Quarter Bin

Those who’ve lost a certain amount of their precious time here at the Quarter Bin over the years may have noticed a tendency to explain via metaphor, often via a reach that drags analogies bruised and bloody from their original contexts to serve the purpose of getting some point across. Expect more of the same here, as a layman’s peek into natural history and anthropology provide a model for looking at things. The background helps explain why a series of comics I’ve avoided (rolling my eyes when they appeared in used-comics boxes during my raids of the Paperbacks Plus and Half Price Books in Dallas for what I viewed as “the good stuff”) actually amount to an important prototype for material that transformed, for better or not for the better, the standards of conventional superhero comic books.

Human origins theory provides a number of points for argument, including even the notion that solid proof of macro-evolution – the creation of species through the transformations of other animals, via accumulated evolutionary change – actually occurs. But some things remain on a less debatable ground, such as the presence of particular genes in the germ plasm of animals. Genetics can point to specific sequences of building blocks of nucleic acids and use these to infer relationships. This has real-world application in areas like forensics (blood and other substances from living bodies carry genetic codes that can implicate ownership) and paternity testing. And the analysis of sequences in our DNA have produced some interesting inferences over time. One of these claims that all living humans can trace ancestry to a single living human or proto-human based on a kind of mitochondrial sequence that remains very stable over time because it appears outside the nucleus and does not participate in the genetic recombination that chromosomes participate in during fertilization.

That bit of long-winded explanation aside, the point boils down to this: We all carry a series of nucleotides (the components of DNA and RNA) that identify us all as cousins, n times removed. And scientists have named this genetic ancestor “Lucy.” When a magazine like Scientific American or National Geographic discusses someone with this name, they consistently intend to mean the natural scientists’ Eve.

Genetic typing can identify relationships between living organisms based on the known biology of terrestrial life-forms. But prior to the invention of modern genetics theory over the last three centuries, other methods existed for classifying relationships between animals. Generally classification looked at attributes of living things and arranged them into hierarchies, into trees, with the art of making such structures bearing names like cladistics and taxonomy.

All of this came into my mind recently when I bought and went through one of Marvel’s “Essentials” volumes, one not particularly high on my list of reprint priorities. Yet I found material in one such volume to convince me I might have found the “Lucy” of a particular kind of comic I discuss here occasionally at the Quarter Bin.

At the risk of falling off my skates and sliding on my face down the sidewalk, I suggest here that a comics event of the early 1970s provided the model for the modern megacrossover. So I can say now where it all started when I find myself wishing, poignantly, that it would all stop. The Mother of Megacrossovers, as far as I can tell, appeared in the form of the “Avengers-Defenders War,” a series of stories that 9ran alternately in Marvel Comics’ titles Defenders (between #8 and #11) and Avengers (between #116 and #118). From the timing and the content, this piece seems to breach the territory between crossover and megacrossover, showing important characteristics of each.

The essential plot remains comprehensible enough: Thor villain Loki, blinded and cast down from a mountain, found himself needing the assistance of Dr. Strange villain Dormammu. Dormammu had, since his first appearances, desired to travel from his own dimension to conquer (and theoretically destroy) our own world, but Dr. Strange had defeated him and bound him by an oath not to enter our own dimension. But he thought of a loophole based on merging both dimensions, and figured he could do so with the aid of an artifact called the Evil Eye from an old Fantastic Four comic. Loki’s treacherous nature combined with a bit of wisdom that led him to attempt to warn the Avengers about a danger involving the Defenders, with the latter team falling for a ruse that would trick them into retrieving the Evil Eye, piece by piece, for Dormammu. Loki’s scheming therefore has the Avengers splitting into units of one and two, early Justice League style, to go stop each member of the Defenders from retrieving the components of the Eye, with plenty of fights between costumed heroes, and, ultimately, a realization that all heroes had served various villains as stooges in this matter. Before the two teams could go deal with the squabbling pair of bad guys from beyond the earth, though, Dormammu retrieved the pieces of the Eye and began doing things with it like turning cities full of people into cheesy reptilian monsters. But all came out happily in the end, despite the Defenders convention of ending stories with the good guys angry and squablling with each other.

In some ways, we have little more here than a combination of a simple crossover (like the routine title hopping typical of Marvel super heroes in the 1960s) and an event book (like the “Kree-Skrull War” in Avengers about two years earlier). But three points implicate the modern megacrossover as the child of the “Avengers-Defenders War.”

1. Reliance on dredging up an old thread as a crisis.
   Defenders built on left-overs from a number of books, constructing in some cases on the remnants of cancellation. The Sub-Mariner may have had a still-in-print title during the beginnings of the Defenders franchise in Marvel Feature, but Dr. Strange certainly and the Silver Surfer didn’t; and the components of crossovers between Dr. Strange, Sub-Mariner, andIncredible Hulk all formed the basis of Defenders to begin with. Dr. Strange and Thor provided central villains. And Fantastic Four provided a gadget – something that looked like a cross between a chalice and a flashlight and called “The Evil Eye” – as the catalyst that made the same old villains somehow much more dangerous than before. Not all such events use this same kind of pretext, but significant ones have. DC’s Crisis on Infinite Earths built on the annual Justice League / Justice Society team-ups in Justice League of America (fairly enough, since these provided much of the editorial difficulty this event sought to correct), the assimilation of other comics book company’s content, and angles from Green Lantern concerning the origins of the Guardians and the 1979 re-casting of the origin of the Golden Age Green Lantern. The strategy seems almost too similar to require comparison here.
2. Threading the storyline through alternating titles.
   Early crossovers appeared contained within a single title, much more like guest appearances than anything else. The Thing and the Hulk would fight in the pages of Fantastic Four even if superheroes from other titles such as Avengers might show up in the story. Continuity might require that related titles acknowledge the deeds within such a run of Fantastic Four, but the actual storytelling occurred within a single book. The “Avengers-Defenders War,” on the other hand, ran in both titles for about three issues each. In this structure, we could see the beginnings of that modern nuisance the mega-crossover. Take what happened here in two Marvel titles and project it across an entire company’s product line – DC, Marvel, Valiant, or a number of others that engage in such annoying practices – and you have the publishing structure, if not the content, of the post-1985 megacrossover event.
3. Presenting a world- or cosmos-shattering menace.
   While superhero comics do this all the time – indeed, have done so to the point that menaces that threaten the universe or larger scales have become tedious and cliched characteristics of hack work – early event comics existed in an environment that preceded the beating of huge scale menaces to the point of death and beyond. The “Avengers-Defenders War” did not have in the past items like Secret Wars I and II and the Infinity Gauntlet event to point at with derision – for, after all, a child in its youth will not generally know how her own children might come out.

It didn’t seem like much at the time. I never heard the books described as a unit until the 1990s. I don’t recall ever reading the events of the work appearing in any of the many good and bad superhero comics I read in the 1970s in the years that remained of that decade. No collectors I knew talked about it, though pieces like Wolverine’s first appearance in Incredible Hulk - a not-spectacular issue of a title that had fairly recently seen much better days – or the Frank Miller Amazing Spider-Man annual with the Punisher in it – provided much debate, even though their plot lines did not provide the foundation for anything much meaningful in 1983 (The Year I Quit Comics).

But such seeming unimportance deceives. Imagine ignoring a black tom cat with one blue eye this year, then seeing, over the following year, swarms of stray cats with the same one blue eye. The descendants in such a case implicate the importance of the ancestor, however trivial he might have seen at the time. Just so today, with verminous swarms of out-of-control crossover events polluting the post-1985 comics landscape, broken by the occasional worthwhile piece. And a series of books of such importance deserve separate anthologization precisely for their importance as prototypes of an effect that would ripple through the form, much more so than the formulaic collections of first-appearances of particular characters or other themed reprints. These books merit collection even by those who never cared for either period of Avengers or Defenders in the same way as other significant events might – the first cross-title crossover, the first multi-issue story, the first death of a superhero, the first stupid return to life of a dead superhero, or significant defining events that point to how comics came from what appeared on the shelves in 1940 to what appears on the shelves in 2005.

Newcomers to Manga

Having broken down after long resistance, I finally decided the time had come to check out some of the more gaijin-friendly specimens of Japanese comics or manga. Much of my intertia had to do with the perceived cliquishness of manga fans in western comics fandom; I had, nor have, any particular desire to acquire a secret handshake based on familiarity with something usable as a filter to divide the world into insiders and outsiders based on non-useful knowledge. Comics fandom, after all, has enough of this just in the form of folks who memorize the arcana of years and years of comic plots and their interconnections. In short, and probably unfairly, I feared to involve myself in what might prove to be the initiation rites of a subset of comics fandom. I did not want to engage in discussions about the difference in meaning in the Japanese suffixes -chan, -san, and -kun, however thoroughly these might serve as a pretext for inflating a fatuous self-esteem. I preferred not to self-congratulate over my ability to remember difficult multisyllabic Japanese names (especially since I have difficulty even retaining the shorter ones in short- and long-term memory). I deemed myself too old to join the numbers of a straw man society we might label Manga Dweebs.

Probably all this represents a great unfairness both to the gallant legions of Japanese cartoonists creating the manga that increasingly saturate American markets and, as well, to the folks that consume them. But grownups approaching middle age find less and less disposable time, and must therefore prioritize our interests; and the greater the crunch on time for hobbies, the more barbed the criticism we often generate in order to determine what will make or fail to make the cut. And a bit of overexposure to improperly vetted material helped me put manga works on the later or never shelf of things to examine.

Enough shallow exposure to Japanese cartoons in the early 1980s – not pursued with any depth of attention, since at that time I began to distance myself from pursuits that bore the onus of “stuff for kids” – disinclined me to certain conventions of anime and manga. And just as manga began to penetrate the West in a serious way, time and attempts to simulate maturity inclined me to dispense with comics altogether. By the time I retired from the pursuit in 1983 (until 1996), I had only encountered one manga work called “I Saw It” depicting a first-person report of the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The temptation exists to view manga as inherently foreign because manga works originate in Asia. But the concept of foreignness implies strangeness, incomprehensibility, and distance. If these properties consistently belonged to manga, manga would not do well in American markets, propagating wildly in a country where geography grants us the privilege of not needing to learn foreign languages. And the distance of an incomprehensibility imposed by cultural differences does not burden an American reader of manga – at least, we might note, such a burden remains considerably less than that of conventional American comics, which can require years of reading to comprehend the backstory necessary to provide meaning and context to the current narrative.

Doubtless some specimens of manga deal in matters of history and culture to an extent that a reader from the West might not recognize or understand the significance of much that occurs on the page. But one can recognize a certain irony in the accessibility of Japanese comics as compared to much that comes out in the United States. For example, compare a work like Avengers Forever to a selected-at-random manga piece, and note which requires more of the reader in terms of shared referents and background. Frequently the manga will do better in a hypothetical test of accessibility, and much of this comes from pursuing certain common formulas that do better in grounding the work in the general human condition and the shared experience those of us fortunate enough to live in the prosperity of post-industrial cultures.

Mechanics of a Manga Concept

Things which recur in a family of works suggest the presence of conventions or forms. And if an admittedly-small but semi-random sampling of works shows common traits this implies a non-anecdotal quality to their role. So a handful of pieces imply to me that the following traits represent manga conventions.

• The socially-challenged kid.
  An imperfectly-adjusted kid trying to cope with the bizarre events of the narrative seems to serve as a common hook to which readers of all ages might relate in manga, even where the manga themselves may dabble in content we could deem more appropriate to mature readers. Fuyuki Hinata, principal protagonist of Sgt Frog, provides a fairly well-adjusted version of the type, not displaying the sulkiness and surliness of his equivalent in FLCL, but instead failing to understand his circumstances because of his own guilelessness; he understands neither the simmering treachery of of Sergeant Frog, nor the dangerous temperament and jealous drives of his unrequited girlfriend Nishizawa. Since much of the action in the episodes recorded in TokyoPop’s Sgt Frog One derives from the scheming of Kero Kero (Frog), Private Tamama, and Nishizawa, a blindness to character flaws serves Fuyuki as well as the more mood-heavy definitions of character one finds in other manga.
• The sexually tense context.
  While the simple and obvious uses of sexual content – of whatever strength, from mild and inferred to coarse, grotesque, and magnified beyond any credibly non-prurient intent – may begin with predictable and sometimes tedious tittilation, writers who actually think about how people interact with each other understand the greater potential for driving a tale comes not from the satisfaction of the urge but from coping with it. Coping may mean overcoming obstacles towards (often ill-considered) gratification; or it may mean a protagonist trying to keep his head clear in a crowded bus full of gorgeous specimens pressed insufferably close against him. Japanese manga and anime explore the latter drive-and-frustration elements to the point that we might see in the works of many of the modern masters an art form within the art form. We could call this the manga cruel tease. Sgt Frog geared for an approach more similar to the PG end of the all-ages spectrum, so the cruel tease does not take a prominent role here; some mild eye-candy and occasional jokes about secondary-sexual-characteristic dysmorphia in female characters, plus rare gags about undergarments, serve this purpose here. However, a spectrum does exist; and manga can get as graphic as one might want it to become on the long walk from more temperate works to the heady territories collectively described as hentai.
• The urban or suburban grounding.
  The wonderful can become mundane when never presented in the context of the ordinary. Many conventional comics forget this; and some contemporary works like Busiek’s Marvels or Waid’s and Ross’ Kingdom Come attempt to expose the overexplored medium of superhero comics to the original contrast between super and man that makes the premises and conventions of the form work. A limited exposure to a handful of manga works has turned up a consistent approach where works ground in the mundane for the necessary parallax to render the larger-than-life remarkable. So, therefore, one findsSgt Frog beginning in a plausible if not average Japanese home peopled by juveniles bound to the minor’s life of schoolwork, socialization through education, and subordination to an adult world where someone else always seems to have power.
• The intrusion of the exceptional.
  In the absence of some improbable development throwing a once-normal, once-understandable cosmos into turmoil, we could expect manga or other comics never to get far beyond the everyday frustrations of work, chores, school, commuting, sickness, old age, and death. The exceptional provides both an engine to force players into motion and a canvas against which protagonist and antagonist can depict his character through how he acts and reacts. The intrusion of semi-anthropomorphic extraterrestrials who somewhat resemble terrestrial frogs – and their interaction with a culture they don’t completely understand as they attempt a low-level clandestine plan to conquer the earth despite small numbers and few resources – provides the necessary dose of the fantastic, with the chemistry of personalities assisting in the work of driving the narrative. While manga can use this in stronger or weaker doses – or, indeed, ignore the most unlikely stuff altogether – most pieces I’ve had to good fortune to go through did involve elements that violate known principles of physics or biology or history. From extraterrestrial frogs in Sgt Frog to magic and dimension-hopping in the adaptation Abenobashi Magic Shopping Arcade to the strange powers of the protagonist Luffy in Eiichiro Oda’s Onepiece.

What to Make of It

As will frequently occur with preconceptions, empirical support failed to defend the view of manga I held prior to some minor experimentation with easily-located works such as the ones mentioned here as part of my sample. While I did find the artistic conventions that provide cliches to American amateur artists, these served as a kind of manga-wide “house style” and did not necessarily include all the art had to offer. One who looks can find things like the inverted-’U’ eyes of an extremely happy character; speed lines; the occasional nosebleed; tears of rage or joy; the drop of sweat and the bulging forehead vein; and the large-eyes small-mouth character design. But to proclaim the material as unvarying on the basis of these conventions does them an injustice.

In Katsuhiro Otomo’s Akira, a reader does not find the same use of facial expression, page flow, or storytelling style as Eiichiro Oda’sOnepiece. Nor do the talents Satoru Akahori, Ryusei Deguchi, and Beni Axia Hirayama who translated the Gainax cartoon “Abenobashi Magic Shopping Arcade” to manga tell a story the same way as the latter talents. And Mine Yoshizaki tells a different story in a different way than the aforementioned creators.

Style, tone, theme, and content differ, making it somewhat more likely that an unbiased reader might find something worth looking at in the manga section even if the American comics reprints seem to bias heavily towards superhero material with a common background and shared editorial model. Without intending cruelty to the worthwhile efforts of decades of American comics creators, I might cautiously suggest that a reader has a better chance of finding a manga in which giant robots do not appear than of finding a trade paperback of domestic content in which caped superheroes do not intrude.

In addition, manga has a potent advantage which American comics used to exploit, but largely marginalized in the decades beginning with the Silver Age, especially after 1985. The editorial model of a writer creating material for DC or Marvel (or even younger concerns like Image) labors under the burdens of continuity models. Even where standards do not demand perfect continuity, writers still must write around decades of things that have gone before. A writer for DC or Marvel who must create material within their shared universes can’t (for example) postulate a story that deals with the first contact of humanity with alien races, inasmuch as both concerns feature enough extraterrestrial species as both characters and menaces that no two contiguous buildings in their versions of Manhattan need to solicit tenants from the same planet. And similar roadblocks to creativity exist throughout; this provides one explanation where much of the worthwhile material either of the senior comics companies produces tends to excel in its fringe or peripheral imprints.

Manga creators retain the autonomy characteristic of owner-creators and therefore can write from the position that each talent may work in a comics universe as uncluttered with material written by others as he (or she) might choose to make it. Eiichiro Oda can therefore write about pirates and mountain bandits; Mine Yoshizaki can postulate that froglike aliens have a fairly clear field for planetary conquest, hindered by competition only from such other races as the concept invites. And neither needs to concern space travel or giant robots regardless of how many other works may feature such material.

So it becomes difficult to conclude that a combination of editorial autonomy, creator vision that focuses on storytelling rather than self-referent navel-gazing, and the talent applied by perfectionism-inclined artists and writers leave manga in a more promising and viable position for posterity. We can speculate whether American comics will consider the lessons the success of Japanese material has enjoyed in our marketplace and adapt for long-term viability or whether the Far East will provide a medium that might crowd domestic material off the shelves entirely.

A discussion between Eddie Fitzgerald, Richard Pursel, Vincent Waller, and John Kricfalusi on the commentary of “Stimpy’s Cartoon Show” (The Ren & Stimpy Show: Seasons Threa and a Half-ish) brought up a theoretical life cycle for cartoons. It struck me as interesting because the history these creators cited belonged to cartoons and animation, but the forces involved seemed equally applicable to the development of comics.

Experimentation and inconsistency
This period occurs between when pioneers first overcome some technical or aesthetic hurtle and actually make a medium or form work towards an initial spread of experimental works based on this leap. In toons, the period between Winsor McKay’s experimental animations but before consistent producers could deliver a product of guaranteed quality or reliable style.

Success and flowering
The celebrities of a medium begin to establish their legends. In such a period, a Tex Avery or Chuck Jones starts creating the works that solidify their early resumes. In the repeated cycle mentioned in the DVD commentary, figures like John Kricfalusi can appear. In the classic American animation cycle, this period ran from the dawn of the forties into the mid-1940s.

Standardization
The concepts and methods of the pioneers provide inspiration and direction for both second-generation and secondary talents. The momentum created by the Success and Flowering period allows creation of good products for a while, but radical new ideas and conspicuous inspiration become rarer commodities. First-tier talent may still appear in the industry and work on the product, but such talent becomes more and more optional to creation.

Imitation and management-driven production
The wrong answer to the question Do shortcuts to inspiration exist? begins indisputably changing the creative process in this stage. Entrepreneurs and managers believe the established success of previous periods distills into an understandable and repeatable formula. This phase appears more obvious in the 1990s cycle described in the audio commentary, where later creators of Ren and Stimpy cartoons tended to imitate rather than innovate in formulaic toons where the salient features of earlier shorts – Ren’s displays of temper, scatalogical humor, and the presence of tighty whiteys – began to appear as conventions without the same logical storyline justifications as previously. At this point, talent plays the role of hired help, and often finds itself unwelcome in the process. Disputes with management may have driven out the original first-tier talents that defined the standards followed by the product; second-generation high-grade talents may understand the business well enough to know to avoid it by this time, or management may explicitly show the unwelcomeness of (supposedly buttinsky-type) talent through examples of disposing of its onetime luminaries.

Decline
However, the stock formulas stifle innovation. Works defined by original design parameters continue but with no room to grow. Whereas an early Warner cartoon character like Bugs Bunny or Elmer Fudd shows evolution from earliest appearances to standardized forms, standardization-driven concepts like the cast of Scooby Doo follow original design specs years after their outfits go out of fashion. In general, an observer of American animation could note that the end of the B-movie system helped contribute to the decline of big-studio animation for movies; and the cheapening of the product as created for television showed in low-budget made-for-the-small-screen products in the sixties and seventies. The reality of the decline showed in symptoms like subjective reactions of viewers, circa 1973, who would turn off most contemporary toons to turn on dubbed-English “Speed Racer” toons. American decline gave a potent invitation for Asian animation, especially from Japan, to come to drive the industry.

Extinction
Restrictions on talent – writers and especially artists – eventually stifle product until stories have no point, animation has no life, jokes have no humor, colors become drab, and programs have no audiences. The legendary Death of American Animation occurred in this phase, though the Ren and Stimpy talents contend that a miniature version of the entire larger cycle occurred during the five years of production of the “Ren and Stimpy” cartoon.

Since animation per se hasn’t died (either as a business nor as a medium), the term extinction may seem hyperbolic, but on the scales of the front-tier productions, cancellation does represent a form of extinction. The end of the made-for-movies Warner, MGM, and other cartoons represented a real extinction, as did the end of the 1990s incarnation of “The Ren and Stimpy Show” in miniature.

Much of this pattern I see echoed in the collapse of the Silver Age of Comics, and, perhaps, in the later collapse of the “New Comics” of the early 1990s. The subject looks to bear future exploration.

http://www.quarterbin.com – There is a serious shortage of female leads with their own titles in the comic book world. The Top Cow studio, nominally part of Image (in fact, it’s a big piece of what’s left of Image, these days) deserves full credit for making a real effort to change that. Let’s have a round of applause for those bold fellows!

Having given credit where credit is due, I am compelled to admit that when I examine any given Top Cow heroine in more detail, I often find they aren’t actually doing a great deal to satisfy my desire to find more female leads I can actually admire both for their fundamental personalities and for the manner of presentation. You know, characters I might actually be able to recommend to some of the real live female human beings of my acquaintance as being worthy of their attention and possibly even providing a protagonist to whom they can relate more easily than they can to the typical male lead.

Let’s start out by examining the worst offender I have encountered thus far: Lara Croft, Tomb Raider.

I have here a copy of the TPB titled Tomb Raider: Saga of the Medusa Mask, a collection of the first four issues of Lara’s monthly title. Dan Jurgens, writer. Andy Parks, penciler. The book is published by Top Cow, and thus done in their usual style of art. To give them full credit for a pleasant surprise, this means that Lara clearly is feminine but is not, I repeat not, depicted with the ridiculously large breasts (by comic book standards, at least) which some artists would instinctively have given her in an effort to play up her most memorable characteristics as a video game character. If I had been called upon to hazard a guess on what she would look like when the comic was about to publish its first issue, I probably would have said “she’ll look much the way Jim Balent made Catwoman look when he became the initial artist on her new monthly title in the early 90s, the title she got after the (not-outrageously-buxom) Michelle Pfeiffer made such a hit playing Catwoman in Batman Returns.”

That’s what I would have said, but I would have been wrong! Sometimes I am actually too cynical in my expectations. (I do hear rumors that Angelina Jolie’s chest area received considerable computer-generated enhancement in the live-action movie adaptation of Lara Croft, however. So my cynicism on the subject of what Lara’s corporate masters would regard as her most indispensable attributes was not entirely misplaced.)

The Top Cow style has never been my favorite, neither at the hands of studio founder Marc Silvestri nor any of his disciples, but it’s a lot easier to take than some Image Founders I could mention (Rob Liefeld and his imitators, for example). Having settled that point satisfactorily, let’s take a closer look at that other aspect of comic book storytelling, the writing.

Dan Jurgens did the writing. Dan Jurgens was heavily involved in the “Death of Superman” storyline in which Superman and a big mass of gray muscle pounded and pounded and pounded on each other until they simultaneously used up their last ergs of strength and dropped dead. Dan Jurgens wrote the remarkably forgettable five-part miniseries for the Zero Hour megacrossover event. Dan Jurgens had the writing assignment on the Captain America comic for awhile after the Heroes Reborn fiasco (Rob Liefeld was the hatchet man who had mangled the Cap concept during HR, by the way). Dan Jurgens has written some other things I preferred not to look at, although I admit he’s also had some good days over the years.

In other words, when I saw that Dan Jurgens was the writer on Tomb Raider, my expectations were not high. My memory was too good. When he took over on Captain America I was willing to give anyone the full benefit of the doubt as long as it was different from what Liefeld had done, but Jurgens didn’t need long to convince me that I was getting bored stiff by his treatment of the classic character. Nor was I impressed with the way Superman and Doomsday had slugged it out to Mutual Assured Destruction after all the other times Superman has actually shown some brains in defeating a host of other foes who seemed just as strong as he is, or even stronger. Nor did I feel the Zero Hour miniseries had done much more than look like a weak retread of Marv Wolfman’s Crisis on Infinite Earths concept.

Looking at the Evidence

But let’s take a look at what Jurgens himself said he wanted to accomplish in this instance. In an interview recorded at http://www.primagames.com/news/interview/1236/, Dan Jurgens said: “As I alluded to earlier, we can’t possibly duplicate the action-oriented pace of a video game. Rather than having that be our point of interest, we have to focus on Lara Croft and get the readers interested in her as a person and her exploits second.”

Let’s take him at his word. He wasn’t just trying to write lots of action scenes so Andy Parks could illustrate them with one dynamic pose after another. (Really!) He was trying to develop Lara as a person. Granted, we only have the first four months’ worth of effort here, but it’s supposed to be a complete story, so let’s see what Jurgens came up with when he tried (I believe for the first time in his career) to write a regular title with a female lead as the title character.

We start out with an action sequence, of course. As is customary in the James Bond films, our first sight of Lara comes as she is finally wrapping up one case, with another soon to follow. A narrator, not immediately identified, tells us we are in Iran and the armed men we see are soldiers. They don’t like Westerners and particularly not the ones they see as thieves, says the narrator. Guess who qualifies on both counts in this instance?

Yes, Lara Croft, who has just stolen a 2000-year-old necklace. When the leader of this detachment of soldiers orders her to take it off, she says wittily, “On the first date? Really, sugah. I’m not that kind of girl.” As she says that last sentence, she’s producing an automatic in each hand and blazing away at the soldiers, then turns and runs away from the ones still alive.

At this point, I was getting a wee bit apprehensive about the moral foundation for her actions. On the face of it, we seemed to be dealing with illegal entry into a sovereign nation, theft of a valuable antique (a national treasure, perhaps?), and cold-blooded murder of at least a few of the local representatives of law and order who tried to apprehend you for the previous crimes. Making a joke while you shoot people doesn’t make your actions any less reprehensible. (Do you imagine the ghosts of the Joker’s victims take comfort in the knowledge that he was laughing heartily as he slaughtered them?)

But I was obviously getting all upset over nothing, because after her faithful chauffeur/bodyguard/etc. picks her up in a helicopter as she jumps off a cliff, he takes her to Israel to return the necklace to a museum from which it had been stolen by “fundamentalists” (presumably Islamic) years previously. (The return happens in the invisible gap between one page and another, since there’s nothing exciting to be seen in that occurrence.)

Well, shucks! That sure takes a load off my mind! Here I feared she was a thief and murderer, but if she did it to oblige the Israelis by returning an ancient piece of jewelry to them, then I guess anything and everything she did was absolutely perfect! Yep! How silly of me to have wondered if I was reading a story about some arrogant sociopath who didn’t see that any other human being’s life had any real value when respecting it would interfere with her personal whims! I should abase myself in sackcloth and ashes for doubting her!

(Ask yourself this: What if she had invaded a museum in Tel Aviv to retrieve a once-stolen antique necklace and restore it to the loving care of the Iranians, shooting down a fewIsraeli soldiers in the process while joking about things she wouldn’t do on the first date, would that be equally praiseworthy? What if she stole it from the Smithsonian in Washington and shot a few members of the DCPD? Would her well-documented claim that the item had previously been stolen by someone else be sufficient to acquit her of Murder One? Or would the judge and jury be more likely to take the highly unsympathetic position that no piece of jewelry on this good earth is worth deliberately killing a few men in your quest to get it back for your employer of the moment?)

Compounding Assaults on the Reader’s Credulity

A very rich and allegedly very evil man named Paris D’Arseine (whom Lara neither likes nor trusts, and makes no bones about it) arrives at Lara’s yacht and says he wants to hire her to find the legendary Medusa Mask for him. A sorcerous artifact that’s supposed to give the wearer vast powers, including the Gaze of Death.

I blinked. He wants an artifact that might give him the power of life and death, and he figures a woman who doesn’t like him will be willing to exert herself to hunt it down and then deliver it into his sweaty little hands for a measly million dollars? Or even three times that amount? It would take considerably more than three million to persuade me to hand such a weapon over to a “terribly ruthless and dangerous man” as Compton labeled him a few pages earlier. If only because I’d have this nagging suspicion that he might immediately try out his new toy on me, saving himself the trouble of actually letting me keep my three million bucks.

Oh, but it’s all right. Lara doesn’t want his filthy money. She wants something else entirely. She whispers in his ear, and at the end of the story we find out all she wanted was a music box he had ordered constructed decades ago, showing a spinning ballerina modeled on Lara’s lovely mother (for whom he had hopelessly carried a torch when they were both young). Er, yes. For some reason Lara can’t stand the thought that this man has something that never belonged to her mother, but contains a likeness of her mother, hence she’ll give him a mysterious magical weapon in exchange for it? And if he then uses it to kill a few thousand people, I guess that’s just tough. There’s nothing like a comic book heroine with a good solid moral foundation for her behavior. (And if you happen to meet such a heroine, be sure to let me know. I’m dying to see her for myself, because I sure didn’t find anyone matching that description in this book!)

D’Arseine said the mask was last heard from on when it was aboard a Spanish galleon which was traveling from Spain to the New World at the time it sank in a storm in 1505. (This strongly suggests the ship was somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean at the time.) For almost five centuries, no one has known where it went down. But he says he now has coordinates for the wreck. (How? He never explains. What makes him so sure that whoever finally spotted the silly thing hasn’t already looted it, or sold the coordinates to someone else as well as D’Arseine? He never explains. Why is he willing to pay a huge price to hire a woman who doesn’t even like him to go down and search the galleon if he already knows where it is and could hire any trained diver to do the exact same thing? The job as described has nothing that obviously requires unique Tomb Raider talents instead of just an able-bodied man with an aqualung. But again, he doesn’t explain. Nor will he ever.)

While she is down there searching the galleon, some unfriendly divers come along, plant a bomb on the hull of her yacht, and cut her air hose. The yacht blows up, but Lara manages to kill a couple of divers, grab one’s aqualung, kill a shark on the way back up to the service, and finds that while her yacht sank, Compton got into a helicopter parked on top in time to take off and is now in a position to fish her out of the water so they can make their getaway.

That’s a nice exciting action sequence as far as it goes, but the follow-up is downright bizarre. Remember I said they had to be somewhere in the Atlantic, i.e. in between Spain and the New World? When Lara and Compton find themselves in a helicopter hovering above the spot where both the galleon and the yacht are now at the bottom of Davy Jones’s locker, I expected them to make a beeline toward a city on whichever side of the Atlantic is closest at the moment (we are never given any indication of just how far across the Atlantic that galleon had made it before it sank), buy any new equipment they require, plan their next move, and so forth. Possibly in Spain or Portugal or the west coast of Africa, possibly somewhere in the Caribbean or elsewhere in the Americas.

But they fooled me! Without explanation, the very next panel is an exterior shot with the Acropolis on a hill in the distance, and a voice from inside a hotel saying, “I must say that my appreciation for Athens is second to no one’s, Ms. Croft – but I cannot fathom our presence here.”

I know exactly how Compton feels. I can’t fathom it either. Moving along to the next panel, showing them inside the hotel suite, we have the following scintillating dialogue:

LARA: There’s a lot I can’t figure out, Compton.

COMPTON: Such as why someone would go to such extremes to murder us?

LARA: Exactly. Which is why we’ve come to Greece. Here, take a look at this.

As this page ends, I’m breathless with anticipation. She’s about to explain why they are now in Athens! Is there something important they need to do here? A clue to track down? A spot of historical research? A man to interrogate?

Turn the page and see. Oops! Silly me! When she said, “Which is why we’ve come to Greece,” I had foolishly gotten the impression that she actually intended to explain why they had come to Greece! You don’t have to say it – I was reading far too much into her words. Letting my imagination run wild. Developing painfully unrealistic expectations. When will I ever learn?

She now shows Compton something she found in the wreck of the galleon. It appears to be a small piece of wood carved into the shape of a chess piece, specifically a knight. This is the calling card of a professional rival and former lover of hers, named Chase Carver. If he hadn’t been dumb enough to leave it when he raided the galleon, she wouldn’t have a clue where to go next. But as is, she can hack into a “global flight plan library” to check up on Chase, thanks to her having just happened to notice what his access codes were in the time when they lived together. It turns out he’s recently flown to Nepal.

Er, yes. That’s all very well and good, but why on earth did she have to fly to Athens before she could establish an Internet connection and do that bit of online detective work? I’m reasonably certain they have Net access in Portugal, Spain, France, Italy, and any other nation that she had to pass on her way east to Greece. Going down the length of the Mediterranean was a move in the right direction if you grant that she wanted to get to Nepal, but she didn’t bother to sit down at a computer and find out what her own final destination was until after she already done that! If it turned out Chase Carver had just flown to Chile to rendezvous with someone, she would have had to say, “Darn! We just wasted hours flying in the wrong direction before I got a clue as to what I was doing! Sorry about that, Compton!”

(Seriously, my best guess is that the artist wanted to draw one little picture of the Acropolis, or Jurgens wanted him to stick it in to add a note of culture to this tale, ergo she went to Athens for no apparent reason and then left again, having done her solemn duty by providing the comic book version of a “photo op.” But within the context of the story, it still makes her look like an incredibly bad navigator.)

Traveling to Katmandu and Beyond Belief

In the narrow streets of Katmandu, some thugs try to assassinate them. Then more thugs come along, shooting bows and arrows (don’t ask me why they can’t just use AK-47s. It’s never explained). Compton falls down in the street with an arrow sticking out of his back and Lara thinks he’s fatally wounded but doesn’t have time to take a pulse. A hand reaches out of a dark alley and yanks her back into it and a man, his face in shadow, now has one hand over Lara’s mouth and the other holding a knife to her throat as he tells her, :”Not another word, darlin’. Not another blessed word.”

As I suspected, it turns out to be Chase Carver, who claims he’s at her service, and they make common cause against the mysterious archers, who (we now see) are dressed something like ninjas…

(I love Chase’s way of saying hello to an old flame. Naturally, whenever I have friendly feelings toward a woman and want to tell her to please be quiet for our own safety, I also hold a knife to her throat to make sure she realizes I’m one of her lt;I>friends. Works like a charm.)

It’s a few pages later, finding she’s trapped with Chase in a building with bad guys closing in from all directions, that Lara finally has a brainstorm and pulls out her pair of automatics and starts shooting back at the bad guys! I had just about concluded that she must have left her guns concealed in her luggage back in her now-crashed vehicle when the ambush started, or else why hadn’t she started using them sooner? Looking back carefully at her hips in various panels since the first arrows arrived, I guess she did have the holsters belted on all the time (under her trenchcoat, which explains why I wasn’t sure on the first pass), but she waited nine pages after the enemy started shooting arrows like crazy before it occurred to her to actually use her beloved guns for something! Why do I get the feeling she is not the sharpest knife in the drawer?

(Maybe it’s her code of honor. “Conventional soldiers who are merely doing their duty under the local laws are fair game – kill them any time you want – but fellow mercenaries and other criminals are nice people who shouldn’t be shot down like mad dogs unless they leave you no other way out. Professional courtesy from one outlaw to another, and all that.” But that’s just a guess. )

I’ll fast-forward across the rest of the (cough, cough) plot. Chase doesn’t have the mask, but he found another clue. He thinks it was taken into the Himalayas. They find some weird markings up in the mountains and thus a secret entrance to an underground complex. Compton shows up. He claims Chase Carver is behind all those nasty attacks and was just using her. Actually, it’s the other way around. Compton is a traitor. He’s secretly resented the elitist pigs of the aristocratic Croft family for years, paying him a pittance and expecting him to take a bullet for them if it ever comes to that. (I’m not saying I can’t sympathize with him.) He grabs the mask and puts it on. He (or the mask) starts speaking about finally having a new body. Lara shoots the mask off his head, he dies, she grabs the mask, the cavern starts caving in, but she and Chase make it out somehow.

She makes the exchange with D’Arseine and he flies away in his plane. She warns him not to wear it, it’s too dangerous, and he seems to agree with her, but then his plane blows up. Apparently he put it on and all the magical pyrotechnics associated with that action (as seen in Compton’s case earlier) blew up the fuel tank or something. The details are kind of vague, which could serve as the refrain for practically every scene in this storyline. (In point of fact, we don’t even know for sure that he perished in the explosion – he may be back someday.) End of story. Gosh, such a grand feeling of accomplishment here. Everyone except Lara and Chase is dead, and otherwise the precious status quo has been maintained; nothing important has changed in the world our dear Tomb Raider lives in with the arguable exception of the death of Compton if we believe he was “important” to her. (As opposed to just a useful tool that she’ll want to replace.)

There are some odd things about Compton’s revelations that he’s a traitor who planted the bomb that blew up Lara’s parents and fiancé (and was meant to get Lara as well). I admit he shocked me at the time, but let’s take a look at why I was so shocked. For one thing, he was the narrator in the first several pages of the first issue of her comic book. At one point – and this seemed to be his own private thoughts rather than a carefully sanitized press release – he commented, “Her father, Lord Henshingly Croft, saved my life a number of years ago – and I’ve faithfully served the family ever since.” A few pages later, when he managed to arrive in a helicopter in time to save her as she plunged off a cliff, he explained to us, “Fortunately, I was close enough, and she was able to catch the ladder on the way down. Sure as my name’s Hartford Compton, I would’ve killed myself had she missed.”

Agatha Christie once got in a lot of trouble (in terms of verbal criticism at least) when she wrote a mystery novel in which the guy who narrated it in the first person actually turned out to be the murderer, instead of (as it first appeared) essentially playing the role of Dr. Watson to the man playing the part of Sherlock Holmes (Hercule Poirot, the brilliant Belgian). But she never actually had the killer make a blatantly false statement in his personal narration to us of what he had said and done and witnessed, and what things shocked him or pleased him as the investigation continued (he was chummy with the detective). Only a bit of his spoken dialogue was deceptive, as well as some things he carefully skipped over in the early part of the novel (the period in which he committed the murder, for example).

But what Jurgens did to Compton here is much more of a cheat. Compton tells us flatly that he has faithfully served the Croft family for all these years. He tells us he’d be so unhappy if he saw Lara die due to his arriving in the copter a bit late that he’d kill himself. Three issues later, he claims he killed the rest of her family (and meant to get her as well) before this storyline even started? This might make a bit of sense if he were diagnosed with multiple personality disorder, but there’s no mention of that. It’s as if Jurgens started out with a near-clone of Batman’s butler (and seasoned veteran of the British army, last time I checked), Alfred Pennyworth, and then suddenly decided in the middle of things that it might be more interesting to have him be an utter rotter instead, and never mind what had already been established in Compton’s own thoughts! The ever popular “Let’s just make it up as we go along!” school of plot development; you’ve got to love it.

A Flawed Model of Heroism

Well, in the bit I quoted above, Jurgens claimed he wanted to make the readers interested in Lara as a person and not just as a vehicle for nonstop action scenes. I started out this piece by saying that I’m always hoping to see more lead heroines in comic books. Let’s sum up what Jurgens did here in trying to meet his stated goal and my personal desire.

• Lara Croft feels no compunctions about stealing artifacts from a national government and killing any soldiers who get in her way (at least, not if she’s doing it for the Israelis).
• Lara Croft makes little jokes while killing people.
• Lara Croft has an abysmal ignorance of geography and navigation; she thinks that if her yacht just sank somewhere in the Atlantic, the closest place to sit down to catch your breath and access the Internet and plan your next book is Athens, Greece.
• Lara Croft is capable of knowing a man for most of her life, having him accompany her on many dangerous and presumably stressful expeditions, etc., without ever getting a clue as to what makes him tick or what his personal worries and grudges are, or even realizing that he might have any personal concerns at all (such as whether or not he was paid enough for this dangerous lifestyle he was living) until he threw his anger in her face.
• Lara feels no remorse about handing her current employer something which she (later states she) knows will quickly kill him if he puts it on.

Contempt for the law. Contempt for human life if you interfere with her personal agenda. A love of combat. Denying any feelings of guilt she might have by covering up with lame jokes. Ignorance of geography. Refusal to ask directions to the nearest Net access site. Incredible insensitivity to a lifelong friend/servant; expecting him to just cheerfully follow her into one dangerous situation after another for whatever wages she pays him without ever wondering if he has a personal life, personal ambitions, etc.

When you add it all up, you have to admit that Lara Croft would make a darn good stereotypical male action hero! Cast in the mold of a ruggedly macho and totally shameless man of action such as James Bond or Conan the Barbarian!

Role Models and Sex-Specific Expectations

I admit that I suffer from some of the usual gender stereotyping in my attitudes toward the differences between men and women. I’m a man, but I tend to think of women as somehow being more patient, more sensitive to other’s emotions, less inclined to kill people in the heat of the moment, and all that sort of thing. I don’t deny that a woman can pick up a gun and learn how to use it effectively if she really wants to; I just tend to assume that as a general rule the “average woman:” (if there is such a thing) probably doesn’t want to carry a big dangerous gun just for the sake of carrying a big dangerous gun as an aggressive symbol of her self-confidence and capacity for destruction, as an emotionally immature male might do (in a street gang, for instance).

So what it looks like to me is that Dan Jurgens, bound and determined to show he could write about women who were just as “good” as men in the important things in life, basically wrote a story that would work very well for a central character who was a macho bloodthirsty man-killing rowdy with an incredible lack of empathy, and then simply inserted the name “Lara Croft” into the script and told the artist to draw her as a woman. Thus “proving” that women are just as capable of armed robbery and murder and insensitivity and poor navigation and all that as any man could ever hope to be! (Gee, how Politically Correct can we get, here? Women really are qualified to do any job a man can do, and do it just as well or better, even if it’s an ugly one! How could I ever have doubted it? Thank you for opening my eyes, Mr. Jurgens!)

In fairness, that may not be what Dan Jurgens thought he was doing when he wrote this story. But that’s certainly the effect it created in my mind. I was hoping to read about a heroine who was a convincing female human being, and also very impressive as she went about her strenuous and dangerous lifestyle. Instead, I read about a rather boringly amoral (and sometimes downright stupid) treasure hunter who just happens to be using a female body instead of a masculine one. You won’t catch me recommending this one to any real life women who are tired of trying to project themselves into the shoes of a male protagonist in much of the fiction they read and are looking for a refreshing change of pace.

But there may be hope for the future. Next time around, I think I’ll write a piece about another Top Cow paperback that recently entered my collection, one which has to recommend it an unfortunately rare characteristic in the action-packed genres of comic books these days: it features a female lead and was actually written by a woman! Is there hope for the future if that trend continues?

http://www.quarterbin.com – This column begins a new feature at the Quarter Bin, dealing with matters that can, or should, connect the diverse media of comics and cinematic pieces (and, to a lesser extent, the movies’ infamous stepchild television). In essence, Screen Views will explore various themes that relate comics to motion pictures, whether in the form of live action film or animation. Why, though, one might ask, should a comics fan look to cinema when comics of almost any era or genre provide a nearly-inexhaustible topic?

To begin with, motion pictures and comics both belong among visual methods of storytelling that conceptually share certain common elements of lexicon. Storyboards, which model films, take the form of a series of drawn images showing the ongoing flow of action, composition of physical elements and cast members, and sequence of action. From “storyboards” to “comics” one need make only a small step – say, the introduction of word balloons and finishing processes such as inking and coloring – and we can note that comics celebrities such as Neal Adams, Jim Steranko, and Frank Miller have involved themselves at various times with storyboarding for films.

Comics and films tells stories in similar enough ways that some things reliably work in translation from one medium to another. The very methods of production, from script to storyboard to dailies, make movies and television dependent on a form of linear art for communicating the idea from written word to photographic cel.

Movies (and television) furthermore mine the occasional concept from comics. “Blade” (and sequels), “Men in Black” (and sequel), “X-Men”, “Superman” (and sequels), “Batman” (and sequels), “Tank Girl”, “The Crow” (and sequel), movie serials featuring Superman, the Phantom, Batman, Captain America, Captain Marvel, television series and television movies depicting the Flash, Wonder Woman, Mandrake the Magician, and by-now uncountable other examples from the past (and more in the future) attest to this. But can filmed media reciprocally inform comics? This question asks two things – does film have something to teach comics, and can comics, as a medium, learn such lessons?

Looking to the Big Screen

“Shallow,” “superficial,” “puerile,” “insulting,” “crude,” and “grotesque” often pepper critical analyses of comic books. The litany of insults – often completely fair and appropriate for some productions – also applies to that which issues from Hollywood and appears on flickering screens throughout America and throughout the world. However, even if much film evokes preemptive sneers, canons of cinema include pieces with considerable artistic and intellectual credibility. Comics, on the other hand, in spite of fewer limitations about what logistical problems allow them to depict, only occasionally garner a thumb’s up from the arbiters of culture and learning, and even then generally among isolated observers rather than as a consensus of the educated. We could blame snobbery, but in so doing we let comics off the hook to easily.

Individual films flop, and do so frequently, but the sheer volume of dollars flowing into the production of movies and from consumers, via ticket prices, video rentals, and VHS and DVD purchases, suggest a viable and robust marketplace for the form, even if certain phases tend to suffer from a slow long-term downturn. Comics, on the other hand, barely eke along, with consumers and producers becoming more and more similar, more and more inbred, and more and more a minority among consumers of popular culture in general. Movies enjoy a higher repute – compare the emotional baggage that attaches to the term moviegoer and compare it to its rough equivalent comics fan and very different images populate the imagination – and, indeed, a higher penetration, with more and better vectors for transmission. Doomsayers predict an ugly death for comics-in-general in a way made plausible, though not inevitable, by analysis of long-term consumption trends.

Comics, then, have problems that do not afflict movies so pervasively, nor ominously, and this suggests a difference or set of differences that can provide a path towards remedying whatever flaws occur between concept and consumption that keep the product of pencil and board away from the eyes of readers. Comics have an uphill path to follow for simple survival, if we extrapolate from trends of sales over the long term. Complacency and self-congratulation represent poisons, not medicines, for the medium; and, even for a healthy form, it does well sometimes to ask how to do things better. So, in the context of cinema, we might ask some cruel questions, with the aim to letting comics metaphorically cough and sputter at the bitter-tasting medicine we try to introduce. Where, for example, do we find the classics of comics – the “Citizen Kane” of comics that motivated a generation of creators? Comics existed in a recognizable form since the mid-1930s, yet only in the last fifteen years or so began to accumulate its own canon. Did movies, from a very early point, understand how to make pieces that would transcend time and outlive creators and original audiences to speak to a future not yet born? And, if so, what did they know that comics needs to learn?

Tunnel Vision and Perspective

Criticisms of Hollywood and its widely-distributed products often point out certain ways in which life in the entertainment industry can isolate talent from the currents of the culture at large. Given a number of factors, including the way some adapt the obsessiveness that makes for good art to the service of making bad politics of forced consensus, the distorting power of great wealth, and lack of contact with a humanity that does not owe its shape to a life in show business, we might assume that nothing Hollywood produces would have any relevance for the Man in the Street.

Big-budget Hollywood movies frequently do fail to return the investment of tens or hundreds of millions of dollars they required to make, promote, and distribute. However, cinema has lessons that comics would do well to consider for the following reasons:

• Movies enjoy a penetration comics can only dream about.
  Tens of millions of people may view a popular movie, with more added from additional vectors of transmission including television broadcasts, video rentals, and home video purchases. While we might give in to the temptation to sneer at movie consumers as opposed to print media consumers, as if we saw mutually exclusive categories here, preemptively to decide that a preference for movies over comics implicates the stupidity of the consumer begs the question. Can comics publishers afford to entertain such a self-destructive, if reassuring, fiction? Or could we have here a phenomenon that requires explaining, which we may need keen minds to untangle? In other words, should we not ask “Why do so many view movies about comic-book-like material when they would not consider consuming comics?
• Movies do not straightjacket themselves to limited genres.
  While some genres of movies do better than others (and some, like pornography, might do better than they deserve to), movies seem to offer consumers a better variety of types. Walk into a comics shop and you likely find wall after wall of genre-similar material, with exceptions hiding in corners here and there. Walk into a multiplex theater and you might, with some luck, run across an assortment in which no genre appears more than once. A decent video vendor – and you might find such in an electronics store or a music shop – very likely has more genres handy than a consumer might care to count. Bring in international, underground, and independent cinema and this variety increases.
• Movies operate under a different logic.
  Disgruntled comics fans might have noticed this through a generation or so of comics-themed films. Comics writers can get away, sometimes, with flat characterization and lack of handles to help consumers relate to the characters in a way that films generally do not dare (although some genres of film can get away with similar omission). Studios may pick actors for their previous successes in film, a self-interested pecuniary consideration; but this often translates to moviegoers’ ability to relate to such actors. Essentially, though, movies require a human face that comics can sometimes omit. Sometimes concepts do not translate well from comics to movies because they do not have the elements they need to translate to reach audiences.
• Movies model a different attention span.
  Movies and comics both, in separate ways, pursue series material. The movie serial, for example, provided one of the models for the ongoing comic series after the 1960s. Movies, however, work on a different, more limited, scope. As an example, to compare series between genres, look (for example) to James Bond movies and the Marvel Comics title Avengers. Bond movies may, in almost forty years, have hit their twentieth film; the Avengers comics, in three separate volumes, passed 400 issues not too long in the past. Different production methods mean that the future hopefully will never have to deal with “Friday the 13th, Part 400;” but the different production schedules, on time scales of years as opposed to weeks, mean that movies have to allow for what viewers might forget between installments. Therefore a movie that attempted to integrate with every detail of previous installments in the series would rapidly become incomprehensible and most likely, from the first sequel, would begin hemorrhaging moviegoers so fast that the franchise would either quickly expire or rapidly mend its ways. With certain exceptions implicating comic-book editorial models, moviemakers do not attempt to make their entire output cohere tightly.

And, perhaps, I could go on about the things that movies do and comics do not. They provide a stronger connection between their characters and the talent that bring them to life; the relationship between Sean Connery and James Bond has a more credible and intimate quality than the relationship between (sometimes-) faceless comics artists and writers and characters that they may not have created nor given their more human aspects. Movies do not require traveling to obscure or distant locations – any town with a movie theater, a video rental store, a cable company, or the necessary proximity to television signals can provide a fairly constant stream of material, with free broadcast content making their product familiar enough that consumers can easily muster the interest necessary to spend money on it.

Many lessons cinema has to offer comics do not take such a generic bent, however, and appear within specific films that advance particular ideas, especially when dealing with the shared aspects of the human condition.

Learning from Example

Comics often embed popular-culture references derived from movies and television into their content. Some examples appear in another Quarter Bin feature, the Recycle Bin. Such imitation, however, often centers on shallow, footnote-like visual images designed to evoke another creation without delving into the ideas behind the work. In such an approach, comics borrows from cinema without learning anything from it.

We can berate movies as shallow helpings of eye-candy until we run out of breath and asphyxiate in a state of perfect self-righteousness, but this will do nothing to disprove that movies, even bad, unsuccessful, silly, or even insulting-to-the-higher-aesthetic ones can demonstrate methods of reaching the consumer that could make the difference, in some comics, between a growing fan base and the slow death of monthly attrition from increasing indifference of readers who try and fail to relate to the contents.

Screen Views will begin, then, with an analysis of models of the hero as provided by various movies featuring characters that could, but do not, derive from comic-book originals. To a degree we must have the disconnect involved with a cinema-original construct, so we can see how a moviemaker might build something comic-like from the ground upwards; attempts to translate existing comics concepts to film can involve a distortion not only of the original material but of the methods moviemakers use to make things mean things. Beginning with a cinema-only treatment, however, we can enjoy both the superficial properties (from which the similarity to comics concepts derives) and the deeper structures of character and theme that resonate with the viewers.

And, perhaps, as this feature moves on we may discover opportunities to invert the question raised by the title of this first Screen Views column, for, since movies often recycle material originated in comics – and often from comics from very early in the history of the modern-format comic book – the flow of information clearly runs from comics to film.

In general, you can browse a large portion of this site without telling us who you are or revealing any personal information about yourself. Once you give us your personal information, you are not anonymous to us. You will be notified when your personal information is collected by any third party that is not our agent/service provider so that you can make an informed choice as to whether or not to share your information with that party.

We may automatically collect certain information based upon your behavior on the site. We use this information to do internal research on our users’ demographics, interests, and behavior in order to serve our users better. This information may include the URL that you come from or go to (whether this URL is on the site or not), your computer browser information, and your IP address.

We allow advertisers and other business partners to place “cookies” onto your computer when you visit this website. These “cookies” are placed to keep track of the web searches you make while visiting this website, as well as your web surfing behavior on this website and other websites you may visit. That information is used to show you advertisements tailored to your interests on this and other websites, and/or to keep track of your response to each ad. If you would like more information about this practice and would like to know your choices about not having this information used to target ads to you, please click here.

Please be advised that we have no access to or control over our business partner’s “cookies”. This privacy statement covers the use of “cookies” by this site only and does not cover the use of “cookies” by any advertisers.

If you send us personal correspondence, such as emails or letters, or if other users or third parties send us correspondence about your activities on the site, we may collect such information into a file specific to you.

You agree that we may use your information to contact you and deliver information to you that, in some cases, is targeted to your perceived interests, such as targeted banner advertisements, administrative notices, product offerings, and communications relevant to your use of the site. Through your access and use of this site, you hereby expressly agree to receive this information.

My opinion of Identity Crisis comes from picking up #1-#6 late and recently. I haven’t seen the last installment, since my shop didn’t have it, but the spilled beans about it already undermined most of the shock of the revelations in it. What remains to evaluate, then, comes in the form of the work’s delivery, though looked at in the larger context of the genre – as DC wants to define it intramurally – other important questions (discussed below) become prominent. I’d give Identity Crisis high marks for execution, without going into too much elaboration. The particulars of the plot and the spoilers about the resolution – indeed, the murder that leads in the first issue of the series – appear on comics message boards elsewhere. The details of who does to whom where matter less than the questions of what and why.

In such a work, we have something the talent behind it can show with a certain just pride. Nothing here will fail to attest to the talents displayed by writer Brad Metzler, artist Rags Morales, or inker Mike Bair. Indeed, I would hope – built on previous disappointments about credit coming to those due it – that a high profile piece like this could help provide the historically underrated Rags Morales the kind of respect he’s deserved since Hourman and lesser known earlier works. The work in general has polish, pleases the eye, has good pacing, characterization, and other qualities a reader might hope for after finding disappointment in less aesthetically successful superhero works. Characters clearly have distinct personalities, and their different drives and values help provide the grist for the grinder of a situation that engulfs them all; and moral complexities and damaged psyches, not roshambo-like comparisons of superpowers, determine outcomes here.

But praise, in this case, mainly serves as a distraction while I cock both metaphorical barrels of a polemical shotgun aimed at this piece. It reflects some things deeply wrong with an attempted redefinition of DC’s version of the superhero model.

• Self-importance. I’ve taken sides on either end of the fanciful versus serious divide as it might apply to comics in general and superhero comics in specific. As a general point, I’d say Identity Crisis falls into a category of mirthlessness characteristic of works directed at people who disdain mirth, joy, lightness. It had a tone slightly – but only slightly – more cheerful than a Jack Chick tract where the protagonist did not make it to Heaven. Works this serious tend to reflect either a sickening sanctimony or a toxic cynicism. The latter provides the taste and aftertaste of gall that defines this work.
• Cynicism. Hopefully – having mentioned this in the previous point – I don’t belabor the angle of cynicism, but it matters here, because it points out that DC currently seems intent on continuing a policy we could call Defining Heroism Down. Because an idealized kind of heroism remains vulnerable to descriptions like unrealistic, polyannaish, unbelievable, and even the dreaded corny or juvenile, observers in the public eye might refrain from impulses to advocate an ennobling view of heroism, where heroes appear as better people than, perhaps, can really exist in a flawed world of fallen men.

So what remains? Does DC intend this work as the model for future works in the genre of the shared-universe superhero? Should we expect shelves covered with works that combine the optimistic tone of Watchmen with the heroic nobility of the movie “Bad Lieutenant,” the less-than-subliminal misogyny (albeit in PG-13 translation) of “Bloodsucking Freaks”? And this wrapped up in themes already dealt with by the early eighties in the Squadron Supreme maxi-series?

Adolescents often attempt to simulate maturity by adopting for public display conspicuous adult vices. Thus, the sixteen-year-old who wants you to see her chain smoking gives away her youth while her slightly older sister might engage in less adopted-for-audiences bad habits since she has less need to counterfeit majority. Identity Crisis very much makes me think of this: An adolescent genre attempting to protest itself as fully grown by showing off a disreputable and anemic moustache, with rape, murder, brainwashing, implicit BDSM, cycnicism and despair serving each as an immature whisker that, even together, fail to completely cover the youthful lip. I remain unconvinced, especially after having seen efforts a generation and more back by comics to assert maturity – many successful, others less so, but sufficient to prove the point of whether the superhero genre can appear non-trifling and substantial.

And I can’t help wondering: Exactly why does this interpretation of the masked hero represent some greater achievement than the works of Jack Cole or Will Eisner? What element weepy closeups of rape victims shows the advance of the medium past earlier plateaus? Do we have progress here, or simple one-upmanship for shock value? And what does the planned, organized destruction of innocence gain for the medium?

The first installment of the Seven Deadly Sins of Comicdom discussed the inflation of comics concepts. While that particular vice does contribute to making comics both pretentious and trite at the same time, another vice threatens the collapse the edifice of the shared universe concept under its own weight: the cult of continuity.

Part II: Continuity

As practiced these days, the cult of continuity requires the editors of comics to choose between several unpalatable and ultimately impractical choices. One, the creative teams on comics can immerse themselves completely in the literature, memorizing every detail of every story that has appeared containing the characters they work with, and use this information to guarantee that their stories contradict nothing previously printed. Two, the creative teams on comics can create phony crises in spacetime every few years to justify throwing out an old, polluted, and corrupt continuity, and, after cleaning the house, rewrite said continuity back at least to the first appearance of the first superhero and possibly back to (or before) the creation of the universe. Three, creators can define safe zones, like “Elseworlds” or “imaginary stories,” where their work can have some sanctuary from the high priests of the cult of continuity, knowing that their best stories may forever reside outside the official canon of the characters they depict. Four, the creators may attempt to tell a good story using a fair approximation of the characters and inherited history within their domain, and say to hell with the howling pharisees of the hard core continuity ethos.

Comics in their infancy could follow the fourth path, which produced the very fertile worlds of the DC Golden Age and Marvel Silver Age. Comics, however, fear to offend their hard-core followers, and dare pursue no such path, typically tiptoeing along paths one and three until their subject matter becomes so untenable that they must follow the third path. Creators, given the freedom of the fourth path, could offer better stories than the “Spider-Clone Saga” or the disposable fluff that helped drive comics circulation figures down into numbers appropriate for small town newspapers. This would require a sacrifice, though; preserving the edifice of comics might involve abandoning the sacred cow of doctrinaire continuity.

The Albatross

Ever wonder what made the Marvel Revolution possible?

When Marvel revitalized the superhero comic form in the early 1960s, it began with a clean slate, devoid of prior editorial commitments. Everything, essentially, that Timely-cum-Atlas-cum- Marvel had printed in the past had failed in the great comics implosion of the 1950s. Market forces, the aging of the Golden Age comics readership, public pressure to clean up the popular culture, and, perhaps, some bad management had brought about a massive extinction of superhero comics titles and whole categories of other types of comics, including the much-maligned horror comic.

This meant that Stan Lee, as a writer and editor, could reformulate the structure of the superhero comic. The commercially viable superheroes, a market temporarily monopolized by DC properties, followed an iconic model of superheroism: Such superheroes combined a model human being with superhuman abilities. Humanity, for such characters, tended to mean physical limitations or trivial problems centering around the maintenence of secret identities or the unwanted attentions of ill-treated girlfriends or beaux. Boxed in by such strictures, these superheroes could do almost anything, including move planets, travel in time, space, and dimensions. However, one sometimes needed to consult the costumes and powers to tell these characters apart, since most tended to the same unselfconscious gallantry, devoid of emotional trouble or ethical questioning.

In Fantastic Four #1, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby ignored the old models and acted if the unwritten code of superhero gallantry did not apply. In this atypical and ground-breaking work, we found superheroes guilty of the following overt violations of superhero canon:

• The Thing demonstrated ill-humor, ill-temper, self-pity, anger, and, most incredibly of all, physical ugliness, characteristics previously typical of villains, not heroes.
• The Human Torch demonstrated cruelty (to the Thing), immaturity, short-sightedness, and other traits not completely foreign to sixteen year olds, but relatively unseen in superheroes.
• Mister Fantastic, although perhaps the most conventional member of the tetrad, still allowed himself to squabble with the other males of the Fantastic Four; and, more uncharacteristically, treated his relationship to the Invisible Girl seriously enough to progress to marriage.
• The Invisible Girl, though initially a heroine of the semi-helpless traditional mold, did not solely dedicate herself to falling out of windows or pestering the nearest tights-clad alpha male about his intentions or secret identity.

Lee had made a leap of conceptualization: He grafted the daytime drama to the superhero comic, and the formula served to save Marvel until its buyout by a toy company in the late 1990s. He created a new superhero model, where stories might involve more than the most recent fist fight with the latest mad scientist out to blow up the City. He had, so he reasoned, allowed superheroes to do things superheroes hadn’t before, including living real(ler) lives, feeling emotions, and, eventually, changing with the passage of time.

Consider the last element, because it holds in it both the seed of Marvel’s rebirth in the 1960s and the germ of the downfall of the entire edifice of superhero comics. In a sense, Lee had introduced into comics something that the old model forbade. He imposed upon the new Marvel mythos a sharedness of the milieu, something known today as comics continuity. The benefits seemed obvious.

• Unlike go-nowhere affairs like Superman’s multi-decade toying with Lois Lane, Mister Fantastic could wed Sue Storm (Superman finally did wed, after over fifty years’ romancing).
• Spider-Man could confront believable problems with school, work, or family in a way untypical of Superman (who frequently resolved similar, though short-lived, problems by using Superman robots as stand-ins).
• Superheroes could move in time, rather than hover in the timeless state typical of Superman, Batman, or Wonder Woman.

At first, continuity offered opportunities to writers, editors, and creators. In its infancy, Marvel didn’t have to worry about what it did with its characters, who could acquire storytelling baggage precisely because they had no baggage to inherit. This allowed a freedom to formulate an editorial policy making stories more dynamic; making characters who could (or must!) have personal lives with real problems.

Time and Not-Time

Marvel decided to enforce continuity. Characters and their actions would have consequences. This meant superheroes could deal with long-term problems, such as the machinations of HYDRA, the animosity of Peter Parker’s editor, the courtship of romantically involved characters. By the late 1960s, DC recognized that Marvel’s increasing market share required them to examine the viability of their own editorial policies, and DC began to follow an increasingly Marvel-like model, especially towards minor and newer characters.

By the 1970s, continuity represented more than new opportunities. It began to represent a new kind of editorial decadence. Lee, to his credit, didn’t have the leisure to worry about long-term consequences of continuity, nor had he intended that comics would impose continuity and deny it simultaneously, by adding each new printed work (good or bad) to a continuity “canon,” but denying characters the effects of time.

Assume, for a moment, that Marvel had enforced the “real-time” concept. Spider-Man, accordingly, appeared in comics as a teen-aged Peter Parker, perhaps 16 or 17 years old, in 1963. This implies a birthdate of about 1947. In 1973, a vaguely-twentiesish Parker would evoke no disbelief. Perhaps not even in 1983, when the calendar would force upon him a thirty-sixth birthday (but some people stay young for a long time). However, in 1987, we would expect of him a fortieth birthday (followed by a fiftieth in 1997). Casual and long-term readers can recognize that no such aging took place.

At the same time, the Spider-Man stories accumulated over the almost 40-year history of the character. This means we encounter Continuity Bug 1: Comics time allows many years of published stories to fit into few (or no) years of character aging.

Nothing so far really causes great problems, if we recognize the (abandoned) iconic nature of heroes and allow for some relaxation of the Iron Laws of Nature; we must make such sacrifices, after all, to even allow for silly things like men in circus costumes walking on walls after a radioactive spider bite.

Who Takes out the Trash?

Continuity doesn’t really begin to stink until we encounter Continuity Bug 2: Everything becomes canon.

People who have read many comics may recognize that some comics contain better writing, better art, better concepts, better dialog, and better what-have-you, than do others. Put more bluntly, some comics reek. While the occasional piece achieves critical acclaim that makes it a classic of the genre (works like Watchmen and Kingdom Come have achieved such acclaim), others simply represent the disposable output of overworked or undertalented staff forced to output material to fill a certain number of pages by a certain deadline. Most long-lived titles go through (hopefully) short periods of substandard, unenjoyable content, bad experimentation, pathetic gimmickry, and other devices one finds increasingly in a shrinking comics market.

Under saner circumstances, we could forgive the occasionally bad story. However, the continuity trap leaves us with no such option. Bad stories remain in the canon, intractable as herpes, and as incurable.

Think of the most rotten comics story you ever read. Imagine that the stories twenty years down the line would have to treat this story as inalterable truth, and imagine how twenty, thirty, forty years’ worth of bad stories could pollute the history of a character.

Think of the rotten stories about Iron Man wandering around drunk and dazed in the early eighties. They hurt to read. They hurt to waste sixty cents to purchase the comics that pretended to contain Iron Man stories. Considering the pain these stories inflicted, we may hope that they hurt to write, draw, and publish. They remain something best forgotten; in an optimal world, we could simply decline ever to speak of them again, and allow the architects of the modern Iron Man title discreetly to fail to remember that they ever “happened”.

However, continuity denies any such merciful escape to us. These remain embedded in continuity, an undeniable printed recording devoid of gaps.

For another, gruesome example, consider the story where the (horribly named) Ms. Marvel became pregnant and gave birth to an extradimensional being who became her lover and mind controlled her and kidnaped her into another dimension. This story became canon; Marvel even demonstrated the cheek to print the resolution of this plot thread in The Greatest Battles of the Avengers. Think of the awful gimmickry, including the perennial deaths of Wonder Man and Adam Warlock, and, as well, their perennial resurrections.

Think of the awful love affairs, the awful divorces, the awful heroes-gone-bad or villains- turned-straight tales that thoughtful revisionism could spare us. Think of the loathesome secret sibling/clone stories we could excise (including stories already cropped from the canons of Superman and Batman, but not (yet) Spider-Man). Think of the outrageous gimmickry of stories that feebly attempted to bully readers into caring enough to buy a fading title.

Does your stomach protest? Does your head reel? Does illness incline you to abandon comics altogether, as have so many? Endure, if you will, a moment longer, to consider this: in a hard-continuity model (one that assumes that all printed stories “happened”), nothing can erase these stories.

Continuity, even where no bad stories happen (and what title can enjoy such a claim?) requires that writers mold their stories around everything that happened previously. Such a task attempted by the best talents with the best faith would require considerable knowledge without necessarily adding to the quality of the product.

With bad stories in the mixture, however, continuity becomes something else. It becomes a festering pit. Bad stories remain to rot and infect all that follows them.

The Broom of Revision

DC and Marvel, between the mid-eighties (DC) and mid-nineties (Marvel) finally encountered a crisis of continuity. Their major titles had run for about thirty years in each case, and by then the history of almost any of their characters had included periods of mediocre to atrocious writing and a list of past events so long as to render almost any potential story redundant. New characters proliferated, in spite of viability, for a new character, however ill-conceived, still remained potentially free of the unwelcome load of all the comics printed before it.

Continuity was strangling comics under the weight of its entire inherited history.

Some characters, albeit generally marginal ones, became casualties of continuity. For instance, the tortured canon of Hank Pym, known at various times as Ant-Man, Giant-Man, Goliath, Yellowjacket, and “Dr. Pym,” included nervous breakdowns, incidents of amnesia, wife-beating, divorce, legal problems, and too many strange attempts to work up reader interest to detail. By the late 1980s, little remained to do with the character but retire him as a superhero, and he remained, for years, a non-heroic figure as a footnote in the titles he once peopled.

We can consider worse cases, however. Marvel managed simply to quietly ignore much of Pym’s history and thereby returned him to his role as Giant-Man; but DC, in the case of its 1940s creation Hawkman, so fouled continuity that the character no longer appears in print in any form whatsoever. DC remade him, remade him again, combined him with earlier versions of himself, and finally attempted to make him into a Platonic version of himself; failing to make this make sense, they dropped the character, quietly, into the feeding pit of the Demon Continuity.

DC, worst afflicted with the consequences of the Strong Continuity Principle, saw the need for a fix by the mid-1980s. The older sibling of the Big Two comics publishers had dealt with continuity like an inner tube, applying patches here and there to keep in the air; but by the eighties, these patches required considerable maintenence.

DC’s first patch involved the revisionist concept, introduced by Gardner Fox, that the DC heroes of the forties and those of the sixties did not originate on the same world; that the elder heroes lived in a parallel universe; and that these universes could communicate certain conditions. This allowed, for a time, an explanation of the youth of DC’s big guns (Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman) and the reinvention of a number of second-stringers whose titles (if they ever had their own) had not survived the 1950s, such as the Atom, Green Lantern, the Flash, and Hawkman. However, DC misused this explanation, and soon had alternate universes popping up everywhere; had one sixth of the issues Justice League of America dealing with the annual interdimensional crossovers; still had unexplained periods of printed comics history (especially fifties Superman and Batman); and, with the passing of time, still failed to explain why the characters didn’t get any older. This problem became more pointed as DC began printing new stories of the original superheroes, who, by the 1970s, would have included mostly sexegenarians.

The second patch appeared in the 1980s when DC brought out Marv Wolfman and George Perez to craft the Crisis on Infinite Earths miniseries, which consolidated or eliminated the alternate universes and attempted to create a shared, single history for DC’s creations.

Intended as a permanent housecleaning, this patch began leaking early on, because, although DC had stated that the Crisis event resulted in a single continuity replacing the multiple dimensions, no one had bothered to adequately address what this continuity included, and DC printed stories for a number of years without ever detailing the missing timelines. Wonder Woman survived a reconstructive canon due more to her popularity than the quality of the revision. Hawkman, revised several times too often and ultimately forced into a trendy, angsty, “gritty” comics mold, did not survive the revision. In the end, almost ten years after the event that would have allowed DC to correct its continuity, the changes remained unmade; and DC therefore cobbled together another crisis event, similarly threatening the universe (through destroying time at both ends toward the present). However, the Zero Hour event did not include the careful planning of the Crisis event, and did not result in aesthetically or commercially popular changes to the DC canon. It included a number of unfathomable changes included, perhaps, for the sake of change itself (Green Lantern became a villain; superheroes died or disappeared; other superheroes reappeared in “hipper” or revised forms that no one, reader or creator, liked).

DC had attempted to reforge its canon in 1985 and 1994, and by 1996, Marvel followed, although Marvel’s attempts rotated around the bankruptcy of the company; Marvel, seeing the growing market share of the self-congratulatory, gloomy, nihilistic “new comics” attempted to remake itself in their image and also created a universe-remaking event. However, the remade Marvel universe proved so unsatisfactory to readers that Marvel recanted, returned the heroes to something like the universe they left, and, in the case of the Avengers, attempted a conspicuously retro-styled refurbishment.

The Way Out?

The question occurs: Why keep patching a worn out tube?

The problem involves continuity itself, rather than its details, after all. Superhero comics did well with almost nonexistent continuity during their childhood (1940-1950) and grew in depth with the some continuity during the high Silver Age (particulary 1963-1971), before the cumulative weight began to crush writers beneath rotting old stories. DC’s three continuity “fixes,” however, all failed; the first in twenty years, the second in less than ten, and the third even as it appeared in print.

Better revisions, it seems, do not fix the problem. One should begin to suspect that the problem lies in continuity itself, not in the content thereof.

DC acknowledged as much by the creation of its Elseworlds stories, in which the general concept of characters appear, but changes skew the canon (such as stories with Superman in the Revolutionary War and the Civil War). If readers bought just for the canon, none would have bought Elseworlds. Nor does continuity subjugate works like the DC/Marvel crossover titles (which appear often enough that the content dominates the hype). While neither approach offers enough sales to revive the medium, their minor success offers suggestions about what comics must contain to succeed. Stan Lee went on record somewhere with a quip that translates, “It’s the characters, stupid,” which, after all, states the whole point behind his sixties redefinition of the medium. To this we could add good scripting, good stories, good art, accessability to new readers, and possibly dozens of other things before we need even consider the overrated (and, when misused, dangerous), continuity.

Comics versus Theses

One more thing makes the Continuity Bogeyman bad for comics. A comic does not need to read like a scholarly thesis; consider that the presence of footnotes every page implies something structurally wrong with either the story or the continuity it attempts to support. When someone makes an argument in a scholarly paper, there the footnotes belong, not in comics; a comic book has failed if the reader needs to examine the contents of a bibliography to make sense out of it.

This statement implies a different view about superhero comics. “Good stories told well” provides what seems an obvious model for the medium, but not everyone agrees with this as a canon; “Stories told with legalistic adherence to established history as expressed in earlier stories” represents an altogether different model which, strangely, appeals to a considerable body of the surviving comics readership.

However, the pleasure in this latter approach seems to involve the reader’s testing his recall against the content of stories; a pseudohistorian’s examination of a long, encompassing mythos in which he may argue about what “really” happened and what did not. It evokes skills of research and memory that, in other contexts, have considerable social value and, with the right training, commercial marketability; these skills characterize attorneys who examine statements and historians who weigh witness accounts of significant events. Can we consider it fair to expect every reader to possess such skills, and offer fare that only feeds his desire to maintain proficiency? Or should we expect the reader to possess a baseline familiarity that requires an ability to understand premises of the medium (superpowers; science-fiction concepts like beneficial mutation, time travel, space travel, extraterrestrial beings; secret identities; sorcery; and so on)?

If a reader seeks to do research, libraries contain an ample body of source material. But sales trends suggest, perhaps, that using a story model that appeals to continuity historians may not reach outside their own intellectual ghetto.

Why, we may wonder, does superhero material interest television and movie audiences in greater numbers than printed material? Literacy may suffer in this age, but not that badly. Could the greater appeal of cartoons, television, and movies that depict the same characters rest in a story structure that does not demand constant currency of comics historian proficiency? Could it, after all, rely on the appeal of the story with the role of continuity minimized?

http://www.quarterbin.com – I defer the temptation to subtitle this piece (Or “How I Helped Torture a Spider-Man Doll and Found Peace”) in order first to explain the purpose of the new feature which this column initiates. Typically here at the Quarter Bin the initiation of a new feature begins with a column explaining the purpose of the new feature. However, Non Sequiturs doesn’t require as elaborate an explanation as other newly-launched themes. In essence, this feature will deal with things just barely tangent to the world(s) of comics but that, perhaps, have more meaning for comics fans than complete outsiders to the Peculiar Four-Color Vice. Each will have some connection, however tenuous, with comics.

Beginning this feature, we have a tale that combines the politics of tobacco, visitors from foreign lands, the evident persistence of the spirit of Carrie Nation, emissions-noncompliant automobiles, a newspaper in a small Texas city, the author of the Quarter Bin, and a perfectly innocent action figure that had to play the role of scapegoat for what trouble the aforementioned ingredients could conjure up with one another. Human perversity, understood beyond the limitations of the merely sexual, serves as the engine that drives much of history and certainly provides what anecdotes bear repeating in the long and short run. And an ugly battle of wills between a heroic visitor from Iraq and some snide scion of privilege threatened to escalate into a company-wide calamity, with the fate of that action figure hanging in the balance.

You might guess, if you have the necessary faculties to decipher my fractured syntax and navigate my multiple-clause constructs and extract from them the drop of semantics buried under bushel-loads of polysyllabic blather, that the action figure, a hapless plastic Spider-Man toy that never did anyone any wrong, connects the entire matter to comics, although faintly and distantly. But to explain the interconnections we need to return to the late 1980s and the physical plant of a local newspaper.

That Chronic Hacking

Having grown up with a pair of irritable lungs in a household of smokers, I feel justified in looking with nothing better than disdain at the follies of smokers. For example, the poetic phrase “a fire on one end and a fool on the other,” derived from whatever source, neatly summarizes my view of those of my peers who took up smoking because they thought it would make them somehow more like Bob Dylan during the height of his credibility in the sixties (or, among the deeper posers, like some imaginary member of some French cafe crowd) only to go on, in the 1990s, to blaming everyone but themselves for a dangerous addiction they had to work very hard in the service of phoniness and posturing to acquire.

On a bad year, exposure to second-hand smoke might leave me coughing almost all the time, to the point that sleep becomes a difficult matter, I remain anchored to a nearby supply of cough drops, and fear the onset of pneumonia. On one occasion, I nearly coughed myself into a hernia. The worst symptom I remember involved the constant feeling that I had some object like a coat hanger in my lungs that I constantly coughed in a reflexive attempt to bring up. From such symptoms I would assume I simply don’t get along with the by-products of burning tobacco leaves.

Human psychology has an interesting way of prioritizing nuisances. For instance, a good stubbing of the toe does not rile us the same way that a cup of cold coffee thrown in the face by an ill-wisher does. The insult far more than compensates for the greater gap between types of injury. This relationship between indifferent and accidental pain and deliberate offense pushed me towards one side rather than the other in an ongoing feud that occurred at the newspaper where I used to work.

The Cane, the Nova, and the Action Figure

We assembled newspapers, adding pre-printed advertising inserts – very likely the same ones you throw out when they fall in your lap as you page through the sections to head towards weather or sports or comics. We did this in a remote corner of a building where physical production facilities occupied the west side (the blue-collar half of the building) and administrative, internal advertising, and news facilities occupied the east side (the white-collar half of the building). Folks from the white-collar side tended to wince at the prospect of a shared break room where employees covered in ink from the presses might also gather and occasionally convinced the president of the company that he should lock us out of the more genteel sections of that building. The same door that kept us from the break room also kept us from the bathroom, which posed some interesting problems when the quarantine held force; common sense, however, usually forced allowing us to use the bathrooms.

A small, vocal, squeamish cluster of whiny snobs generally effected the quarantines. And most grandly among these I must place one D—- G——, whom henceforth we might call Mister Air Quality. He would walk through several departments, all the way from his safe haven in the white-collar side of the building, through the break room, past the bathroom, down the hall, and into the mail room – the spiritual center of the blue-collar side of the building – just to glare at us long enough to see that someone had noticed him, then turn around, slam the door, and go back to his protected little haven for his kind. He did this, on the average, three times a day.

He did this because he hated smokers, which tended to constitute 25%-50% of our department. The company had no particular smoking policy at the time, so this loopy jerk thought he would invent one. And he didn’t seem to care at all whether the objects of his bug-eyed hatred actually entertained a fascination with the nasty leaf or not. I – the heavily allergic non-smoker – received his evil eye as often as everyone.

If forced to muster the politest still-accurate term to describe Mister Air Quality, poser would come to mind. Guys who carry canes in an attempt to seem like East Coast old money – particularly in Texas, where bona fide old money has an altogether different style – mark themselves as fair game for derision. I imagine in the world outside the Bible Belt the same principle applies: Those who attempt to impersonate the more handsome, the more well-bred, the wealthier, and the better educated by some lame prop any ex-con could pick up at Goodwill for under three dollars tend, as a general rule, to fail in the impression they intend to put across. A writer might aspire to greater social standing than a mail-roommachinist, but as time went on long-timers figured out that many of the writing staff came straight from college, degree in hand, to work for minimum wage. The ex-cons in my department made more than that, frequently without benefit of GED. Mister Air Quality’s pretentions to superiority, then, had a debatable quality to them, since no one in the mail room would do something so dumb as go to college for years to get a degree that entitled him to a minimum-wage job.

Mister Air Quality became a kind of celebrity on the blue-collar side of the building through his over-the-top displays. For some time, though his job responsibilities had nothing to do with pressroom or mail room functions, this Carrie-Nations-in-Trainig would pull his theatrical protest against the mail room, vigorously slamming the door each time. He gave us headaches with his door-slamming. We came in with headaches and he made them worse. We had jam-ups in the machines because we turned toward the source of noise when he’d go through his ritual. He made the Average Joe want to bang the guy’s head against the wall like he slammed that door, only not just three times a day - perpetually, until it became a soft, furry sac. Only luck and a surplus of human mercy kept him from such a fate.

Three doors and most of the internal building separated him from any possible contact with what smoke came out of the room. Given the inverse square law, plus the aforementioned system we might view as an airlock, we all figured that he never actually smelled smoke. Ventilation in the mailroomus volume of airspace, sufficed to keep the concentration low enough that it did not set off my own allergies during eighteen-hour days in the place. If it didn’t make me sick, that sorry cane-wielding wreck didn’t have any particular cause to leave behind his air-conditioned world of writing editorials about how the airport affected Grapevine, Texas.

Mister Air Quality’s tantrums, must, then, serve a theatrical purpose, an attempt to demand our attention (as a lord might demand that of a commoner) and make us aware of his noble displeasure at a disobedient world. He must have misunderstood some clause of his contract as a six-buck-an-hour word-flinging hack to include our absolute subservience to his whim. Yet no similar regard for the quality of other people’s air seemed to move him. Particularly as we watched the cars pull out of the parking lot at the end of a normal business day – many of us neither had the luxury of working a normal day schedule, nor even owned automobiles – we would shake our heads to see the clouds of blue, white, or black smoke that would belch volcanically from the exhaust of his pathetic early-eighties Chevrolet Nova. In a month our entire department, should the non-smokers take up a four-pack a day habit to complement their more experienced smoking brethren, would fail to emit as much foul-smelling by-product of combustion.

The Last Chain-Smoker

Here we must introduce another player, F—- J—–, whom for convenience we might call “The Lion of Baghdad.” The Lion, understood in a narrative sense, represented a balancing moral force.

Back in those days, I worked under the supervision of the Lion, an Errol Flynn-like Iraqi from Baghdad. If homegrown varieties of raw force and alpha-male dominance games had failed to render him meek and submissive, I would wager that little north Texas had to offer would do the job. And, indeed, he took poorly to the locals in general, as do many visitors and long-term residents in our country from foreign climes who find something terribly wrong in finding that the place they come to only poorly duplicates the place they came from. For the Lion, smoking served as more than an addiction and a way to dispose of income. It represented a stinky cloud of smoke in the face of a world that had failed to break his backbone.

Absent a no-smoking policy, F—- would smoke. Presented with a sermon about the subject, he would deliver the byproduct of his vice squarely into the sermonist’s face in one blue stinking cloud. I still have a few burn scars on my forearms – fortunately, concealed by blond forests of apelike hair – where he persuaded me to desist from some cruelty I might inflict on him for my own amusement. The Lion weighed 140 pounds or less and feared neither strength nor size, recognizing the advantages of superior determination. He had a sense of humor but a limited reservoir of mercy.

We all hated Mister Air Quality. Imagine getting up for a 5:30 am shift after staying until 7:30 pm the night before – running the same machine – only to listen to him slamming his doors all day long, every day. But the Lion hated him more. He reminded the Lion of every local missionary who had attempted to browbeat him from the faith he grew up in; he reminded him of every prig who had preached about sex and booze; he reminded him of every self-righteous ex-smoker who had delivered a sermon about those who shared the addiction.

Volleys in the Campaign

The Lion had no particular scruple against physical violence. If you doubt this, someday I’ll show you my burn scars. He did, however, have a canny eye for strategy and a lucid notion of scale. If given the time to think about what to do against a target, he would come up with something that would leave his target crying mad. So, given that his group worked the early, early, early morning shift – some three-and-a-half hours before the folks in Mister Air Quality’s department began to filter in the door, groaning at the earliness of the hour – he had time to investigate.

He knew Mister Air Quality’s name from the endless editorials about local school bond issues and airport-related noise ordinances and he followed the name-plates through an empty department to locate M.A.Q.’s desk. And there he found that Mister Air Quality had a friend: a Spider-Man action figure.

It took me a moment, when I saw the Lion wandering around with a Spider-Man action figure, to make sense of the situation. What, I wondered, could make an Iraqi grin so evilly and while holding a Spider-Man action figure?.”Look,” he said, holding the plastic toy towards me, “Spider-Man.” I nodded, blankly, waiting for a payload of meaning to show up. Then the Lion produced his handy disposable cigarette lighter. “Mister Air Quality‘s Spider-Man,” he elaborated. Then he lit the lighter and put the toy’s face in the flames, far enough away that it didn’t melt, but long enough that it accumulated a coating of black ash. Then the Lion took the tiniest scrap of white paper from a department-store flyer, rolled it into the tiniest cigarette the universe had ever seen, and glued it to Spider-Man’s mouth with an incredibly precise dot of super glue.

The Lion had converted Spider-Man into a smoker, and not a casual one, either; no, the kind of smoker who would chain-smoke until his face turned black. The Lion had turned Mister Air Quality’s friend against him. The beauty, the elegance, the simplicity of it all, and the inevitable blow-up that must follow putting the spark of this tiny affront to the gunpowder of Mister Quality Control’s volatile temper, all combined to render me ready to fawn at the Lion’s feet. Simple dignity, however, compelled me to limit my role. Henceforth, in the events that followed, I would variously play the role of sentry or guard during the necessary raids into white-collar territory for each subsequent salvo. He also serves who stands and waits, or something like that.

And we found confirmation of our already-low opinions of Mister Air Quality in his subsequent reaction, something well out of proportion to someone who has already experienced even a tiny piece of the ugliness the world can offer. Some of us remember when we routinely ran from mobs of rock-throwing brats as part of an everyday routine getting to and from home and school; or suffered under the lies of teachers who claimed to have witnessed things they only suspected and told their tales as truth; or, daily, might expect the attentions of bullies within and without school; and who never could hide our bikes well enough that the goons wouldn’t daily break a few new spokes or reflectors off it. To us, something like a Spider-Man action figure with a charred face represented getting off the hook.

However, to a dyed-in-the-wool narcissist, one whose infantile world-view cast every object in the universe as occupying a subordinate orbit to the central, solar self, the outrage exceeded all bounds. In a universe where everyone owes you something, you dare not ignore anything. An ethos that says you should have something because you want it and you occupy the center of creation also says that non-compliance represents a treasonable deed against the primacy of your rule. Something, then, departed from some intestine and hit a fan.

Strangely, though, Mister Air Quality’s supervisor didn’t see the moral crisis this involved. “Why do you bring toys to work, anyway, D—-?” he asked. And when Mister Air Quality sought to escalate it up the chain of command (and I doubt that he would have stopped before reaching the president of the company without someone intervening), M.A.Q.’s boss flatly told him no, a monosyllable we must suspect his parent(s) never used on him.

We had a few days of sweet peace, perhaps where a rage so intense boiled in Mister Air Quality’s soul that he feared to unleash against us. But by the end of the week, the door-slamming ritual began again.

The Lion recognized the need for ongoing reeducation here. The next lesson involved locating the more discreetly-located Spider-Man toy – cleaned up, but bearing some barely-discernable visible stigma from the first lesson – and administered the ash facial again. However, rather than relocating the piece immediately to Mister Air Quality’s desk, the Lion took the toy to the break room refrigerator for more therapy and froze its head in an ice cube. After a day or two passed, and the ice froze solid enough, the Lion then returned the long-suffering Spider-Man doll to Mister Air Quality’s desk, to melt over his paperwork just in time for him to encounter it in the morning.

A fool abideth not correction. Mister Air Quality brought the matter one step further up the chain of command, to have his boss’ boss tell him to shut up and keep his toys at home, and then to have his boss tell him not to bother his boss’ boss about stupid stuff like that. And perhaps some more communication ensued, or Mister Air Quality had to seethe longer; whatever the cause, though, we had a solid week and longer devoid of the random-slam-of-the-hour.

If you recall the old joke about the difference between genius and stupidity, you remember the punchline: Genius has limits. It surprised no one when the door-slamming picked up again. Texas weather teaches that you can’t predict some things and should just remain as ready as possible for the dangerous kind. But the Lion, patient when driven by purpose, administered another lesson: This time, Spider-Man ended up with a full-sized cigarette butt glued to his face with a generous, visible, permanent blob of super glue, with his hands holding the oversized coffin nail in place so that the action figure’s body language confirmed his true smoking pleasure.

After this, a legendary blow-up followed within the office of Mister Air Quality’s boss, with much yelling on both sides. One marvels that the boss didn’t stab him through the heart with a ballpoint pen to shut up his petulant rant. However, he did get something of what he wanted: an official memorandum saying that employees will not trespass into sections of the building where they do not work. By such a mechanism, one would suppose, vigilance could prevent further unconscionable abuse of action figures.

Of course this cut only one way. Within days Mister Air Quality had come back to slam our doors again.

Crime Doesn’t Pay

In those days, a duumvirate ran that newspaper. So that nothing actionable appears here and no one takes offense at seeing their names in print, I will provide suitably dignified aliases. President Ferret, who had married into the family that owned the company, officially ran the newspaper; Vice President Big Head actually made the decisions and did the necessary shouting to make them happen, in the absence of the necessary assertiveness from President Ferret.

President Ferret and Vice President Big Head sometimes walked the floor of the various departments, in the dubious assumption that ten minutes every few months would provide useful insights into how these departments worked or how changes might make their performance improve. Vice President Big Head, in particular, had a keen eye for stuff he didn’t like, and would usually find something to complain about during each foray into the unexplored jungles of the blue-collar side of the building.

Mister Air Quality chose to make one of his visits at precisely the moment that happened to find both President and Vice-President on the adumbrate floor, and he spared nothing in his presentation. None of the usual sources of noise ran at that moment – nor press nor inserter machine nor air compressors ran at that particular moment. All voices remained still to defer the silence towards something Vice President Big Head had to tell us about some upcoming contract we had received to print another local paper from one of the lake towns that cluster around a certain stretch of Interstate 35. And Mister Air Quality had left his cane behind to leave both hands free for door-slamming.

He had evidently also taken his vitamins. Some of the Viet Nam War and Korean War veterans in that wing flinched at a sound that threatened to trigger reflexes honed in response to incoming enemy fire. Eyes bulged and goggled; President Ferret flinched; the Lion failed to contain a grin so huge and evil that it seemed he could bite a pumpkin in two with it.

Vice President Big Head responded with the most dignity, neither starting nor flinching, but slowly turning to the door. He asked who had slammed that door. Warmly and sincerely, the Lion told him: “D—- G——.”

Though our first-tier fantasies never materialized – after all, the cops can’t bust you for slamming a door at work, regardless of how many people might like to see forty cops clubbing you with nightsticks as police dogs tear at your genitalia with their razor-sharp fangs – and our secondary wishes didn’t come true either, since no one lost his job that day, we nonetheless did bask in the peace of a future in which no one slammed that door again. Mister Air Quality never came back, and therefore received no subsequent education from the Lion of Baghdad.

All of the previous fails to put an answer to the question of what became of hte much-bothered action figure. My own best guess suggests adoption; one rumor claimed that one of the tour groups from local elementary schools, a recurring feature of working at the newspaper, passed through the newsroom and left, in its wake, an empty space where this veteran toy once proudly took all the abuse we could lay on it. I hope this version proves true; even insensate plastic deserves better than to serve as a proxy in a battle of wills against a determined enemy that can not lose.

Before my two year lapse from the Quarter Bin, I had begun a series of columns examining the effects that the continuity based editorial model had or could have on conventional comics created under such standards. These included a need for repeated housecleaning of accumulated backstory once it begins to obstruct creativity; the intrusion into the series model of pieces whose primary purpose involves the maintenance of continuity and backstory rather than simply telling of a good story; the burdens imposed upon the readers who find themselves having to become collectors to understand ongoing plotlines; and changes into the structure of story arcs themselves in a milieu where tales begin and continue, but don’t necessarily resolve or end.

Continuity can serve, when misused, to skew other things than the stories subject to it. Indeed, it can provide the bludgeon with which segments of fandom bludgeon each other into conformity, or goad pros into shifts of emphasis that value the excellence of creators’ ability to recall trivia above the basic storyteller’s task.

The Pedantic Face of Fandom

Comics readers appear in other media in forms which seldom flatter. Consider, for example, The Comics Shop Guy from the cartoon series “The Simpsons.” His images attract adjectives most of us would prefer to avoid: slovenly, snobbish, petulant, uncivil, and idiotic (with the latter term returning to its Greek origins to mean that experience has failed to educate him and, therefore, he occupies a kind of private universe).

An even better view of this kind of negative image – and remember that works of comedy play off human flaws, so works of comedy will generally find flattery or even detached accuracy as contrary to their purpose – appears in a trifling character on the long-gone cartoon “Freakazoid,” the aptly-named Fan Boy. Consistent with various characters who would show up in the middle of one of the hero’s crises and do absolutely nothing that helps anyone, Fan Boy would appear – a fat white male too old to qualify as a child and too trifling and immature to qualify as an adult – and explain, at length, some point of trivia that no one in the story cared about and generally no serious person would have much interest in hearing.

Fan Boy or The Comics Shop Guy represent a change from the comics fan as viewed by the first generation to enjoy comics in their modern format. Turn back to an Our Gang short and you might find the likes of Spanky and Alfalfa engaged in an argument about the comic strip heroes of their day in very basic terms. Could Tarzan defeat Flash Gordon? A fair, if hypothetical and ultimately unimportant question. A short exposure to both strips could convey sufficient information to make an informed case, even if in the end the prejudices of the debaters would determine their positions and determine the outcome of the argument.

Essentially, anyone could participate in such an argument, should the desire afflict him. But the coming of continuity introduced a world of opportunities for hairsplitting, pedantic detail-mongering, and the exclusion of outsiders through cultic lore.

Weeding out Outsiders

In The Dark Tower, Stephen King crafts a telling scene. He includes as a relevant event the accident that nearly took his life, where a motorist ran into him. And in a conversation between King and the man who ran into him – whether drawn from a real recollection of words they exchanged or not – the motorist tells him more than once about how he loves King’s work. And, by talking about details of Cujo and It, he establishes that he has seen the movies but not actually read the books. In context, we read this as another method King used to identify the man who nearly took his life as an idiot.

But we so commonly beg questions about things we expect people to have read that we forget the assumptions we make. King’s almost-killer didn’t read the books, and we translate this as a symptom of stupidity. Can we say that a man who hasn’t read Stephen King’s works qualifies as stupid? Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein never read his works, since both men died before anyone would ever see such material in print, but we do not qualify either figure as lacking in intelligence. King did not argue People who do not read my books prove their stupidity, but the more subtle converse Stupid people do not read books, including mine.

However, the desire to establish one’s bona fides as smarter-than-thou tempt many of us into epistemological dishonesty, and misuse of inverted syllogistic reasoning often provides a handy tool. I know something you don’t can, with the right makeup, masquerade as I am smarter than you are. And unconventional or fringe learning often provides great opportunity and temptation to engage in such dishonest claims. In my own memories from the 1970s, I can recall incidents where comics fans established the stupidity of Everyman by citing examples of people who couldn’t get that the name David Banner did not belong to the Hulk; BruceBanner did. That no one seemed to know or care served as a made-up-on-the-spot criterion to gauge intelligence, without too much serious questioning of such as a test. And, at the same time, the judgment did not bother to investigate questions about how much the David Banner people knew about things in general, nor what kind of grades they made, nor how they did on achievement tests.

The tendency to use familiarity with a canon of works to establish insiders and outsiders – in some contexts the educated and the ignorant – exists in the real world, outside of popular entertainments such as comics. It exists in politics, and uses its voice whenever someone accuses you of ignorance for not believing in conspiracy theories you may never have had the ill-luck to have heard. It exists in cultivated tastes in food, clothing, housing, and liquors, wherever someone deprecates the excellence of your taste for your lack of familiarity with some obscure brand or label sought out precisely for its balance of quality to obscurity. It shows up in religious esoterica; and, indeed, takes on qualities of a low-grade religious cultism.

The insiders and outsiders already exist, delineated by familiarity to printed works of little practical importance to the business of everyday living. But it doesn’t truly become cultic without another important element. The insider-outsider divide provides the faithful and infidels; but a doctrine to establish heretics – and, incidentally, to provide a mechanism of control via threats of heretic-labeling – would complete the package. The lore of continuity provides such a doctrine, providing opportunities and criteria more tempting than other, more nuanced standards for judging comics or comics fans.

A Usable Doctrine

At least part of the comics-consumer’s experience in the works of the medium comes from interaction with other comics fans. Even before the Internet removed barriers to communication between people with similar interests but widely varying location, comics fans might find themselves and form cliques, especially through mechanisms like organized fandom. And much of the interaction had and has to do with the exchange of opinion about known and available works of comics.

Determining what constitutes a worthwhile work and a regrettable or unfortunate affront against the consumer’s finer sensibilities can use such methods and criteria as the self-designated critic may select. Simple first-reaction gut-instinct often comes into play: “I just didn’t like it and can’t recommend it” represents a fair answer, even if it lacks the meat that the aesthete or philosopher seeks. Or a comics fan can proceed from very specific terms of probation, rejecting (for one example) works that have more plot than story or which rely too much on exploitation of the dark side of human nature and depict violence in too casual a light.

As in morality or politics, art provides certain benefits for the critic who also recognizes the possibilities for self-aggrandizement through endorsement or through withholding approval. To claim to have taste suggests the ability to recognize taste, which similarly implies the ability to grant or withhold a credential. The excellence of my taste, I might say, gives me the right and power to label you as a coarse, crude, uncouth boor unable to distinguish the Bright and Good from the Dull and Bad. In so doing, I could give myself the (manufactured) right and power to sanction your tastes. And, in the real world, snobs do this all the time. This tendency goes back centuries. Mark Twain wrote about one method of exposing snobs by taking the bands from expensive cigars and putting them on cheap cigars and watching as connoisseurs of fine tobaccos lauded the high quality of the reeking burning leaves as they smoked them.

The desire to establish oneself as an arbiter of quality or taste runs strong in many people. Perhaps it reflects one of the inevitable behaviors of a being like man who combines great intelligence with a social mammal’s tendency to form dominance hierarchies when such traits exist in populations where day-to-day interaction precludes, by design, establishing one’s primacy by beating lesser animals and taking their mates. But this desire does not necessarily carry with it the necessary aptitudes to justify one’s claims of excellence in taste.

But one property comes cheap, in the sense that it does not necessarily require the intervention of explanation or judgment: human memory. To debate whether Frank Miller or Neal Adams demonstrates the apter kind of cinematography in comics will boil down to a contest of opinion. But an argument about whether Wolverine killed a guard on page 3 of some comic from 1989 does not so much rely on opinion. It presents a much more empirical scenario for debate and boils matters down to yes – no questions without depending on taste to play arbiter.

Effects in the Real World

The internal disputes in comics fandom often provide something sound minds do well to ignore or avoid, in that they illuminate qualities that do not occur in the inventory of the highest traits of the human character. Depending on your viewpoint, passionate arguments about things that don’t matter yet escalate into the near-hysterical might depress or might provide a kind of black humor.

A few years ago, DC comics printed a mini-event miniseries called The Kingdom, which used elements from Kingdom Come as a setting and launching point for introducing a plot device that would justify relaxing a hard-continuity editorial model. And howls of outrage resonated through electronic on-line communities. Arguments abounded making claims that readers might expect to lose all the gains in coherence-through-continuity that DC had achieved since Crisis on Infinite Earths. The diabolical “Hypertime” would, so arguments went, blur the line between out-of-continuity and in-continuity, all would go soft, and the legendary Bad Old Days of multiple alternate timelines would return. Strangely, though DC indeed had a mechanism to allow such things to occur, and it did have material to integrate via the old multiple-parallel-universes model, including the old Earth-Pick-a-Number worlds and the Elseworlds and the Vertigo creations, the elder surviving Big Two company instead exercised discretion and restraint.Superboy and Flash engaged in Hypertime-related plots but not much came of it.

Consider, for example, this review of The Kingdom which appears on Amazon here:

Mark Waid should go to hell for this., July 7, 2001
Reviewer: “berggonecrazy” (Orlando, FL United States) – See all my reviews
Kingdom Come was one of the best stories ever and had the potential for a lot of great follow ups but is completely ruined by the Kingdom. Why did Mark Waid think that this was the way to follow up Kingdom Come? There were too many mistakes here to be believed, the story was bad, the art was bad, and all it served was to create a plot device that completely undo’s Crisis and is sure to be an even bigger mistake in the future. [remarks clipped for brevity]…In it’s defense the filler stories showcasing the Kingdom Come characters decent, enjoyable stories with good art exploring the Kingdom Come future, which is what a KC sequel should have been about. But these aren’t enough to forgive Waid and to ever just his writing again.

Note “completely undoes Crisis,” “sure to be a bigger mistake in the future,” and “aren’t enough to forgive Waid and ever trust his writing again” (hopefully I do not misrepresent Berggonecrazy with my corrections of typos). Forgive Waid? Did Waid harm someone, slander someone, steal food from orphans, or do more harm than good to humanity with this story? In The Kingdom I agree that we do not see Mark Waid’s best work, but does this justify a grudge or a sense of betrayal to the point that we should never trust his writing again? Or could the drive behind the animus depend on a perceived affront to continuity, understood both as the editorial principle and as the backstory of content accumulated over time? Bless Berggonecrazy for caring enough about comics to defend what he likes and believes in, but to my eye this looks like policing in defense of the Hard Continuity Principle. I see here a defense of The Dubious Central Virtue of Comics more so than a defense of other principles of storytelling which fair debate might claim Waid failed to satisfy in The Kingdom.

For all the good that editors’ and writers’ restraint did, Mark Waid found himself the target of abuse of the sort pros occasionally must endure and which implicates segments of fandom as detached from the practical and ethical aspects of reality. Similar to parallels today where original-and-unmodified “Star Wars” fans bellow that Lucas’ edits in the 2004 edition boxed set ruined the movies for them, Waid occupied a temporary plateau of shame once reserved for Ron Marz. But Waid had not destroyed DC nor its editorial model in the same way that George Lucas has not raped anyone’s childhood. The hyperbolic logic and vein-splitting outrage result less from anything they have done and more from the strategy of the cultist of each particular genre to police the heretic and stop deviationism in its tracks. And we should not lose the irony of someone telling Lucas what he could and could not do with intellectual properties he created and owns, especially when arguments resort to rights of property – one might as well denounce a landlord for repainting a rented house. You might not like the color, but who determines where and how to paint it?

And the notion of policing comics at the publisher level (the level at which shared universes logically must stop for considerations of who owns intellectual properties) runs afoul of the normal aesthetic experience. The works of a musician or a filmmaker or a painter can, but need not, interconnect and interdepend. A less-than-satisfying work by a given talent does not invalidate previous or subsequent works and does not invite insider policing in the same way; beyond the usual predictable accusations of “selling out,” creators of other media do not suffer the same kind of hostile scrutiny from people looking to find errancy to sanction. In comics, though, fans police not only the creators of comics but other fans who might fail to demonstrate the desired stringency in enforcing the understood standards which fan cliques may deem as the necessary principles of content and the obligations of producers to consumers. From the slanderous or threatening electronic communication to or about pros to message-board campaigns calling for the boycott of some work that fails to follow some set of principles, we see in miniature mullahs of continuity calling for mini-fatwasagainst some Rushdie-du-jour. Mark Waid might have worn the bullseye at the end of the 1990s and anyone who trifles with the wishes of the mullahs might do so in the future.

Comics enjoy artistic strengths today, some of which required fighting out medium-internal disputes over decades to establish, and, therefore, have anecdotally achieved peaks that invalidate many of the condemnations of the medium that generally derive from the worst, rather than from typical, works. But the passage of old vices can open opportunities for new ones. Since modern comics exist in three tiers – the community of creators, the works themselves, and the communities of consumers – we can note the potential for ways to go wrong that involve the interaction of the human players. The medium and the industry do not need creators fearful of angry campaigns by pedantic fault-finders to constrain their creativity; nor do they need an image that suggests we can find behind any given title a surly body of continuity police ready to swarm (metaphorically) over the occasional imprudent talent who takes liberties with stories written and printed years or decades ago.