Markup View

Author: suedenim

Jun 20th 2011 at 4:53:58 PM

I think two different things are getting mixed together here, which may account for the confusion.  The above description is basically about the publishing term - a "series" that really isn't one, but a one-shot.  That's fairly rare, and in the old days was even rarer.  (Various arcane postal regulations made it more sensible to keep a current series going than to end it and launch a new one.  A famous example from the '50s had ''Moon Girl'' shift from a sci-fi to a straight romance by changing its title first to ''Moon Girl Romance'', then to "A Moon, A Girl... Romance!"  With "Romance" in letters about 50 times the size of the other words. :)

Another type of "One-shot" would be the kind that shows up in publications like DC's ''Showcase'', where each issue had a different feature.  One-shot stories, but which were generally used as tryouts (akin to TV pilots) - thus ''TheFlash'' got his own series after a few ''Showcase'' installments, but (for instance) ''Fireman Farrell'' did not.  Both DC and Marvel had several titles like this in the '70s.

And then another usage of "one-shot" might simply be a "done-in-one" story - i.e., you can read that one issue, get a complete story, and have no particular need to read earlier or later issues of that publication.  Once the overwhelming norm, now (with more focus on continuity and soap-opera-style subplots) less common.