My wife has a pair of socks from a sandwich shop. I've been married to her for a while, although we didn't merge sock drawers until relatively late in the relationship, so that's why I didn't notice it until now. They're clearly from a few years ago. Enough of the writing has been destroyed by multiple immersions in water that I'm not able to actually tell you the name of the sandwich shop. It has "the best subs", I can tell you that. No phone number appears to have ever been on it.
Why would a sandwich shop have socks made? The immediate answer is advertising, I realize that. Plastering one's name onto stuff--that's been around forever. You can still get a job standing out in front of car dealerships wearing a furry costume, even though that's become a go-to indication that a fictional character (almost always a male) has given up on his dreams and taken the lousiest job he can find. But this sandwich shop isn't a chain. And socks--I've never had socks made, but I'd imagine that you need to buy lots and lots of them for it to be cost-effective, and I'm almost positive that they were given away free (my wife buys things all the time, but I feel confident in the assertion that she would never buy socks from a sub shop), which means that there was a conscious decision made to 1) have socks made and 2) give them away so that one could 3) reap the profits of a sock/sandwich-based marketing campaign.
And yes, I know that the repetition of the phrase is most reminiscent of a small, mewling child, but again, I ask: Why?
Two of the more recent entries from DC & Marvel that have struck me both as A) wrong-headed and B) unbearable are
Spider-Man: The Clone Saga and
Superman: Secret Origin. Now, it might just be that I'm prejudiced against using colons in titles (due to that whole "finished puberty" thing), but it's somewhat difficult to comprehend the necessity of either of these as objects, beyond the "so people can get paid" thing. Neither comics are worthwhile to the "ongoing narrative" that the Big Two's larger titles thrive upon--you don't need the Clone Saga to keep up with Dark Reign, and you don't need
Superman: Secret Origin to keep up with--well, you don't actually need
Superman: Secret Origin at all, because anybody who purchases something like
Superman: Secret Origin already knows all the basic stuff that a title like that is going to provide. (A better title could've been found, even though they've already used "Birthright" and overused "Year One." Maybe Geoff Johns was just nervous about a comic called "Superman: MY SUPERMAN, MINE!".)
If you haven't read either, both of these comics take past events from the characters' continuity, retell them with an eye on the term "definitive", and...well, that's it. Collect dollars. Describing the terms' plots is impossible to do without being both pedantic (because everything one needs to know is in their respective titles, with one being about Spider-Man's clone saga and the other being about Superman's secret origin) and arrogant, since only one issue has been released of either title. It's safe to say that they're hoping to follow the model that's been set for them before: sell at a semi-decent rate for the single issues, all the while hoping for the sort of lifetime collected success that comics like
Batman: Year One enjoy. (The road to obscurity and failure has been set as well, with titles like
Metamorpho: Year One and
Spider-Man: The Crybaby sitting around, hoping that the local librarian doesn't check their circulation history and stamp them "Unwanted".)
Any comic book character that's been around for a relatively extended period of time (think ten years, although five usually does it) is going to run into some continuity problems. There will be gaffes in the names of their supporting cast, there will be times when they appear in a multitude of titles without a comprehensible timeline, sometimes an editor will misinform the colorist, and a black character will turn white. All of those things are par for the course, and while they can be irritating, they're not the sort of thing that any Big Two comics reader can realistically expect not to run into. Comics are made by people, characters outlive writers, and eventually, somebody is going to forget how Simon Dark is "supposed" to behave.
It's the name of the game--and honestly speaking, it's that durability that often attracts people to the Big Two's shared universes. People want to "keep up" with somebody like Batman, the same way that they wanted to "keep up" with Sherlock Holmes. Part of the appeal is going to rest in the belief--wrongheaded or no--that what happened with these characters matters, and for that belief to have any lasting appeal, the history has to have some form of reliability to it. That's how you end up with continuity. It's not that it makes for better stories, in a lot of cases, many of the strongest super-hero stories are the ones that operate with complete disinterest for continuity--
The Dark Knight Returns,
All Star Superman,
Cage--but continuity does make for stronger relationships between the audience and product--and it also makes a product that can sell during the months and years that nobody creates an
All Star Superman type.
As lustful as one might feel towards independent alternative comics, very few of them provide the "come back next week" attraction that companies like Marvel and DC provide. Serialized manga provides cliffhangers in spades, but the creator-driven nature of manga also means that the opportunity for decade long character-driven epics are lesser in number. Having a regularly scheduled product that doles out story points and narrative arcs in a long ranging format, one that can take months and years to conclude--comics have thrived on it, and one can't ignore that television has fully embraced the same recipe. Even reality shows have grasped onto the trick.
But
Superman: Secret Origin and
Spider-Man: Clone Saga aren't the same thing as a
Civil War or a
Crisis On Infinite Earths. They dabble in a different kind of continuity, one that treats the past as a mutable object that can be, with enough time, made "right." The attitude seems to be that there's been some kind of general agreement that "things weren't done correctly, but now, with the experience of time and the knowledge of history, they can be!" It's not a recipe for product "that matters", it's a recipe for another "What If", except now the "What If" is supposed to supplant memory--and memory, criticisms of nostalgia or no, doesn't like being pushed around. Superman's Secret Origin can't be "changed", because Superman's origin was stapled to the brains of Superman readers years ago, it's why they're still keeping up with the character now. Fixing the Clone Saga can't be done in 2009, it can only be done in a time machine, one that goes back and stops the initial torrents of product that clogged the walls and rooms of the 90's.
Crisis On Infinite Earths, on the other hand, operated as a window from past to future, abandoning portions of DC's shared universe so that the comics could move forward with a cleaner slate (for good or ill). It didn't seek to change the past, it chose to close some of the unreliable roads and give the status quo (which, by then, had become a vast portion of DC's appeal) greater weight. Civil War, Dark Reign--these things pushed the stories forward, they created new occurrences to learn, to revel in or despise--for better or worse, those comics looked to what-comes-next.
Superman: Secret Origin is content only to play in the past, tweaking and poking at old comic book stories so they more closely match up with the ideal version of the character that the flavor-of-the-year writers currently prefer.
It's the equivalent of playing a role-playing game by constantly making up characters and going home before you actually play the game. The end result is one that makes Superman stories that operate as temporary placeholders--comics that will, eventually, be fixed and updated. Now, if the audience was changing, if it was being replaced by a younger reader who didn't remember all the old crap, it might make sense. But the audience isn't changing, which means that DC is producing yet another "Year One" for a group of readers that's already bought and ingested the story multiple times.
Spider-Man: The Clone Saga--it's arguably even worse, not being able to point to a hyper popular creative team as reason for existence, and opening with a text page that freely admits "Everybody knows that the Clone Saga wasn't very good." Like
Superman: Secret Origin, The Clone Saga is being treated as if it's a fragment of coal, and it will only take a few more polishes to reveal the gem underneath.
But neither of those are true. Superman's origin is one that's been told so many times--in television, comics, film, even cartoons--that the only innovation to be found is in the art team's decision to marry the character's appearance to that of Christopher Reeves, a man whose portrayal of Superman is considered seminal only so long as you ignore the fact that the last time Reeves appeared as Superman was in a terrible movie from 1987. The Clone Saga was--and honestly, it's inarguable at this point, despite claims to the contrary--a fundamentally stupid story that ignored every aspect of Spider-Man's lasting appeal and tried to replace Peter Parker with a motorcycle-riding guy who
washed dishes. (And the less said about the "Let's Get Physical" outfit, the better.)
These aren't super-hero comics that seek to move the story forward in any way, but comics that operate like the end result of thought experiments--"What if the Clone story had a better ending" and "What would it be like if we pumped a whole lot more emotion into Clark Kent's formative years?" These are fan fictions wrought large, a big budget production of Geoff Johns' ideal version of pre-teen Clark, a Marvel "once again, with feeling" remix of Ben Reilly. That's not intended as a criticism of fan fiction--writing that kind of stuff is a hobby, just like reading comics or watching crappy sitcoms--but it is a rejoinder to Marvel and DC for going ahead and publishing it.
After all, fan fiction is supposed to be free.
And there should be lots of sex.
Tucker Stone's writing may be found in print in Comic Foundry and online at The Factual Opinion, where he frequently reviews new releases.
This Ship Is Totally Sinking is © Tucker Stone, 2008
