What Makes a Story Timeless? The Evolution of Moore, Otomo, and Dickens

What makes a story timeless? This isn’t one of those rhetorical questions where I’m going to answer it for you. I genuinely want to know. I do not know what makes a story timeless, and I’d love to hear your opinions and your thoughts.

For context: I read through the first two volumes of Alan Moore’s The Saga of the Swamp Thing, and I think I’m going to just blow through the rest of the series. I say “blow through” for a specific reason. Originally, I thought I’d read maybe the first volume, maybe the second volume, and then hop back into Akira and go back and forth between them. But what I noticed is that while I’m interested enough in Swamp Thing to want to see what happens, I’m kind of rushing through it—as opposed to Akira, which I really want to savor every step and every bit of it.

The art, the visuals, the story, the page composition—just everything about Akira, I want to take in as slowly as possible and suck it all in. Knowing that if I had a specific story that was multipart waiting for me on the other side of Akira, I would feel an urge to read quicker so I don’t forget everything that happened going up to it or forget where I was.

Grading the Alan Moore Canon

With Swamp Thing, it’s not like I don’t like Alan Moore’s writing. I love Watchmen. V for Vendetta is actually probably my favorite Alan Moore work of all. I’ve read through Promethea. I have From Hell on my waiting-to-read list, which is probably what I’m going to read after Akira. I’ve read plenty of Alan Moore over the years, and Saga of the Swamp Thing is just one that’s been waiting on my list that I never got around to.

And that leads me to the question. Because Watchmen, even though it’s set squarely in the ‘80s, feels kind of timeless. V for Vendetta definitely feels timeless. Promethea is a future story that feels like it could take place kind of at an “any-when” time. Akira also feels very timeless to me.

Saga of the Swamp Thing feels very squarely set in the time it was created. It feels like a comic of the early ‘80s in terms of the dialogue, the artwork, the pacing—everything about the narrative structure feels dated to me. I am saying that I’m enjoying it; otherwise, I wouldn’t finish the whole series. But if I were going to give it any knock or any criticism, it’s that it doesn’t feel like it ages as well as some of Alan Moore’s other works.

That is also no shade on Stephen Bissette, John Totleben, Alfredo Alcala, or any of the other collaborators on the series. It’s just something that got me wondering specifically: why does this book, by a team of creators that I respect, feel more dated than other works by those same creators?

Looking Back Across the Centuries

I started thinking, well, maybe it’s something about the time period when it’s created. But that’s not necessarily true. Shakespeare, when performed well, can feel as contemporary as anything else. It feels like a period piece, but it still has a timeless aura to it where you can enjoy it at any time. We’ve also seen Shakespeare adapted throughout the decades and centuries, updated to whatever the modern times were since it was created.

I started thinking also about something like Charles Dickens. I don’t remember a ton of Dickens that I read in school, but I remember A Tale of Two Cities feeling like a pretty contemporary story. I think you can look at works throughout the 17th, 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries—stories that, no matter how long ago they were written, still feel very contemporary. I think that’s true for some comics as well.

So it just got me wondering: what makes something feel timeless versus feeling like it is of an era, or, in the most pejorative sense, dated? I don’t know.

What do you think is the secret ingredient that makes a story timeless? Is it universal character emotions, or does it come down to specific pacing and structural choices?

Why do you think certain works from the exact same creator (like Alan Moore’s Watchmen vs. Swamp Thing) age so differently in terms of dialogue and narrative structure?

What is a comic, book, or movie that you love but fully admit feels incredibly “dated” or stuck in the specific decade it was made?