The Panopticon/Publisher's summaries and synopses for Titan comic books
For each kind of story, we are lucky if the publisher provides even one official summary/synopsis. And Titan provides two of those for each issue. This post suggests to look if we cannot use them more efficiently.
Here is what Titan provides for each issue:
- Summary, which is available before the purchase and, thus, is designed to entice you to buy the issue without disclosing any plot twists.
- Section entitled "Previously..." at the beginning of each issue. It is only available after the purchase and summarises the contents of the previous issue (or sets the stage for the whole series in case of the first issue). Since this section is designed to bring the reader up-to-speed on where things are, it usually provides an accurate if short synopsis of the previous issue.
Note also that most Titan stories are multi-issue stories, meaning that each story is supplied with several summaries and several synopses.
Of all this multitude of information, we are currently using only the summary of the first issue of each story. I propose to see if it is viable to harvest more information, especially for multi-issue stories. I use the first story in the Doctor Who: The Tenth Doctor comic book series as a guinea pig. The story in question is Revolutions of Terror and it comprises 3 issues.
In the following posts I present
- Exhibit A: what we currently harvest;
- Exhibit B: how the summary of all 3 issues glued together looks;
- Exhibit C: how the combined synopses of the first 4 issues look (the 4th one containing the recap of issue 3).
My suggestions follow the exhibits.
