When did continuity begin?

[Gothos]

Except that in the oral tradition in which those epics evolved they likely changed in every telling depending on the interests and ability of the teller and the interests and regional biases of the audiences, and it wasn't until a codified written version was made that the elements of the story became static...

-M

True, but those "regional biases" meant that the storytellers couldn't just make up any old story they wanted about, say, Theseus. They might adapt the essence of a Hercules story and rewrite it for Theseus, but they'd still have to take into account the locales and actions with which Theseus was already associated.

[emb021]

During the Golden Age of Comics, continuity was rare, but did exist.

Mention was made of the Human Torch/Submariner battles.

Before that Bill Everett had continuing stories with his earlier characters like Amazing Man and Skyrocket Steele (you can see these in the first Everett Archive)

Siegel and Shuster had their early character, Doctor Occult have a continuing storyline.

There was some continuity in Eisner's Spirit.


But mostly the early comic books, the stories were pretty much standalone, and nothing changed.

Same was largely true of the pulp heroes, but I have found exceptions. There were a few returning villains in The Shadow. Operator #5 had several continuing storylines, such as the 13-part "Purple War" series, and the later unfinished "Yellow Vulture". Dusty Ayres had one single story arch, and when it was cancelled, they wrapped up the story in that last issue. Even in the Green Lama, there were changes in the secondary characters, and references were made to past stories that were footnoted.

But certainly the big push for shared universes and continuity came about in the Silver Age.

[Gothos]

Mickey started out unable to fly. He took lessons, and he could fly a plane for the rest of the strip.

He got a dog, Pluto, and kept it.

He met bad guys more than once, remembering past meetings. Same with some supporting characters.

He has different careers, some of which are briefly alluded to later on.

It's not as continuity-heavy as, say, Little Orphan Annie, but it definitely has continuity.

That sounds like the highest level of continuity comic strips usually managed, comparable to works like ANNIE and DICK TRACY. At the same time, we should keep in mind that such strips conveniently "forget" some details when the author or his audience lose interest in them. It's not quite the level of the "tapestry paradigm," that assumes that every character is still living his or her life, waiting to be brought back in some capacity.

[spoon_jenkins]

Two things I will bring up-if you want an interesting read on the developments of oral traditions in literature, the seminal work is The Singer of Tales by Albert Lord-Lord is a folklorist who spent a good period of time travelling with cultures that maintained an oral tradition to understand how such traditions were maintained and passed down.

As for the OT, the motivation to codify and record the traditions in writing was the Babylonian captivity. Most of it existed as oral tradition with bits and pieces written down in various forms but was by no means codified or standardized before then. The most interesting thing to look at is to see the evolution of the creation accounts-all three of them-the two most are familiar with from Genesis and the third from Psalms and the Noah story. The third creation account was written in the reign of David, the other two written down in the period of the Babylonian captivity. The first is free of all influence of Sumerian/Babylonian elements, the two from Genesis and the Noah tale, are rife with Sumerian/Babylonian elements, beginning with but not ending with the flood account of Noah, an element that was absent from pre-Babylonian Captivity tradition.

There is a large body of work examining the evolution of the OT stories. One of the earliest is Sir George Frazier's (of Golden Bough fame) Folklore in the Old Testament, but there is a lot more recent scholarship as well. I haven't dipped into that well much in the last 10-15 years, but I worked with a couple of scholars who specialized in it when I was in grad school and kept abreast of the work on it for a while before more pressing concerns drew my attention elsewhere.

-M

A good summary of this scholarship for the general reader is Who Wrote the Bible? by Richard Elliott Friedman. It gives a really good sense of how scholars determined the Pentateuch (traditionally ascribed to Moses) was actually written by at least four authors (or groups of authors) writing in different eras and different locations.

[Reptisaurus!]

During the Golden Age of Comics, continuity was rare, but did exist.

Hell, the first Ka-Zar stories from MARVEL COMICS were basically a movie serial - Each episode continued directly from the last.

[LEADER DESSLOK]

All the replies so far are all worthy of consideration indeed.

I'll just add that continuity really seemed to become the all consuming gospel truth, in Marvel at least (and it being the company that elevated the notion to principle and myth in the mid 1960's), during the era when editorial centralization started to come to the fore. This period is mostly associated with the "fan inspired period" which was a driver of Editor-n-Chief Jim Shooter.

Certainly, Lee and Kirby pioneered a consistent mythos that became the shared universe of the Marvel "movement", but Lee never seemed to take the whole notion as gravely as the subsequent generation of fans would. His cornball sense of humour and instinctive feel for irony almost served to undermine the encroaching seriousness of the whole business. It was as Charles Hadfield said, "an inoculation against the real" that continuity in extremes tends toward.

And Kirby was always too intent on his telling stories, o allow the albatross of extra-territorial continuity to impinge or dilute the energy of the telling.

We get the strongest sense of this with the Eternals, for which Kirby clearly had a strong and independent vision, only to have it unfortunately absorbed into the enervating and outside realm of Marvel continuity.

I don't think Kirby, or Lee for that matter if he was still writing, had a chance in the Jim Shooter era when continuity truly began to be king.

I'm always championing Stan Lee's tenure on THE INCREDIBLE HULK series as representative of his best solo work. Lee himself has often described SPIDER-MAN as a comic book soap opera, and that is true to a certain extent, however, I argue that in actual execution, THE HULK was even MORE of a soap opera and a better one at that. He no longer had a Kirby or Ditko to set the foundation, so I believe he was more engaged and most of his storytelling devices, which might border on the cliche in other strips, were right at home in THE HULK.

For instance, the "romatic triangle" (Bruce Banner, Betty Ross and Maj. Talbot) was actually a pentagon with both Gen.Ross and The Hulk himself added to the mix. And again, lets not forget the villains and of course, the terrified populace. THE HULK series was Frankenstein, Dr.Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde, Superman, Peyton Place and Godzilla all in one! And when we look back at history, THE HULK series is the one that suffered the most after Stan Lee's departure; not really living up to its past greatness until perhaps the arrival of Bill Mantlo and to an even greater extent, Peter David.

If you want to talk about "continuity" this series had it in bucket loads, with several stories folding seamlessly into each other.

[emb021]

That sounds like the highest level of continuity comic strips usually managed, comparable to works like ANNIE and DICK TRACY. At the same time, we should keep in mind that such strips conveniently "forget" some details when the author or his audience lose interest in them. It's not quite the level of the "tapestry paradigm," that assumes that every character is still living his or her life, waiting to be brought back in some capacity.

Actually, the comic strip with the highest level of continuity is probably Gasoline Alley. You can read the original strips in the collections by Drawn and Quarterly, and IDW is starting collections done by Dick Moores who took over from creator Frank King. In GA, the characters aged at about the same pass as the strip passed. So you had Skeezix, who showed up as a baby, grow up during the course of the strip, along with all the other characters. I think in the current strips he's an really old guy.

Funky Winkerbean is another strip with continuity, with even 'time jumps' where the strip jumped forward several years. The main characters started out as high school students, now are adults with teenage kids.

Dick Tracy had a level of continuity, but it was somewhat slow. You had Junior grow up from a kid to an adult. Sparkle Plenty and Bonnie Braids grew up over the course of the strip from babies to adults (Junior would later marry Sparkle). But Tracy and other characters seem to age less. Vitamin Flintheart, the old hammy actor was old when he first showed up in the 40s, and when he came back several decades later, was still about the same.

Little Orphan Annie had a lesser level of continuity. She pretty much was frozen at a certain age. There was a much smaller group of continuing characters, so this was less of a problem.

[Ed Love]

Hell, the first Ka-Zar stories from MARVEL COMICS were basically a movie serial - Each episode continued directly from the last.

That's because they were adapting the longer earlier prose Ka-zar pulp at first and so was just that one story broken up into smaller monthly installments.

However, there were quite a few strips in GA comics that played out as ongoing serial stories, especially in the really early days. Probably because serials, pulps and newspaper strips were what they were emulating where ongoing stories were commonplace. Your average pulp usually had several stories of differing lengths including at least one that was a serial. Your Tarzans, John Carters were all serialized first (and this following an even older tradition as the works by authors like Dickens and Dumas were first published in serial format)

But, as superheroes became more and more dominant, the stories became increasingly done-in-one and the serialized ongoing stories became rarer.

[Gothos]

Hell, the first Ka-Zar stories from MARVEL COMICS were basically a movie serial - Each episode continued directly from the last.

Cliffhanger stories were comparatively rare, though. FAWCETT's Nyoka started out imitating the movie serial format, but quickly took up the done-in-one format. Since a lot of the publishers had interests in the pulp magazines, I tend to think that when those publishers did comic books, they tended to go with what they already knew: episodic stories with few if any linking connections.

[Gothos]

I'm always championing Stan Lee's tenure on THE INCREDIBLE HULK series as a representative of his best solo work. Lee himself has often described SPIDER-MAN as a comic book soap opera, and that is true to a certain extent, however, I argue that in actual execution, THE HULK was even MORE of a soap opera and a better one at that. He no longer had a Kirby or Ditko to set the foundation, so I believe he was more engaged and used most of his storytelling devices, which might border on the cliche in other strips, were right at home in THE HULK.

For instance, the "romatic triangle" (Bruce Banner, Betty Ross and Maj. Talbot) was actually a pentagon with both Gen.Ross and The Hulk himself added to the mix. And again, lets not forget the villains and of course, the terrified populace. THE HULK series was Frankenstein, Dr.Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde, Superman, Peyton Place and Godzilla all in one! And when we look back at history, THE HULK series is the one that suffered the most after Stan Lee's departure; not really living up to its past greatness until perhaps the arrival of Bill Mantlo and to perhaps an even greater extent, Peter David.

If you want to talk about "continuity" this series had it in bucket loads, with several stories folding seamlessly into each other.

I'd like to see (or do) a good write-up of Stan's history on the strip, especially since he stayed with it longer than features like AVENGERS or X-MEN, though he may've had pinch-hitters over the course of the sixties. Ironically, on some HULK dvd Stan remembered only having done the feature a few years, when his last Hulk script was something like '68 or '69.

However, not to get off the subject too much, but Kirby helped Lee map out the original parameters of the Hulk concept, while I'd say Ditko was pretty important in refurbishing the series, particularly by introducing a romantic competitor for Betty Ross. As always it's impossible to know how much Stan contributed to the Lee-Kirby or Lee-Ditko collaborations, and Stan certainly could've thought of Talbot as easily as Ditko could have. But I agree that Stan was important to the character, especially by virtue of his keeping Old Greenskin around as a guest-star in various books after the cancellation of the first series, and prior to the berth in TALES TO ASTONISH.

[Gothos]

That's because they were adapting the longer earlier prose Ka-zar pulp at first and so was just that one story broken up into smaller monthly installments.

However, there were quite a few strips in GA comics that played out as ongoing serial stories, especially in the really early days. Probably because serials, pulps and newspaper strips were what they were emulating where ongoing stories were commonplace. Your average pulp usually had several stories of differing lengths including at least one that was a serial. Your Tarzans, John Carters were all serialized first (and this following an even older tradition as the works by authors like Dickens and Dumas were first published in serial format)

But, as superheroes became more and more dominant, the stories became increasingly done-in-one and the serialized ongoing stories became rarer.

Obviously I replied to Reptisaurus before seeing that you had said somewhat the same thing.

One quibble: the serialization of a single novel is a different animal from something like a comics-serial, IMO. The first is "close-ended," in that it ends at a definite point as the plot concludes. An "open-ended" serial ends one particular continuity, but then it usually spins off a new plot as the old one ends, so as to hit the next storyline running. In comics strips they usually did this by introducing a new character who would be next to complicate Dick Tracy or Pat Ryan's life. I assume soap operas on radio and TV popularized the idea of introducing a subplot that would eventually escalate into a main plot, and that Stan Lee borrowed from those whenever he did things like the complicated "immortality serum" storyline of the late sixties.

[Reptisaurus!]

That's because they were adapting the longer earlier prose Ka-zar pulp at first and so was just that one story broken up into smaller monthly installments.

Oh, huh. I didn't remember/never knew that. (Probably the former. I've got 4/7ths of the Marvel Masterworks: Golden Age Marvel Comics volumesi, and you'd think Roy Thomas would have mentioned this in one of his introductions.)

But, as superheroes became more and more dominant, the stories became increasingly done-in-one and the serialized ongoing stories became rarer.

And serialized continuity wouldn't work for humor strips, either, which were the biggest chunk of the comics market for a lot of years.

Plus, in a practical sense they would have been easier for the editors to commission. If you're featuring serial stories, you need to run one particular strip - For done-in-ones, you can use whatever you've got sitting in a drawer somewhere.

However, there were quite a few strips in GA comics that played out as ongoing serial stories, especially in the really early days. Probably because serials, pulps and newspaper strips were what they were emulating where ongoing stories were commonplace. Your average pulp usually had several stories of differing lengths including at least one that was a serial. Your Tarzans, John Carters were all serialized first (and this following an even older tradition as the works by authors like Dickens and Dumas were first published in serial format)

But, as superheroes became more and more dominant, the stories became increasingly done-in-one and the serialized ongoing stories became rarer.[/QUOTE]

[Lorendiac]

There was some continuity in Eisner's Spirit.

I was going to mention that if nobody else had!

But mostly the early comic books, the stories were pretty much standalone, and nothing changed.

I had been thinking that too -- about the "lack of change for name characters." I think as long as there have been superhero comic books, there have been cases where, for instance, the hero and villain meet for the second or third time, and someone takes a moment to reminisce about what happened the last time they met. (As in: "Hey, I really thought he'd died in that big explosion!" or "Last time he kidnapped Lois Lane -- I hope he doesn't try that again!" or whatever.)

But after a story (or serial) was wrapped up, you could generally count on everything to revert back to the Sacred Status Quo for anyone who hadn't been killed off for real (and those people would usually be people who had only been created for the occasion as Literary Cannon Fodder, always meant to die at the proper dramatic moment).

So the first time Batman and Robin fought the Joker, Batman was "Bruce Wayne, richest eligible bachelor in Gotham," and Dick was "his youthful ward, who lives with him at Wayne Manor," and Joker was "a pasty-faced insane clown with green hair and a huge grin." Those things were rock-solid canonical fact at the beginning of the Joker's first story, and they were equally true at the end of the story.

The second time Batman and Robin fought the Joker, all of the above still held true.

The tenth time Batman and Robin fought the Joker, all of the above still held true.

None of the essential items about any of those characters were being altered from one story to the next -- so even if events from one or more previous "clashes with the Clown Prince of Crime" might be mentioned in dialogue, and/or drawn in flashback panels . . . so what? Nothing had really changed and nothing was expected to change, even though the characters vividly remembered all of their previous battles with one another!

But decades later, by the fiftieth or sixtieth time a comic book depicted "Batman and Robin" fighting "The Joker," it would have been a whole different "Robin" getting into the act! (Jason Todd in the 1980s, let's say. I really have no idea just how often Bruce had fought the Joker before Jason started wearing a Robin costume, so let's just estimate "fifty or sixty previous occasions.")

So I would say that the main thing that began to change the readership's understanding of "continuity" was when, in the 1960s, it became commonplace for Stan Lee (and his successors as Marvel writers) to introduce things that looked like "Significant and Permanent Change" into the ongoing adventures of the main heroes.

For instance, Peter Parker graduating from high school and starting college; Reed and Sue finally getting married and then having a baby boy; Bruce Banner's secret identity as The Hulk eventually becoming a matter of public record; and in the 1970s we had such things as Gwen Stacy and Norman Osborn both dying and staying dead (despite a false alarm with a clone of Gwen a bit later, and Norman's eventual return about two decades after he'd died), and all that sort of thing.

There was plenty of "continuity" in American superhero comics before any of those things happened -- and before DC started mimicking the idea by such "Significant and Permanent Changes" as Dick graduating high school and going off to college himself, and Barry Allen getting married to Iris West -- but in the old days, the "acknowledged existence of continuity" didn't matter quite as much because the only visible changes to popular ongoing characters at DC (for instance) were along the lines of: "Gee, now I've fought and defeated The Toyman twenty times instead of only nineteen!"

P.S. Years ago, I took a crack at listing all the different things people may mean when they talk about "continuity" and whether or not something new (such as a movie, a TV show, or a new writer's run on an old character concept's title) is or isn't "respecting the essence" of the previous continuity of that character!

If anyone wants to look it over, my notes on the subject are still available at: 9 Categories of Continuity