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Official releases → Where spoilers are allowed → Ways you can avoid spoilers → What is not a spoiler → Comics and spoilers |
As compared with stories in other media, comic stories take ages to be fully published. Editors may start a page about that story from the official release of the very first instalment — before the story has been completely finished.
Don't go further than today
When writing a comic story page, don't go beyond what has transpired in the story as currently published at the time you're editing it.
Writing about things within the story
It is often a safer course of action to wait until the story has been completely published before starting articles about the narrative elements, like characters, places or gizmos.
But you're not prohibited from writing about things that have already appeared in a published instalment.
If you choose to start an article about a narrative element before the story is fully published, it's a good idea to write about your subject without assuming that the story is telling you the full truth. Phrases like the following help to protect against surprises when the next instalment is published:
- according to Character X ...
- in the opinion of Character B ...
- at the time that such and such happened, Character C said ...
Dealing with cliffhangers
Multi-issue comic stories are a serial art form. Cliffhangers are employed to keep the reader interested from one instalment to the next. Most cliffhangers work by misdirecting the reader.
That's why taking early parts of a comic story at face value is often a very unwise idea, as comic writers delight in telling lies that will sell issues. You must be very careful. Think about most of the good televised cliffhangers. If this wiki had been going when The Caves of Androzani premiered, we could potentially have written that the Fifth Doctor and Peri got shot by a firing squad — something that never actually happened. This sort of total misdirection happens at the conclusion of almost every instalment of modern comic stories.
For this reason, it's probably best if you do not ascribe any certainty to anything contained in a comic cliffhanger until the story is completely published.