THOR’S COMIC COLUMN 11/18

Hope my editorial goes over well. I've been reading a lot of Susan Sontag lately, and trying to channel the structuralist and deconstructionalist writers I read in grad school.

Also, the picture I gave you for Carbon Grey Origins #1 was actually cover A! Arrrrghhhh! I discuss cover B in the review.

Really enjoyed D.S.'s breakdown of Mr. Terrific. His discussion of atheism and how misunderstanding it has affected the book is totally why I'm dissapointed in the book. Could've been a contender.

Yeah, what is it with pop culture and atheists? I keep hearing about how the entertainment industry is run by a bunch of godless heathens, yet atheists are always treated as either irredeemable, somewhat alien villains, or people who are just having a hissy fit at God and will come around eventually.

The best atheist narratives are the ones that don't literally revolve around God but instead feature people realizing that society is predicated on a big lie, like The Truman Show or Dark City or even, fuck, The Island.

Writing another op-ed right now called "Wolverine's goatee and Hawkeye's shades: Marvel Comic's Brand Synchronization", in which I analyze minute costume changes from 9 years ago. 

What's funny is that a lot of the same problems with continuity were in play when there all of those early Church councils in Rome trying to whittle down all of the different Gospels and other texts down to what is today's "canon". Even then, you have all of these apocryphal books and letters that don't make the cut that become harbingers of secret wisdom that The Man doesn't want you to know. The rejected continuity doesn't want to die. Of course, we didn't seem to have this problem before our culture started swinging toward one, true God, and thus one, true narrative. Before that, there were multiple versions of the stories we call myth in tragedies and epics and so on, with many changes in details in order to get across the author's point. I like that latter approach. If we're going to share a narrative, then at least let it be done in a way that really lets authors bring themselves to the material instead of subjugating themselves to it. Come to think of it, this seems connected to something I've always hated in Comics: the "house cleaning arc", or when a new creative team has to devote 3 to 6 issues to clean out the mythos before they can tell the story that they really want to tell. (I liked Bart's continuity piece, by the way)

And thanks for the kind words on my review. There's obviously a lot to unpack regarding how modern pop culture is equipped to deal with atheism, and my review doesn't really scratch that surface. Mister Terrific is a good example by dint of its derivative nature. I'd hate to really come down on modern writers (I hope to be one some day), but the culture just seems to have this association between spirituality and depth that runs deep enough to the point that most people simply can't express feelings of truth, beauty, or justice outside of spiritual framework. I guess what I'm trying to say is that everyone needs to read Rousseau's "Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar" from Book IV of Emile. Rousseau's great insight about religion is that the stories don't really matter that much; what matters is that one properly loves the world. Some people don't need the stories.

Great comparisons D.S.. I'll have to check "Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar" out.

My whole idea for the continuity argument stemmed from a friend complaining about Wolverine being everyone at once (X-Men, X-Force, Avengers, his own book). I told him it didn't matter, that Marvel only wanted to appeal to different fans who wanted to see Wolverine in different situations, but he couldn't wrap his head around it. 

Without being very familiar with the modern Mr. Terrific, the best handling of his atheism is from an issue of Infinite Crisis by Geoff Johns. After Hal Jordan storms out of a sermon by Zauriel the angel, Mr. Terrific explains to Black Lightning why he doesn't believe in God. Makes me wonder about Johns' belief system, considering how ruthless he's portrayed the Spectre, the wrath of God.

I totally forgot all about that bit. I'll have to hunt it down. I remember back in Mr. Terrific's JSA days that they were playing with the idea of "How could you possibly be an atheist in the DCU? You've got the Spectre running around!" I was thinking about that when writing this review, and I couldn't think of one good reason to at least be a worshiper in the DCU. You've literally got every god ever conceived running around that place and giving people superpowers, and these god beings often get their asses kicked by guys like a certain Kryptonian we all know. And Superman doesn't ask anyone to worship him. What separates Yahweh from the rest of the pack in that regard?

One thing I was hoping they'd do in the new 52 is maybe go "Full Kirby" with their gods and mystical-powered heroes. If you're starting over, I think that you can easily tie characters like Captain Marvel, The Spectre, or any of the magic users, into a new version of the New Gods mythos. Those characters would probably come out much cooler, anyway. Think of The Spectre being so powerful because he's a living motherbox or something.

EDIT: Man, that was geeky. 

Just to play devil's advocate, I'm not sure it's fair to say Watchmen's continuity isn't solid because there are RPGs. While I'm aware of the semantic quicksand you get into by trying to declare what's canon and what isn't, there's obviously a huge difference between, say, Bob Kane vs Frank Miller's take on Batman, and the Harry Potter novels by J. K. Rowling vs. online fan fiction. Of course it's up to the reader to decide, but one is always going to be a lot more "official" than the other, and this is especially true for a self-contained story by a single author and artist. A story has to have its own internal continuity, or it's considered to be a failure. And since Watchmen is self-contained, external continuity is basically irrelevant in the sense of the average comic book series. If the RPG reveals that Nite Owl was bitten by a radioactive owl, does it really matter? Most people aren't aware of the RPG, and there's no further story to be told, so it's not going to affect that. Whereas revealing that Swamp Thing was actually a plant that gained sentience who only thought he was a resurrected human has a major impact on the ongoing title.

Likewise, if I write a story in which it turns out that Romeo and Juliet didn't stab each other quite hard enough to die, are given a time machine by Reed Richards and then go on to fight Dracula, it's not like that's going to colour future discussions of Shakespeare in academic circles. Continuity "matters" differently when it's enforced in ongoing titles by Marvel or DC than it does everywhere else.

I basically agree with you, Prankster. I used the Watchmen RPG as an example because it was officially published by DC and had Moore's involvement (he co-wrote an essay included in it). Obviously that trumps fan fiction in terms of importance. There can be internal continuity if there is a stand-alone text, a graphic novel or individual issue of an ongoing series, but the more a franchise is expanded upon the more a hierarchy is created: the graphic novel on top, the RPG one step down, the upcoming prequels another step down...

Or to put it another way, here's the official Star Wars canon description from wikipedia:

But that kind of heirarchy only exists because there's so much stuff spun off of Star Wars, now and in the future, as part of Lucas's plan for the franchise. Alan Moore doesn't want Watchmen to be a franchise. That, to me, makes a major difference in regarding what qualifies as continuity. (And a game, by its nature, is going to feature deviation from continuity anyway.) The stuff that was added to Superman later, like Kryptonite or the ability to fly, which contradicts his earlier appearances, has more weight to it because it's part of an ongoing "shared world". But I have a bit of a problem with this stuff because, in the case of superhero comics, that shared world was created out of a desire to turn characters into franchises in order to exploit them. This is the danger you can run into when you start discussing "canon"--rendering the original author "faceless", as it were. That's not to say I'm unhappy that we have all this extra stuff that's fallen into the "idea" of Superman over the years, but putting the franchise ahead of the author is a problem unique to the geeky, pulpy properties like superhero comics. Mary Shelley or J. R. R. Tolkien don't have to compete for attention with all the people who have used their characters; their original stories stand as a shared bedrock. Of course you can read anything you want into anything, but at that point the discussion of canon becomes basically irrelevant, because the author can't control what's in people's heads anyway.

I'm just concerned that you have to draw the line somewhere, and at a certain point you're kind of disrespecting the author--authorship sometimes being a fragile concept in the world of superhero comics.

Not my intention. If anything I'm attempting to destroy all lines. 

As for authors, it all depends on the context. Creator owned material is a different story than umpteenth author writing Detective Comics. What I tried to cover in the article is how even an author can betray their own material with their own characters (Thomas Harris abrupt personality switch for Clarice in Hannibal) or a version of a character that they distinctly own (ex. Frank Miller's Daredevil with The Man Without Fear, his Batman with The Dark Knight Strikes Again). When I say betray I'm not even speaking in terms of quality, but in original intention and natural progression. 

This leads to the debate over "ownership" between fans and creators. "X wouldn't do that!" It's the nature of the industry. If an author chooses to serialize a work, it's an acknowledgment that the work has gotten bigger than the author. Otherwise, why not create something else original? 

The most important aspect of continuity I discussed in the article is Essence, and Essence is more often than not what the original creator brought to a character and/or story. For instance, Darwyn Cooke's The Spirit is really Darwyn Cooke's Will Eisner's The Spirit. Once it gets away from the original author, however, it can only ever be a close approximation. The original author, as well, can overextend themselves and get away from the original Essence.