I was going to make this comment, and suggest “a dearth” be replaced with “no dearth”, or possibly “plethora”

Just trying to maintain some continuity in the English language …

Did you stop doing these? I was really enjoying them.

Theno

Claremont’s final few years on Uncanny received a lot of criticism because of the continuity it brought with it made it inaccessable to new readers, but that’s different from sucking.

Usually, for me, a story sucks due to continuity when the new team on the book decides to devote their first or first few issues explaining why established continuity in the book, or in other books, was wrong, and then they reboot the character or team.

An old example is Power Pack. A newer one is Titans. I felt that Graduation Day served no purpose than to “graduate” the Titans to Outsiders and Young Justice to Titans for no real purpose. From my outside opinion as a reader, it seemed that the only purpose to Graduation Day was to kill Donna Troy (again), put Robin in as head of Titans (instead of Dick, wierd thinking, IMHO), and basically re-establish the Titans as the Sidekick-Team (Robin, Wonder Girl, Superboy, and Impulse from Young Justice.)

The story of Graduation Day might have been good, if it hadn’t so obviously been for the express purpose of relaunching a title that (again, IMHO) didn’t need it (Titans), rebranding a title that had been cancelled (Outsiders) and continuing a team whose title had been cancelled (Young Justice.)

Come to think of it, the Titans / Legion crossover had the exact same problem. I wanted to see Robin and Brainac 5 bicker over tactics, or at least put their heads together to come up with a fantastic foolproof plan. Instead, the story was a huge continuity fix/set up for a fix, and the characters and plot were so secondary to that goal that I couldn’t get into it, and couldn’t enjoy it.

Theno

Also I’d really like to know about Cooke’s “ridiculously lame motivation for Zoom.”

(As for my feelings about ‘New Frontier’, someday I’ll put up a full-length review in my blog so that I don’t have to keep explaining it piecemeal in various different comics threads. Let’s just say it was severely underplotted, filled with exactly the kind of continuity porn people have been complaining about, and that I wildly disagree with its central theme.)

I only know stories sucking because of bad writing. And not being consistent with what was stated before is bad writing.

I am going to take “continuity” in the sense you’re using it to mean narrative or thematic cohesion within a particular story, which is a more agreeable definition to me.

“I’ll give an excellent example (well, I think it’s excellent) that doesn’t involve comics or continuity. ‘28 Days Later’. Nobody seems to have liked the ending to that movie, and while they all give lots of reasons, it’s very simple as to why–it broke its own continuity. They established early on in the film that there were news reports that the infection had spread to Paris and Manhattan–thus, to North America and Europe.”

I totally missed all the stuff about the disease spreading beyond the UK, though that may not necessarily be the reason that I liked the ending. 28 Days Later is thematically unified and narratively satisfying, so, to me, the fact that there were news reports talking about the spread of the disease (which I seriously can’t remember, maybe I need to watch it again) doesn’t really affect my enjoyment of the film.

“At the end of the film, when they realized they’d written themselves into a corner, they just said, “No. It’s confined to the British Isles. Never mind.” They cheated their audience by changing the rules when they needed a quick solution to a problem they’d put themselves into, and thus betrayed their audience’s trust.”

I guess so. I don’t really consider that a particularly effective example but I understand your point.

“You say, “What about ‘non-canonical’ stories like Monster Society of Evil or New Frontier?” (I say, “New Frontier sucks.” But that’s a whole other topic.) I actually say, those don’t present themselves as in-continuity stories. There’s an unspoken contract at the beginning of those books that says, ‘Let’s step away from the game we have established over there, and start a new one, with slightly different rules, over here. I’ll tell you what these new rules are, and some of them might be different.’ But, crucially, Jeff Smith doesn’t violate his own continuity. Mainstream DC’s, perhaps, but not his own.”

This doesn’t really contradict what I said here:
“I guarantee you that every single great to excellent superhero story is very selective in what it chooses to take from the characters previous history. It simply has to be that way because almost every single character with an appreciable publishing history has a dearth of awful stories that are best left deteriorating in a barrel at a Superfund site.”

Except for the part about New Frontier sucking, I’m not sure how a right thinking individual might hold that opinion! Any story that makes Wonder Woman, Hal Jordan and Martian Manhunter interesting is worthy of at least minor praise.

“I think this comes from an attachment to the entities and properties of the corporation rather than the desire to emotionally connect or react to a story. I just think that being overly deterministic about “what matters” is being arbitrated by fan mandate and editorial consensus rather than good stories v. bad stories.”

On the contrary–I think that you can only emotionally connect or react to a story if the writer is willing to be honest with his/her readers, and playing fast and loose with continuity (whether accidentally or deliberately) is not.

I’ll give an excellent example (well, I think it’s excellent) that doesn’t involve comics or continuity. ’28 Days Later’. Nobody seems to have liked the ending to that movie, and while they all give lots of reasons, it’s very simple as to why–it broke its own continuity. They established early on in the film that there were news reports that the infection had spread to Paris and Manhattan–thus, to North America and Europe.

At the end of the film, when they realized they’d written themselves into a corner, they just said, “No. It’s confined to the British Isles. Never mind.” They cheated their audience by changing the rules when they needed a quick solution to a problem they’d put themselves into, and thus betrayed their audience’s trust.

You say, “What about ‘non-canonical’ stories like Monster Society of Evil or New Frontier?” (I say, “New Frontier sucks.” But that’s a whole other topic.) I actually say, those don’t present themselves as in-continuity stories. There’s an unspoken contract at the beginning of those books that says, ‘Let’s step away from the game we have established over there, and start a new one, with slightly different rules, over here. I’ll tell you what these new rules are, and some of them might be different.’ But, crucially, Jeff Smith doesn’t violate his own continuity. Mainstream DC’s, perhaps, but not his own.

To use another analogy, it’s a lot like chess. There is such a thing as “fairy chess”, where both participants play according to a mutually-agreed on set of rules that are different from the conventional rules of chess. But that doesn’t mean you can play chess without rules.

It’s beholden to it but not chained to it, in fact my absolute favorite thing about it is that it shows you why that character is cool to begin with, and why that character is worthwhile by making it the conceptual center of the book, rather than spending so much time deciding what really happened and what didn’t. It moves forward, upward and outward AND it kind of makes you want to pick up a Showcase or two. It’s not John Byrne’s claw handed, cross eyed take on Doom Patrol.

A prime example is in all of the The Initiative books. Nearly any book in the mainstream Marvel universe seems to spend a page or two (admittedly down to a panel or two this far out) telling us what the Civil War was…what the end results was…and what the current scorecard is. That’s space that could be used for actual storytelling instead of constantly reminding us just what’s going on in the universe as a whole.

To show I’m not company-biases, it’s mostly the same issue I have with Countdown. There are a few titles that tie directly into Countdown that I like the concept of: Challengers, The Atom, and a few others. But the Countdown title itself is NOTHING but continuity concerns. I REALLY want to like the title, but all it’s done so far is present continuity connections (even identical scenes) between books, but all of the important events happen in the other books…not in the series itself.

I can think of an example of a book that came out this week that I thought was a lot of fun, but ignored previous continuity: Metal Men. The book was loads of fun, but ignored the previous mini-series that established the Metal Men as previously human. That was handwaved away in 52 by admission of mental illness…but if that’s all that’s necessary to ‘correct’ continuity, I don’t see how it’s any more valid than a writer just randomly changing things on a whim.

The issue also establishes that Ray Palmer was interested in miniturized dentists, and that Will Magnus wasn’t really interested in building robots…all things that contradict previous continuity. Heck, it even ignores the recent (atrocious, again, in my opinion) Superman/Batman Metal Men story.

But it was a darn fun book (for me, at least). As long as the whole series is consistent with itself in continuity, I really don’t care. If the next appearance of the Metal Men contradicts this series, I may like it or I may not, depending on the skill of the creators.

I don’t know, Brian, my instinct is to believe that an editor should nip that kind of thing in the bud, especially in a kid. You don’t want him getting the impression that anal retentive taxonomy is more important than good storytelling.

It is tough, but fair!

Interestingly enough (and I am pretty sure this is accurate, although I could be off), as it turned out, letters like that, rather than teaching readers what to expect, instread ended up “teaching” editorial that they SHOULD start paying attention to stuff like the different Atlantises, because, apparently, “that’s what the kids care about.”

So soon after that letter came out, DC actually DID start paying attention to silly stuff like that.