How do I make the premise of an epsodic series understandable through a one-shot?

[JoshRaed]

As it stands now, my one-shot story required me to explain the entirety of what the characters do with their lives, and I'm not sure what would make the story actually explain itself.

The series is about a girl, her mom, and her brother, traveling the country in an RV as they encounter horror monsters and stuff and deal with them. Every chapter would be something different.

I really don't know how to make this concept understandable with just one episode or whatever. Like the RV, protagonist, mother, and brother are already there, and she does encounter a monster and deal with it, with her psychic powers, but no one can seem to piece together what the series is about regardless of those details.

I don't really get how other shows do it. I can't put a theme song to explain this in a webcomic, and I can't reference other episodes because this is a one-shot, and I don't think connecting this idea to a whole series that doesn't exist would work either. What could I do instead?

[Legendofgenii]

Is it dystopian? Monsters have taken over the world kind of thing, and they are survivors?

If so, could they be shown driving by the carcasses of some long dead monsters, maybe make-shift graves at the side of the road? Drawings of monsters they’ve fought before on the walls of the RV - some have been crossed out?

Sometimes it’s fun for the reader not to know what’s going on initially, but they should know by the end of the story. You can keep feeding them little clues and information, like the above.

Alternatively, just go for the obvious, and have the characters candidly chatting about the fact they hunt monsters?

[JoshRaed]

It's more like Ben 10 but scary, but I've said that way too often so I didn't say that.

I guess I could have the characters discuss candidly a monster type thing. I think that would make the story make so much more sense, because looking back it feels like it could have just as easily been a silent hill type deal without the established context that they just regularly see monsters.

[darthmongoose]

One option is that the character is narrating her life somehow. Either she narrates what she does to the audience directly, or you can use a framing device like she's writing it in a diary, recording it as a sort of log, either for work record or evidence purposes or in case they die, or she could be talking to somebody they met on the road.

In the excellent story podcast "Alice Isn't Dead", the framing device is that the main character is recording an audio diary of her strange supernatural encounters while driving a truck around the US, and she's speaking as if she's addressing her former lover, Alice, allowing the story to be told in an audio format to the audience with a believable framing device that's also world building.

A lot of older novels were written with the framing device of it being a letter sent to friends or family, or you have Gravity Falls where the narration at the start of the first episode is Dipper's diary.

[ylldre]

I also struggle with important basic exposition of my fantasy comic world. I don’t like exposition but sometimes it is really important if the lore is dense. I do this by explaining the lore as the propaganda told by the unreliable ruling class narrator, which shown by the not so fitting image below the misinformation story/narration. I think personally I can forgive reading a comic where the first chapter is rather obvious exposition device where characters discuss the monsters, how did they come in the first place etc because I know it’s harder to relay background story in comic than in a novel, for example xD