How Lost is like an X-Men Comic

Great article comparing Lost to comic books. Read the whole thing here.

I always thought Lost was like a comic book perfectly realized in moving form. From the beginning, I wanted to fold every episode in half, stick it in my back pocket and take it up in my treehouse. It reminded me of those old DC comics when the editor would hand the writer the already-drawn cover of the book and say, “Write a story around that.”

“…and there’s a word balloon, and Kate is saying, ‘Look out, Sawyer! It’s… a polar bear?!’ Go. Have it on my desk by the end of the day.”

The twists and turns also smacked of a serial story that could never end. If there were a comic about survivors on a mysterious island, there would come a day when the whole “castaways” thing would be played out. I can absolutely see Mark Waid pitching his run on the book: “What if we take them off the island? No no! Hear me out! What if we start doing flash forwards, and some of them get away, but then they have to come back again, so they can leave again? Also, there is time travel. Needless to say.”

The whole “we have to get off this island; we have to go back to the island; we have to get back off this island” dynamic seems pretty familiar as a comics reader, doesn’t it? How about those characters you saw five times more of after they “died”?

Of course, that is the one advantage Lost had over most comics. It got to end. Sad as I am to see the sun set on Claremont Dangler Island, in the end it wasn’t about the mysteries; it was about the characters. The crazy crap that was happening mattered, but only because it mattered how it affected those people we’d come to know, how they felt and what they did in the face of ever crazier crap. It’s Wolverine that endures, not the Siege Perilous, and isn’t that the way it should be in the end?

via ifanboy