It was reported yesterday what the new status quo will be for the upcoming Spider-Man comics. This is probably both good and bad for a lot of comic book fans out there, but mostly for the continuity nerds. I’ve never been a stickler for continuity when it came to reading comics. If you have a series that regularly changes creative teams, you need to be flexible in order for the stories (which are supposed to be the essence of comics) to be interesting. I see each new creative team arc to be an alternate version of the title character’s world; sharing some elements to maintain familiarity, but not identical.

What makes things hard for companies like Marvel and DC Comics is that they frequently have multi-title crossovers that involve the participation of their entire “universes”. Then once the event is over, some books will stay focused in that continuity while others will go through the creative team shift into a new interpretation. This understandably causes some confusion with many a faithful reader.

For example, one of the big notes in the Spider-Man press release that I totally expected concerned the recent “Civil War” event that Marvel had this past year. One of the key moments of that story was that Spider-Man revealed to the public that he was in fact Peter Parker. But as you can see in the release, Marvel’s explained that way simply as that everyone just kinda forgot and his secret identity is a mystery once more. Or in Simpsons terms, “a wizard did it.”

DC Comics tries to clean up their universe’s continuity by doing a “Crisis” event that basically reboots the DC universe. I don’t think that’s necessary, though. I’ve come to accept that with each new story arc, it’s more comfortable to experience it not so much as “this is Batman”, but more like “this is a Batman story”. Cuz who can really decide what is the definitive “Batman”?

I guess my big problem with all the continuity nerds out there is that they demand the impossible. First of all, it’s mathematically impossible for any comic book (let alone comic book universe) to maintain an accurate continuity. If you’re going for anything accurate, then you have to factor in that comic book characters age. If Cyclops joined the X-Men when he was a teenager in the 1960s, then he’d be in his mid- to late-60s by now! I don’t care what kind of cosmic powers the character has that might be used as an excuse for their slowed aging process, their non-superhuman supporting cast would age normally. Aunt May should be long-dead by now. Possibly even J. Jonah Jameson.

Secondly, with all the years that many books have existed, spanning the involvement of multiple creative teams, and if you include every cross-over or spin-off, who can seriously keep track of all that history? Yes, maybe comic book nerds. But unfortunately, the nerds that are best versed in even a single character’s history are also shitty writers. If you can get one person who can get one person with encyclopedic knowledge of a character who can also write a fulfilling story, then it’s an era of beer and skittles for fanboys the world over.

So in a way, I wish comic book publishers would make announcements like this more often. Instead of taking a great story and then retro-fitting it so that it’s compatible with the supposed continuity in order to satisfy nit-picking dorks, they come out an say, “Hey, here’s your Spider-Man for the this year. We think you’ll like him.” Sure, you risk turning away some of the niche audience, but in the long run you leave the door wide open to welcome in loads of new readership.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 8th, 2008 at 4:37 pm and is filed under Rants. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.