Obviously, I loved your meditation on the pleasure of serials.

Still pleasant to hear, though! :-)

I think it's interesting that super hero comics have done so well with serials, even though (from what little I've seen of them) the backstory could grow so huge and complicated that the writers were forced to add those little footnotes: 'Lex Luthor discovered lavender kryptonite in Superman #103: The Lure of the Galaxians'.

I can't think of another paper medium where serials are that successful. Even the SF/F genre magazines don't publish serialized novels much anymore.