“We don’t often spend enough time on ramifications in mainstream comics, so here was a place to build a whole storyline around them.” —Ed Brubaker (“The Ed Brubaker ‘Captain America’ Exit Interview,” David Brothers, comicsalliance.com, November 1, 2012).

Brubaker’s statement reminded us of a piece written by Renaud Pasquier (« “Homeland” met en scène le nouveau Jack Bauer de l’Amérique parano », Le Nouvel Observateur, September 29, 2012), in which he analyzes the first season of the TV series Homeland: ” However, this story won’t at all engage in a furious investigation fueled by the fateful ticking of the clock. What gives fiction its rhythm is time, not external or mechanical time, but something intimate and organic. The irregular and non-linear time of experience; the time of suspicions, doubts and hesitations; the time of emotions, thoughts and memories; but also, the time of delusions” [translation].

In an interview with Mark Waid, Tom Spurgeon used the word “decompression” to talk about Waid’s writing style (Interview # 22 – Mark Waid, www.comicsreporter.ccom, January 10, 2013). We like the image the word creates. We’d like to refine this a little and suggest there is an analogy to be made with the accordion: you need to let air into the instrument (decompression) in order to produce sounds (compressions). If our stories operate only in action mode (compression), they can no longer breathe, there is no longer time to come to understand the characters, their motivations, their evolution. Compression and decompression: that’s our recipe.