Adversity and Comics

I could probably call this Adversity and Story Telling but I'm coming at it from a comics stand point at the moment.

Anyway.

How about this for a thought experiment?  I call it the Cookie Box Video.

There are two videos with the description "Guy getting a cookie out of a box."

The first video features a man standing in a plain room.  A roughly waist high box with a hole in the side sits on the floor next to him.  A table of random junk sits nearby.  His goal is to get the cookie, which is inside the box, out through the hole, at which point he can eat it.  He is not allowed to damage the box in any way.  From off screen someone says start and he walks over, reaches into the box, pulls out the cookie and eats it.  The whole thing takes maybe thirty seconds.

The second video starts out exactly the same way.  The box looks the same except there are a series of baffles inside the box which prevent him from reaching the cookie with his bare hands.  The cookie is also sitting in a smaller box with a timer set for ten minutes.  If he can't get the cookie out before then he loses.  In addition every minute people off camera will pelt him with icy cold water balloons.  He is of course welcome to quit at any time.  If he comes up with a way to get the cookie quickly but the viewer couldn't come up with the method on their own it will increase their sense of his competence.  If he struggles the whole time and just manages to succeed then he gets credit for perseverance.  If he fails then that will raise our sympathy for him and his reaction to that failure will tell us a lot about who he is as a person.  Does he get mad?  Blame others?  Laugh about it?  Demand another try?  Regardless how it goes down our sense of this person will have increased.

So which one would you want to watch?  Which one would you tell your friends about?


When Bobby Morse is sent to defuse the missile carrying the Goblin Gas (Amazing Spider-man #28) the actual events are:  Bobby decides to defuse the missile, Bobby defuses the missile.  We never see her at risk of failing so this big flashy scene doesn't have any real tension.

In Ironman, there is a point where Riri decides to go fight a villain and ends up facing off against The Armadillo.  Except there is no fight.  She flies down, punches him and the fight is over.  Once again the result is a lack of tension and a failure to develop either the hero or the villain's character in the process.  (And before you say "But it's the Armadillo!  He should lose that fast!" keep in mind that according to the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe the Armadillo can "Withstand the impact of a truck loaded with ten tons of cargo traveling at sixty miles per hour."  He isn't a joke and punching him out isn't how you beat him.)

[This is a separate thing:  Riri being beaten by Will-o-the-Wisp is a good start but do we ever come back to why a character that was always a reluctant villain was doing villainy after getting out?  Also I love Stefano Caselli's art. Don't want anyone to think that I just hate everything.]

There are a bunch more I could go into but that gives you an idea of what I'm talking about.  So next time you are setting up a conflict and resolution ask yourself how hard you are making it for the characters to get the cookie out of the box.  The harder it is, the better the cookie tastes when you finally get it.