The Many Loves of "We Publish Fiction, Not Documented History"

The idea that a concern with continuity stems purely from the fans imposing it on the editors is complete crap, mind you. Superboy and Wonder Girl are both characters who came about purely because of the editors and creators applying the same kind of "but if X then Y" logic to their material as fans do when they ask about Atlantises, and the publishers are the ones who established line-wide "universes" with the shared elements those imply -- it's not like readers had any reason to say "well, Sherlock Holmes and Jay Gatsby are both published by Scribner's, I wonder if Holmes ever caught up to Gatsby in his bootlegging days," nor the comic book equivalent.

But the letter is awesome because it's still correct.

but on the other hand i really view comix characters as mythical characters, and i'm certainly not worried about continuity when i'm reading the greek myths, or the iliad, or what-have-you. and honestly i find it a little hard to swallow that, say, wolverine circa 2006 has actually experienced every single wolverine adventure since he was introduced. where would he find the time?

The Waste Land = Vertigo!

You just need an issue of Zatanna where the phantom stranger talks about his jugs.

Continuity in closed, manageable, finite systems (like Buffy, or The Shield, or other TV dramas) works great. Of course,
I'm discounting the books that've spun off from Buffy in this. Continuity in a 40-year-old or 60-year-old universe containing hundreds of characters where hundreds of creators had a hand in telling stories involving multiple characters, and trying to reconcile all those stories into one contiguous narrative - that's the stuff that drinking binges are made of. (Did Tiresias drink?)

Of course, if a good story came of these attempts at reconciliation, then awesome. I don't think that's happened so much, though.

xpost;

i mean what i like about myths so much of the time is that these are characters that can be re-used by anyone, their storytellers retold as the teller sees fit, w/o worrying about fitting to anything more than the basic details. and i like when comix writers and artists take that tack.

Absolutely -- but just like we'll always have comics writers who come along and decide to tie all those appearances together, Tiresias -- who was used as a dramatic device a lot, sort of a stand in for "prophet who tells you shit you don't want to know, but you need to know, but you don't want to know" -- got the same treatment. I don't remember if his "origin story" or "Phantom Stranger appearances" came first, but the former ended up being retold, revisited, a lot in order to fit it all in.

But I think continuity is important in the second form, as a way to show how and why things are meaningful in a bounded context. (Valiant was really good at this. See also Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman.) I think what makes New X-Men bad at continuity wasn't the gaffes (Sebastian Shaw as telepath), but the way that he couldn't always surround his characters with meaningful contexts--Fantomex, for example.

For that matter, the idea of Magneto running Genosha is a more powerful one if it isn't coexisting with Doom-run Latveria, T'Challa's Wakanda, etc.

What bothered me was that it never made that leap -- too often you'd have crossovers like Fall of the Mutants (which is about when I stopped reading, somewhere around then or Inferno) that grew out of the X-books but crossed over into everything else, right at the time when the two universes were least compatible with one another.

Wow, I couldn't disagree more. As long as you don't feel you have to reference these other bits of continuity, and if there's a chance that someone might get a good story out of them (EG the reigning monarchs storyline in Black Panther), what harm does it do?

Then again, I think Morrison's approach to continuity is the only sane one: ignore the bad ideas, keep the good ones. And it works on a per-story basis as well - some Batman stories need Gotham to be his problem, some need him to be Superman's best buddy.

Was it you that I had this argument with regarding Swamp Thing, Tep?

The problem with the "do what works on a story for story basis" is that there are, what, six writers working today who actually have the liberty to do that with the Big Two publishers. Everyone else is required to work within editorial edicts when they're working on a company property -- hey, I trashed sixty pages of pitches I was working on for Marvel because House of M rendered them impossible, I didn't have the choice of just ignoring what about it I didn't like -- and those editorial edicts are largely informed by what's been published in the recent past.

1: The stop-the-heart Slayer-creation mechanism. The idea that the magical Slayer-making machine is fooled by a technical death that only people in the age of modern medicine would even call "death" was odd, but that's okay, I dug the Kendra two-parter, and I was okay with Faith.

Once knowing about that mechanism, though, and knowing about it in the context of an increasingly callous Watchers Council and a perpetually angst I-don't-wanna-be-the-Slayer Buffy, it should have been abused. Go Flatliners on Buffy. Make an army of Slayers. Stop the heart, start the heart, stop the heart, start the heart ... there's almost no good argument against it when you're weighing the slight chance of her death in controlled medical conditions (potentially assisted by the very flexible magic of the Buffyverse) against the usefulness of a thousand active Slayers.

Both the Kendra two-parter and the appearance of Faith are on some level rewards to the attentive viewer, for noticing the loophole in the Slayer-logic -- but then the obvious consequences and implications of that loophole are ignored once the joke is over.

2: Angel's curse and the orb of whoopdewhoop. I hated the idea of treating Angelus as a separate being, but nevermind that, that's a separate issue. As rare as those Angel-soulifying doodads were, soulifying a vampire was such a potentially useful thing -- how many lives would have been saved if the Master had a soul? if Drusilla did? -- that as the Buffyverse levelled up over and over again, so that magic became cheaper and more powerful, this should have been abused too.

This isn't as big a thing, it's mostly just another example of how no one in the Buffyverse was all that good at being a vampire slayer or Watcher or etc. Dark Wesley was the exception, once he lost his glasses -- which is why he wound up being my favorite character.

Neither of those is something that makes me hate the show or anything, they just made me stop participating at that level.

(In the context of the Buffyverse, and with the possibility of magical help, I'm not even sure it's a risky proposition.)

*me, obviously, but i mean in the buffyverse

I'm kinda with you on this, but 1) Faith was around, so that explains it a little bit and 2) the writers just didn't want to bother with that story thread again, and they made the right choice.

The Abu Dhabi thing was totally my personal fanwank--after all, the watcher's council didn't bother to tell Giles about Kendra or Faith. I guess there's no particular reason I should do the writers' work for them, though.

On the soul restoration thing - I always assumed that it wasn't a "soul restoration spell", it was an "Angel soul restoration spell" that the Gypsies wrote. The only reason Willow knew how to cast it was because Jenny Calendar found and translated the original Gypsy stuff, so presumably Willow and Giles didn't know how to generalize it.

The point isn't whether any of these things work for the story, like I said when I first brought it up -- and they didn't affect whether or not I liked the story. They were examples of a certain level of attention to detail being encouraged by the story at first, but not paying off in the long run.

(As far as the Angel-soulification -- I can believe that Giles and Willow didn't know how to generalize the spell in second season, but by fifth, the level of magical ability available makes it seem like an almost trivial thing -- especially when you fold in the kinds of things that are possible on Angel. It's really just an example of the fact that you can't draw too many conclusions about the setting, because not enough of it is consistent, despite all the illusions of worldbuilding.)

http://kevinnowlan.blogspot.com/2010/06/new-mutants-51-hate-mail.html