B. Maximum

New blog, same old me. As before, gonna be writing mostly about media and games. Entertainment would be more succinct, I guess.

Mainstream superhero comics need to change (for the rest of the entry, I'll just say 'comics'). Basically, they're trying to have their cake and eat it too. They (by which I mean the publishers, editors, some writers) want to keep their characters and universes entwined tightly with continuity, yet not to the point where various logical consequences, specifically character aging, are necessary.

To be fair, I think lots of writers and editors don't care for strict continuity at all, because of how restrictive it can be. However, the publishers feel compelled to keep titles entrenched in it, for two main reasons I can see. First, current comic customers were raised on continuity, as far as they are concerned continuity is an intrinsic part of comics. This developed over time, I would guess sometime in the 80s, as the customer base solidified away from being children who would read for a few years and then stop (to be replaced by the next generation), and towards dedicated fans who began as children and never stopped. Second (and certainly related), major storylines and company-wide events, which are responsible for almost all top-selling books these days, depend heavily on continuity.

Of course, none of this was planned, particularly. Comics are basically an evolution of old pulp stories and serials. The thing is, neither those old stories nor comics were expected to last 40+ years, and the pulps didn't. So now comics are a bizarre frankenstein genre: neither true serial nor finite story. Essentially, things are exepcted to happen and change, but only up to a certain point, and for the most part, while past events happened, their real-world historical or temporal context is willfully ignored. Obviously this creates a great many inconsistencies and paradoxes, and the more time passes, and the more stories that are written, the worse it gets.

I'm not going to go into detail here, but obviously the One More Day fiasco is an extremely ugly symptom of this problem, a deliberate rollback of some parts of Spider-Man's history, while leaving others intact. The problem is that they've done their job too well, fans care so much about continuity that changing it without an extremely detailed and rational explanation (relatively speaking) of exactly what has changed and how it all interacts under the new timeline, results in feelings of betrayal and disrespect for previous stories and history. It also destroys the illusion that characters are not in fact locked into a specific status quo.

Basically, comics were created without thinking about the long-term, they stabilized into an illogical but seemingly workable paradigm, but now enough time has passed that it no longer holds up. If the paradigm doesn't change, this conflict will keep happening again and again.

What to do? Well, there's 2 obvious choices, each of which has some serious problems. First, convert into more of a traditional, rigid serial form of storytelling. No real changes, even minor, and little or no reference to past events. Both Marvel and DC (hard to believe I went this far without naming either of them) do in fact have low-continuity comics which are aimed at children (which, ironically, used to be the vast majority of their readership, now it's a niche with no respect from most fans). Interestingly, I think the publishers would prefer this to be the norm, since it synchs up well with non-comic portrayals such as movies and tv. However, as noted above, they've bred the modern comic fan too well.

The other choice is to embrace continuity fully and logically. Characters age and die appropriately. A particular story or character may have a natural beginning, middle and end. Personally, I think this is by far the better option, and not to nutride the Japanese, but I agree with the reasoning that kids like manga (as opposed to comics) because things change, stories advance in meaningful ways, stories end. A story has a lot more punch if you don't know what's going to happen. I'm actually surprised that they haven't tried it yet, since out of continuity stories set in the future (wherein characters have aged naturally and died) are very popular as a rule.

Bottom line: they can continue as they are, with the stories and characters degnerating more and more under the increasing pressure of pseudocontinuity, or they can try and fix it. Either way is apt to be painful (at least in the short-term) both for them and the fans, but I believe that if they make a change and stick with it, everyone will be happier in the long run.

The above is hardly a definitive or complete analysis, but I think it works, even if some of my assumptions and facts aren't dead on. As always, I welcome alternative opinions or corrections.