Entry tags:
Continuity, the Limits of the Serial Format and One More Reason Comics Suck Right Now
Keeping in mind that I never read Spider-Man regularly in any of its incarnations, I still find the whole "One More Day" storyline distasteful.
[For those that don't know/don't care, after Peter Parker revealed his identity in the incredibly distasteful "Civil War" crossover two? years ago, someone put a bullet in his Aunt May. I assume that Luke Cage restrained himself from saying "I told your dumb ass this would happen if people started going 'round revealing their secret identities an' shit." I get fuzzy on the details here because, frankly, I'd rather read the phone book or Leviathan than a Spider-Man comic even at the best of times, but I understand that to save May's life (or bring her back to life) Peter and Mary Jane do a deal with Mephistopholes (this all being an update of Faust) to sacrifice their marriage for May's life. So now Peter Parker's single and living with his widowed Aunt May in Queens New York once more, his marriage to Mary Jane have been wiped out of existence and memory. Apparently the only one truly happy with this development is Marvel Eeejit-in-Chief, Joe Quesada, who had some sort of nerd-rage hate-on for Mary Jane and believes that superheroes can't be husbands and fathers. I personally wonder what the comics-reading husbands and fathers, not to mention the married patriarchs among cops, firemen, ambulance workers, members of the armed services, social workers, doctors and everyone else who puts themselves out there for the greater good each day feel about this pronouncement. But, as usual, I digress.]
To help sort out some of the confusion, Marvel has printed a helpful two-page primer on the new normal of Spidey's world, including such tidbits as "Spidey unmasked during Civil War but no one remembers who was under the mask so Spidey's secret identity is TOTALLY SECRET again. Now. Whatever". [Insert eyeroll here] Because the solution to a really stupid creative decision is to, obviously, pretend like it never happened. Oi. [eyeroll x 2]
Needless to say, there is nerd-rage and wank aplenty in comicland over "One More Day", including reports that writer JM Straczynski (of B5 fame) tried to get his name taken off the last few issues. From what I've read, the consensus seems to be that this was an ass-stupid idea and throwing out 20 years of comic book continuity, not to mention the various plotlines and their repercussions arising out of the "Civil War" event of the last 2-3 years, is both irritating and offensive to long-time readers. The argument from the other side of the aisle on the continuity issue (an even larger bugbear for comics fen than media fen, if that can be believed) is that if you enjoyed the story and thought it was good when you read it a) you got your money's worth and b) it doesn't make the story less good now.
I'd accept this logic if not for the fact that US superhero comics are serials and serials by their nature accrete meaning and history as they go along. Tossing out chunks of Spider-Man's history doesn't make the individual stories any more or less good as discrete entities but it robs them of their meaning and the long-time reader of the entertainment and satisfaction of watching those events emanate and payoff through the life of the serial. In effect, it would be like Ron Moore deciding that Season Three of Battlestar Galactica didn't count or Tolkein coming back from the grave and to announce that he was going to edit the Rohirrim out of his new slimline edition of The Lord of the Rings - who could watch "Unfinished Business" or read Eowyn's confrontation with the Witch King without feeling that the works, stripped of the meaning that comes from being part of a larger whole, have been diminished? I don't blame Spider-Man readers for being pissed. I don't even read the damn comics and I feel rather annoyed and condescended to by Marvel's attitude.
As I read through the comments and counter comments on ComicBookResources.com and Newsarama, it occurred to me that the Spidey reboot highlighted the limitations of the serial format. The Amazing Spider-Man has been, I believe, published on a more or less monthly basis since the 1960s; its now up to issue 540-something. In that time, I think Spider-Man has aged 15 years (and has now been de-aged again). Understandably, there comes a point at which even the most creative minds run out of stories to tell. With between 40 to 80 years of history weighing down on the superhero characters that dominate comics today, even the most creative minds also begin to run out of stories to tell that haven't been told before. I believe this is why we've ended up with so many crap crossovers and "special event" books published in the last 20 years (or basically as long as I've been reading and Not Reading comics) as publishers attempt to keep the market interested in ever more familiar permutations of characters that we already knew to begin. At the same time, the various gimmicks used to get the audience's attention have become increasingly trite and cliched through overuse - characters die, they're reborn, they marry, they divorce, they die again, they're reborn in the pages of another character's book so you have to wait six months for everyone else to figure it out, then they die again. No one believes that Mary Jane and Spidey are going to stay separated, instead everyone is talking about how long it will take to get them back together.
In the end, cheap, gimmicky, event-driven writing is as bad for the medium as a whole as it is for the individual books. Comicbook readers are an audience like any other and the normal rules apply - fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame one me, fool me three times and I'll admit Jim Lee's pretty, pretty art suckered me into buying All-Star Batman and Robin, the Boy Wonder, fool me a fourth time and I'm out of here. The comic book marketplace is less than half the size today that it was 15 years ago. Crappy writing and big-ticket "events" like "One More Day", which ultimately don't go anywhere, have played a huge role in the attrition of the comicbook audience. And old comics readers (like me) aren't being replaced by fresh blood (my nephew). Their superheroes are on Teletoon or at the movies where the writing, characterization and diversity of characters are all better than in your average DC/Marvel monthly.
It is in TV and movies but not the comics themselves that I find characters like Superman, Batman, Spider-Man, the X-Men being reinvented with each passing era, much the way that the legends of King Arthur and Robin Hood are recapitulated and reimagined with each passing generation - from the Gothic Revival poetry of Tennyson to the feminist neopaganism of Zimmer Bradley. Whereas the monthly books, by trying to hold these characters in stasis - aging them, de-aging them, rewriting a character's history here, deleting a relationship there - renders them increasingly soulless entities. Change is not only an inevitability but it is the engine that drives drama. A narrative without change is one without both meaning and excitement. It is a pointless endeavour. Marvel Comics would do better to leave off their next big marketing gimmick and contemplate Ecclesiastes instead: "to everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven".
ETA: Because it just wouldn't be a post about comic books written by me if I didn't include something about what I will now refer to as 'The Cause' a la Richard Jordan in Gettysburg - Something Positive's take on Women in Refrigerators.
[For those that don't know/don't care, after Peter Parker revealed his identity in the incredibly distasteful "Civil War" crossover two? years ago, someone put a bullet in his Aunt May. I assume that Luke Cage restrained himself from saying "I told your dumb ass this would happen if people started going 'round revealing their secret identities an' shit." I get fuzzy on the details here because, frankly, I'd rather read the phone book or Leviathan than a Spider-Man comic even at the best of times, but I understand that to save May's life (or bring her back to life) Peter and Mary Jane do a deal with Mephistopholes (this all being an update of Faust) to sacrifice their marriage for May's life. So now Peter Parker's single and living with his widowed Aunt May in Queens New York once more, his marriage to Mary Jane have been wiped out of existence and memory. Apparently the only one truly happy with this development is Marvel Eeejit-in-Chief, Joe Quesada, who had some sort of nerd-rage hate-on for Mary Jane and believes that superheroes can't be husbands and fathers. I personally wonder what the comics-reading husbands and fathers, not to mention the married patriarchs among cops, firemen, ambulance workers, members of the armed services, social workers, doctors and everyone else who puts themselves out there for the greater good each day feel about this pronouncement. But, as usual, I digress.]
To help sort out some of the confusion, Marvel has printed a helpful two-page primer on the new normal of Spidey's world, including such tidbits as "Spidey unmasked during Civil War but no one remembers who was under the mask so Spidey's secret identity is TOTALLY SECRET again. Now. Whatever". [Insert eyeroll here] Because the solution to a really stupid creative decision is to, obviously, pretend like it never happened. Oi. [eyeroll x 2]
Needless to say, there is nerd-rage and wank aplenty in comicland over "One More Day", including reports that writer JM Straczynski (of B5 fame) tried to get his name taken off the last few issues. From what I've read, the consensus seems to be that this was an ass-stupid idea and throwing out 20 years of comic book continuity, not to mention the various plotlines and their repercussions arising out of the "Civil War" event of the last 2-3 years, is both irritating and offensive to long-time readers. The argument from the other side of the aisle on the continuity issue (an even larger bugbear for comics fen than media fen, if that can be believed) is that if you enjoyed the story and thought it was good when you read it a) you got your money's worth and b) it doesn't make the story less good now.
I'd accept this logic if not for the fact that US superhero comics are serials and serials by their nature accrete meaning and history as they go along. Tossing out chunks of Spider-Man's history doesn't make the individual stories any more or less good as discrete entities but it robs them of their meaning and the long-time reader of the entertainment and satisfaction of watching those events emanate and payoff through the life of the serial. In effect, it would be like Ron Moore deciding that Season Three of Battlestar Galactica didn't count or Tolkein coming back from the grave and to announce that he was going to edit the Rohirrim out of his new slimline edition of The Lord of the Rings - who could watch "Unfinished Business" or read Eowyn's confrontation with the Witch King without feeling that the works, stripped of the meaning that comes from being part of a larger whole, have been diminished? I don't blame Spider-Man readers for being pissed. I don't even read the damn comics and I feel rather annoyed and condescended to by Marvel's attitude.
As I read through the comments and counter comments on ComicBookResources.com and Newsarama, it occurred to me that the Spidey reboot highlighted the limitations of the serial format. The Amazing Spider-Man has been, I believe, published on a more or less monthly basis since the 1960s; its now up to issue 540-something. In that time, I think Spider-Man has aged 15 years (and has now been de-aged again). Understandably, there comes a point at which even the most creative minds run out of stories to tell. With between 40 to 80 years of history weighing down on the superhero characters that dominate comics today, even the most creative minds also begin to run out of stories to tell that haven't been told before. I believe this is why we've ended up with so many crap crossovers and "special event" books published in the last 20 years (or basically as long as I've been reading and Not Reading comics) as publishers attempt to keep the market interested in ever more familiar permutations of characters that we already knew to begin. At the same time, the various gimmicks used to get the audience's attention have become increasingly trite and cliched through overuse - characters die, they're reborn, they marry, they divorce, they die again, they're reborn in the pages of another character's book so you have to wait six months for everyone else to figure it out, then they die again. No one believes that Mary Jane and Spidey are going to stay separated, instead everyone is talking about how long it will take to get them back together.
In the end, cheap, gimmicky, event-driven writing is as bad for the medium as a whole as it is for the individual books. Comicbook readers are an audience like any other and the normal rules apply - fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame one me, fool me three times and I'll admit Jim Lee's pretty, pretty art suckered me into buying All-Star Batman and Robin, the Boy Wonder, fool me a fourth time and I'm out of here. The comic book marketplace is less than half the size today that it was 15 years ago. Crappy writing and big-ticket "events" like "One More Day", which ultimately don't go anywhere, have played a huge role in the attrition of the comicbook audience. And old comics readers (like me) aren't being replaced by fresh blood (my nephew). Their superheroes are on Teletoon or at the movies where the writing, characterization and diversity of characters are all better than in your average DC/Marvel monthly.
It is in TV and movies but not the comics themselves that I find characters like Superman, Batman, Spider-Man, the X-Men being reinvented with each passing era, much the way that the legends of King Arthur and Robin Hood are recapitulated and reimagined with each passing generation - from the Gothic Revival poetry of Tennyson to the feminist neopaganism of Zimmer Bradley. Whereas the monthly books, by trying to hold these characters in stasis - aging them, de-aging them, rewriting a character's history here, deleting a relationship there - renders them increasingly soulless entities. Change is not only an inevitability but it is the engine that drives drama. A narrative without change is one without both meaning and excitement. It is a pointless endeavour. Marvel Comics would do better to leave off their next big marketing gimmick and contemplate Ecclesiastes instead: "to everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven".
ETA: Because it just wouldn't be a post about comic books written by me if I didn't include something about what I will now refer to as 'The Cause' a la Richard Jordan in Gettysburg - Something Positive's take on Women in Refrigerators.
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