to do with comics? To look forward, we must first look back. In 1993, David Simon’s book Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets was published, leading to both considerable acclaim and the seven-season NBC police drama Homicide: Life on the Street, which Simon left journalism to work on himself.

In the late ’90s and early ’00s, a few hotshot young turks entered the comic industry with backgrounds in crime fiction: namely Brian Michael Bendis, Greg Rucka and Ed Brubaker. They didn’t all come in at the same time, or at the same place, but they fairly quickly found each other and started to collaborate. Their writing was detail-oriented, their dialogue as realistic as possible considering the context of the standard superhero comic, and their plots were always planned out far in advance. All of them, in terms of influence, were disciples of Simon.

In the Powers v2 #12 50th-issue blowout interview, Bendis states that “HOMICIDE: A YEAR OF KILLING on the Streets by David Simon … started my absolute love affair for the idea of a homicide detective and his life.” Brubaker and Rucka have both cited Homicide as a major influence on the dynamic and structure of the Eisner award-winning Gotham Central. These three would later go on to work on a variety of projects, both somewhat related to crime fiction (Daredevil, Crime Bible, Detective Comics) and not (Wonder Woman, Uncanny X-Men, Mighty Avengers). Wherever they went, however, the humanistic perspective and attempt at verisimilitude fostered by their crime work would go with them, no matter how bizarre or alien the project.

Additionally, particularly Bendis is often tagged with the reputation of being responsible for what’s known as “decompression”: which is seen as either dragging out scenes or giving them room to breathe, depending on your perspective and the quality of the work. Where before a particular story or conflict would tend to take up one or two issues, with plot threads leading from and to the next issue separate from the particular episodic story, runs would be built as successive arcs, usually four to six issues, which tell a single story, with plot threads running between them. Any attempt at making each issue immediately accessible was abandoned, a necessary sacrifice in the name of verisimilitude and narrative complexity.

This approach, rather than alienating readers, combined with the newfound proliferation of trade paperback collections to shoot Bendis, and later Brubaker, up to the top of the sales charts. These extended stories, heavy on realistic dialogue and character interaction, were hugely popular in collected form and drew tons of new readers in. Which brings us back to The Wire.

It’s interesting to note that, unlike comics, television hadn’t really – and still hasn’t – made that switch completely yet. DVD box sets are replacing trade paperbacks in the metaphor, and certainly shows like Lost or Arrested Development are far more enjoyable when watched in order, but they still make an attempt for each episode to tell its own story. They still act on the unspoken assumption that every episode could be someone’s first, and that as writers they have an obligation to hook them. This is an attitude very much encouraged by the networks. As a result, many shows get bogged down in episode-specific details to maintain the fractal nature of their storytelling – to serve the needs of that single episode’s story, the stories of the multi-episode arcs around it, and on top of that the main driving throughline of the show. This nearly crippled Battlestar Galactica during the back half of season three, as all momentum from the midseason climax was lost in a sea of forgettable one-episode stories with no impact slotted into the story just to fill out a schedule.

The Wire, despite being ostensibly an ongoing television drama (well, ongoing to five seasons, the same way you could consider Y or Ex Machina an ongoing comic) never went with that route. Each season had its own arc, but even though each episode had a different writer and director, they would flow together to create one cohesive story – no episode-specific crises, no tangents slotted in to make the series more “accessible.” It was full speed ahead from the word go, and to say it was critically lauded would be a fair understatement. Unfortunately, unlike Bendis – who got to prop his experiments with comic pacing on the marketing giant known as Spider-Man – David Simon had an HBO show with unknown actors and unknown characters, so that commercial success largely eluded him.

It’s going to be interesting to see how this relationship continues to develop. It’s easy to say that Simon, his writing partner Ed Burns and their staff are unaware of this connection, but considering the Ultimate Spider-Man shout-out in season two I’m not wholly convinced. People always accuse the comics market of being infantile and underdeveloped, but the aspects that made The Wire so unpopular with the general audience have been hugely successful in the comic industry, both inside and out of the corporate-owned superhero market. Does this speak just to the talent of the creators involved? Increased marketplace awareness within comics fandom? Or simply luck? I have no idea.

But I do know I’d kill to see Simon and Burns do a comic.

Alternate Current is a series of weekly posts on thought-provoking, or simply fun, topics from bright minds all throughout the blogosphere. We take submissions and responses, so if you’d like to get into the mix, send an email to David Brothers. This week comes courtesy of David from Funnybook Babylon.