In my personal opinion, I'm actually not a fan of this kind of intro. I sort of find action/triller scenes to be a bit boring, especially if the reason of why I should care about said characters has yet to be established. You can still have a mysterious hook without having it be chaotic. Heck, look at the film Dreams of a Life.
this is the first time, I ever posted to a forum, I don't actually use any social media accounts tbh.
Sure, I like to deliver my content with some flair, that being said in the long run, it's clearer for the person reading to understand the topic if it's concise, detailed and objective as possible.
Where I am located it is a Saturday evening, I don't write these posts because I want to kill time at work, but because I really do love story telling and I want to help people to create more and hopefully better too.
I could write the same topic in 10 minutes, but it would not be clear, and I'd just end up writing dozens of responses to clarify what I meant, which would waste both our time.
that being said, I also understand your point, everyone has different tastes when it comes to prose. Regardless, I hope the content of the thread helped you with your projects or at least gave you a different perspective on writing.
-Pablo
I see your point, it can be difficult to like a character before you know their personality, that being said, I feel like there is some kind of primal connection when it comes to seeing a character sincerely trying to survive and the effects of that on their mentality.
Like you're actually there with them, hoping they survive. I personally feel like this is even better without any or with little context, it's just survival at it's rawest.
I think that's the entire appeal of films like the Revenant and The Grey, and what makes them so effective with what they've set out to show.
hey, I just wanna really quickly clarify my comment so there's no misunderstandings
i wasnt complaining what you're doing is clickbaiting (though... it is), i was saying the topic at question is clickbait.
that is to say, you wrote like 3 paragraphs explaining what clickbait is without saying the word, and i wanted to (humoristically, hopefully) point it out!
do i think clickbait has place in writing? absolutely. we more commonly see it in form of cliffhangers but i think thats actually more or less the same in different places in time in terms of the comic.
aka 'giving a minimal amount of information to generate interest'
but i also think it's very disliked for an obvious reason; it's annoying.
it's kind of a ruse, and 99% of the time the content won't be able to hold up to whatever the readers want it to hold up to be. i didnt read your comic (@pablo) so hell, maybe you pulled it off really well, but it's very rare to find good.. clickbait...
just look at breaking bad. one of the best written series ive ever seen, and it Very Much used the clickbait format within its episodes, but it never managed to really pull it off well.
not to mention to use it embedded within the writing, just like you said, could put us in a situation where we just don't care enough about the characters or story to want to know what the end of the 'clickbait' is.
I think KRWilliams did a fantastic job outlining this in their response, and giving us some tools on how to avoid it.
also... i think your topic is valid but the reason you're getting iffy responses is that:
a. you're presenting yourself as a 'master' (giving your own work as an example? ouch) without anyone having asked about it, making it feel like you're looking down on other writers a little (even if this wasn't your intension at all!) multiplied by the way you write which really is surprisingly and unecessarily, as draconic put it, customer-services-esque
b. your title is clickbait. you're having people enter and immidiately telling them "ha! i got you!" like... nooo..... just like in fictional content and popup ads, clickbait is annoying because the content can't live up to be as interesting as the mystery. you probably would've gotten way better responses with a title like "the place of clickbait in comics," "purposful underexplaining in writing", "info deprevision as a writign technique" etc etc
Yeah, I'm not a fan of this kind of writing either. To me it usually feels lazy and even egotistical in a way ("My story is SO cool that I don't even have to explain it!"). I see this happen in anime every now and again and it's usually the fastest way for me to just go watch something else.
You can have cool action AND explain what's going on, even if it's just one or two quick sentences and leave your readers not feeling confused and abandoned.
That doesn't mean you can't start off with action, but you should really give some context somewhere early on. It's even worse when a story starts off with this type of scene and... then just continues like it's completely normal, no explanation, no anything. The reader just has to figure it out on their own as they go. This happened in the Attack on Titan manga when they suddenly switched to a completely different cast of characters with no explanation that left my husband and I confused for a few chapters...... (Hoping the anime does it better).
Maybe some people like that, but personally for me, it's just a turn off. I like context. I like explanations and not being confused.
I agree, it was definitely a faux pas on my part to link my own story I should have used another resource to illustrate my point, but mine was there, it was free to read and since it's only 11 pages long (the rest is still being uploaded) short and to the point.
Also the only other piece of visual media I knew that used the same technique was Darren Aaronovsky's film "Mother!" I genuinely couldn't think of anything else that would directly illustrate the point I'm trying to make.
And you're right, the point I was trying to make is clickbait, I didn't actually realize it/see it from that perspective until you pointed out XD. I did however want to clarify it's applications in creative writing, which is why I spent so long on each point.
Also, I'm still learning this whole forum thing too, so my internet etiquette is still in the process of being refined, while the title was meant as clickbait, I genuinely didn't mean it negatively. I'll avoid misleading titles in the future.
I appreciate your criticisms,
-Pablo
"Don't explain it" reminds me of some books on here that I've tried to read but just drop. They opened up mentioning dozens of characters, names of things that could be anything from cities to other characters but I have no context, powers or forces I guess, and offer me almost nothing to connect to.
It feels like reading a book about a foreign country for the first time, but I'm expected to already know everything about it.
One of the basic tenants of giving creative advice is that you don't use your own personal works as an example (unless you're demonstrating basic sentence structure or something like that). Not only does it come off as egotistical, it frequently doesn't track well to the point you're trying to make.
In this case, I disagree that INTERMINUTE is a good example of this in media res technique. I do like that it starts with an action chase scene. The audience understands immediately that our protagonist is being hunted by authorities who have control of time/space, which is intimidating and pretty cool. That's all we really need to know for now to feel engaged.
The attempts in pages 4 in 5 to add context actually hurt more than help. The character in the mask appears out of nowhere. We can't tell if the protagonist recognizes them or not. The visions we see don't have any information other than "police bad" which we easily intuit from our protag being chased by authorities. There's nothing to analyze here, just "stuff that doesn't make sense yet." And the dialogue "memories in other loops" is so without context it's essentially meaningless. They might as well be speaking gibberish.
An audience can only have so many questions in mind when reading the beginning of a story. "Who is this man? Why is he being chased? Is this Future Earth or somewhere else entirely?" Good questions that can slowly be unraveled. "Who is this person in the mask? Do they know each other? What is a loop? Why is he seeing memories from OTHER loops?" I'm betting the answers to those questions aren't going to matter until after the chase part is over or at least lulled. So there's really no need to introduce them this early at all.
Though not as much of an action scene, a good Tapas example is Joel.
We know almost nothing about Joel from the start: he's a dude who escaped from a crashing plane. Over the first few eps we discover he has some kind of power. He's a hitman. There's almost no dialogue but it aligns very well with known genre tropes that we intuit a lot with very little.
Joel please update :<
Anyway, that's my two cents.
So, this is only ONE way to start a compelling story from hundreds of other ways. To start a story in the “middle” and show no beginning is a pretty tried and true technique, but it’s not the only way to do it, like you suggested. It is an extremely common way of starting a story (especially in movies) and is a no-fail way to catch the reader’s attention.
This kind of advice, in my opinion, is a little too.. “I tried this before and I’ve seen this before so it must be the CORRECT way to do things”. I also agree with @KRWilliams that different things work in different mediums .
Also, being thrown in the middle of a chase scene - I’ve seen that hundreds of times. It just SCREAMS:
RECORD SCRATCH “hey. So I guess you’re wondering what I’m doing in this situation.”
Signed, Dawg O. Dawgness, director of Leftovers
edit: After reading @minerrale's post, I realize that I'm one of those people who are being unnecessarily aggressive.. I don't mean to come off as mean-spirited, just pointing out some potential flaws in this post in a comedic way. 
OP, I hope you continue to post advice threads since they ARE helpful!
I'm not going to argue any point here, just remind all of you that this community is supposedly kind and welcoming, yet you're all, at the least, making fun of someone who is very obviously not used to chatting in the casual way we are, and at the worst, being unnecessarily agressive.
Y'all should be ashamed of yourselves.
Now, Momma Minnie is getting her her old ass out of here.
I still love you, little buttercups 
@Pablo.C.S , i would add to your advice that while it is a clever trick to engage audiences by making them ask themselves questions about how they got there, is important that the answers live up to the hype of the questions created by the intro. Otherwise, people may feel cheated.
Also, for these kind of stories it requires to have the story ready and a lot of planning of the events that happened to avoid contradictions and plot holes. Personally i would not recommend it for people who write on the run making things as the story progress.
My point is that blowing the mind of the people with the revelations is as important as the curiosity generated with the first impression.
You should watch Pulp Fiction. The story doesn`t follow a linear time structure, but the way all is interconnected and the way it plays with spectations makes people ask themselves interesting questions and to give satisfactory answers.
Warning: Is a Tarantino movie, so, expect some blood and swearing
This perfectly describes how I felt about Ergo Proxy, it raised more questions than it answered and the ending felt more uh... artistic than satisfactory. 
On the other hand I really do like this style of writing overall. If I just get giant exposition dumps it can feel like the author is treating me like I'm too dumb to figure it out on my own. I think just how much or how little info you start with largely depends on what you're trying to achieve/ context of the type of story and so on.
Oh god yes, Ergo Proxy is one of the worst in that regard. I hated that stupid show. Personally I am sick of - specifically Anime - introducing mystery plotlines very early on or throwing you into a world without explanation and then never giving a satisfying explanation. I feel so cheated when that happens. Sometimes it can be part of the appeal (see Higurashi season 1 for that). Sometimes there is another good stuff to distract you from that. But often it just draaaaags out the story.
That being said: Of course you can throw a reader into an unknown situation and reveal everything slowly. Gunnerkrigg Court does that masterfully as every little mini explanation is satisfying in its own way. But there are pitfalls to be aware of for sure.
i hope people read it and mull on it a bit ,or take a guess at what will happen
[KNIGHTS CHRONICLES](https://tapas.io/episode/1030648)
I agree with everything you said! Sometimes it's hard, and I get impatient and want to put my story out there, but the best thing I've ever done is paced it out.
I admit that I am not reading the entire thread. If someone else written this before me, I apologize in advance.
The technique being described here by Pablo has a literary term. It's called En Media Res. That translates from Latin as In The Middle. I see this a lot in prime time television shows. Most often, the first scene presented is lifted from the middle of the story (exactly as Dawgofdawgness described it). In Media Res does not necessarily have to happen out of narrative sequence though. If the first scene is all action, that counts in my opinion.
Pablo's specific variation involves stretching out that initial scene. He includes the narrator doling out important information for the reader as the scene progresses. This might work for a lot of stories. Thirty pages seems long to me, but your mileage may vary. I can think of a few stories from classic literature which could have benefited from this approach.
P.S. If Pablo is off-putting and comes off like a professor, my posts must give forum members flashbacks of finals week and school stress.
Actually, no. Your tone is different. Granted you do have a "teaching" mode, but it doesn't come across like your trying to teach a class.
I understand this idea of this and know it works well for some people, however it's a method that I don't really enjoy and doesn't work to attract me to read something. Hack I didn't realize this thread was existed until now, and I honestly thought it was a forum game like "explain you comic in 3 words" or "summarize your comic/novel badly or like a cars salesman" so I was sad to find no forum game.
With that said, I don't like enduring my readers to something I am not a fan of myself, though I also try very hard not to over explain because readers do not like that either. So I do kind of a balance were a general idea is given at the beginning, and the rest is explained in bits and pieces throughout the story.
There are is a comic I did that kind of start this way but it will never be something I always do, simply for the fact that it worked for that specific story but it did not work for others. Writing methods are great like that, there are so many of them and not all of them have to be utilized to make your story work. I mean, if every story started the same and followed the exact same rules it would be pretty boring.