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Brian Hague
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 14 November 2006
Posts: 8515
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| Posted: 11 February 2018 at 4:23pm | IP Logged | 1
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Robbie, that is a great analogy.
I've long thought that the "Tangent" skip-month event DC did years ago should have been the blueprint to the post-Crisis universe. Keep the names and a few other items for the sake of the legalities, but then just come roaring out of the gate with a whole new slew of characters and concepts, some close to the originals, some not, but making the whole new arrangement at least as different from the pre-existing one as the Silver Age was from the Golden.
The fans would have screamed bloody murder, but hey, if you don't want Pre-Crisis style DC, then here is something entirely different. You said you wanted different, right?
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Robbie Parry
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 17 June 2007
Location: United Kingdom
Posts: 12186
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| Posted: 11 February 2018 at 4:25pm | IP Logged | 2
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Thanks, Brian. :)
Rick Whiting wrote:
| Frankly, I think that the Big 2 should grow a pair and be straight up blunt with the fans and fans turned pro, and let them know up front that they will be retconning out of continuity (without any in story explanation) and ignoring any past or future stories that do not work regardless of how popular or critically acclaimed those said past stories were. |
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I have seen letters columns from 50s and 60s comics. And whilst the editors were friendly enough, they didn't suffer fools gladly. I have seen some shared via social media. Letters asking about Clark's glasses or why this or that didn't happen were answered in a blunt way (blunt to the letter-writer, but not blunt as far as I am concerned).
Good!
That's the approach needed for today. If John Doe writes in to pedantically take apart some minor continuity error, then the editor needs to either come up with a witty answer or dismiss it.
I always felt that as far as comics are concerned, we're the "passengers on a carriage" but the editors/creative personnel are the "drivers of the carriage". They control the "reins/horses". Yes, we're along for the ride, and what a pleasant ride it will be, but we shouldn't take control of the "reins/horses". That's not our job.
And if we're unhappy, we simply step outside the "carriage". But what seems to happen at times is that some try and take control of the "reins".
I wonder how much the concept of the No-Prize contributed to pedantic behaviour from some readers. Chicken or egg? Did the No-Prize create pedantic fans or did pedantic fans latch on to the No-Prize and, well, get worse over time? Because whilst it might have started off as fun ("Wonder Man had yellow glasses in one panel, blue in another and I think that was due to...), it might have morphed into something much more pedantic, affecting other areas of fandom.
I could be wrong.
Edited by Robbie Parry on 11 February 2018 at 4:27pm
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Greg Kirkman
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 12 May 2006
Location: United States
Posts: 15775
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| Posted: 11 February 2018 at 4:59pm | IP Logged | 3
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It can be a fine line between fans inappropriately exercising a sense of ownership over characters and stories they don’t own, and their calling out creative teams who don’t know what they’re doing, or are disrespectfully running beloved characters into the ground.
Edited by Greg Kirkman on 11 February 2018 at 4:59pm
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Robbie Parry
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 17 June 2007
Location: United Kingdom
Posts: 12186
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| Posted: 11 February 2018 at 5:36pm | IP Logged | 4
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I agree, Greg. Obviously, a post such as mine cannot begin to cover the nuances of everything (not unless anyone wants to read thirty paragraphs). ;-)
I mean, if someone decided to reveal that Captain America had been a drunk-driving armed robber during his teenage years, and wanted it made canon, I'd be resisting that!
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Michael Casselman
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 14 January 2006
Location: United States
Posts: 1217
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| Posted: 11 February 2018 at 6:56pm | IP Logged | 5
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I wonder how much the concept of the No-Prize contributed to pedantic behaviour from some readers. Chicken or egg? Did the No-Prize create pedantic fans or did pedantic fans latch on to the No-Prize and, well, get worse over time? Because whilst it might have started off as fun ("Wonder Man had yellow glasses in one panel, blue in another and I think that was due to...), it might have morphed into something much more pedantic, affecting other areas of fandom.
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In the long run, they would have best been served by ignoring (and CERTAINLY not printing) any and every letter that came in pointing out every piddling error and inconsistency. Once you encourage the laser-focused obsession with the details, you open yourself up to the archeology-mentality of that faction of the readership that ends up becoming the archeologist-comic-pro.
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Robbie Parry
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 17 June 2007
Location: United Kingdom
Posts: 12186
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| Posted: 11 February 2018 at 7:00pm | IP Logged | 6
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Very true, Michael.
I'm not suggesting it's the "chicken", it could well have been the "egg" instead, but both in US titles and UK reprints, I have seen some anal letters about such things. Many years ago, Panini Comics (the successor to Marvel UK) had one issue where the editor said something like, "Can we do away with the really pedantic and minute No-Prize attempts?" It was getting silly.
I think it's been a factor, even if only a small one.
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Adam Schulman
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 22 July 2017
Posts: 1717
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| Posted: 11 February 2018 at 10:22pm | IP Logged | 7
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CRISIS was a crap story with great art, I agree.
That said, Roy Thomas's "I'm really my own daughter" origin story for the second Black Canary in JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA almost justified CRISIS all on its own. Anything to make that story non-canonical, please!
(I'm really my own daughter...hence, I remember making love to my own father...yikes...Roy didn't think that one through at all...)
I suppose there was a case for "smooshing" Earths 1 and 2 together and erasing some "doppelgangers" so that DC writers would stop mixing up which characters were supposed to exist on which Earth. Certainly a case for rewriting Wonder Woman's history so that one single version of Diana was a JSA member in the 1940s, then went back to Paradise Island, then went back to the U.S. and rescued Donna Troy, then later was a founding JLA member.
I mean, Diana was a victim of so many bad scripts that declaring all of them non-canonical would've been just fine.
Superman's history just needed a little tweaking so in time everyone would forget about the most silly parts, like the "Superbaby in the orphanage" bit, or everyone knowing that Superboy was from Smallville and yet no one could figure out where he lived.
And the "look" of Jor-El and Lara could've changed so as not to be stuck in the Buck Rogers 1930s. But no need to rewrite Krypton's whole history -- just don't do any more stories about Krypton! And I say this as someone who loved JB's THE WORLD OF KRYPTON.
(The more I think about it, the more I realize JB is right -- most of what he wanted to do with Superman could've been done without "negating" most of what had been established during the Mort Weisinger and Julius Schwartz years.)
I think eliminating the whole DC multiverse was a mistake -- parallel Earth stories can be fun, folks! -- but I would've been fine with a story that made everyone -- really everyone -- forget its existence, much as almost everyone in the DCU forgot by late 1986, and then, say, ten years later, real time, we find out that the multiverse still exists, minus a few parallel universes. It was just inaccessible by anyone, even Barry Allen or Wally West or Johnny Quick of the Crime Syndicate, who didn't remember it anyway.
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Adam Schulman
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 22 July 2017
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| Posted: 11 February 2018 at 10:24pm | IP Logged | 8
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That's the approach needed for today. If John Doe writes in to pedantically take apart some minor continuity error, then the editor needs to either come up with a witty answer or dismiss it.
***
Or not print John Doe's letter in the first place.
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Brian O'Neill
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 13 November 2013
Location: United States
Posts: 1964
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| Posted: 12 February 2018 at 4:07am | IP Logged | 9
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Adam Shulman, you make some great points about that hideous mess in JLA 219-220. Roy Thomas wrote some great stuff before and after that, but I don't know what he was smoking when he came up with that!
(Interestingly, Gerry Conway was credited as 'co-plotter' on that story, just a few months after he left the title following a 5-year run, with two 'filler' issues in between. Presumably, the Black Canary angle was all Roy's doing, and Conway was just there to get the story to that point).
On your point about Wonder Woman, didn't the TV show do something simialr to account for her longevity(while Steve Trevor's son was a double for his father, and so there was no need to recast!)
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Adam Schulman
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 22 July 2017
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| Posted: 12 February 2018 at 7:38am | IP Logged | 10
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Brian -- yep. And it worked. DC should've embraced the idea in 1987!
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John Byrne
Grumpy Old Guy
Joined: 11 May 2005
Posts: 132263
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| Posted: 12 February 2018 at 9:11am | IP Logged | 11
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That's the approach needed for today. If John Doe writes in to pedantically take apart some minor continuity error, then the editor needs to either come up with a witty answer or dismiss it.*** Or not print John Doe's letter in the first place. •• Best solution. First time I heard the term "circular file" was in reference to letters the editors decided not to print. Which, by the way, was most of them. And those which did get printed were often heavily edited, to turn them into something comprehensible. (On writer/editor fell into the habit of composing his lettercols by simply sending in three or four typed letters, usually without even reading them. Ultimately, someone pointed out that many of the letters were actually unusable. Being typed did not make them intelligent.)
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Dave Phelps
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 16 April 2004
Location: United States
Posts: 4178
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| Posted: 17 February 2018 at 12:14pm | IP Logged | 12
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Eric Sofer wrote:
| A few topics seem to be heavy with discussion of the Crisis on Infinite Earths, Infinite Crisis, Ultimate universe, etc. So let's talk about it. What got your goat about these/ |
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Kind of a loaded question there… :-)
Crisis - I'm pretty good with it actually. I was the right age (12) when it came out and, while I lost a beloved childhood favorite in the aftermath (All-Star Squadron), the DC that followed was a nice place to be. I wish they weren't quite so anti-continuity at times - did they really have to kick off that Deadman mini-series right at the end of Brave and the Bold #86 and negate most of his intervening appearances? - but a lot of good stuff came out around then. I liked Barry, but having Wally inherent the mantle was something that had never been done before and that was exciting. I didn't think the Multiverse was hard to understand and questioned the need to get rid of it, but the only thing the Multiverse really did for me was enable a variety of characters to interact and, well, they're all on the same planet now and can interact all they want. The older I get, the more I notice the flaws, but I still like it.
That said, it's the textbook example of a story you do once and then Never Again. Which brings us to...
Zero Hour - kind of an in-continuity patch for the post-Crisis hiccups. Nothing particularly against it, but nothing particularly for it either, and I think they were needlessly rough on the JSA.
Infinite Crisis - the sort of culmination of a storyline that started with the outright disturbing Identity Crisis (seriously, what is wrong with these people), continued through Countdown (or "hey, lets make Blue Beetle feel worthless and then shoot him in the head") and four lead-in mini-series (okay, those were kind of fun and brought back some decent characters) all for a series that boiled down to "I didn't like John Byrne's decision to not fully power up Clark Kent until high school or George Perez' decision to not backdate Wonder Woman's debut and it's very important that We Fix That" with a touch of self-righteousness (and, yet, a complete lack of self-awareness) for good measure. Meanwhile, virtually all the major events of the series were designed to hearken back to equivalent events in the first Crisis, which made the whole exercise seem even more masturbatory.
The One Year Later exercise that followed killed any lingering feelings I had that the post-Crisis DC should have been better thought out with a more unified front. Some series did okay with it, but for the rest it was an annoying hiccup at best for no real useful purpose. (I did like 52, but not THAT much.)
Final Crisis - disjointed mess, and I didn't care for them bringing back Barry Allen. And yet another "it's always darkest before the dawn" story that's completely pointless because there's never any dawn.
FlashPoint - no opinions on it creatively because I didn't read it, but using it as a mechanism for rebooting the DC universe struck me as being incredibly douchey, all the more so because it left virtually the entire line as it stood at te time hanging. Some series manage to squeeze in a proper conclusion, but most it was just a page or so of a "final thought" and that was it (at best). It just felt like DC was telling their entire current readership to go f- themselves. They can restart their line all they want, but at least give the old versions a proper farewell first. (It didn't help that they decided Johns and Morrison should be able to finish their Green Lantern and Batman runs "properly" so those characters more or less continued as they were. Kind of defeats the purpose of a line-wide reboot.)
Meanwhile, on the Marvel side...
Ultimate Universe - the reason I went from being generally indifferent to reboots to outright not caring for them. Say what you will about the 80s DC reboots, they tended to introduce their elements and then move forward. With Marvel it felt like they felt the need to do their versions of the classics. So the Green Goblin is throwing MJ off of a bridge, there's some weird story having to do with a Phoenix, etc. At no time did these version come across as "a new incarnation of the characters" for future creators to pick up the baton and run with them. Instead, they were Brian Bendis' Spider-Man or Mark Millar's Avengers, which didn't do much for me. Pretty pictures at times, though.
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