MovieBob said:
Continanity
This week, Bob examines the insanities of continuity.
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And this is why limited series tend to produce better, more believable characters.
When you begin a story, or a character's run within that story, with
reasonably-predictable timeline in mind, you can create story arcs that have an organic and interesting shape. You can aim for a single "grand climax," steering all events toward it, away from it, back toward it, and eventually
BAM! You're there, and the rest is denouement.
But you can't create that shape unless you know both the beginning and the ending point. You need a finite space in which to work. And having that finite space allows you tell a far more interesting story, because it will have direction, and highs and lows that both
matter. Most importantly, it will have closure.
You know what
does go on and on, for an unpredictable amount of time, with various highs and lows that have little or nothing to do with each other?
Real life. And real life, for the most part, is
fiercely boring. There are highlights, sure, but the rest is eating, sleeping, walking, and pooping. When you hear stories of someone's heroic life, you're reading the highlights, and usually only from a brief period within that life. You're not forced to sit around for the rest of it. Beyond this, you're listening to the story
after the fact, which means there's an ending to that story, even if the person is still alive.
Comic books and soap operas have to be more interesting than real life, which means concocting unlikely or impossible scenarios and grandiose means of having the hero come out on top. Like any good story, there are several mini-climaxes, usually leading up to one big one. But unlike good stories, these series are forced to do the same thing over and over again. It goes one of two ways.
The first way ends with a story having
too many "grand climaxes," such that they're no longer... well... climactic. How many times can you save the world from "certain doom" before it starts to become pedestrian? How many evil twin clone robots can show up before you already have a stock plan for dealing with these things? The extreme example of this one could be called "Friends Syndrome," or "Ross/Rachel Syndrome." Reusing the same climax over and over. They can only be apart/together/apart/together so many times before most folks just quit caring.
The second way continues into over-the-top escalation. The basic idea is the demote the last "grand climax" to a mini-climax on the way to something greater. This could also be called "Dragonball Syndrome." Sure, you just gave your all to defeat the biggest bad around, but
really it was just his human form! Now you have to face him in his
true form! But then, of course, you discover some
new super secret attack (which you should have learned from the beginning, really) which you use to defeat him. And with his dying breath he tells you... that he
isn't the biggest bad. There's another one coming that's bigger and badder, and you're all doomed (again).
Each has to be bigger than the one before, which quickly gets out of hand, because these things tend to grow on a logarithmic scale. Soon, you reach a point where you just have to think, "Well what the hell do we do
now?" And that's how soap operas got vampires.
So characters and stories of an indefinite lifespan lead to stories that either plateau or sore rapidly into completely outrageous places. But guys like Superman and Batman have something else stacked against them when it comes to remaining compelling characters in a grand story: They have outlived their audience (and writers) several times over.
Superman was a product of his generation. People needed that super-capable, super-moral, super-patriotic hero that could never be defeated. Superman was that hero. He was everything good and pure and strong and true. Then, when things calmed down, the new generation found him... well... kinda boring. I mean, nothing was a challenge. Not really. Enter: kryptonite, a handy little doodad that suddenly gave Superman a vulnerability. This bought them some time, of course.
But the fact remains that the generation reading Superman now is not the same as the first. The generation
writing Superman now is not the same as the first. And that means the character has to constantly be "reimagined" into a new version that fits the current generation (see: Emo Clark Kent).
It also means that, in all likelihood, the new generation of writers were fans of the old generation, and they want to recreate the wonder and awe they felt. It's basically fourth-generation
fan fiction at this point. And when you hire fans to continue the project, your project suffers from a sort of "creative incest," and minor flaws propagate from one generation to the next, becoming noticeable deformities.
It ends up this way because we get to a point where we don't want to create new heroes and try to, once again, get people invested in them. The old guys are a security blanket. The name and face, and what it used to represent, will carry the product. Consequently, while the writers cling to this security blanket, audiences will follow suit. With all the hundreds of new heroes being created in this information age (where
every Joe can get his goods to market), they'll tend not to risk it. They'll stick with the tried-and-true for as long as they're out there.
So instead of compelling stories with a beginning, middle, climax, and end, possibly with several lesser stories woven into the middle, we get reboots, alternate universes, retcons, hideously exaggerated conflicts, and any other means of reusing the same heroes over and over and over. Of these options, I really think reboots are the best--you get a chance to wipe the slate clean and start the story again.
But if you don't set a destination, you're only delaying the day where the "son" becomes the "father" again. Let heroes die. Let them retire. Above all, let some stories
end.
(And speaking of shoddy DC continuity, does
anyone have a clear, concise origin for Catwoman? I mean seriously.)
![Fr]anc[is](https://eg-forums-escapist-data.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com/data/avatars/l/93/93202.jpg?1620797781){kind=avatar}
. But the french BD are a different thing, a case of parallel evolution of the comic-book and I dare say they treat their readers with more respect and less spandex suits