In the previously mentioned Story, Robert McKee’s book on (amongst other things) script writing, he notes that it’s easier to write experimental and challenging structures in ‘realistic’ settings than it is in ‘fantastical’ ones. The example he uses is The Usual Suspects, which structurally is all over the place. Fantasy and SF films are more conservatively structured because the audience needs some kind of grounding in order to identify and relate to the film, and you’ve got to do enough work as it is to suspend disbelief in your nuclear-powered gorilla robots without throwing in an arse-backwards narrative.
I think there’s a similar glitch with cosmic comic book stories (or SF generally). There’s a tension between making something relatable and going completely crazy. Also, I think many writers, given the chance to write absolutely anything at all with no limits find themselves pushed to write something either coherent or interesting. Jack Kirby was able to do it because, after all, he had an incredible amount of imagination to spare. But even then, his most successful stories (in my opinion, of course) were ones where Stan Lee was able to tether them, if only a little, to human considerations.
The original Star Trek was fortunate in that it was breaking new ground. It had pro skiffy writers on-staff, and the Enterprise was able to whip around alien worlds and concepts that had never been succesfully portreyed in that way on telly before. Even then, the ship herself was the constant, the establishing hook between scenes. The series was not able to maintain its quality further than the first two seasons.
Move forward to The Next Generation, and the patchy early series are the ones with the original-series style exploration. As TNG improved, it became more about an exploration of the familiar characters, and their interactions within the boundaries of the known, rather than with the strange new worlds of the famous intro monologue.
Deep Space 9, from a dramatic standpoint perhaps the most successful of all Treks, doesn’t bother with an exploratory mission at all, and instead features one primary location and delves deeper still into the interactions between its characters. This evolution seems deliberate, moving away from the difficulties of maintaining audience engagement while showing something completely new every week. Voyager tried to do the exploration thing again, and proved to be absolutely pants. The Star Trek franchise has turned further inwards still, now only addressing events of its own continuity’s past.
Space opera comics have never been big favourites round my way, which is a little odd considering my interest in, well, every other kind of space opera. So it’s been good fun to find a number of excellent recent cosmic comic stories: better, in fact, than most of the stuff in the Earth-bound sections of the respective universes. From DC, I thought Adam Strange by Andy Diggle, Green Lantern and GL Corps, the space sections of 52 and then Starlin’s Mystery in Space have been brilliant (I didn’t read Rann-Thanagar War due to poor word of mouth, but I’ll probably read it at some point). The success of these comics have been due to a real feeling of structure to the DC’s off-earth universe, not to mention all have a secure grounding of some kind: either the quest to find Rann, and then return to Earth, or the development of Oa, Mogo, various minor planets and, in particular, Hardcore Station, as real functioning settings that feel both alien and familiar, that appear both functional and alive.
And the same can be said of the two main Marvel space stories: Annihilation and Planet Hulk. Like the DC stories, they have both been firmly grounded either on a single planet (in the latter case) or through a single overarching storyline. Both storylines have benefitted from a strongly consistent tone and continuity, and given a long time to really establish us in their alien environments. In fact, this kind of consistency isn’t only advisable in stories set in space; it really should be standard practice in any ‘event’ or longterm story arc.
