Continuity Comics Conversation

Continuity Comics Conversation

I wanted to do a post on continuity, and connected-universes in superhero stories. As comic book culture permeates more movies and television, the question of how to continue the story through multiple platforms is an interest to many fans. In some fans it seems like all they care about. When you see questions about TV shows like SHEILD and Arrow, most questions become less substantive and more about what characters might appear in each show from outside the story. In the comic books, the various storylines and characters of the respective companies know each other and often interact with each other. Fans have enjoyed seeing that in live action so much now, that they are hounding for more, rather than talking about each quality of each project.

Go one day without hearing how this all works

Now tracking the continuity between every project is fun, but will create problems. The main thing is that instead of judging these shows and movies based on their merit and quality, we are now judging all the shows on how they line up to a bigger story. The problem is compounded as more projects tie into the same continuity and bad projects might begin to hurt good projects moving forward. It is worth thinking about, as comic book adaptations do not seem to be going anywhere, and there are more fun ways to enjoy these stories than looking at how they line up.

Cinematic continuity, and its going to get bigger and bigger!

With that in mind, I thought we should look at the comic books and how they have dealt with their interconnected universes, and what lessons we should take to movies and TV:

Comics are the beginning of these massive interconnected stories, where multiple books came together to tell stories with various characters. It is important to remember though, that every single time that comics have tried to add to their continuity, it was an experiment. Superman and Batman were the first characters to meet each other from different books, and were only done as a sales gimmick. The Justice League, the biggest form of a universe-building book, was only created to boost sales of the lower selling superhero characters like Aquaman and Martian Manhunter, and paring them with the more popular ones like Flash and Superman. The reason all of the different Marvel superheroes knew about each other was because Stan Lee and company had the heroes reading each other’s comic books…in the actual comics. The Marvel universe came to become interconnected because a comic creator thought Spiderman reading an Ant-Man comic would be funny.

The first teams and shared universes. 

I bring all of this up to show that no one ever had a grand plan that the overarching story should look like. Even though characters are from the same world, there was never a climax or finally created for them. The Marvel and DC Universe came about because a bunch of creators tried different things with the library of heroes they had, to either boost sales or just because they were board. And of coarse, there were amazing stories told by having characters come together. Writers and artist getting to use low selling characters as guinea pigs for their ideas led to some of the greatest character retcons and everlasting stories. Looking at the famous Green Lantern/Green Arrow run of Denny O’Neil and Neil Adams as just one example, the team only brought those characters together because Green Arrow got canceled. At the same time, a smart creator can make a good story when they put their minds to creating something knew.

Great stories that needed more than one character to tell...

At different points of this experimentation the comic book continuity got to big and made it hard to understand what was going on.  Stories like Crisis on Infinite Earths and retcons like Spiderman’s One More Day were created in order to help fix continuity. Afterwards new people could feel welcome to pick up new stories with fresh jumping on points. The other stories that came about, were when to help sales, mega stories were created that force the readers to buy many different books. This is called a crossover: If Superman was telling a story across four books that have Superman in them, the reader needed to buy all four issues. That is the challenge with continuity; if you don’t feed the idea that all of these different stories have consequences in each other’s books, than you are not really telling a relevant story. At the same time, if you spread the story to thin fans will be disinterested and leave.

Necessary Cluster-you-know-what

Don’t get me wrong; some of my favorite stories are crossovers. Writers and artists worked incredibly hard and did great work in the realignment stories like Crisis and the stories still work through the test of time. But what is left with all of these counterbalancing stories and different interpretations is that comic book continuity becomes impossible to read in a linear fashion. If someone wanted to read the first Batman story, at this point that could really mean over 10 different stories.

This is the fear with building these interconnected worlds in TV and film. I feel that a general audience is far less patient. You can’t tell them to work harder to understand the story going on. More than that, if the continuity falls apart because stories are bad then people could give up on the story all together. As a mega fan, I love getting back-story and seeing actors I love popping up everywhere (look at Nick Fury by the great Samuel L. Jackson, who is all over the Marvel universe in TV and movies). But at some point the bubble can burst, and if that does the fans will be the ones that suffer.

(Read stories like this since you like it, not to follow a timeline)

So the answer to enjoying continuity stems from continuity in comics. At this point in comic books, where there are so many different continuities and variations on how to read a story linearly, we the readers actually control our own continuity. Comics lend themselves to becoming linear stories, but it is up to the fan to choose how to compile the story best for them. It also allows the readers to omit the stories that they do not enjoy. If you do not like when Superman was a living lightning bolt, just don’t re-read those issues and you will be fine. In comics, more than any other medium, the fan can create the story they want to believe in.

So that’s what this post is all about. As fans, even when continuity is offered to us to keep us interested we should create our own continuity to watch and re-watch what we enjoy. If we do not like a new movie that comes out, just don’t count it in the story you want. If they produce a TV show that never ties into anything, but you still enjoy it, enjoy the fact that you have two stories that you really enjoy. I wanted to talk about this because as mainstream culture embraces these great stories, and might sometime reject it as well, it is important to remember that the viewer gets to determine the worth of the stories given to them. Enjoy watching the companies try and tell the stories they want to tell, enjoy when things take interesting complications. But at the end of the day, no one can construct the continuity of a story across multiple platforms other than you.

And with that, lets get back to watching how good things are, and not worry who is coming through door number 3.

Dov Smiley is an independent comic book publisher and founder of the Smiley Spot. His current works can be found at jonahcomic.com, as well as amazon under the same name. His full portfolio can be found at dovsmiley.blogspot.com