Comic Book Resources

You sir, are the Einstein of Comics. That was brilliant. How many comments to follow will be of the tune “That’s not the way it is! Bitch, bitch, moan, moan” I wonder…

/Don’t eat beef. Eat Deer.

I think there’s a difference between what’s good for comics and what’s good for Marvel and DC superhero comics. Sure the illusion-of-change might be good for keeping the Marvel and DC brand the same over the years, and also perhaps good for any very long-running series, but in general, it’s bad for comics as an artform.

It’s scary how much we agree, it’s like you subscribed to my brain or vice versa. Personally, I believe that Gwen Stacy was the single biggest mistake to ever happen to the Spider-Man mythos, that it irrevocably damaged the character, and deep down Conway knows and regrets it, which is why he made that statement. I think even if you add up all those modern changes you mentioned to Spider-Man, it still pales in comparison to the shift in tone that hit Spider-Man from the death of Gwen Stacy.

And later writers have backpedaled from that major change in just about every medium by turning Mary Jane into a Gwen stand-in. The modern MJ was revealed to have been only pretending to be a wild and crazy party girl, and suddenly her personality is just like Gwen’s. Brian Bendis does Ultimate Spider-Man and Mary Jane is reimagined as a brainy straitlaced classmate of Peter’s…Gwen anyone? Mary Jane’s old tough party girl role is taken this time around by Ultimate Gwen, who is promptly killed. It’s like Bendis is making a subtle commentary that the wrong character was killed the first time around, and this time he knocks off the party girl. Kirsten Dunst is basically playing Gwen Stacy, except pursuing acting instead of science.

“I think there’s a difference between what’s good for comics and what’s good for Marvel and DC superhero comics. Sure the illusion-of-change might be good for keeping the Marvel and DC brand the same over the years, and also perhaps good for any very long-running series, but in general, it’s bad for comics as an artform.”

Why? Real change doesn’t necessarily mean good comics. Illusion of change doesn’t necessarily mean bad. The 90s had a ton of real changes that totally sucked. Just look at the ramifications of the Avengers Crossing or Daredevils costume and secret ID change and tell me those were classic stories that stand the test of time.

Just to clarify — I WAS talking about Marvel and DC superheroes, mainly. I love indie books but this Grand New Theory doesn’t really apply to them. Those creators are beholden to no one, they’re not handing off their characters to another set of hands down the road.

It just got tiresome always typing ‘mainstream superhero comics’ and I didn’t always do it. But that’s what I meant.

I really doubt that Iron Spidey and all that will ever count as Real Change once they’re undone in a couple months or with the next writer’s run. Precious few things have ramifications anymore. I’m not sure if that should bother me or not.

What I do know is that I loved that zany electric blue Superman and I just picked up a few issues of it in the quarter bins at the con today. For me, that’s nostalgia, even if it wasn’t quite ten years ago. Yeah. Weird.

I agree entirely with the theory.

I am, however, something of an anomoly in your theory, as I got into comics post crisis, yet I am still an “Illusion of Change” person. I grew up on married Spidey, the David Michelinie era, and I think those comics were pure illusion of change. They just kept swapping window dressing. Sure, you had villains or supporting cast dying off sometimes, but A) dead was most assuredly NOT dead, and B) it never affected the series beyond three or four issues.

I think I just like my illusion of change done really well. As in, people could easily mistake it for change, if they don’t delve too deeply. I mean, when Aunt May’s fiancee died during the Return of the Sinister Six, sure, it was sad and all… but did it change the series much? And how long before she started dating Willie Lumpkin? Same with villains dying. I loved Kraven’s Last Hunt, one of my favourite Spidey stories ever, but it doesn’t change SPIDEY much at all. He is fine a month later. Same with Harry dying.

Another thing is your list of “real change” that has happened to Spidey in the last few years. Some of them, I would argue, are not “real” changes, as they would be so easy to undo. Aunt May finding out the secret is a big one, can’t undo that without somethign really stupid (another actress?). Organic webshooters, hard to undo. However, being an Avenger, wearing armor, and teaching high school are all things that could be easily, and fairly reasonably, taken away with one hard-luck issue. No more permanent than any of the myriad of apartments Peter has lived in. Sins Pasts is tricky, and would be sort of hard to get rid of, but… well, it’s odd, since most of the things one would want to undo happened as retcons… it seems like it would be fairly “easy” to un-retcon them.

I will admit, I am scared that JMS will unmask Spidey. I am holding out hope that there will be some sort of attack or something to stop him. This would definately be a genie that would be hard to put back you-know-where.

Gerry Conway wrote alot of the first comics I read as a kid and I always did feel he was a bit under-rated as a writer. Sure, he had some pretty lackluster ideas now and then (JLA Detroit gets panned alot) but he wrote a ton of series and some of them are really a joy to read even today.

My views tend to mirror yours from what I can tell. I just think it would be nice if there were more of mix of approaches by the main two companies than there appears to be. I really don’t see why Superman can’t be handled one way and Swamp Thing another, other than the goofy “inter-universal continuity” thing. But then I also think the two companies LIKE having both sets of fans arguing with each other. What’s Quesada like to say? “Any publicity is good publicity as long as it gets people talking” or something like that?

Well, my thoughts on Gwen Stacy’s death are available elsewhere, so I’ll simply say here that I broadly agree with your interpretations of that particular case.

The basic problem with ‘Real Change” in serial adventure characters — maybe “infinite series” would be a more elegant term?” — is that almost all of them achieve success via the discovery of a winning formula. It happens in other media too, of course: look at James Bond, a franchise that has heretofore survived four decades and five lead actors with largely superficial changes to what remains the same setup and plot in each film.

Real change works much better in stories that will legitimately end. Leaving aside continuity as an issue quite specific to superheroes and soaps as genres, how many characters in classic adventure fiction undergo real change? Where’s the big turning point or change in character in the Sherlock Holmes stories or permanently tips the balance of power in H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulu Mythos? What long-lasting plot developments in the Simpsons constitute real and noticeable, as opposed to meaningless or superficial, change? What are the key plot moments that forever altered Dick Tracy’s comic-strip adventures?

Such stuff succeeds not because the plot moves along with sheer interest, but instead because the stripped-down and eternal nature of the underlying situation of the characters are so simple and unadorned as to be almost infinitely interpretable. Their artistic impact works through this illusion of immediacy nearly every reader or viewer feels upon encountering them. They’re raw and archetypal if you’re a cultural universalist; more accurately, I’d say that they’re well-polished mirrors that show us what we want to see of ourselves and our circumstances in them.

The unchangeability and shallowness of the basic concepts in every case inspire us as readers and viewers to layer our own concepts and meanings onto them, to make metaphor. More plot data and the thematic sophistication of a different sort that ongoing and lasting change generates would simply get in the way of this type of art. It’s not “junk art,” it’s not “low art,” it’s simply streamlined culture as opposed to worked or complex art.

And I daresay that most of us need both types of art: novels AND fables, Symbolisme AND basic allegory, magical realism AND ineffable myth, and, yeah, Jimmy Corrigan AND superhero comics. The inferiority complex of comics really shows itself in these kinds of debates, because it seems to be only comics fans who spend time obsessing over the “outside” or “public” perception of comics themselves. In every other medium, the simpler art and the more complex art coexist without this kind of deep anxiety. We don’t demand that children’s books, potboilers, and the like be banished from bookstores because ; no one tries to shut down summer blockbusters on the grounds that they hurt the reputation of a medium that also includes Oscar-caliber stuff or arthouse movies. Of course, both prose and film had their periods of being ghettoized and fulminated against; they simply outlasted the perception. Comics will as well.

I agree that comics must keep growing as a medium, and frankly, they are growing, at least artistically. Imagine David Mack comics twenty years ago. Imagine pre-insanity Dave Sim comics in the 1930s or 40s. Imagine Will Eisner comics in the days of cigarette card strips and the Yellow Kid. It can’t be reasonably done; it’s like wondering why no one made Citizen Kane before 1941 or Breathless before the 1950s. Comics have expanded their range of techniques and subject matter prodigiously ever since their inception. They’re still doing so. What it will take is less breast-beating and artistic policing, and a lot less complaining about what’s commercially successful at present. Not many innovative or “important” movies or novels are bestsellers in the way the simpler stuff is. It’s the long run that tells, and the long run that legitimates a medium. And with bookstores stocking TPBs and manga, a Hollywood infatuation with everything from Jack Kirby to Harvey Pekar, and increasing coverage in publications like the New Yorker and Harper’s, comics are coming along just fine.

(I also wonder if it’s really possible, in the long run, to achieve it in any property that becomes “mainstream” or at least popular. Even finite series or one-off stories that manage that kind of success find themselves endlessly retranslated and adapted with minimal change to the major elements — the endless Shakespeare remakes and “updated versions” are our version of this, just as Shakespeare’s plays are themselves simply stylistically more sophisticated adaptations of still older stories and other peoples’ plays.)

Well, I’m gonna diverge from the crowd a bit here and point out a couple things where I think this theory isn’t quite gelling. Not for me, at least. First of all, it’s fiction. So none of the changes are actually “real”.

Second of all, I think it’s time we stopped looking at retconning as this inherently bad stigmatized thing and started to acknowledge it as a common device in comic book storytelling. It happens, let’s get used to it. Better yet, let’s admit to ourselves that in a few rare cases, retconning has been good.

And since it does exist, and it is common, and it can be good… We’re back to my original point that the “real” changes aren’t all that “real” to begin with. No change is so big that it cannot be undone. Conway was pretty radical for some of those statements. But I’d go one step further. It’s not that superheroes aren’t supposed to change. It’s that they simply DON’T and/or CAN’T change. Eventually, everything resets back to zero.

Maybe instead of “real” change we should look at it as “long term” change. Organic Webshooters can easily be undone, but it might take a while longer to phase out than, say, Peter Parker grows a mullet.

Or how about “fundamental” (ie We all knew Superman wasn’t going to STAY blue, but I’m sure we can all agree that it was a change on a fairly fundamental level).

As always, an interesting (and well-written) read. Good comics criticism will help make good comics. The writing is getting there, and you’re helping lead the way.

Having said that, while I agree with the premise, I think there might be an additional nuance to consider. Both the ‘real change’ and ‘illusion of real change’ camp of superhero comics readers are looking for a similiar type of soap opera in their serial fiction. Soap operas, despite the title, are not necessarily bad or low fiction. Some Spainish telenovelas, for example, revolve around single-season story arcs focused on changes in one or more central characters. Some American science-fiction series (like Battlestar Galactica) have adopted similiar trappings for their serial-fiction.

However, the things that an adult reader/viewer would likely latch onto (namely, certain levels of continuity detail) don’t necessarily translate for kids. For example, ‘Teen Titans Go!’ has largely dispensed with secret identities; each character (like the TV show) has one identity that defines them for the series. A secret identity is a staple of superhero fiction, but isn’t necessary for all superhero stories.

While some fans might argue about which secret identity the Robin from Teen Titans employs (ie, is he REALLY Dick Grayson? Jason Todd? Tim Drake?), there’s a larger portion of fans of THAT iteration of the character that likely don’t care. Since a secret identity isn’t integral to the ‘Teen Titans Go’ iteration of the character, it simply doesn’t matter.

So, then, which is the more ‘real’ version of this fictional character? The Bill Finger version? The WB Kids version? The version currently featured in the title ‘Robin’? Or, like a good Hercules story, are they all simply different takes on a central concept?

Taken a step further, the most ‘non-superhero’ superhero cartoon available is ‘Aqua Teen Hunger Force.’ With this series, continuity is entirely mutable and part of the premise of the show. Characters are routinely killed or changed in a massive way for the sake of whatever absurdist story is being told. By the next story, everything has been reset back to square one.

Which points to something else. Namely, the use of multiple comics lines with different story premises. Spider-Man, again, points the way. While everything said about Spider-Man is true in some of the titles featuring the character, it isn’t necessarily true for the Ultimate Spider-Man version of the character. Or the manga Spider-Man. Or the Indian Spider-Man. For most readers of a superhero comic, the starting point is the iconic image OF that superhero. This creates the identity from which everything else follows, including the stories.

Marvel seems to have largely understood this much to their success. Fans, also, seem to understand this. While DC has seen a tipping of the scales due to “– Crisis”, they also seem to have recognized this with the small experiment of their All-Star Line.

Naturally, all of this mostly only applies to a narrow niche of comics (namely, American-Superhero-Serial Fiction-DC/Marvel).

Good column!

In my experience, people who complain about “real change” are really complaining about “change from the status quo as I knew it.” All the people who pine for the Silver Age never complain about the radical overhaul that was done to the various Golden Age characters, because the Golden Age isn’t what they remember. Organic webshooters? Ha! Superman acquired a fortress of solitude, a fleet of Superman robots, genius-level intellect, super-memory and “super-hypnotism,” the bottle city of Kandor, a super-menagerie of sidekick animals along with his own super-powered cousin, and a variety pack of rainbow-colored kryptonite. Can you imagine any set of changes that radical happening to a major character today? Either they’d all be undone in six months or the fans would lynch the editors. Hell, it seems like half the DC fans on the internet still want to string up John Byrne for rolling back the changes Mort Weisinger made to Superman back in the late 50s.

What’s changed isn’t the writers and their pernicious ideas of “real change” - which, as others have rightly pointed out, usually isn’t real at all - but in readers. At some point comics stopped being a disposable medium and started becoming something you “collect,” with the same readers sticking around for years and even decades. Back in the 30s, 40s and 50s you could change Superman’s powers with little to no explanation and the kids buying the comics didn’t much care - or if they did, they’d soon be replaced with new kids who didn’t know there’d been any change in the first place. With long-term collectors, though, you got new demands for consistent continuity that just weren’t there before - and change, real or imagined, suddenly became a much more dramatic and terrible thing.

I think, adding in my two cents, that Real Change is very important, very vital, and very necessary to comics…and as such should almost never be done.

Here’s what I mean–I once read an essay on horror, where the author talked about the “five percent” rule. He said (and I paraphrase here) that if in the first five percent of the story, there’s a legitimate piece of genuine horror (a dismemberment, a zombie, a whatever) the other ninety-five percent of the time, you don’t have to actually include it because everyone expects it now. So if you show someone get eaten by a shark in the first five minutes, you can get away with very few shark attacks in the story overall, because now everyone’s primed to expect a shark attack every time a character goes swimming.

The same is true with comics and real change. You do need, every once in a while, to throw in a genuine and believable change just to make sure the audience doesn’t feel too safe. The scene at the end of this week’s ASM works because while we’re all saying, “Nah, they’d never publicly reveal that Peter Parker is Spider-Man…” we don’t know anymore, do we? We’re not sure. That cliffhanger is gold because we really don’t know. (My money, and I’m purely speculating here with no inside knowledge, is that he’ll be interrupted by an attack by someone or other, and won’t get the chance to do anything he’ll regret later on.)

So Gwen Stacy needs to die, or how can we believe that MJ’s ever in danger?

But by the same token, real change should be used sparingly. It doesn’t need to be used often–the illusion of change works 95% of the time. And you never know when you might make a real change you’ll regret later on and want to change back (see ‘Clone Saga, The’.) And the changes back are never as good of a story as you’d hope (see ‘Green Lantern: Rebirth’.)

So–while I come down on the side of “Illusion of Change”, I think you need to have the threat of “Real Change” for the illusion to work.

There goes that “Gwen Stacy needed to die” statement again. People say it so much that we take it for granted as true, but why IS it true? It works in the short-run as a close-ended story, but in the long run what positive impact does it have? It becomes something that hangs over the character. Whenever Spider-Man’s adapted into a TV show, cartoon or movie, how to handle Gwen becomes he 800 lb gorilla in the room. It leads to awful clone sagas, endless reprise scenes on bridges, neutering and butchering a spunky, fresh character like MJ into a Gwen-clone just to fill the void.

It was a great, powerful short-term story that should have been told in a What-If tale, not in the mainstream continuity.

“It leads to awful clone sagas, endless reprise scenes on bridges, neutering and butchering a spunky, fresh character like MJ into a Gwen-clone just to fill the void.”

It didn’t necessarily have to lead to awful clone sagas, endless reprise scenes on bridges, etc., any more than marrying MJ to Peter necessarily had to lead to turning MJ into a supermodel. You’re confusing the events themselves with how the writers followed up on those events. It’s not Gerry Conway’s fault that J. Michael Stracyzinsky wrote “Sins Past”, or that the Marvel editors of the 90s launched the “Clone Saga.” At any point in Spider-Man’s post-Gwen history, a clear-minded editor could’ve called for a moratorium on lugubrious bridge scenes and endless callbacks to the Conway story. It’s the follow-through, not the swing.

Gerry Conway himself wrote the first clone saga. And the problem with big changes is that they end up overshadowing everything else about the character and becoming a crutch for lazier writers in the future. A big change is too big to ignore, so you either have to (1) explicitly retcon it, which just complicates everything, (2) implicitly retcon it, like how creators have tried to make Mary Jane into a new hybrid Gwen-MJ or (3) build upon it with more big change stories, which just end up compounding the problem and leading to choices (1) and (2) anyway.

I’m not saying that the Death of Gwen was a bad self-contained story, just that it was damaging in the long run to a franchise that is meant to go on perpetually. Gerry Conway himself HAS to realize the same thing, otherwise what else could he have been talking about in that interview? That’s pretty much the biggest change he’s ever been responsible for in comics, if he thinks big changes are a mistake, it’s pretty much a given that he has to think that was one of the biggest one of all.

Think about if Lois Lane was killed a few years after her introduction by Lex Luthor and how that would have impacted and complicated the whole evolution of the Superman mythos in the long run. Superman has always been uncomplicated and easy to adapt into movies, TV, newspaper strips, whatever: it was always Superman, Lois, Perry, and Jimmy.

Spider-Man on the other hand has a markedly different tone pre-Gwen’s death and post=Gwen’s death. It’s a major “loss of innocence” moments, and is so pivotal that any attempt to return to the levity of the Lee/Ditko and Lee/Romita era rings false. Also it alters the Spider-Man motivation radically. When Uncle Ben dies, it shows Peter that not using his powers can kill his loved ones. Remaining Spider-Man makes sense. Gwen Stacy’s death (and George Stacy’s death as well) are fundamental changes because now loved ones are dying as a direct result of his being Spider-Man. If being SPider-Man now causes death to his loved ones, is his remaining Spider-Man still as noble? Or is it now selfish? The clarity and purity of his motivation is now unnecessarily complicated and muddied.

Furthermore, lazy future writers in an ongoing work-for-hire book are an inevitability. No matter how ideal a future we like to imagine, at some point your favorite character is going to be in the hands of a crappy writer again. That’s another reason why the big change has to be handled with care. With manga like Dragonball or Naruto, big changes work because it only has one creator for the life of the manga. If the writer instituting the big change is good, you’re insured that the aftermath of the big change will also be handled well. Also, the manga will eventually have a definitive end, it’s not expected to exist in perpetuity.

But when you turn Hank Pym into a psycho wife-beater or Tony Stark into an alcoholic or Dick Grayson into a loser with no self-esteem, it’s inevitable that those major changes will end up overshadowing the characters, especially in the hands of the inevitable weak writers that will sooner or later get their hands on the book in the future. The big change ends up defining the character.

It depends to an extent on the concept. Team books can have it both ways. Individual characters can experience change without the actual concept of the book altering - because once a character has completed his arc, you can either start a new one, or write him out and replace him with something else. Groups like the X-Men and the Avengers can provide real change in that way, while the basic concept of the book remains unaltered. (Obviously, this doesn’t apply to titles like Fantastic Four, where it stops being the Fantastic Four if you change the cast.)

Agreed, Paul.

How does your theory apply to, say, a “superhero” character like James Bond? Here’s a character that - over the course of forty years and and handful of different actors - has had numerous “life changing” moments in his movies: new girlfriends dying on him, long-time friends being murdered by organized crime, a terrorist organization he fought for a number of years striking back at him and Britain, and others. Yet, at the start of each movie, Bond is right back in the same place in which he started. Nobody bats an eye - you don’t hear, “How could James Bond sleep with those two women in this latest movie? He was in love with so-and-so, who died so tragically.”

I’m probably in the “illusion of change” camp. I don’t read Batman, Superman or the X-Books, precisely because I don’t want to have to do research every time a character appears on panel. I loved the “Batman Adventures” comic book, because I love the character of Batman but don’t want to have to deal with 19-part stories running through seven comic books. X-Books, same reason - I read Ultimate X-Men because I want an X-Men fix without having to buy fourteen monthly books and three limited series just to keep track of what’s really going on.

But, I also like long-term subplots that deal with deep character issues: JMS’s exploration of Spider-Man’s origins, Peter David’s exploration of G-d in both Supergirl and Fallen Angel, Warren Ellis’s exploration of human nature in Transmetropolitan.

Although, thinking about it, I do read more James Bond type comic books - Ultimate books, the Authority, that have lots of big explosions and a general “status quo ante bellum.”

How does your theory apply to, say, a “superhero” character like James Bond?

Well, that’s the fun of theorizing, isn’t it, is trying to apply it!

My feeling is that this is true of ALL series characters, in comics or out, that are in an open-ended format. James Bond works best as an ‘illusion-of-change’ guy. Ian Fleming certainly knew this — he married off Bond once, you know, but he made damn sure Mrs. Bond was dead by the end of the novel. It was a classic illusion-of-change riff. Bond just works best that way, in prose or in the movies. So do Doc Savage, Captain Kirk and the original Enterprise crew, Tarzan, Conan the barbarian, Sherlock Holmes, Modesty Blaise, Nero Wolfe, Nancy Drew… I’m sure anyone reading this could rattle off a list of their own. The key words here, though, are open-ended format. A premise that is designed to generate endless stories.

Now, if your format is somehow NOT open-ended, then you start to subconsciously piss off or alienate your audience when you treat it as one. Remember how irritated people used to get at the X-Files writers? “Quit jerking us around and EXPLAIN something!” And I can see this same backlash starting to happen with shows like Lost. Because that format is not infinitely open-ended, especially the way they’ve designed that show.

Now, on the other hand, if your unspoken contract with the audience is to simply tell a LONG story in series format — like, say, Tolkien, or “24″ or Harry Potter — then if your audience likes it, they’ll ride along, you can get a lot of mileage that way. But you still have to END at some point, pay off everything you are building to, or you get the same angry backlash. Harry Potter must eventually graduate from Hogwarts, in other words.

The thing I think superhero writers trip over is sometimes they can do a story that has consequences you can’t reset, that changes the basic premise of what you are doing. T. has been very eloquent on the subject of Gwen Stacy being one of those.

Also, kudos to whoever pointed out that part of the problem is that what started as a periodical, disposable entertainment form has suddenly become a ‘keeper’ that the audience can refer back to, like chapters in a novel as opposed to episodes of a TV show. (For that matter, you can see the same change happening with the DVD revolution to episodic TV dramas too.)

I was going to get to that part too, honest, but I thought I was running a bit too long and I think that’s another column all by itself anyway. But it’s a vitally important point. You couldn’t DO a project in comics like “52″ until very recently. Now it’s a given that the audience will be ABLE to follow along, there’s no question of the book not being out there for the people who want it. That was not always the case in comics.

How does your theory apply to, say, a “superhero” character like James Bond?

Bond fans would go apeshit with each new 007 movie if they were anything like comic fans, because what allows for all those drastic changes you mention is the fact that there’s basically no real movie-to-movie continuity in James Bond. Despite a handful of recurring characters and a few scattered references, a shared history is not a key feature of the Bond films. In fact just the opposite: it’s been critical to the longevity of the character that his history doesn’t really matter at all, explaining away three decades’ worth of wild inconsistencies (along with the fact that the character should be pushing seventy by now).

What holds the Bond movies together is shared tone and themes, not shared history. Superhero fans too often make the mistake of clinging to continuity of history, however, which can never be consistent over decades of publishing. Which is why writers shouldn’t worry about making big changes to a character, as long as those changes still leave that character’s themes fundamentally intact. If the changes don’t work, they can be undone, retconned away or forgotten; if they do work, they add variety to a character that would otherwise eventually become stale.

I thought it was obvious–James Bond is a Time Lord. MI6 thinks he’s just been getting plastic surgery, but he’s been regenerating.

Um, back to Gwen…I’m sorry, but I really don’t think it was a mistake. Maybe it was because it was “before my time” (I was about 10 when Secret Wars came out, if it helps people lock down my era of comics), but I don’t think I was reading a Spider-Man fundamentally different from the one that Lee/Ditko did, or one that was confused about what Spider-Man should be, or one that was trapped in that era. I don’t think the series had a “loss of innocence” moment, or that if they did, it was right there in Amazing Fantasy #15. Peter has always joked to cover private pain, he’s always used levity to deal with tragedy, that stuff’s always been there under the surface. Perhaps Gwen’s death was just when you first noticed it.

I think that Gwen had to die to give meaning to Peter’s claims that he can’t let villains know that he’s Peter Parker, or they’ll hurt the people he loves. Think about that claim for a moment, because it’s used in every single comic book everywhere. (Disclaimer: It’s not, actually.) We all just assume it’s true. It’s the driving issue in Civil War. It’s a central trope of superhero books, the notion that a concealed identity is necessary. But without Gwen’s death, it always remained an abstract, unproven threat. After Gwen, we understood in a tangible way that Peter was right–it was necessary to keep Spider-Man a secret, because men like the Green Goblin can never know. It’s the 5%.

I think that yes, they’ve gone back to that well with Spider-Man a few too many times–in particular, in the mid-90s (how many “bridge scenes” were there in 80s Spider-Man?), where they had totally lost any sense of direction on the Spider-books in the tumult of buyouts, mergers, and impending bankruptcies, and editors were essentially telling writers, “We want you to milk Spidey’s most emotional moments for a quick buck,” (and that’s not to blame those editors, either. They, in turn, were dealing with layers of management higher up that were demanding impossible sales increases and immediate returns on their considerable investment.) Those stories left a bad taste in people’s mouths about Gwen, clones, and the Green Goblin in general, and made stories that weren’t mistakes seem like them. (IMHO.)

But all of this is distracting from the main point, that change should be used sparingly. I can use a different example–the Flash. Barry Allen’s death was moving, important, and signified that yes, heroes can die. Permanently. (Hypothesis: Barry Allen is far more interesting as a dead symbol of heroic mortality than he ever was as a living superhero. Discuss.) Wally doing the same thing ten years later, and again ten years after that, signified nothing and shouldn’t have been done for a “Who’s the Flash this week?” stunt. The bodycount in ‘Infinite Crisis’ is much higher than that of ‘Crisis’, and as such means much less…especially since we can feel confident that those characters will come back eventually. Marv Wolfman used death more sparingly, and as a result it had more meaning.

I didn’t start reading comics at the end of 1974, so I basically started reading Spider-man until after Gwen was killed (although I acquired the issues surrounding her death fairly soon after becoming a regular Spider-Mman reader). Nevertheless, I’m generally in the “illusion of change” camp for comic serials of unlimited duration.

However, also I think that the few occasions where permanent change can and probably should occur, mainly to correct flaws in the existing story set-up.

For example, I think the Peter-Gwen-Mary Jane dynamic was more fun and set-up more interesting stories than the Peter-Betty dynamic (which to me, grew rapidly tiresome when I first read the Ditko issues of Spider-man). Love triangles of this sort have been a staple of fiction since humans first started telling stories.

And I agree it was an incredible mistake to kill Gwen, because Gwen’s death killed such a classic love triangle that was still so full of possibilities. For example, I don’t know if it has ever been pointed out before, the choice between Peter’s choice between Gwen and Mary Jane in many ways shows the tension between two sides of Peter Parker: the intellectual “good boy” and the wise-cracking devil-may-care super-hero. Although this triangle was not in place at the beginning of Spider-man, I think that it was an improvement over the original “romantic life” for Peter Parker.

Another example of a triangle that was ruined by a permanent change was Superman marrying Lois, effectively killing a good chunk of the Clark Kent character. The Clark-Superman-Lois triangle was another classic.

One example of a semi-recent permanent change that I think was a good idea was having Aunt May know Peter’s secret identity. On balance, I think Aunt May knowing his identity actually opened some story possiblities, particularly once Peter was not living at home. This would have been even more true if she had been the only one to know Peter’s secret. Once Peter moved out of Aunt May’s home, it always seemed to me a struggle to get her involved in Peter’s life.

However, knowing his identity, Aunt May is effectively always part of Peter’s life and, to me, allows for a stronger Aunt May character to be created i.e. we get to see how she deals constructively with this knowledge, rather than having her just worry about her “helpless” nephew Peter (as she did for years, even though it was quite evident that Peter looked pretty healthy and capable to everyone else in the world).

John, if Gwen Stacy’s death was so pivotal to Spider-Man as far as making her better, why will no later adaptation touch that event with a ten foot pole?

You want that event by event? It’s pretty clear why Fox Kids didn’t adapt the story–they don’t do stories with deaths in them, period. They wouldn’t even let the X-Men kill off Morph unless the writers promised they’d bring him back in a later episode. There was no way they’d ever do a “death of” anyone episode, whether it was good, pivotal, important, or anything. They have network guidelines that say “NOBODY DIES”.

The Spider-Man movie? Because they only have six hours to try to tell the entire forty-plus year story of Spider-Man, and they can’t include everything.

The Ultimate line? Oh, wait. They did.

But as it happens, I think you’re asking the wrong question. Flip it around, and I think it becomes pretty clear why I believe I have a point: If Gwen Stacy was such an important piece of the Spider-Man mythos, and her death was such a mistake, and if the dynamic of the series was permanently ruined by killing her, why is it that Gwen Stacy’s only ever shown up in one adaptation of the Spider-Man mythos, and they killed her off there too? Seems to me that she’s magnificently irrelevant to Spider-Man’s life story, apart from being a useful object lesson on the dangers of dating super-heroes.

In short, Gwen is like Barry Allen–she’s a more important, interesting, and symbolic character dead than she ever was alive.

“In short, Gwen is like Barry Allen–she’s a more important, interesting, and symbolic character dead than she ever was alive.”

I’m not sure I agree with that. What does Gwen actually symbolise? You might say that she represents what happens if Spider-Man fails to get the job done… but doesn’t Uncle Ben already serve that role? More recent adaptations have felt able to dispense with her entirely - the Ultimate books only pay lip service to her by using a character of the same name in a different role, while the films just slot Mary Jane into her place.

Gwen, as a character, doesn’t stand for anything that the book particularly needs. At best she’s a hyped-up version of something Uncle Ben already provided. The death of Gwen Stacy is usually wheeled out as a “death of innocence” signifier, but that’s really because it represents a style shift in superhero comics - one of the reasons why her death is sometimes cited as the symbolic end of the Silver Age. She’s really a symbol of the way the superhero genre has changed over time - something which is meaningless to non-fans, and understandably omitted from adaptations aimed at a mainstream audience.

“The Ultimate line? Oh, wait. They did. :)”

No they didn’t. They created a character called “Gwen Stacy,” but it wasn’t Gwen at all. It was the classic “bad girl” MJ. Then they promptly killed her and swept her under the carpet. Meanwhile, Ultimate MJ is the one who actually acts like Gwen. And she’s left alive. Can you tell me anything about Ultimate Gwen’s personality that’s remotely like mainstream Gwen’s personality? Meanwhile Mary Jane is portrayed as “Brainy Janey?” It’s obvious that Ultimate MJ fulfills the role of the original Gwen. The way Bendis does it is no longer a major change but rather now a minor change.

“But as it happens, I think you’re asking the wrong question. Flip it around, and I think it becomes pretty clear why I believe I have a point: If Gwen Stacy was such an important piece of the Spider-Man mythos, and her death was such a mistake, and if the dynamic of the series was permanently ruined by killing her, why is it that Gwen Stacy’s only ever shown up in one adaptation of the Spider-Man mythos, and they killed her off there too? Seems to me that she’s magnificently irrelevant to Spider-Man’s life story, apart from being a useful object lesson on the dangers of dating super-heroes. ”

They don’t reference Gwen because the name has been permanently associated with a depressing event that is uncomfortable to handle. But I’ve addressed your point already: the proof that she’s important is that in just about every adaptation, in the mainstream MArvel Universe, in the Ultimate Universe, Mary Jane has now been turned into Gwen. The classic Mary Jane character has been dead for decades. As soon as Conway himself killed her, he introduced the Gwen clone to appease angry fans. He killed Peter Parker’s Lois Lane and realized eventually what a mistake that was.

Also, the Mary Jane in the movies bears little resemblance to the Marvel Universe MJ, prior to the death of Gwen as well. The death of Gwen eventually resulted in a major transformation of the Silver Age MJ character as she had to take on more of Gwen’s qualities.

The MJ in the movies has a backstory (abusive father, growing up next door to Peter during her childhood, etc.) that is actually more similar to the Ulimate MJ than to the Marvel Universe MJ. Except for being an actrees, the movie version of MJ is almost nothing like the pre-death of Gwen MJ.

Gwen Stacy died 1973. Unless you want to claim a significant part of today’s readers is above 40 (i.e. enough to make up a fraction worth speaking of, i.e. the no-change guys) there are no people left from an age of innocence. (Which - as moose n squirrel rightly pointed out in Superman’s case - never was.)
In other words, everyone we are talking about (=majority of internet fandom) came after “real change” started to happen and hence all that “divides” them is preference. Which certainly varies, but I for one have yet to see opinions break down neatly into the two categories of your theory. Those make for easy stereotyping, but upon closer inspections complaints about any change rarely break down into pro/contra real change. In my experiece that is. Sure, there are cases where a change exceeds the general comfort zone for change of any one reader, and in those cases the above dichotonymy might make sense (though even here I’d hold it’s a individual rather than a general threshold), but in many cases people also complain about poor, inconsistent writing, violations of established character traits and th like. And not everyone who likes a particular change (again, regardless of one’s position on the overall real to illusionary change continuum) likes it for the “right” reason.
For instance, my own preference for Spiderman’s black costume is entirely unrelated to my general preference for “real” change and 100% rooted in my poorly developed sense of aestetics. To me, it just looks cool.

Just to clear up a basic misconception that some people here are repeating: MJ had an abusive father and spent a lot of her youth living with her Aunt Anna next door to Peter in the comics, courtesy of Gerry Conway’s Parallel Lives GN. That’s the source of the revelation that MJ knew Peter was Spider-Man almost from the beginning — she saw him go out to window to confront he Burglar the night Uncle Ben was killed, and part of why she avoided dating Peter for awhile in the old Ditko issues was explained by her uncertainty about who the ‘real” Peter was.

They created a character called “Gwen Stacy,” but it wasn’t Gwen at all. It was the classic “bad girl” MJ.

That’s a fairly radical oversimplification. The “old” MJ was a party girl with a troubled backstory, not - as Ultimate Gwen was - an outright delinquent with a “shot at redemption” storyline. Neither the Mary Jane nor the Gwen of the early seventies maps directly onto their own (or each others’) Ultimate counterparts. There exist more than two “girlfriend” character types.

“t to clear up a basic misconception that some people here are repeating: MJ had an abusive father and spent a lot of her youth living with her Aunt Anna next door to Peter in the comics, courtesy of Gerry Conway’s Parallel Lives GN. That’s the source of the revelation that MJ knew Peter was Spider-Man almost from the beginning — she saw him go out to window to confront he Burglar the night Uncle Ben was killed, and part of why she avoided dating Peter for awhile in the old Ditko issues was explained by her uncertainty about who the ‘real” Peter was.”

Yes, a big retcon. But think about what the point of that retcon is. It’s basically to explain to readers that Mary Jane wasn’t what she appeared to be on the surface: a happy go lucky, superficial party girl. She had more depth and compassion and empathy, similar to Gwen. Just another example of how MJ was remolded to fill the void left by Gwen’s death. Look at the original issues and none of that intent of an abusive father or emotional depth existed. Even in her thought bubbles, MJ was exactly what she appeared to be on the surface, a hot, shallow, superficial party girl. Another example that Conway realized he made a mistake. Changing MJ into Gwen was just a way to bring Gwen back without actually bringing her back.

I’m sorry again, but I don’t see where you’re…well, not where you’re coming from, but where you’re going to, really. You’re saying that Gwen’s death caused MJ to grow up, to become less superficial and shallow, and to become a more interesting and sympathetic character–and that, in sum, every other interpretation of MJ since has used the later, more developed and three-dimensional character and not the former vapid, brainless partygirl.

Then you’re saying that move was a mistake.

Still disagreeing with you, here.

I have to agree with Paul, Marcus, & John here. I was born in 1981, and like many after me, I’ve barely seen Gwen in a story. The only ones I’ve read with her in it are Spider-Man Blue and Deadpool #11. To the majority of comic fans today (and in growing number), I think she really means nothing now. The overuse of her death to manipulate emotions mostly rang hollow and I really know nothing abut her, nor am I that interested, as she’s only had impact to Spidey in her death.

SIDENOTE (Gwen did appear in the animated series - I saw pictures of her when I was searching for images for a custom figure I’m working on).

We have a more mature MJ, who wasn’t “molded” to Gwen, but that grew up and has a more developed character. She isn’t Gwen written with MJ’s picture (although it’s entirely possible that a few bad writers have tried to do so).

Neither of the Ultimate girlfriends are anythig like their counterparts, nor are a lot of Ultimate characters (Colossus, Doc Ock, etc…). It seems silly to flat out declare that Ultimate MJ is Gwen, unless Bendis has said that’s what he was going for. Otherwise, you have nothing to back you up but your opinion of how a character should be written. This is just what happens when different writers getthe same characters.

Brilliant!!

Keep up the good work.

“I’m sorry again, but I don’t see where you’re…well, not where you’re coming from, but where you’re going to, really. You’re saying that Gwen’s death caused MJ to grow up, to become less superficial and shallow, and to become a more interesting and sympathetic character–and that, in sum, every other interpretation of MJ since has used the later, more developed and three-dimensional character and not the former vapid, brainless partygirl.

Then you’re saying that move was a mistake.”

Yes. because it took away everything that made Mary Jane fun and unique in order to turn her into a Gwen clone. You get something that pleases no one. She’s now this weak amalgam character that’s not quite together as Gwen but not quite as wild and out there as the real MJ. Personally, I liked Gwen as the smart, mature one and Mary Jane as the bad girl, party animal. I really don’t think her maturation is a move up, it took away what made the character unique, so no I don’t think it’s an improvement. But since the writers and editors realized that killing Gwen is a mistake and they needed to find a way to fill the void she left, they decided to use Mary Jane to do it.

Look at the book after Gwen left, it basically became like Three’s Company after Suzanne Somers left or Charlie’s Angels after Farrah Fawcett left: a revolving door of auditions. It’s just Pete alone in an apartment with no direction and uninspiring girlfriend after uninspiring girlfriend, until they eventually brought back MJ and turned her into a pale Gwen imitation. The “real” MJ, Deb Whitman, Marcy Kane, Black Cat, none of them worked as well as Gwen. So now we have “Pseudo-Gwen” MJ, which makes one think that if we had to suffer through all those years of lackluster supporting characters just to end up with a pseudo-Gwen anyway, what was so good about killing off the original?

Do you think the Superman franchise would have benefited long-term from killing off Lois Lane 10 years after his inception?

“I was born in 1981, and like many after me, I’ve barely seen Gwen in a story. The only ones I’ve read with her in it are Spider-Man Blue and Deadpool #11.”

So how can you comment on whether her death impacted the books negatively? You don’t know about the tone of the books before her death, so you aren’t able to compare the before and after.

Plus, if you’re only exposure to Gwen is a Jeph Loeb story, I doubt you got a good depiction.

“Do you think the Superman franchise would have benefited long-term from killing off Lois Lane 10 years after his inception?”

No. But, nor do I think that the writers would have left Superman / Clark Kent without a female presence for the next sixty years, either. After your comment, T. Said:

“So how can you comment on whether her death impacted the books negatively? You don’t know about the tone of the books before her death, so you aren’t able to compare the before and after.”

…which is true, in a hypothetical death of Lois Lane in 1950-ish time. Would that have been the time that Lana Lang was introduced? Or, possibly, a never-thought-of female character that turned into a Lois Lane-type later on? It’s hard to say.

For the time that Lois Lane was created, I think there would have been an “illusion of change” moment. If Lois herself didn’t come back, they would have introduced a character that was close enough to be indistinguishable to Lois Lane.

“So how can you comment on whether her death impacted the books negatively? You don’t know about the tone of the books before her death, so you aren’t able to compare the before and after.

Plus, if you’re only exposure to Gwen is a Jeph Loeb story, I doubt you got a good depiction. ”

I’m not saying whether or not it impacted them negatively.

I’m saying that to the vast majority of readers, it doesn’t matter because she’s been gone so long. Most (including myself) have never read her character, so she doesn’t make an impact apart from being a ghost.

All that is seen of Gwen anymore is poorly written comics that go for a cheap emotional response by referencing a death that the target audience has no emotional ties to. She’s not relevant to Spider-Man anymore. As was said in the previous discussion on Spidey’s marriage, he should be able to move on with his life by now, rather than thinking of Gwen every time some trivial crap happens in his life.

Of course, I didn’t get a good depiction from a Jeph Loeb story. This doesn’t make me want to see her though.

From the Spider-Man story reprinted in Deadpool, Gwen seemed just as much the party girl as MJ. Neither seemed to be written with any personality whatsoever. That’s why I don’t see her as too much of a loss.

Apropos of nothing, it occurs to me that Pete’s been married to MJ in the comics for almost twice as long as Gwen’s character was alive.

If Gwen hadn’t been killed off, I’m not so sure she’d even be considered such an important character in the Spidey mythos. She wasn’t an “original cast member”, she was just the latest in a string of love interests for Peter, following Betty and Liz. It was killing her off that cemented her as “Peter’s one true love” in the eyes of many fans. I also wonder if her death was an attempt to push the book back closer to the original version of the character- the post-Ditko, Romita-era Peter had become a handsome guy with a steady girl and a gang of friends. He still had to deal with cashflow problems and Aunt May’s health, but he wasn’t the loser of the original stories. Gwen’s death gave the book a fresh shot of pathos.

I always liked MJ much better than Gwen. She had much better dialogue- at least when Stan was writing. Gwen always seemed a bit vanilla, like Betty from the Archie books or Lana Lang. Who’d pick any of them over Veronica, Lois, or MJ? Those girls had some moxie.

Brilliant!

I agree on all counts.

One point I would add is that this isn’t necessarily a Marvel/DC issue, but more of an Old Established Character issue. Old established characters with a notebook full of history should not be changed much.

They’ve survived for decades of continuous publishing for a reason. All that’s really needed is to tweak things now and then to keep the characters modern. In the seventies, Clark Kent dabbled in television news and later, Peter Parker moved on to college, then to graduate school. That’s fine.

What doesn’t need to happen is constant change for the sake of change. If every change was permanent, many characters would soon lose the facets that made them successful in the first place. That’s fine for fans who have read those characters for a decade or more and who remember what once was. That’s not so fine for fans who pick up their first issue of a certain comic which had endured constant change for three years. Daredevil isn’t really Daredevil; he’s a Daredevil who’s undergone big major change after big major change. The costume’s the same, but the man is very different.

Luckily, there’s room enough for everything in comics. Writers who want to craft real, lasting change can work on non-OEC titles or independent titles. For instance, when Bendis changed Spider-Woman, who gave a flying flick. SW was dead to the world, and no one had her comics hanging on the wall. But when Bendis is working on an OEC, he should restrain his tendencies to effect real change. That’s not the purpose of OEC.

Similarly, instead of working on third-tier characters, creators can work on independent comics. If you create your own characters from scratch, you have the right to change them in any way you see fit. If Erik Larsen wants to amputate the Dragon, he should go for it. If Todd McFarlen wants to kill Spawn and replace him with a 13-year-old Icelandic boy, more power to him. But don’t do that with Batman. Don’t do it with Captain America. Don’t do it with Green Lantern. Don’t do it with Ben Grimm.

Um…when you say “If Erik Larsen wants to amputate the Dragon, he should go for it,” this is a reference to comics, right? I mean, it’s not a euphemism for…I mean, no guy would actually…oh dear, he doesn’t actually call it “The Dragon”, does he?

(Sorry, couldn’t resist. )

Good concept, but there’s one possibility that’s left out in the “illusion of change” vs. “real change” dichotomy. The comic book could just end. Serial fiction has faced this for generations before superhero comic books came along. TV shows have to deal with the prospect of cancellation or “someday this will all be over.” Go back far enough, and even Charles Dickens would end his large and incredibly padded stories eventually.

What really sets the average mainstream superhero comic book apart and unites both of these arguing sides is the implicit expectation that the story of Spider-Man will never end. That’s an important underlying assumption which almost always goes unstated in these discussions, but which also establishes the grounds for the argument.

If you recognize this as the initial premise, then I think it’s pretty clear that the illusion of change people will win in the end. There’s no way you can have Real Change for any sustained period of time if your starting goal is to never reach the end of your story.

One other point to make is that I would not include Conan among the heroes who have endless adventures and the illusion of change, as I would with James Bond. Howard had a story thread for Conan’s life, from his younger days as a green hick from the sticks all the way to seizing his own crown to sit upon a troubled brow. The distinction between Conan’s serial fiction in prose and that of the average comic book is that the connective tissue between the stories was often left unsaid. That connective tissue is also how tons of post-Howard writers (including Kurt Busiek) have managed to expand on Conan, usually without fundamentally contradicting the arc of his life.

Brilliant column…

I have to say as a reader who came into the fandom in the early 90s I find both sides of the fence to be partially right, and partially wrong. If the “Illusion of Change” crowd had their way we would have never seen the Byrne/Claremont X-Men, The New Teen Titans, Kyle Rayner, or even Impulse all characters I very much hold dear to my heart.

The “real change” crowd on the other hand has opened the door for gratuitous violence, huckster ism, and sometimes catastrophic editorial mismanagement.

As for me… I see the need for real character change, but I think it should be well thought out and not rushed. I mean seriously we got two decades of Wally West as Kid Flash, so why couldn’t I get a few more years of Bart Allen as Impulse? Why couldn’t they have stuck with the Morrison-era status quo for the X-Men a little longer? And why change the cast of New Mutants/New X-Men/X-23 & Her Amazing Friends just when I feel like I’ve gotten to really know the book’s cast.

I find it odd you list Spidey’s current status-quo as permanent changes, as well… I sincerely doubt Spidey’s going to be wearing his new outfit beyond Civil War, and considering how many times the Avengers roster rotates, he could easily leave the team at any time.

That was really good.

I can safely say that I stand for change. because People will allways write comics, and changes will happen. Why not accept that and have non change stories for as long as you can untill you can build up to a well thought out Real change that involves groth. As opposed to a change that reverts the charicter back to an earlyer version.

Night crawler, Ordained priest….
Nope! It Was All A Dream!

Wolverine: “Finally, I dont have to look like an idot in broad daylight.”
And then back to costumes..

The thing is, what ever change you institute, so many writers just want to get their hands on charicters to make the book a continuation of the book they read as a kid, Real change actually happens very rarely.

When it does most writers just ignore it to make it easyer to write the story they wanted to.

The best example of this is the Warren Ellis Extremis Iron man. That story has been finished for two months and Noone is picking up an the ramafacitations of making Tony a futurist zelot.

Most of my favorite Big 2 super-hero comics are the “real-change” books (e.g. PAD Hulk, Miller & Bendis Daredevil, Starman, Suicide Squad, Claremont & Byrne and Morrison X-Men, Ditko Spider-Man).

The ’90s were not a period of “real change,” but long-term “illusion of change.” How long was Superman dead? A year? Heroes Reborn was abandonned after 13 months. Batman wasn’t crippled for long, Gotham City was rebuilt, Daredevil ditched the armor, Hal & Ollie are back, none of the X-Men stayed dead for long…

The ’90s’ changes had two faults which were insurmountable. 1) As has been pointed out, most of the ’90s changes were editorally mandated, and poorly written; 2) They were constant. Every month, it seemed, another character was changed. We fans got sick of it. I felt that none of the changes “mattered” because they were temporary.

The alternative, however, was mostly recycling past stories. How many times can the X-Men beat the Brotherhood, or Superman stop Luthor? Super-hero comics can become mired in familiar genre trappings when there are no “real” changes.

I find it odd you list Spidey’s current status-quo as permanent changes, as well… I sincerely doubt Spidey’s going to be wearing his new outfit beyond Civil War, and considering how many times the Avengers roster rotates, he could easily leave the team at any time.

But think about the implications of those. The reason I listed them is because the way they happened, Peter had to tell the Avengers who he really was. Which is a BIG change, and hard to back down from. Likewise, Peter’s teaching career was presented as an adult looking to give back to the place he grew up. It was not only a fully ADULT moment, it was shown as almost a middle-aged man’s kind of midlife crisis epiphany. A middle-aged — okay, LATE twenties, early thirties – married guy who lives and works with a group of superheroes that know all his secrets is miles away from the basic Spider-Man idea of a young, vaguely school-age/collegiate, tormented loner. That was why I listed them… I was just ticking off the various changes to the strip’s premise that were A) pretty major alterations to the staus quo and B) implied even MORE changes to the concept, hidden implications that are hard to back off of.

But really, all these back-and-forth comments about Spider-Man are getting a bit off the track. He’s just the test case. I could just as easily made it Batman and Robin. Having Dick Grayson age and go off to college was a big change and it spun lots of other changes out of it that various writers have tried to back down from, and then other writers made REAL changes to THOSE illusion-of-change re-sets. And so on. You can take almost all of the long-running open-ended series in superhero comics and apply this and literally see the pendulum swinging between the two schools of thought. THAT was the epiphany. Spider-Man was just the example because I happened to be immersed in his adventures last week.

Great column.
Great discussion.

I’ve been thinking quite a lot about this issue lately. I’ll start by saying that I place myself in the “illusion of change” camp, with reservations.
Let me state the obvious: When it comes to a corporately owned Old Established Character (OEC), there can be no long term plan for the future. Stories are told by writers, guided by editors, and constrained by past stories and by the current role of the OEC in his or her particular comic universe. Writers have a responsibility to leave an OEC in a condition that is minimally constraining to the next writer.

So, if we accept that the role of the writer is not to “advance the plot” (since there is no overarching plot to advance), then what is his or her purpose? In my opinion, the writer’s mandate is to tell good stories within the established mythos of the OEC. This sounds straightforward, but the constraints of 30+ years of continuity become a real albatross, and lead ultimately to things like the Elsewords, Ultimate, All Star and upcoming Confidential lines, which give writers the freedom to fiddle with or completely ignore the burden of continuity.

What does this mean for the “main-line” titles? I honesty don’t have a clue. Peter Parker is middle-aged and married and there is no going back. You can’t unmarry him and you can’t make him younger. Wait a second, these are comic books we’re talking about here and absolutely nothing is out of the question. I give you exhibit A: Batman Annual #25. I thought it was pretty lame, but there it is anyway. Which I think