Comic book examples of Establishing Series Moment.
- In chapter one of All Fall Down, a news vendor comforts a small boy by telling him "Nothin' bad ever lasts in the comics. Death, doom, disaster? There's nothin' they can't fix." Moments later, a superhero plummets out of the sky, destroying the news stand and dying instantly.
- The title page of the first issue of The Amazing Spider-Man (Lee & Ditko) is of Spidey sticking to a wall, with angry people pointing at him and yelling "Freak! Public Menace!", establishing that this is a comic about a Hero with Bad Publicity.
- Bone opens with a few pages of amusing bickering by a standard Comic Trio of cartoonish anthopomorphic bones. Cue an attack by a horde of realistically-drawn locusts, which splits the three of them up and strands them in an unfamiliar place.
- The very first image from the first issue of The Boys has what looks like a superhero getting his head violently and gorily stomped in with a combat boot in close-up, telling us immediately that this is going to be a violent series with no romanticization of superheroes.
- Get Jiro! opens with a trio of foodies entering Jiro's sushi establishment. Their sushi-etiquette proves to be so poor (eating them with chopsticks, dipping them directly into the sauce, mixing soy sauce with wasabi and asking for california rolls), he snaps and lops one of their heads off with his knife. The cops sees the head roll out into the parking lot and, rather than arrest Jiro, remark that this has happened before and offer to get a Cleanup Crew for Jiro. This clues us in that this hyper-violent, John Wick/Sin City-esque world sees the food and the restaurant industry as Serious Business, as well as establishing our protagonist Jiro as a Chef of Iron with a Code of Honor.
- The first pages of Maus might seem to be an unusual opening for a narrative about the Holocaust, but they actually speak volumes about Art Spiegelman's unconventional—but deeply personal—approach to the subject matter. Though the book is about Spiegelman's father Vladek, an Auschwitz survivor, it opens with a flashback to Spiegelman's own childhood, where he runs crying to his father after his friends abandon him while rollerskating. Instead of comforting his son, Vladek callously responds, "Friends? Your friends? If you lock them together in a room without food for a week, then you could see what it is, 'friends'..." This notably foreshadows the book's focus on the children of Holocaust survivors and their efforts to overcome the generation gap separating them from their parents.
- The first issue of Saga has two: First, a narrator gives us a poetically worded monologue "This is how ideas become real" as an alien couple prepares to give birth to their child, followed by the mother saying "Am I shitting? It feels like I'm shitting!" Barely a few minutes after, the couple is attacked by a group of soldiers from both parents' respective sides, each of them wanting to kill the couple and their child for being a half-breed, and a gruesomely violent battle ensues. Later, it shows robots with human bodies and TV's for screens having anal sex, and one of them has PTSD. Both of these moments serve to illustrate the combination of eloquent beauty and crude, often very vulgar brutality that will go on to define the entire story.
- As Grant Morrison argues in Supergods, the very first image of Superman in the cover art
◊ of Action Comics #1 actually speaks volumes about many central themes of the Superman mythos. Notice that it depicts a mysterious Herculean strongman note striking a dramatic pose while hoisting a car over his head—telling us that it's a mythic tale of superhuman feats, but also a story for the modern age. And in a time before color photography, the eye-catching primary colors in Superman's suit would have given him a decidedly futuristic vibe, subtly telling the audience that he was an evolved being with the power to lead humanity into the future.- Of course, the actual comic doesn't come up short, either: The first page of Action Comics #1 features:
- The explosion of Krypton, with baby Kal-El's rocket escaping.
- Baby Clark lifting a chair above his head as a baby, showing he had great powers from birth as a result of his alien heritage.
- A montage of adult Clark showing off his famous powers: leaping a tall building, lifting a steel girder one handed, and running faster than a locomotive.
- And finally, Superman, boldly standing above the city in his iconic costume while a narrative caption informs us that he is "Champion of the oppressed [...] who had sworn to devote his existence to helping those in need!"
- Of course, the actual comic doesn't come up short, either: The first page of Action Comics #1 features:
- Transmetropolitan starts with Spider Jerusalem getting a call to get back to work in the City. He rants about how horrible the City is, blows up his favorite local bar on the ride out so that no one will enjoy it without him, ditches his car in gridlock, makes a commando raid on his editor's office, and strikes a deal to write blistering rebukes of the corrupt government. All of this establishes the series as the adventures of a violent, misanthropic gonzo journalist in a metropolitan dystopia.
- The very first thing we see in Watchmen is an extreme close-up on the Comedian's smiley-face button lying in a massive pool of blood, which a man carrying a sign reading "The End Is Nigh" walks through, all set to Rorschach's iconic, menacingly nihilistic opening narration. And thus the audience understands instantly that this is not your typical superhero comic.
- X-Force:
- The first issue of the Peter Milligan run, which introduces a big new team of mutant superheroes out for fame and glory… and then kills all but a few of them off. When this comic advertises that Anyone Can Die, it means it.
- The first arc of Uncanny X-Force makes it seem very much like this is going to be your typical X-Force comic; shallow, style-over-substance '90s Anti-Hero action about a mutant black ops team. Then X-Force reach their current target and find out it's a child, marked for death merely because he's a clone of Apocalypse. And then Fantomex shoots him dead anyways, because hey, it's for that greater good that X-Force has always justified assassinations with. This is NOT going to be your typical X-Force comic.
- Chew: The comic starts off with a man cutting some vegetables for a soup until he accidentally cuts himself and spills blood on it which shows that the comic you are about to read contains a lot of violence with a bit of "cooking".
- The Department of Truth opens with Lee Harvey Oswald being taken into custody for assassinating the President. When he is questioned on whether or not he did it, he admits that he cannot properly remember if he did, a sign that people are already speculating on alternative truths.
- The first few pages of Hellboy feature a paranormal scientist and a costumed superhero joining a team of American soldiers to foil an occult ritual masterminded by the Nazis during World War II—definitively establishing the series' capricious mix of dark fantasy and retro pulp sci-fi. It also makes it instantly clear that the series is set in a Fantasy Kitchen Sink universe where absolutely anything can happen.
- The first issue of the Matt Fraction run on Hawkeye (2012) opens with our hero falling from a great height in the middle of a typical adventure and catching himself with a grappling arrow in usual superhero fashion... only to slam into the side of the building, lose his grip, and tumble down to the street below, landing on a car, followed by a hard cut to him spending six weeks recovering from his severe injuries in the hospital. Pretty much all of it is Played for Laughs. In a few pages, you know this is comic is a Deconstructive Parody of superhero comics full of Surprisingly Realistic Outcome, Mood Whiplash, and Black Comedy.
