Can Comics And Stories Have Expansions?

Although this article is something of a rambling thought experiment about writing and/or comics, I’m going to have to start by talking about old computer games for a while. Trust me, there’s a reason for this and I’m not just geeking out about old games for the sake of it.

Anyway, back in the golden age of computer gaming (eg: the 1990s and early 2000s), games companies often used to do something really cool with their games. Basically, a while after they’d released a particular game, they would release expansion packs for it.

Usually, these were a separate CD or a set of floppy disks that contained extra content for the original game (eg: new levels, new weapons, new items, new characters etc…). With a few notable exceptions, you usually needed a copy of the original game in order to use the expansion pack.

Because old expansion packs for games were often sold on physical media (unlike modern “downloadable content” or “DLC”), there was an incentive for games companies to actually make them worth selling and worth buying.

In other words, a good expansion pack from the 1990s would often increase the amount of content in a game by 10%-30% at the very least. Whereas, with modern DLC, a game company can get away with selling things that only add as little as 0.1% new content to a game (eg: like the notorious ‘horse armour‘ DLC) because they don’t have to actually sell a physical product.

So how is any of this stuff relevant to making comics and/or writing fiction?

Well, as you’ve probably guessed, I was wondering if it was possible to do a similar thing with comics and fiction. I mean, on a very basic level, most sequels serve this purpose – since they often follow on from after the events of the original novel or comic. But, well, a full-length sequel isn’t really an expansion pack.

Personally, I can only really think of a couple of examples of something close to a traditional “expansion pack” in comics and fiction. One of those is a comic called “Death: At Death’s Door” by Jill Thompson – this comic is basically a re-telling of the events of Neil Gaiman’s excellent “Season Of Mists“, but from the perspective of a different character.

Even though the main story is pretty much the same, there are at least one or two extra side stories that aren’t shown in Neil Gaiman’s original comic. Not only that, there is also a lot of additional humour and character development that wasn’t present in the original comic.

But, unlike most expansions for computer games, Jill Thompson’s “Death: At Death’s Door” also works as a stand-alone story too. In fact, I actually read it before I read “Season of Mists”. Even so, it’s probably best enjoyed after reading “Season Of Mists”.

The only other example I can think of is an e-book called “Double Dead: Bad Blood” by Chuck Wendig.

I haven’t actually read “Bad Blood” (mainly because I prefer reading traditional paper books), but it’s a short sequel to an absolutely excellent zombie/ vampire novel by Wendig called “Double Dead” (which I have read).

Although “Bad Blood” is technically a sequel, I’d argue that it’s probably more of an expansion for the simple reason that it’s only about a third or a quarter of the length of the original novel. In other words, it’s primarily intended as something to supplement the original novel.

Even so, expansions for stories and comics have been pretty rare – and this is probably more to do with the publishing industry than anything else. Basically, before the invention of e-books, printing short stories and novellas was more of an economic risk. Since, according to traditional wisdom at least, these things don’t sell as well as full-length novels do. So, there was less incentive to print lots of physical copies of these things.

Of course, with e-books, length is fairly irrelevant. Even the largest e-book only takes up a trivial amount of memory. Likewise, another great thing about e-books is that literally anyone can publish them – so authors can publish shorter works without getting the approval of an established publisher first.

Another thing which may have limited the popularity of expansions for comics and stories is the simple fact that only expansions for popular things will sell in any quantity. Why? Because, unless you make a stand-alone expansion, the potential audience for your expansion only really consists of the people who have read and enjoyed your original story or comic. If your original audience was fairly small, then this means that the audience for your expansion will probably be even smaller.

Although computer games had this problem too, the fact that there were far fewer computer games than novels around in the 1990s probably helped to ensure that expansions sold quite well. Since, although the audience for computer games may have been smaller – they also had a smaller variety of games to choose from.

So, yes, there are probably quite a few reasons why expansions for stories and comics haven’t been as popular as those for computer games, but I certainly think that it’s something that writers and comic creators shouldn’t dismiss.

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Anyway, I hope that this was interesting 🙂