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GROTH: I always found the adventure strip in the newspaper format a little unsatisfying because you summarize the plot every day and you only have several panels to tell the story. I always found it a little unsatisfactory, more suited to a humor strip.
MARSCHALL: I can see where some people would feel that way, but I don't think so. It's just that it's a little different than if you didn't have those demands. But that's like saying you would find Saturday morning movie serials unsatisfactory, and you know what makes for satisfaction? Sometimes the very devices that are forced upon you to cope with the day-to-day situation can work to a charming end. Harold Gray for instance, who I think is the greatest storyteller in the history of comics -- strips or books -- dealt with that in a very novel way, For most of the run of the Orphan Annie strip every day's strip would be a different day's action. That was very hard to do, but he pulled it off very well; I don't know anyone else who's attempted it. Another thing is, he would recap a story, not by a simple caption -- he would very seldom use captions -- but he would have characters go into soliloquies or dialogues. My favorite story of his, from '36-'37, lasted 14 months; by the time the whole story ran, you'd see it from the angle of every character, either through a soliloquy or a dialogue, but every character through the course of the story had recapped the action: it was a fascinating insight into the story almost like what Wilkie Collins did in The Moonstone, only not that heavy-handed. So there was a case where a guy had the restrictions of having the story chopped into seven pieces each week and overcame it beautifully. Not everyone can do it.
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GROTH: You don't think it might be that we're living in more impatient times. We're getting films like Close Encounters and Apocalypse Now, which overwhelm newspaper strips in a way.
MARSCHALL: Well, they do, but you're talking about apples and oranges. It seems axiomatic to me that if you're willing to read a story broken up in panels or to wait one day to read the continuation of a strip, you should be willing to wait 13 weeks for the whole story. Why not? If you accept the format of the continued strip you don't sit there and wish "Oh, why can't I read this for an hour and a half straight, like I sit in the movie theatre for an hour and a half?" People don't think that way. They've accepted the cliches of the form -- not the content, the form -- and then it doesn't bother you. You only hear that argument used as an apology by the story artists and writers who don't have confidence in their own work and the syndicate managers who are at a loss to explain the unpopularity of continuity strips. I'm really convinced it's just because they're badly done. They're boring.