Continuity 4: Things Fall Apart

The following post contains SPOILERS regarding House of M, The Omac Project, and current events in the ongoing Batman title.

Before I started writing all of this, I was thinking about Batman. Tim O'Neil has been doing some thinking of his own over at The Hurting, and while I don't have the level of distaste for the character that he does, there are certainly some cracks in the structure of Batman's corner of the DC universe.

Recent months have seen the reveal of the true identity of the Red Hood; Jason Todd is alive and waging his own war on the criminals of Gotham. Jason gave a speech to Batman about how he would do all of the things that Bruce was unwilling to do; he would take the lives of criminals if he felt it was necessary. Unfortunately, anyone who's been reading comics for any amount of time, and is older than the age of five, will be able to figure out that what that means is the red Hood will gun down some no-name street thugs, and perhaps one or two mid-level "name" supervillains will be sacrificed in order to give him credibility.

Of course, the one villain who he'd be most likely to kill will remain on this side of the veil.

Jason Todd was originally "killed" by the Joker, who administered a vicious beating with a crowbar before blowing Robin up real good, as memory serves. Jason has enjoyed a bit of payback--he laid his own crowbar to the Joker--but of course, the beating wasn't fatal. More than most members of Batman's rogues gallery, Joker is a character that readers cannot apply logical thought processes to without coming to the conclusion that he really ought to be deceased by now. The character has been portrayed as a mass murderer many times over, and despite his insanity, poisons and gadgetry, is basically a normal human being, physiologically speaking. Any entity that had caused so much devastation, and had escaped from confinement so many times, would surely have been targeted by some other superhero, vigilante, or angry mob of citizens laying siege to Arkham by now, even if one assumes that Batman himself would not take any action.

Batman doesn't always hold up to extended scrutiny either. Does his vow to his dead parents mean that when someone commits a crime in his city, he'll beat them up, but anything after that is someone else's problem? Does he believe in the law just enough for them to take care of his follow-through so he doesn't have to? I mean, we're talking about a man who developed an intricate network of spy satellites that can keep track of basically every person on planet Earth, if current issues of The OMAC Project are to be believed, and that was to keep an eye on his friends. (Well, perhaps "friends" is too strong of a word . . . let's say "colleagues," then.)

Following that line of thought, why didn't he use the satellites to monitor every inch of Gotham City in order to control crime? You would think that anyone with control issues on that level would at least become frustrated with Arkham Asylum's revolving door, and would do something about it. Bruce Wayne could buy the asylum and upgrade the security. Batman could drag every crook in town to the cave and keep them drugged up on drip-feeds in Matrix body pods. There are plenty of paths that are more logical than his current actions, particularly if one wishes to write Batman and stay true to his current extra-paranoid asshat portrayal.

The issue, of course, is that Batman's trademarks have to be maintained, as do the Joker's and Catwoman's and other merchandisable members of the Batman Family. The illusion of change may reign from time to time, but status quo must be maintained. No matter what situations may arise, the force of inertia will eventually return the flagship icons back to center. Not long ago, in the Superman books, Luthor was elected President of the United States, and shortly thereafter, learned Superman's secret identity. I thought at the time that it was a bold move, and I wondered what kind of stories we'd see when a man with the resources of a country behind him could now meddle with his enemy's entire life. I shouldn't have gotten myself excited; Luthor was mindwiped of that knowledge within a year.

Of course, this sort of problem is always going to be worst with the primary icons who have sold lunchboxes and Underoos for decades. We've had a few different characters step into the shoes of "guy-with-magic-ring" and "guy-who-runs-fast" or "guy-who-shrinks-and-junk." Even there, though, sometimes I find that if I think too hard about the details of a given story, tugging on one thread can make the whole thing fall apart.

The longer a character has been around, the more likely it is that this will be a problem; the chances of contradicting earlier setups or creating adventures based on idiot plots seems to increase with time. In Marvel's House of M, the series started off with a gathering of heroes who were discussing killing the Scarlet Witch due to her reality-altering powers. We-ell, if her mutant power is the problem, why not put one of those power-negating collars on her that they had in Genosha? (Which reminds me--Rogue really should have picked one of those up.) Or, alternately, why not have Forge zap her with the mutant-power-removing gun that he used on Storm all those years ago? Then there's also the "mutant cure" recently concocted in Astonishing X-Men--a title that half of the heroes in the room appear in. It's difficult for me to buy into a situation where then only option discussed is euthanasia, when someone in the room could have--and should have--mentioned other possibilities. If you want to spend a couple of panels with Magneto saying that he won't let his daughter be "neutered" or something, that might be aceptable, but ignoring the possibility entirely veers into "idiot plot" territory.

When the hype on books like House of M proclaims that "nothing will be the same," it's difficult to get too worked up about it. There will still be an X-Men movie next year, and a Spider-Man movie after that. Of course, the original Crisis on Infinite Earths surprised me quite a bit at the time, so one never knows, I suppose.

Ah, well. Don't mind me. I'm just processing.

Continuity 3: "The Man"

I consider Stan Lee to be the second father of continuity because in those early days of the Marvel of the sixties, Stan was writing every title, and was the architect that made the Marvel Universe into a creation that was consistent with each of the company's titles. Marvel heroes bumped into each other farly frequently, and if there was a large event that certain heroes were absent for, there was probably a footnote explaining how those characters were in Latveria or the Negative Zone or something. Along with the new layers of characterization that he gave to his characters, Lee's worldbuilding attracted the attention of many readers.

Of course, even when only one person is responsible for writing a group of titles, it can still be difficult to keep track of everything. That's why the No-Prize was invented, after all. Of course, the logistics of maintaining a comics universe are even more complicated today; Marvel's X-titles alone outnumber the titles that Stan had to handle. The Ultimate universe, created in part to deliver stories about classic characters without the burdens of decades of history, has already had some inconsistencies in its continuity, particularly in regards to the Fantastic Four and Doctor Doom (and their initial portrayals in Ultimate Team-Up). The current House of M event may be an attempt to "clean up" the Marvel Universe, in the way that DC has previously tried with crossovers such as Crisis on Infinite Earths and Zero Hour (and may be again with Infinite Crisis).

Dc seems to be putting great effort into its universe at present, with Geoff Johns installed as head Continuity Cop leading up to the Crisis; there have been some hiccups, but the road to the Big Event has actually gone relatively smoothly, considering the number of titles that seem to be involved. Over at Marvel, change seems to be in the air as well; relationships between separate titles had been fairly loose in the Jemas/Quesada era, but current events seem to be pointing toward a more unified Marvel Universe once again.

Tighter universes can make for good reading, but as with many things, the results will depend on the execution. When I look at events like the original Crisis, I see creators who want to follow in the footsteps of Roy and Stan, who want to answer questions and "fix" things while unifying their respective universes. In and of themselves, there's nothing wrong with these desires; good comics can come of them, if continuity is used as a tool in service of a good story. Alan Moore's "finale' for Superman comes to mind, of course. Mark Waid and Barry Kitson are doing a good job on the new Legion title, sometimes using expectations based on past incarnations of the Legion and subverting them to surprising effect. Don Rosa took snippets and samples from Carl Barks' Disney Duck stories, and used them to craft The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck, which I'm currently enjoying immensely. I think Kurt Busiek is another good example . . . that reminds me--I need to re-read Avengers Forever.

If, however, the story isn't told well--or worse, there's no "story" there at all, just retcon-fetishising--then the results may be poor. Moreover, while it may be impossible to fully visualize all of the potential implications of a "fix", creators should certainly make the effort to consider the follow-through of their actions to avoid situations like "the Hawkman problem." (I enjoyed the original Hawkworld mini-series, and it would have been fine if they had simply inserted that into Hawkman's origin, but then they decided to have him come to Earth for the first time right after Invasion!, and everything fell apart.)

This problem is evident in other media--television shows and movie sequels sometimes fail to maintain the tone of previous installments--but it's especially pronounced in a medium like comics, where the adventures of characters like Superman and Batman have been published continually every month for over sixty years. Continuous publication of licensable characters can lead to some fallacies of logic that no amount of continuity patches can correct . . .

. . . I guess I'll talk about that next time.

Continuity 2: "The Boy" and his children

Continuity, as we understand it today, has two fathers.

One of them is Roy Thomas. Roy grew up in the forties reading Golden Age comics and worked on the first comics fanzine with Dr. Jerry Bails before becoming a comics professional. My personal familiarity with Thomas' work largely concerns his "Earth 2" work at DC on titles like All-Star Squadron (set during WW2 and intertwined with the previously-printed Justice Society tales in All-Star Comics) and Infinity, Inc. (the present day stories of a super-team made up of the children of the JSA), but Roy also did some work at Marvel, and was their editor-in-chief for a time; I remember reading issues of his run on Invaders, which groupd Captain America, the golden age Human Torch, and the Sub-Mariner together as a WW2 team (along with Bucky and Toro, of course).

Mr. Thomas is, I believe, the first and best example of a comics fan getting the chance to work on the characters he grew up with. Comics in the Golden Age were uncomplicated in certain ways, but some of the issues that comics writers were taking for granted raised questions in the mind of young Roy. The Flash originally left the Justice Society of America because he had received his own solo title, and any members popular enough to have their own titles became honorary members. It actually said that was the reason in the pages of the actual issue of All-Star. Of course, that explanation makes no sense within a storyline, unless all the characters know they're just in a comic book. So as Roy went on and began writing comics, he came up with explanations why Green Lantern was only chairman of the JSA for one meeting (in the real world, he was another member to receive a solo title) and the like.

The effects of this today can be seen as both a blessing and a curse. Readers today certainly expect a certain amount of consistency from one issue to the next, and that's natural. Sometimes, however, bad ideas or poorly-executed stories come about, and it may be for the best if some of those are simply forgotten. The same may hold true for good stories, for that matter; I'm sure there are currently a fair number of fans of the JLI era who would have prefered that certain characters simply be left alone, rather than be brought out of mothballs only to have their grey matter aired out and/or stepped on.

Brad Meltzer is, I'm convinced, one of the Children of Roy. I am of the opinion that a large part of his motivation to write Identity Crisis was a desire to "explain" some of the slightly-nonsensical bits of the Silver Age. In those days, it was perfectly acceptable to partially mindwipe the entire population of Earth if it meant hiding the secret identities of the JLA. I believe Brad wanted to look at the "consequences" of those actions under the lens of today's post-Watchmen comics. I don't think that was the big thing for him, though. I see a kid reading his issues of Justice League of America and Teen Titans, and wondering why Doctor Light acted so differently in one title than he did in the other. Comic-book logic might have lead that kid to decide that the Justice League must have done something to Doctor Light to make him act differently. Then, perhaps, he might have wondered to himself, what could Light have done that was so evil that the Justice League would take his personality away, when they haven't done that to anyone else?

A good friend of mine once said that Brad Meltzer wrote the story he did because he's not a fan. I think he might be too much of a fan.

So who's the other father of modern continuity? Oh that's Stan Lee, of course.

But I'll talk about him next time.

I'm still thinking.

Thoughts on Continuity

Recently I was in the mood to re-read Grant Morrison's run on JLA. I haven't looked at those issues--or any JLA on a regular basis, honestly--in years. I enjoyed reading them again, but I found myself contemplating the relative merits and pitfalls of continuity.

In the first story arc with the Hyperclan, Superman has long hair; the Mullet of Steel was added at the tail end of the Death and Return of Superman. Immediately following that arc, we have Electric Blue Superman for some time. During the Injustice Gang arc, Wonder Woman is dead, and the Flash is out injured for one or two issues--just enough time to cover the issues in Flash's own book where the injury occurred. The Flash does manage to heal up in time to appear for the rest of that story, but Diana remains dead, or a goddess, or whatever her status was at that time. In the following arc, which saw membership in the League double, Diana's mother Hippolyta is a member of the JLA as the then-active Wonder Woman.

There are various other examples of this, such as the "dark Flash" who was briefly a member in Wally's absence, but the most notable (in my opinion) was the issue of JLA that attempted to explain why no superheroes intervened in Gotham during the No Man's Land period; the attempted "continuity graft" was more noticeable than usual, since the timing of "No Man's land" meant that this issue was shoved in the middle of Grant Morrison's ongoing final arc, World War Three, with a different creative team. I believe Mark Waid wrote that one, and it was pretty good for what it was trying to accomplish, but it was jarring when compared to the flow of the story it interrupted.

When re-reading Morrison's run, I started thinking that perhaps they should have been written out of continuity with the DCUniverse at large. Superman could have been the classic Superman in every story. The Flashes, Green Lanterns, and Wonder Women could have remained consistent. Morrison's JLA stories would have potentially been a classic group of arcs without the small, incomprehensible bits that fly past all but the most hardcore of comics readers--I should say, hardcore DCUniverse comics readers. One of my favorite books of last year was Darwyn Cooke's New Frontier, which constructed its own internal continuity. (I really wish that DC had published it in a single trade paperback, instead of two, since it's a standalone story. Well, perhaps it'll be collected that way in a future edition.) One of the best examples of the power of the standalone story is Watchmen. It has been asked before: would that story be as enduring if it used the Charlton characters that its cast was based on? Would it have been as well-received by fandom if that had been captain Atom instead of Doctor Manhattan, the Question in place of Rorshach? (Of course, the Question has since seen a few Rorshach-esque interpretations, but . . . )

Of course, this is all in hindsight; at the time, I'm sure I appreciated the fact that JLA was "in continuity". If Morrison had only used "classic" versions of the characters, as Alex Ross will be doing in his upcoming Justice project, then I might not have seen Morrison's take on Kyle Rayner, which went much farther than his own series did in terms of making me care about that character. Moreover, when it's done well, it can be fun to see the further ramifications of actions or events of a particular title. Of course, that can certainly be overdone. Peter David has been back on the Hulk for a few short months, and he's already involved in the House of M crossover, while his new title, Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man, will be involved in a crossover with all three main Spider-titles for its first three issues. I was looking forward to trying out a new, standalone Spider-Man book, and this crossover situation makes the book less appealing. Continuity with the other books be damned--I just want to read a book with a good creative team on an interesting character.

A writer with skill can use continuity as a tool that enhances his or her stories. Dan Slott's recent Spider-man/Human Torch mini-series is a good example; each issue took place during a different "era", with one story set during the Spidermobile days, and another set when Spidey had the alien costume and Torch had that funky John Byrne haircut. It all built to an excellent final issue set in today's New Avengers era, which I don't want to spoil, but I will say that it's recommended reading for any fans of those characters.

So continuity in and of itself isn't necessarily evil. Even while reading those JLA stories, I found myself smiling occasionally, remembering certain bits of other stories that I had completely forgotten about. I'd say that the Electric Blue Superman stories in and of themselves were somewhat forgettable--at least, I had forgotten them--but Grant Morrison used him to good effect. Perhaps like many other things, the value of continuity depends on how it's used.

I'm still thinking about it.