Seriously though, nobody asked for this advice, nor is it particularly good - illustrated by kip above.
This feels like a weird humblebrag, interspersed with self advertisement, wrapped up neatly in a shitpost disguised as profound advice.
-Allyn Crowe, writer of burns
I'm sorry you feel that way, but if you click on my account and look at my previous threads you can see that this isn't some random thread, a lot of my threads follow the theme of offering insight and assistance, just as I was offered when I started out writing.
My intentions are not to draw in views for my comic, but to help other authors out. And judging by the likes the thread has gotten, it managed to achieve what it set out to do, at least partially.
I only linked my story exactly because it just so happened to illustrate the point I was making with the thread.
If you have criticisms of the actual content, instead of attacks on my person, then please share it with us all, I'd be happy to consider what you have to say.
And I don't need to humblebrag, my content speaks for itself.
-Pablo, Author of INTERMINUTE
I think there's also another thing to consider here, and that's the difference between formats such as comics, video games and TV, and novels. While novels have been taking on more cinematic tropes in recent years, there are still a few things that you can and can't do in novels compared to the big screen.
Firstly, you have to describe what a character looks like in a novel, so that people have an idea in their head before they even begin. This will automatically slow down quite a lot of the action if you do it the traditional way. Depending on whether you're writing in third or first person as well, you are going to be even more limited. (How many first person novels have we read where the main character has a look at themselves in a mirror? - too many!) That's something that each author has to come to in their own way - how much to slow things down with description in the opening chapter and how much to leave. In general though, depending on your genre, avoiding exposition and being overly descriptive in the first chapter is a good shout so long as you've got some tight grips on your characters and locations.
One of the best pieces of advice I think of daily is that the opening line of a novel should have a person, a location and a problem. Obviously, insert your own style into it, but in order to hook your readers, they should know something immediate.
Here's a few examples of what I mean here:
"It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they executed the Rosenbergs, and I still didn't know what I was doing in New York." - Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar (First person so person identified, location identified and their main problem - plus we get a little intrigue with an execution!)
"It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife." - Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice. (Person identified, our man with money (Mr. Bingley), our problem (he wants to get married).
"The man in black fled across the desert, and the Gunslinger followed." - Stephen King, The Gunslinger (Person - man, location - desert, problem - gunslinger).
Following these for your opening helps you often stop from going into too much exposition too early and helps you focus on what you're readers are most interested in - the PROBLEM. That is often your hook to your story and why people will keep reading.
INTERMINUTE's method works visually, but changing that into writing would require a lot of different techniques and could end up with a disjointed effort to try to put it into a written chapter. As far as a comic writing goes, it's an excellent way to do things, as far as novel writing goes - writers do need to include a tad more to make up for the lack of visual aids and probably wouldn't insert a flashback into the first chapter, which would classed as needless exposition to come back to later. Even you have had to put it in the author's notes that it's meant to be a flashback, rather than trusting your readers to get it.
If you want to see some great opening lines that can serve to inspire you (and ones that focus on this method which is focusing your first chapter on a problem that needs to be solved) there's an article here that has some wonderful ones: https://www.buzzfeed.com/sarahgalo/it-was-a-queer-sultry-summer1
(Edited to say that this isn't actually aimed at OP, but rather the topic itself. I'm using general 'you' here except when directly addressing INTERMINUTE as a reference point).
The intent is to provide players with a sense of pride and accomplishment for unlocking different heroes.
*** EA flashback intensively **
--
Dear Pablo, Author of INTERMINUTE.
Most of users has positive reviews about your topic, as you've seen.
But this is not about the content you post, it's about your presentation.
I guess the reason is you haven't used forum much in the past. I believe it's just a habit being created from the long history of working in office. It feels like you're posting all of this because of your work, not because you want to use the Tapas forum voluntarily. That's why everyone feels uncomfotable with this series of your educational topics.
In sort, everyone is fine with your posts.
But you should stop using the formal speech, and act like a casual friend instead.
Sincerely
- Draconic, Author of 'Alter Within: Ellis and Zayn'.
--
Or I can say like this:
Dude, are you from customer services? Because all of your posts feel like that.
Hi KRWilliams,
I completely agree, naturally there is a gap between comics and other visual mediums and a novel, however, and this might be a controversial point, I disagree that a character's physical attributes must be described, when writing a novel, regardless of perspective.
This is real only a minor detail and doesn't effect the plot, with the exception of gender and race, which can also be inferred from name and setting,
example: someone called Artyom who lives in Russia is most likely a male and Russian.
But other than that, appearances aren't really necessities nor does it add to the atmosphere in the same way, say something like set design does.
If physical appearance was a key aspect or theme of the novel, for example if a certain set of physical attributes, changed the course of the story around a specific character, then this can be illustrated, naturally through the interactions and dialogues of the supporting cast. Also regardless of whether it's first or third person.
I also don't necessarily think that a flashback needs to be explicitly pointed out, nor does it need to be repeated out in full, just start off a little bit before said flashback ended whilst repeating core details. The audience can infer from this that the scene is a from where it left off, previously. Though I will agree it might feel disjointed with the first read.
Lastly, I will admit that INTERMINUTE's specific way of revealing information wouldn't translate well in a written medium, aka shifting from one scene to another and detaching itself completely from the MC, but it can still be done if it's remains tied to the perspective of the main character, and him actively adapting to those conditions.
For example, if I were to adapt this chase scene to a written medium, I would have it so Dustin (the red haired character) would have a walkie-talkie, or perhaps overhear it from a radio on the street as interference, listen to the time police plan out they're raid, eg: "Free to prog, okay to falcon."
look up at the sky, seeing the flare explosion and make commentary on how the world is losing it's color and freezing: "shit! it's becoming grey, no, no... I better make it out before everything gets frozen." etc. something along those lines.
Although I understand that this is probably not nearly as effective, as it was with a visual medium.
and of course, I understand your response is aimed at the content, I appreciate you taking the time to discuss the limitations of this perspective.
-Pablo
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.
