Way back in 2009, Tom Crippen asked why Batman wasn’t given the poewr ring instead of Hal Jordan. I suggested that this showed that the whole shared world concept was idiotic. Kurt Busiek took the opportunity to explain the pluses and minuses of DC’s shared world.
[Noah]:My point is just that the whole continuity/shared world aspect of the big two’s output has some real downsides; it’s kind of ridiculous and incestuous and can lead to a lot of idiocy. I think Tom’s question gets at that. The real question, for me, at least, isn’t so much — why doens’t Bruce Wayne get a ring? As, why is it a good idea to have this kind of fan-fiction shared world in the first place?
Because it’s fun to have the characters meet.
It’s fun to have Batman stories, and it’s fun to have Superman stories, but it’s fun to have Justice League stories, too. It’s not really any more complicated than that. It’s entertaining.
The stories are the cake, and the shared-universe stuff is frosting. Things tend to go horribly wrong when people start to think the frosting is more important than the cake, and then get better when they remember that it’s about the cake after all.
The real answer to questions like, “Why doesn’t the Flash clean up Gotham City, too?” is “It would make Batman’s cake lousy. People read BATMAN because they like crimefighter stuff where Batman’s cool, and don’t really want to see Superman or the Flash or Green Lantern mess with that particular cake.” On the other hand, people who like stories where Batman and Superman and Green Lantern work together have the JLA cake, and some people like both kinds of cake.
But if you start to tie it together with logic foremost rather than entertainment, then you need to explain why Superman doesn’t help all the other heroes almost all the time, and why aren’t the crimefighters turned into SF-type heroes to make them more effective, and you end up with everything being JLA cake, and no solo Batman cake left. Or you come to the conclusion that it doesn’t work, so Batman shouldn’t be in the JLA, which maybe preserves the Batman cake, but it messes up the JLA cake.
So in the end, the answer to all of these questions is: Don’t mess with my cake.
Batman cake, when well done, is good. JLA cake, when well done, is good. But if you pay too much attention to the frosting, the cakes all start to taste the same, and that might be logical, but it’s boring.
This is also known as the Go ‘Way Kid, You Bodda Me school of comics continuity. Shared universes are fun as long as they make reading comics more fun, and not fun when they start to tangle things up and mess with the individual series concepts. When that happens, you can either go with it even though it messes things up, in the name of logic and continuity maintenance, or you can sweep it under the rug and look the other way.
Much as I love continuity, I’m a big fan of sweeping it under the rug and looking the other way. If it serves the X-Men series better to let Kitty Pryde age while it serves FF better to have Franklin age a lot slower, then that’s good — that’s cake, and both the FF cake and the X-Men cake should be good on their own terms. You just don’t have the characters talk about how they’re aging at different rates.
And if Batman could solve most of his cases by getting on the JLA communicator and asking Superman or Rip Hunter or someone to use time-travel or super-powers to solve the mystery, then you ignore it, because that’s frosting, and the important thing to do is make it a good Batman cake. He can do all that stuff with Superman or Rip Hunter in the other cakes, where those flavors enhance the story rather than messing it up.
[Noah:] But that’s probably just me…
Not really. But just like readers who don’t let it bother them that Nero Wolfe was 40 years old for 40 years straight, or that Linus was in kindergarten when Sally Brown was an infant, and later they were in the same class, there gets to be a point where you decide whether you want it to be strictly logical, or you want it to be fun.
Used to be, things sold better when they didn’t tie in too much, and nobody asked why the Avengers didn’t show up to help out with Galactus or where Spider-Man was that day. Nowadays, it seems like you can’t do a big story without it sprawling over most of the other books in the line, and that’s selling well…for now. But next year, or five years from now, who knows?
Maybe the individual cakes will be more important. Or maybe it’ll be mostly frosting, and Batman _will_ have a power ring.
Kurt has several other comments on that thread, so be sure to click through. Also, I discovered while putting this post together, Kurt actually collected his comments together on his own blog here (and that’s where I got the nifty image below by Joe Quinones.)
This from a guy who co-wrote an entire twelve issue series whose raison d’etre was to resolve the minutiae of inconsistent continuity. It was the world’s longest pitch for a No Prize.
Not to mention (I’m not mentioning it!) all the stuff in that Justice League/Avengers crossover about the differences between DC-Earth and Marvel-Earth: in DC-Earth people drive like this…
Well…that’s not inconsistent, though. He’s saying that doing continuity porn can be fun…and doing other things can be fun (like Astro City — which I think is pretty good.)
Kurt Busiek’s view of continuity was/is seemingly based on the belief that monthly, serialized comics–a publishing business model–justifies an obviously aesthetically defective approach to continuity. Characters aging at different rates in the same universe is ridiculous, and can’t be anything else.
Continuity can be loose. If stories were written as close-ended, standalone works, characters could be referred to and used in various ways, without differences in interpretation mattering.
If a shared universe is going to be anything more than a marketing gimmick, continuity should be either loose or tight. Saying that continuity will be tight, for the sake of cross-promotion of titles, and then violating it whenever it’s convenient, makes the creators involved frauds.
SRS
I demand a twelve issue mini-series to resolve the inconsistency in Busiek’s views! It turns out his clone was being controlled by a cybernetic implant from the shape-changing aliens of the future…
But, yeah, I know it’s not strictly inconsistent. It just struck me personally as incongruent, maybe only because those are the only two things by him that I’ve read (plus a few bits of Astro City — not my cup of tea), and they’re like the BangBros of continuity porn.
Sure, sure, CP can be fun. Everyone likes those Don Rosa stories (me too!) and they stand to Carl Barks’ Scrooge stories as Roy Thomas stands to superhero comics from the 40s.
“Characters aging at different rates in the same universe is ridiculous, and can’t be anything else.”
It worked for Charles Schulz.
It worked for Charles Schulz.
Yes, but Peanuts wasn’t dramatic, nor did it run long stories.
I’ve never seen anyone try to justify continuity violations on an aesthetic basis. The justification is always “Well, it’s my job to write stories about these characters, and if I don’t violate continuity for this story and if I don’t have the option of violating continuity when I need to for later stories, then I won’t be able to get the stories written and other writers won’t either, and issues won’t come out on time, and the publisher will go out of business, and we won’t have jobs anymore!” Sobbing ensues.
Tight continuity is an intellectual limit on story structuring that forces a writer to be inventive and to work to get stories written. If continuity prevents him from writing a given story, he has the options of coming up with other story material or finding a different job.
Writers have frequently referred to working with the corporate Marvel and DC characters as taking them out of the toy box and putting them back in later, when one leaves a series, and in line with the “illusion of change” editorial policy, but equating the characters to toys can be interpreted very negatively.
SRS
I don’t know, Steven…Peanuts had pretty long narratives, and the characters were certainly consistent over long periods of time. Except when Schulz felt like he wanted to not make them consistent, as when he aged babies to six year olds relatively quickly.
A lot of the most aesthetically acclaimed comics stories violate continuity. Batman Year One retcons shamelessly. Grant Morrison’s Animal Man run uses a clumsy deus ex machina to erase its last few issues for deliberate aesthetic effect. Alan Moore’s Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow story is out of continuity.
I guess you can start saying, well, those are special cases…but I don’t really buy it. They’re special cases because how continuity was violated was thought through and done well aesthetically. Most continuity violations aren’t. But most continuity isn’t either.
I think it’s less continuity or not continuity that’s the problem, and more a dwindling, incestuous audience and a business model which is both ethically despicable and (not unrelatedly) creatively bankrupt. The proliferation of continuity porn plays into that…but it seems like a result rather than a cause.
“It worked for Charles Schulz.”
There was also that awesome movie where Brad Pitt turns into a baby.
(That’s my second favourite Brad Pitt movie, after the one where Heaven is holding hands with Brad Pitt on the beach.)
That last part about Benjamin Button must be a joke, right?
My praise for that film is as sincere as my praise for Tree of Life — interpret that however you will…
Note that Busiek’s entire argument is based on the premise that the existing editorial system–the heroes and villains exist to battle each other, soap-opera style, and go into suspended animation between issues, etc.–is the only one.
That system lacks logic, though, and tight continuity is one of the few things that makes the stories at all believable. Sacrifice the continuity for the sake of making the story “fun,” and who is the story supposed to appeal to? People who read the stories for the artwork, presumably.
Any approach which forces the writer to make the heroes and villains people who don’t exist merely to battle each other and fill page space causes Busiek’s argument to collapse.
SRS
I’ve never written a 12-issue series whose raison d’être was continuity speckling. A story needs to be a story, not mere universe-janitoring.
I did write one that was about a big sprawling war between two of the Avengers’ greatest foes, with them caught in the middle, and there was plenty of continuity exploration along the way. But the raison d’être was the adventure, the story, not the other stuff. Without the story, the continuity stuff wouldn’t have come up at all.
And yeah, what I’d say about that is that there are readers who like that sort of cake, and judging by how well that series has done over the years, we baked a pretty good one.
But I still didn’t have Spider-Man phone up the Avengers or FF every time a threat looked serious in UNTOLD TALES, because that’s a different kind of cake, and readers want and expect different stuff from it. The question was, after all, why doesn’t Batman get a Green Lantern ring, not why some projects have bags of cross-universe connections. They have them because they’re fun. They’re just not so fun that the audience wants them in every single book.
Nero Wolfe, by the way, is another example of a series where people aged at different rates. There were stories where Nero and Archie met a character they’d seen years earlier, and the character had grown to adulthood, while Nero and Archie were the same age as always. Rex Stout simply didn’t rub the audience’s noses in it.
It’s probably a good thing that writers and publishers aren’t as rigid about how fiction can work as Steve Stahl is; we get more variety that way, from stuff that’s very strict about the rules to stuff that isn’t. And audiences can gravitate to the approaches they like — or, like me, can like a whole bunch of approaches, from that great Alan Brennert story where Hawk & Dove grew up but Batman hadn’t aged commensurately to that great Englehart story that treated DC continuity in real time except for the characters’ aging to stories that build on the minutiae of cross-connected continuity (who, me?) to stories that look the other way and pretend that Mopee never existed and Dr. Don Blake never built a functioning android.
Different kinds of cake are fun. It’s good to have Batman stories and JLA stories, even though by strict logic Batman should be calling the JLA into Gotham all the time unless he’s an idiot. But that makes for bad Batman stories, so cross-universe-logic goes out the window in favor of Batman-solo logic.
So it goes.
kdb
Nice to hear from you again Kurt.
You do realize that two or three years from now I will probably have to highlight this comment in a post now…
You’re like an owl, sir.
But with a much longer digestion/regurgitation cycle.
kdb