T w e n t y S i d e d

I don’t usually read comic books. I like the idea of comic books, though. I like individual superheroes. But the books themselves are a mind-melting retcon clusterfarg of pretzel logic. When I talk to people who follow the books, it usually begins with someone trying to bring me up to date on the story of some character, and it goes something like this:

Did you see the new Captain Excellence?

Captain Ex? Didn’t they kill him off in the 90’s?

Well, they’re bringing him back. Well, actually, this is a new one. He’s a clone of the original Captain.

A CLONE? Didn’t they have that one arc at some point where he found out he was really an android that was programmed to look just like a human?

Yeah they did. But they said at one point that even though he’s a machine, his skin is like, organic.

Hm. So if you cloned him, he wouldn’t really be Captain Ex, since you wouldn’t have the robot insides that gave him his powers.

Actually his powers were mystical.

Well you wouldn’t have that either.

You can’t know how the spell works. Maybe it applies to him and any clones.

That enchancter must have really been thinking ahead. Anyway, how did they wind up with a clone?

Jayne made it.

Jayne Judas? The Feeder? She was his arch nemesis!

Not her. I mean Jayne Jennings, her twin from the alternate dimension. She was the opposite of the Feeder. She was good.

But she was a reporter. How did she clone Captain Ex?

She did it way back during the Invaders Saga. She got some of his DNA had herself impregnated with it by the Justice Alliance.

She wasn’t pregnant during the Invaders Saga. Or ever.

She concealed it with a hologram.

Why? I mean, why have a cloned Captain Ex baby at all?

She was in love with him.

But if the baby was born during Invaders… that was what? 1998? The clone would only be 11 by now.

She used a super growth process on him.

So he looks like the old Captain Ex now?

Pretty much, except the new costume is mostly black.

Yeah, but he’s really a kid.

Well, he has some of the memories of the original Captain Ex somehow. Maybe they were like, in his DNA or something.

So a reporter secretly had a baby of the man she loved who was actually a cyborg…

Android.

…and hid the pregnancy from everyone – including the scientists who helped impregnate her with the DNA – and accelerated the growth of the baby. And she did all this because she loved him. As opposed to just telling him how she felt.

I’m sure they’ll explain it when the book starts up. You gonna get it?

I think I would die of stupidity poisoning.

The continuity problems are inherent in long-running multi-author stories. Star Trek has the same issues. Writers come and go, and they all have their own agendas and their own take on the hero and their own idea of what’s “cool”. That’s fine. I love seeing what different storytellers will do with the same idea. It all makes for interesting reading until they start trying to stitch the disparate tales into a single whole, a process akin to trying to cook dinner using a single random item from every aisle of the grocery store. It might sound like a fun challenge at first, but when you’re standing there in your kitchen with a box of corn flakes, a bottle of Windex, some beef, a tube of toothpaste, a bag of marshmallows, a jar of pickles, some aspirin, a package of croutons, a mop, and orders that you must use everything, you will wish you had planned things better in advance or maybe set up some rules to guide what items wound up in your cart. The result is not pretty or elegant.

The problem gets much, much worse when crossovers force you take these dozens of long-running comic books, and turn all of those mangled stories into a single overarching universe-level continuity. You will need to resort to ugly hacks and contrivances just to begin to get a handle on the problem. But even if you can soften the story up with some retcon and hammer it into some sort of logical shape, you’re still left with the problem of the jarring thematic differences. I like science fiction. I like mythology. I like wizards. I like mafia stories. I like aliens. But I don’t like them all mixed together in a great big soup of nonsense. Spider Man, Thor, Dr. Strange and the Punisher all blend together like Snickers, Jack Daniels, and Spaghetti sauce. (Note to self: Stop writing when hungry. You use too many food-based analogies. )

Mary Jane is conceptually a great character, although at times she’s been a laid-back party girl, and at others a selfish, chain-smoking bitch. It all depends on who the author is this week.

And even if you keep things from getting too mangled, you still end up with the biggest continuity hole of all: Time. Peter Parker has been in his late 20’s / early 30’s for almost half a century. If he was in his late teens in 1962, he should be about the age of Aunt May. He met Mary Jane when she was a “groovy” hipster in long hair and go-go boots. They courted, married, and now (or last time I checked, anyway) she’s a famous television actress with an established career. And neither one of them has aged. What is it like when they reminisce? “Hey MJ, remember last week when it was 1965 and you were a hippie?”

There really is no fix for this, although I suppose if I was running a comic book empire I might try to do things differently. I’d run books in five or six year self-contained arcs, where a single writer is free to do what he likes as long as he doesn’t invade anyone else’s continuity. Re-tell the origin, or don’t. Kill off the hero at the end, or have her retire, or just leave it open. Or tell a series of steady-state tales, Trek style. When the run is up, you wipe the slate clean and start over. This gets you out of the mess where you have a single hero who has died four times, lost his powers twice, had his powers altered once, fought six evil twins, turned evil once, had amnesia three times, and who has his identity outed and re-hidden on a regular basis. Writing these huge stories is a lot like writing software: You end up with a lot of cruft and if you don’t clear the board every once in a while the project becomes unmanageable. If you’re doing the self-contained six-year (or whatever interval) arcs, then it’s like refining the story as you go, or playing variations on a single musical theme. A popular run could be embraced by fans, and the favorite elements might end up in future tales. A bad run would at least not become part of the established continuity forever.

I don’t know if that would appeal to the usual comic book audience, though. I would love it. But then, I like planned stories that arc and end, which seems to be at odds with how the business works. Part of the appeal of Watchmen is certainly the darker, more philosophical take on superheros. But I suspect the other big draw is that it forms a cohesive whole. We can talk about the arc and what it says in a way that just isn’t possible with other hero stories. I can’t help but wonder if they worked to take the idea of a “graphic novel” and focus more on the “novel” and less on the “graphic” if it might not make for better fiction.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.