DC v. Marvel: 7/16/08 Column

[Zugernaut]

To echo what you wrote, Steven, I've thought that since Crisis on Infinite Earths (and to some degree before), the vast bulk of DCU stories have always and only been about the DCU--usually, correcting or modifying some kind of continuity issue.

Certainly almost all event books have been about exploring the continuity problems wrought by COIE.

Power Girl has been trying to find out her true history since 1986. Hawkman's is constantly reinvented. Wonder Woman restarts afresh after COIE, and decades are spent retelling JLA stories in which she couldn't have been a member (only to have that all changed back after Infinite Crisis). Various things happen to the eldest JSAers to keep them alive. And of course there are the vast narrative contortions required to resurrect characters like Hal Jordan and Green Arrow.

Not that there haven't been good stories to come from it--there have been many. But the DCU has been navel gazing for over 20 years now, much more so than Marvel. And there are no signs of it slowing down.

[Imaginos666]

To echo what you wrote, Stephen, I've thought that since Crisis on Infinite Earths (and to some degree before), the vast bulk of DCU stories have always and only been about the DCU--usually, correcting or modifying some kind of continuity issue.

Certainly almost all event books have been about exploring the continuity problems wrought by COIE.

Power Girl has been trying to find out her true history since 1986. Hawkman's is constantly reinvented. Wonder Woman restarts afresh after COIE, and decades are spent retelling JLA stories in which she couldn't have been a member (only to have that all changed back after Infinite Crisis). Various things happen to the eldest JSAers to keep them alive. And of course there are the vast narrative contortions required to resurrect characters like Hal Jordan and Green Arrow.

Not that there haven't been good stories to come from it--there have been many. But the DCU has been navel gazing for over 20 years now, much more so than Marvel. And there are no signs of it slowing down.

I blame Wonder Girl.

[Theron]

As good an explanation as any. I know that (not being a DC lifer) many times I try out a DC title, I get lost very quickly in weird continuity that I don't understand. Marvel can cause the same problem, but it seems Marvel as an editorial choice is better at glossing over continuity whereas DC doesn't make as much of an effort to make the books less impenetrable. A good story will keep me reading the book either way, but if I'm confused about the foundation of the story, then it has to be even better for me not put it away in frustration.

[Matthew E]

I can't support the notion of a complete linewide reboot.

I'm a Legion of Super-Heroes fan, and the two complete reboots that the Legion has had have been alienating events for that fanbase. There are people active on Legion message boards, who call themselves Legion fans, yet who haven't bought a Legion comic in decades... because, according to them, there haven't been any legitimate Legion comics in decades. Reboots drive fans away.

One can make the argument that it's okay to lose some of the old fans if you bring in even more new fans... but where are DC's efforts to bring in new fans? They could be doing that anyway! I don't think a reboot in and of itself would attract new fans; it'd be an odd kind of potential fan who's staying away entirely because they think comic books are too hard for them.

[Zugernaut]

I can't support the notion of a complete linewide reboot.

I'm a Legion of Super-Heroes fan, and the two complete reboots that the Legion has had have been alienating events for that fanbase. There are people active on Legion message boards, who call themselves Legion fans, yet who haven't bought a Legion comic in decades... because, according to them, there haven't been any legitimate Legion comics in decades. Reboots drive fans away.

One can make the argument that it's okay to lose some of the old fans if you bring in even more new fans... but where are DC's efforts to bring in new fans? They could be doing that anyway! I don't think a reboot in and of itself would attract new fans; it'd be an odd kind of potential fan who's staying away entirely because they think comic books are too hard for them.

Matthew,

I agree with you in the sense that reboots are often inferior to the earlier versions, and that would certainly be the case with the Legion.

On the other hand, the urge to preserve certain favorite continuities is what created the post-COIE problem. Wonder Girl, Hawkman, Infinity Incorporated, All-Star Squadron, Legion . . . the list goes on and on. 20+ years later DC is still wrestling with many of those issues. If EVERYTHING had restarted at No. 1, as I believe was the intent, you might have had a more cohesive universe, instead of a single universe that rapidly became more complicated than the previous multiverse.

But as you and Steven say, the reboots have to be great for it to work. And we know that many times that just doesn't happen.

[Lorendiac]

One strange thing is that DC has managed to find the nerve, intermittently, to "reboot a little bit at a time." They just never work up the courage to say: "Let's go for a clean sweep and throw all the clutter away at the same time!"

Right after COIE, they basically threw away all previous Superman continuity, and did the same for Wonder Woman. Meanwhile, however, they kept as much as they could of JLA continuity, and most of the continuity of just about every other hero who had ever served alongside Supes and Wondy in the JLA (or in any other context).

Come to think of it, I hear they also rebooted Captain Marvel (Shazam!) twice in the next few years. Once in a miniseries written by Roy Thomas which made it clear all the previous adventures were no longer in continuity; once in a graphic novel written by Jerry Ordway which made it clear that all the Pre-COIE stuff was no longer in continuity and neither was Roy's miniseries!

The Legion of Super-Heroes got rebooted in 1994, and again in 2004. ("If at first you don't succeed . . ."?)

I heard Travis Morgan, the Warlord, got rebooted with a new series a couple of years ago, and I heard it was awful. I haven't actually read any of it; today I have no idea what his "current status in continuity" is supposed to be, or how many of his pre-Reboot stories are ever going to be acknowledged again. (Does he still have a daughter named Jennifer Morgan who's a very powerful sorceress? Beats me!)

Other characters and groups have been rebooted over the years -- I heard Byrne got to reboot the Doom Patrol a few years ago, and then I heard rumors that someone else was turning around and un-rebooting the Doom Patrol to put it all back the way it was before . . .

All these haphazard "let's just reboot a little bit" stunts just create more trouble, of course. For instance, since Wonder Woman got rebooted as "Here I am, just now arriving in Man's World, many years after Superman and Batman debuted!", but the Teen Titans didn't get rebooted at all, in the late 1980s a bizarre situation arose, if you looked at it from the perspective of a typical inhabitant of the DCU: "Donna Troy, Wonder Girl, has been an experienced superhero for several years; she was a founding member of the original Teen Titans. On the other hand, this 'Wonder Woman' person is a newbie whom nobody ever heard of before last week. Logically, this means Diana is the Painfully Inexperienced Rookie who's trying to slavishly imitate the proud example of Donna Troy, the Extremely Seasoned Veteran. Wonder Girl came first; Wonder Woman shamelessly copied her 'original look' later!"

Sure, that would be easy to explain to a "new reader" of the Titans comics or the Post-COIE Wonder Woman series; somebody who had heard that the "Post-Crisis" DC comics were supposed to have a much simpler, straightforward approach to describing the single timeline in which everything was now happening in all the superhero titles . . . right?

By the way, one thing that confused me in Steven Grant's column: He seemed to be saying that back in the 1960s, the hard core of DC's fanbase was Golden Age fans who still had stacks of comic books (or at least the memories of reading them) from the 1940s, and thus DC catered to these people's tastes by offering revivals of character concepts that mostly had begun around the time of World War II.

My impression was that DC figured most of its potential readers in the late 50s and 60s had only been born in the 1940s (or early 50s), and might be pleasantly surprised by such "new" heroes as the Earth-1 versions of Flash, Green Lantern, Atom, Hawkman, et cetera. I thought the rule of thumb in those days was that DC figured they were doing well if the "typical customer" stayed faithful to them for about four years at a stretch, before he started spending more of his pocket money on other matters, such as filling up the gas tank and taking a girl on a date.

Just how many diehard fans of the superhero comic books of the 1940s were still regular customers for that medium and genre two decades later? Or did Steven Grant mean that the "old-timers" were just a very loud minority who had disproportionate influence on DC's editorial thinking, because the grown-up fans were much likelier to write lengthy letters to DC, describing exactly what they wanted to see revived with a new paint job? As opposed to a "silent majority" of schoolkids who bought "Justice League of America" and "Superman" comics at the local drugstore and simply didn't know or care what had happened to characters who used to be featured in comic books two decades earlier?

[Michael P]

I blame Wonder Girl.

I blame people not being able to shut up about Wonder Girl. It's really the textbook example of what Steven was talking about. If it were in Marvel, Stan Lee would have just said "Her name's Donna Troy, she's Wonder Woman's sidekick, now shut up and stare at her gams." (Bob Haney really was cut from the Stan mold in that manner; he was probably the only writer at DC who didn't give a rat's ass about continuity as long as he could play with whatever toys he wanted.) But the DC people had to give some kind of explanation of why she was around, and what all those "Wonder Girl" imaginary stories were about, and whether she was from Earth-1 and Earth-2, and the end result is the character as you see her now: useless.

This is why I liked Hypertime; it was probably as close as DC ever got to a Marvel-esque "the continuity is there, but we don't worry about it that much" attitude. (Of course, Marvel hasn't actually had that attitude in years, largely thanks to Roy Thomas.) The basic idea was "every story happened somewhere, but we're not name specifically where." Of course, that didn't fly with either the readers or the editors, who of course were both made up of just the people Steven describes here, and as such, it was largely ignored, then quietly folded up and put away in the aftermath of Infinite Crisis, where we now have "every story we liked happened somewhere, and we've numbered and pinned up all the wheres like a butterfly collector." Which is, of course, what the fans want.

Steven mentioned that Marvel & DC spent much of the '70s catering specifically and only to their fanbases. Unsurprisingly, that was one of the more creatively fallow periods for both companies, and equally unsurprisingly, it's the one this decade reminds me the most of. We even have a capsizing distribution system to complete the nostalgia.

Boy, I'm in a mood today.

[bartl]

Steven mentioned that Marvel & DC spent much of the '70s catering specifically and only to their fanbases. Unsurprisingly, that was one of the more creatively fallow periods for both companies, and equally unsurprisingly, it's the one this decade reminds me the most of. We even have a capsizing distribution system to complete the nostalgia.

Grant, and a couple of others here, may remember my continual use of the term "incestuous" in the late 80's/early 90's.

[Steven Grant]

I should point out that I was just working out the logic of it. Whether DC does a total reboot or not, I really don't have a pony in that race. It just strikes me, after working it through, that it's the best solution. But certainly it would upset at least a few people. Anything that's done, even if it's doing nothing, will upset at least a few people.

But what it would take is a general plan (as I've mentioned before, pre-orchestrated "universes" inevitably become ludicrously claustrophic and mechanical, and don't last long): basically, one reboot and a plan, and stick to it.

One of the big outcries against such at thing is that it "invalidates" all those old stories. But... but... they're fiction! They still exist. No one will go through every building in the world and burn all the copies. There will still be reprints. DC can still acknowledge its past, it just wouldn't make it the content of their new material.

- Grant

[Zugernaut]

I think the concept of a gigantic, sprawling universe with perfect continuity is an appealing idea but mostly impossible to carry off, mainly because of human beings being what they are combined with the sheer weight of the storytelling. You might maintain some reasonable continuity with only a handful of creators over the course of several years, but you expand much more than that and problems creep in.

Of course the elephant in the room that even the biggest continuity adherents tend to ignore is the lack of character aging. You can come up with magically explanations for some golden age characters surviving, but where their children fit becomes more problematic with each passing year. And there are technological advances over the course of decades that impact stories and can't be conveniently explained away. So maybe you have an updated retelling, and of course there are subtle changes that impact this or that older story.

The frustrating thing for me is the attempts to "fix" continuity that should never have gotten out the door in the first place. Hawkman was in bad enough shape without Zero Hour, which turned him into some kind of Hawk God amalgamation that solved absolutely nothing.

I wish DC had followed the path that someone suggested a few years ago: the new, post-COIE Earth could have just been another Earth in the multiverse where most of their stories were now going to take place. They seem to have finally come around to that concept, only they're 20+ years too late.

But using that approach, they could just move to a brand new Earth every 20 or so years, and each generation gets their own version of the heroes. By the time continuity became a nightmare and the heroes were jumping around from Earth to Earth, it would be time to do it all over again.

[Steven Grant]

This is why I liked Hypertime; it was probably as close as DC ever got to a Marvel-esque "the continuity is there, but we don't worry about it that much" attitude. (Of course, Marvel hasn't actually had that attitude in years, largely thanks to Roy Thomas.) The basic idea was "every story happened somewhere, but we're not name specifically where."

The problem with Hypertime is that no one understood it, including its creators. Grant Morrison's explanation of Hypertime was completely different from Mark Waid's. (Kind of appropriate, I always thought.) The fact that I can be credited with writing the first published Hypertime story when I had no idea I was doing it (and, from my perspective, wasn't) is indicative of the concept's fuzziness.

I still don't quite understand the underlying principle. As far as I can tell, it was a sort of application of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, supposing that the nature of something is altered by the observer through the act of observing, with every reader being "allowed" to effectively pick and choose which stories they considered "real" or "unreal." Pure anarchy, in other words... but I've got no problem with that...

- Grant

[Paul McEnery]

It makes me want to pitch a Hawkman series where he's the only person aware of all his Hyper-carnations at once, and everyone else's, and is able to slip from one narrative to another without losing his marbles. Much.

But this all reminds me of Moorcock's last big trilogy, where the characters were aware that they were characters in stories, and "scaled" up and down between realities. In one reality, they're a character in someone else's story. In a higher reality, they're manipulating the lower realities like a god -- or like a videogame player.

[Zugernaut]

I still don't quite understand the underlying principle. As far as I can tell, it was a sort of application of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, supposing that the nature of something is altered by the observer through the act of observing, with every reader being "allowed" to effectively pick and choose which stories they considered "real" or "unreal." Pure anarchy, in other words... but I've got no problem with that...

- Grant

Which, when it comes right down to it, is pretty much what's really the case, even if we're "told" that certain stories happened and others didn't. Because we all know by know that it's all in flux...

[Steven Grant]

But this all reminds me of Moorcock's last big trilogy

Which one was that? I missed it entirely. (My days of obsessively following Moorcock's output are, sadly, way behind me.)

- Grant

[Steven Grant]

Which, when it comes right down to it, is pretty much what's really the case, even if we're "told" that certain stories happened and others didn't. Because we all know by know that it's all in flux...

And we all like the stories we like and would rather the stories we don't like had never existed.

Hypertime is more like hypertaste...

- Grant