I Can See Your House From Here - Archives
vol 2 number 23
Personal computers, especially those that are set up to run Windows or Linux, are hardly the most efficient machines in the world. This is one of the reasons that Macs are better computers: the instruction set built into their CPUs is more optimized than those of Pentiums and other PC chips. This is largely because, way back when, Intel built a less-than-perfect set of instructions into its chips. As time went on, they continued to add on to that concept; by the time they realized that they had started wrong (and thus progressed less-than-perfectly), they were faced with a decision: continue as they had, or start from scratch. Starting from scratch, though, meant potentially losing a huge chunk of the market, since most people would be not too pleased with having to throw out all their old software and start over themselves -- a fairly expensive proposal, especially back in the late 1980s. The lesson should be obvious.
I wonder a lot how many comic writers wish that they lived in a world filled with either time machines, mind control devices, or really forgetful readers. It's bad enough trying to write a single screenplay without mixing up situations or secondary characters; imagine having to follow up on 60 years of history and continuity by many, many other writers, some of whom have made their own mistakes.
Much like in real life, you can't take things back. You have to accept what you've done, and live with the consequences, regrets be damned. If you accidentally kill off your hero's love interest, then you have a single hero (unless, of course, you're willing to play into the cynical "no one's ever really dead in comics" idea). If you amputated your lead's left leg two years back, you'd better hope that he's not going to have to take part in a kicking contest anytime in the future.
Unlike real life, comic writers can call on the mysterious powers of Speculative Fiction Writing to help them out of the mess that they (or those before them) made. This is where the boys get separated from the men, often with the subtlety of a crowbar to the cranium. The good writers introduce a new element to the mythos, as when Barbara Gordon became Oracle, or Frank Miller's Elektra: Assassin . In these cases, the writer was faced with a character with a serious limitations (a paralyzed Batgirl and a dead Elektra), but further developed those characters (and those around them) using those limitations to their advantage.
Bad examples include the Spider Clone saga, the endless undeaths in comics, and the ridiculous morass that Wolverine's past has become due to his lack of memory. The temptation is to take the easy way out; the writer can try something that fails even though it is a nice idea (Jean Grey's replacement by the Phoenix force and subsequent 'hibernation' at the bottom of the Atlantic), or call on the ever popular Deus Ex Machina (can someone give me a good explanation for how Mary Jane Parker survived the plane explosion? Or tell me how Aunt May isn't dead?), or, in the worst case, to simply ignore that bit of history that stands in your way. This is part of what's wrong with comics today, though -- by ignoring the past, offhandedly assuming that your readers are forgiving or forgetful, you make the suspension of disbelief that much more difficult to maintain.
Comic books have long had the issue of continuity to deal with, and not just on a month to month basis. DC produced the first major intra-company maxi-series in Crisis on Infinite Earths because the histories of all the different characters and worlds had gotten crossed and tangled. Even after destroying whole universes and killing a large chunk of it's roster, DC ended up doing the dance all over again a few year later with Zero Hour . Still later, they called on Mark Waid and Grant Morrison to come up with the idea of Hypertime -- a concept that made all the killing and destruction and retroactive continuity unnecessary, since Hypertime allowed for endless parallel universes and therefore endless possibilities.
And if you just rolled your eyes, you know how the rest of us felt when it happened.
You won't see these sorts of things happening at CrossGen or Chaos!, but to be honest that's probably largely because of their youth. Odds are you won't see it in a book like Savage Dragon , but Erik Larsen owns the book, and has written every issue. Continuity is a fact of life for them, as well, but it's easier to deal with when it's your baby and only yours, or when there's no real history to screw up. No, this is a problem for the older properties; even a character like Vampirella, whose main selling point is T&A, had to be retrofitted to tie up loose ends.
Marvel Comics is perhaps the best example of screwed up continuity (with the exception of DC's Hawkman ), although their solution was less Intel and more Solaris*: start from scratch. When The X-Men was a huge hit in theaters, it would make sense for sales of the book to see a peak in outside interest, right? Normally, yes, unless you're talking about the X-Men, a title that was so convoluted that even long time readers had stopped trying to understand what was going on from month to month. The answer: fire the editor, replace the creative teams on the X-books, and, most notably, relaunch the entire Marvel Universe in the Ultimates line.
The basic idea was to take characters that everyone was familiar with (beginning with Spider-Man and the X-Men), pare them down to their essentials, and start over. While the idea seemed more than a little iffy to long time fans, it worked well: each of the books has been a huge seller, and (at least for the time being) the storylines make sense again. The obstacle remains, though: as forgiving as the fans have been, we can't forget, and each new issue brings reminders of what came before. While the Brian Bendis and Mark Millar have been doing a great job of rebuilding, there is the inevitable fan that wants to know why this character is black now, or why that character has a new look, or when we'll see a classic standoff replayed.
Like enemies, voters, and wives, comic fans have long memories. There's also a certain cynicism that runs through the community: we want new things to succeed, but we'll jump at the slightest opportunity to tear them down. As much as we don't want to see Gwen Stacy or Jean Grey or Superman dead, we want to know that we aren't going to be treated like three-year-olds at a magic act; when someone dies, we want them to stay dead (especially when we've seen the damned body!). Certain illusions are acceptable, like revealing that a villain has been impersonating a hero for some months, but only when they forward the storylines. It may seem that, just because we read books with pictures, we're not capable of thinking like adults, but guess again -- if you're going to try playing a shell game with what came before, you'd better be a David Copperfield or a Penn and Teller. We might not fall for the magic, but at least we get to look at Elle MacPherson or a man covered in cockroaches as a distraction.
We've all done things we regret, be it quitting a job too soon, not keeping our Star Wars action figures in their boxes, or not burying the bodies quite deep enough. We can't just forget about all those things and move forward like they never happened, and odds are pretty good that you're not going to wake up and find that a clone has been living your life for you and now things are all going to be okay. Writers should treat history the same way. Think of it as a challenge to be overcome, not a detail that can be glossed over. If you don't like the limited options you see for the Hulk because of all the work that Peter David did, then you should be writing something else, not erasing history to fit your vision.
Because we comics fans may be cheap, but we ain't that easy.
*New Year's Resolution #1: more Dennis Miller-esque references so oblique that maybe 1 out of 400 might understand them.