Comics are Awesome III

[Shockwave]

I often analogize comic book consistency is like listening to your drunk friends try to recall a story about another time you were all drunk. Some people remember stuff one way, one person remembers different people being there, some people will remember the same people but in different places or outfits...

Hence the value of examining the issue in question when discussing it!

Or the stories in general and collectively.

I often analogize comic book consistency is like listening to your drunk friends try to recall a story about another time you were all drunk. Some people remember stuff one way, one person remembers different people being there, some people will remember the same people but in different places or outfits...

Not sure I really agree with that analogy... I mean it's not that people simply aren't remembering the details right or the same way, when it can actually be the events and details themselves that change in a comic that they generally give an explanation for.

I should probably clarify that my analogy stems from the perception that DC or Marvel (or IDW or whoever) is essentially telling me a story, the story of events and characters in their various universes. Except now the industry is so muddled down with back writes and reboots and what have you that it essentially is like having ten drunk guys at DC trying to tell what happened. "Ok, so like Superman was there, except he wasn't, then he was dead, but he got better..." Yeah.

[Sparky Prime]

I should probably clarify that my analogy stems from the perception that DC or Marvel (or IDW or whoever) is essentially telling me a story, the story of events and characters in their various universes. Except now the industry is so muddled down with back writes and reboots and what have you that it essentially is like having ten drunk guys at DC trying to tell what happened. "Ok, so like Superman was there, except he wasn't, then he was dead, but he got better..." Yeah.

I can understand how the continuity might be perceived that way at a glance, but the whole point of those reboots and back writes is an attempt to help alleviate things that are muddling down the story. When done right, it's really not so hard to follow as you make it sound. Although admittedly I don't think anyone has been doing the best job with that in the past few years, when so many of the creators and exects not making up their minds on how to handle the story.

[Shockwave]

Editorial and executive indecision is part of it, but it's not so much looking at a glance so much as looking at the bigger picture. When I think of the idea of reading "the story of Superman" if I were to start at the beginning with Action Comics #1 and read on through everything featuring the character up through today, it would not be a cohesive story. His power set alone would be all over the map which is kind of how I get my analogy. It's like you start off with one guy telling the story and then the next guy is like "yeah that happened but here's what REALLY happened" and then the next guy is like "yeah, that was it, but he could also do this!" and the next, "Yeah that too and also this power, oh and by the way, his outfit actually looked like this". So it just keeps getting more and more inconsistent over time. Yeah, back writes and continuity fixes are there to try to alleviate that, but it would be better if there was just a single set of rules to begin with. It's like a decades long game of Telephone where the teacher starts at one end of the room telling a student that she walked her dog and by the time it gets to the end of the room the last student is telling a story that involves the cybernetically resurrected corpse of Hitler. Oh sure, the story of the dog is still there, but it turns out in that version that she was walking her dog in Berlin in 2358 which is now under the oppressive rule of cyberzombie Hilter.

This is what intrigues me about the upcoming Marvel's "The end of everything" thing they've been hinting at. I would love it for them to just end everything, yell "ETCHA-SKETCH!" and start over. In fact, the starting over thing is kind of what got me into Ultimates. Which was actually doing pretty good at being consistent up until I couldn't afford to read it anymore. Never really did get back on track with that one.

[Sparky Prime]

Editorial and executive indecision is part of it, but it's not so much looking at a glance so much as looking at the bigger picture. When I think of the idea of reading "the story of Superman" if I were to start at the beginning with Action Comics #1 and read on through everything featuring the character up through today, it would not be a cohesive story. His power set alone would be all over the map which is kind of how I get my analogy. It's like you start off with one guy telling the story and then the next guy is like "yeah that happened but here's what REALLY happened" and then the next guy is like "yeah, that was it, but he could also do this!" and the next, "Yeah that too and also this power, oh and by the way, his outfit actually looked like this". So it just keeps getting more and more inconsistent over time. Yeah, back writes and continuity fixes are there to try to alleviate that, but it would be better if there was just a single set of rules to begin with.

That's kinda what I meant by at a glance, taking a quick look to see just how much history there is to a character with out really looking at what's actually still part of continuity. Everything from Action Comics #1 all the way to today isn't supposed to be looked at as the "bigger picture", not all of it count anymore. Superman's story has essentially been restarted from the beginning, a couple times. It's not something they've just kept building and building all this time. And to fair, when they started the comics all those years ago, there's no way they could have predicted where they'd go or how long they'd last.

This is what intrigues me about the upcoming Marvel's "The end of everything" thing they've been hinting at. I would love it for them to just end everything, yell "ETCHA-SKETCH!" and start over. In fact, the starting over thing is kind of what got me into Ultimates. Which was actually doing pretty good at being consistent up until I couldn't afford to read it anymore. Never really did get back on track with that one.

Personally, I think it'd suck if they just ended everything. I mean, eventually if they want to maintain the characters as they do a reboot was inevitable, but I'd like for them to keep something around to acknowledge the previous history at least.

[Shockwave]

Is Action Comics still going? Also, wouldn't it be generally assumed that the same Superman that's seen in Action Comics would be the same Superman that's seen in the other books put out by DC (not accounting for books that actually are stated to take place in alternate universes), like, is the Superman seen in Superman/Batman the same one from Action Comics, which would be the same one in say... Man of Steel (ok, this is where my comics knowledge is falling apart, I don't even know how many Superman titles there are or what they are called, which is why I'm genuinely asking this question)?

And actually, this is something I just expect from any writer. Keep things consistent. There's nothing wrong with trying to do something new with a character or story, but it should be within the confines of being consistent with what came before. A writer shouldn't have to reboot or back write anything to tell a story with a particular character. When I read Harry Potter, it's consistent. JK Rowling doesn't change Harry's abilities midway through. She doesn't change him into a cyborg or anything like that, it's a single consistent story between all seven books and I expect that consistency in anything that read and anything that I watch including tv and movies. Such changes that happen in comics on a regular basis would never be tolerated in other media, so I often have to wonder why it gets tolerated so much in comics. At the end of the day, any writer is basically telling a story. That story should be consistent. That's really all I'm saying.

[andersonh1]

Action Comics is still going, even though they got to issue 904 and then reset the numbering.

Superman's continuity has a number of phases, which are generally looked at as separate individuals. There isn't a hard and fast dividing line between the first two, so I'm generalizing.

- the original/Earth-2 Superman: this is the guy that debuted in Action Comics #1 in 1938
- the Earth-1 Superman: pretty much considered to be all Superman stories from the Silver and Bronze Age, so more or less 1956-1986. These two Supermen would interact from time to time during the 70s and 80s
- post-Crisis on Infinite Earths Superman/Byrne reboot: Superman was firmly started over in 1986 with a lot of revisions. This version more or less lasted until 2011, though they were really screwing the with his origin and status quo from 2003 onward
- new 52 Superman: the guy we've had since 2011

If it wasn't for the creation of Superboy and the idea that all of DC's characters from the 1940s lived on another Earth, there might not be any dividing line between the first two at all, and all stories from 1939 to 1986 might well have been considered in the same continuity. But Superboy was a retcon (yep, retcons go back to the 1940s, so they've been causing trouble for a long time) since Superman had never been Superboy, and so they had to explain him away somehow, and the idea that the original 1940s Superman had lived on Earth-2 with the original Flash, GL, etc. was the solution. There was never a hard and fast break where the writers said "this is a new Superman" like there was after the Crisis though.

With some other characters, pretty much everything did count. Some of the B-listers haven't had as many stories about them published, so if it was on the page, it happened, at least until 2011. When I was reading JSA in the 2000s, those stories from the 1940s were still in continuity. Grant Morrison found a way to put every Batman story ever into continuity. Most of Hal Jordan's stories still count, though these days you have to excise Green Arrow from his history, which is problematic.

A lot of the problems boil down to having books that are published for such a long time, and having a shared universe with many different creators. There are bound to be contradictions given those circumstances.

[Shockwave]

That presents an interesting scenario that is unique to comic books: It's not like DC or Marvel was around originally in 1938 when Action Comics debuted. DC came into existence later on as a merging of several other comic book publishers, so the idea of having one central company set the rules for all of these different characters wasn't really there until they conglomerated into DC. And DC has just been trying to reconcile all of these differing ideas for all these different companies ever since? I guess that certainly would explain why comic fans put with as much as they do.

[andersonh1]

That's right, and DC's original solution for integrating different groups of characters was to put them on their own Earth in their own universe. So the Charlton characters like Captain Atom or Blue Beetle had their Earth, Captain Marvel had his own Earth, the Quality Comics characters had their Earth, etc. And it worked fine, until someone at DC decided that it didn't, and the Crisis integrated everyone into the same Earth with a shared history. That's where continuity problems really took off, in my opinion.

To be fair, we got some good stories out of that shared Earth. But we also got a never ending series of "fixes" that attempted to smooth out all the problems caused by all the retcons needed to suddenly have everyone together. And they still bought other characters and tried to integrate those as well. It's still gone on as recently as 2011 when Stormwatch was made a part of the New 52.

And what's DC's big thing now? 30 years after Crisis, the multiverse is suddenly the big thing again. And that's fine with me. I'm a reader who didn't start reading until a few years after the Crisis, but the more I look back, the more I prefer keeping groups of characters on their own Earth, in their own continuity. I think it makes things simpler and easier to keep track of (which, ironically, is the opposite of what they were saying in the 80s when they decided to merge everything). I don't think Captain Marvel needs to be on the same Earth as Superman. They're similar enough that one of them is going to feel redundant, which may explain why Cap has had trouble keeping a successful series for long. And the JSA seemed to do just fine on their own Earth, though I can't deny that having Jay Garrick, Johnny Quick and Max Mercury as supporting characters in the Wally West Flash series was a big part of the appeal.

The bigger the stable of characters, the harder it has to be to keep everything straight.

I think superhero comics are a fun genre, and I enjoy them quite a bit. But there's no denying they've had some major problems with storytelling and continuity.

[Dominic]

Why? Those 2 universes merged to become part of Earth 0, but Earth 50 isn't the Wildstorm universe anymore, it's the Justice Lords universe and Earth 13 is now the League of Shadows universe rather than the Vertigo universe. It seems clear some universes merged while others were created as a result of Flashpoint given those universes still exist but not as they had before. That would also explain any contradictions with any other universe.

Based on "Flashpoint" #5, I would have thought that there would simply be no E13 or E50. (I have no problem with the Justice Lords, provided DC does *something* with them. But, for all the hype DC gives their multiverse, they do not use it much outside of over-hyped fight books.)

Most sensible thing I can come up with is that DC is already publishing stuff to reflect the state of things after "Convergence". But, that is all speculation with a dash of rumour for now.

Earth 15 - that entire universe was destroyed by Superboy Prime...

Of course, the one I most wanted to see comics based on is the one that stays gone.....

his is what intrigues me about the upcoming Marvel's "The end of everything" thing they've been hinting at. I would love it for them to just end everything, yell "ETCHA-SKETCH!" and start over. In fact, the starting over thing is kind of what got me into Ultimates. Which was actually doing pretty good at being consistent up until I couldn't afford to read it anymore. Never really did get back on track with that one.

That is pretty much what they are doing, not unlike DC's original "Crisis on Infinite Earths". They are going to modernize and streamline. It is probably best to assume that most everything is getting tossed.

So long as they keep the same creative teams (even if they rotate to different books), I will stick around.

[andersonh1]

http://robot6.comicbookresources.com/20 ... omic-ever/

I find it interesting that it's the "52 known worlds of the local multiverse", possibly implying the infinite universes are still out there, just not mapped. How could anyone map infinity anyway?

This may all seem like a stop-gap of a comic, something to kill time while Jim Lee finishes drawing the next official chapter of Mutliversity, but it ends up being maybe the most DC comic book of all time.

For here Morrison takes what is often cited as a negative about DC’s line of comics — including by plenty of people who make, edit, publish and promote those comics — and reframes it as their strongest, most endearing virtue. It’s a bit of a love letter, but it’s more an alchemical formula, turning leaden comics-making into gold. The secret? Reminding readers that it was never really lead at all, but was golden all along.

This is what he did with Batman. He found a way to make every story fit, and he's attempted the same thing with DC as a whole.

All of these changes, the story makes clear, happened and mattered, even if no one within the stories themselves remembers them. “Only The Monitors kept a record of it all,” the narration says, “written into the fictions of Earth-33.”

Earth-33 is, if you consult your guidebook, Earth-Prime; our world, the real world … or at least, the real world as we can read about it in these comic books. It’s a nice reminder, one that might have been even more welcome closer to the reboot of The New 52, that the events of those comics are real to us, no matter what changes editors and writers might make to the characters, which memories and events are altered or excised. Those changes are all part of the story.

And Morrison's inspiration goes back to Showcase #4 where Barry Allen is reading Flash Comics featuring Jay Garrick. The adventures of someone in one world appear as fiction in another world.


screencast

That panel is essentially the genesis of the DC multiverse as it exists today, and I love that Grant Morrison pays tribute to that in Multiversity. This is the kind of connection between past and present that makes DC so appealing to me.