Modernity has a passion for speed, which makes decompression popularity and assimilation in every industries’ product life cycle all the more fascinating.

Decompression in comics

In comics, decompression consists in stretching storytelling, leaving more space for visual. So the story slows down, using more panels and pages to say less. In other words, you could say that panels’ efficiency plummets (that is from a story point of view). I invite you to check out this comprehensive article from Ogiue for more details.

One factor that help spreading comics decompression popularity, was that it made sense commercially. With the rise of faster and more visually oriented support, audience naturally turned to narratives that are more immersive and easier to follow. So lower word count / panel and more splashing visuals. As for traditional paper comics, decompressing a story helped “milking the cow”. Once you hooked the audience, you could multiply the volume of books sold with the same story (that is assuming you managed to hook the audience). As a result, stories that used to last one monthly episode became story arcs spreading over four weekly episodes. Same frequency (one story / month), four times the volume sold!

Product life cycle & narratives

In essence, decompression helped the comics industry to extend their product life cycle. The product life cycle is a theory that divides the life of core content (product or service) into various stages. Number varies, but essentially: Development / Introduction / Growth / Maturity / Saturation / Decline. More details about product life cycle’s theory on Hubs blog or Investopedia. Decompression was the comics industry solution to spread the maturity phase, without being too obvious.

Marketing and advertising are focusing more and more on narratives to target their market, and as such, teachings of decompression are becoming widespread techniques for almost every industry. The new norm for success is to increase frequency and be extremely reactive, but to distill less ‘new’ content each time (multiplied fashion seasons, tech’s doted updates, parted movie franchise, and so it goes).

So, as the slogan goes, ‘Less is more’…

PS: A big thanks to guest artist H2 for this page!