Comic Book Resources

I always get confused, was it Snapper Carr or Rick Jones who played Wesley Crusher on Star Trek: TNG?

Very good point, John, and one that I had completely forgotten. (Which, I should be ashamed of because of just how big a Dr Who fan I am.)

In the role playing campaign I write and edit, we are hitting our 20th event and some players are getting confused as to what happened when. Recently, it was suggested that I start including a “Player’s Programme” to remind players of people and places they’ve met before.

But, I could introduce a Snapper Carr-style NPC to deliver the information a bit more organically and in character. I’ll have to think on that.

Theno

That’s the cross-universe meeting we need - Snapper Carr meets Rick Jones. Jones can be from the Earth that had the Avengers or Invaders analogues in the DC Universe (multi-verse) and they can realize that, despite the different names, they’re the same person in their respective universes. And Jones can ask Carr what’s up wth the stupid snapping habit.

The “guy who doesn’t know what is going on” was really critical for the Silver and Bronze Age versions of the JLA, given how static their core membership was. At least a few of the Original Seven were in every issue and even the second tier characters had been around FOREVER. What is odd is how long it took for the writers to figure out this was boring.

Introducing new heroes in that role never worked very well for me. There was always a cycle of stories in which, say, Firestorm had to demonstrate their worthiness as a Leaguer. This had two negative effects. The first was to make the Big Guns of the DCU seem like insufferable snobs. The second was to diminish the value of being in the JLA. Unlike the Avengers, being a member of the JLA was like being a member of the Supreme Court during that period: no one ever left. When they made a mistake, the writers were forced to justify it. Cool minor characters, like Zatanna, got the short end of that arrangement.

The irony is that it was only after they blew up the entire roster did they bring back true “gateway” characters to the title. Dale Gunn, Vibe, Gypsy, Steel and Vixen were given a thankless task of making readers forget that Superman wasn’t around and that their Head-Quarters was hopelessly lame. Sadly, they were exactly the type of new-ish characters (not recovered B and C listers) that the title was starving for.

It was just that the stars had already left.

What is amazing is that the JLA struggles with this TO THIS DAY. Brad Meltzer packed his roster with exactly the sort of veteran C list superheroes that killed my interest in the post-Giffen League and the post Waid-Morrison League, but no Gateway characters to be found.

I believe Rick Jones and Snapper met in JLA/Avengers. And got along like gangbusters. Which is to say, really well.
It’s been interesting to see what they’ve tried to do with Snapper in years since, to make him more “consequential”. After Invasion, he became a teleporter in charge of a group of space pirates. (Thanks, Peter David). After 52, he became a jerkish secret government agent spying on super heroes (Thanks Keith Giffen).
The gateway character is always a hard sell. Dr Who is about the only example which does it right with regularity.

and don’t forget his mentor role to the Robot Hour Man.

Doctor Who has advantages. First, there’s a built-in shelf life for companions. Since the Doctor is essentially alone, he can pick up and drop off companions as needed. They never hang around long enough to get too knowledgeable and he gets someone to talk to. It’s a little harder to explain why a half dozen or more costumed characters need some kid hanging around their club. He sticks out like a sore thumb and is the opposite of a solo title, where the role can be shifted between Lois, Jimmy, Perry, Lana, etc.

The second advantage Doctor Who has is that there’s always something different to add to the equation. Even if it’s the Daleks again, it can be on a different planet or a different era. After a while, even Snapper has to know who Felix Faust is and why he hates the JLA.

The JLA has no mechanism to rotate in new gateway characters, because there’s no real reason for a lot of civilians to be in or near their HQ

Good analysis of Snapper, Mr. Seavy.

On a completely random note, does anyone remember Snapper’s role in the short-lived “Hourman” series? It made even a hardcore Snapper-hater like myself a fan.

That’s the cross-universe meeting we need - Snapper Carr meets Rick Jones

In addition to the JLA/Avengers meetup, there was a more casual exchange between the two in Young Justice #39, as Snapper has a telephone conversation with an off-panel and unnamed Rick Jones. Everything Snapper tries to brag about, Rick just tops. Something to the effect of:

“Yeah, I just spent the last year tagging along with a uber-powerful hero who can see the future…oh, you did too. Well, a bunch of aliens gave me superpowers, but then I lost ‘em…ah, you too. I had my hands cut off and replaced. I see…you lost the use of your legs and got better.”

While it’s beyond the scope that Mr. Seavey has so carefully and intelligently set forth for these essays, I will take it upon myself to be the insufferable doofus who makes the JSA/JLA comparisons.

The JSA had at its start a “gateway character” like Snapper in the form of Johnny Thunder. The primary difference is that Johnny is effectively a humor character, albeit one with super-powers who can technically be an active team member even if his story segments are generally built around his screwing up his mission and being rescued either by his Thunderbolt genie or by one of the more “proper” JSAers.

Of course, Johnny also belongs to the Golden Age of comics, when there was a greater proliferation of popular comics genres appearing right alongside the superhero strips in various anthologies. By the late 1940s, when the broad humor comic books had borrowed from newspaper comics and vaudeville had started to fall out of fashion, Johnny is functionally replaced by Wonder Woman — who as the team’s “secretary,” despite her powers, is there for the members to exposit to — and fully replaced in his own feature and in JSA stories by Black Canary. (He was already being phased out, of course: his last few appearances in All Star Comics didn’t give him his own chapter of the JSA story, and relegated him to support roles in the bookend sequences.)

What Johnny does that Snapper doesn’t when the former is working in the story is to provide a change of tone in his own chapters, where the comedy revolves around his sheer stupidity. That stupidity does double duty in that he also gets to ask the cabbageheaded questions that prompt exposition at the beginning or end of the story when all the heroes are gathered. And unlike Snapper, there’s no pretense of identification with Johnny. He’s meant to be an object of ridicule. Snapper too often gets scenes that attempt to justify his existence, scenes in which a crummily-dialogues teenager is somehow made the linchpin of the JLA’s plan for victory or somesuch. Even by Silver Age standards, those scenes are painful.

Johnny gets away with being relatively useless for two reasons: first, because his T-Bolt is both powerful and smart, and gets to function as a deus ex machina on multiple occasions. At least two of the Golden Age stories featuring the Brain Wave as the sole antagonist are resolved by having the T-Bolt singlehandedly undo the villain’s JSA-destroying scheme. The deus ex machina can be withheld because Johnny’s meant to take the whole story to work out the obvious wish or solution of just having his omnipotent “pet” fix everything, and on occasion the T-Bolt acts independently because Johnny never gets there. It’s telling that the T-Bolt stops doing much in the last few Johnny Thunder vignettes that appeared in All Star, as the writers downplayed Johnny’s limited claim to “superness” in the process of easing him offstage.

The second reason Johnny can be in the JSA and the story engine needn’t strain much to accomodate him has to do with a fundamental difference in the ublication premise: the JSA isn’t built on the N times X sales model. In fact, it’s the reverse — it was designed at the beginning to feature the second- and third-tier characters who culdn’t support secondary, quarterly titles. The idea was to give each of them a second monthly story in the form of their individual segments of a JSA adventure and thus increase their exposure.

In a bizarre bit of writing that could only work in the looser atmosphere of 1940s comics, the JSA’s own charter explicitly made any member with a second comic a reserve member. Superman and Batman start out that way; when the sales idea works and the Flash and Green Lantern get their own quartery comics, they’re pushed out of the book for a time too. Of course, eventually the appeal of the team book becomes a sales engine all its own — something seemingly unforeseen by the creators — and Flash and GL are brought back in. And at this point, Johnny i probably doomed because the book is becoming an “N times X” sales idea. Indeed, the JSA outlasts virtually all of the members’ solo features, and by 1951 is the only place that, say, the original Atom even appears.

It’s that point in the evolution of the team book concept generally and the JSA particularly that Gardner Fox and Julius Schwartz can look to whent hey revamp the JSA story engine as the JLA engine. And even then, there are odd echoes like the marginal appearances of Superman and Batman in the first several JSA stories…and, perhaps, in Snapper Carr, a more “serious” version of Johnny Thunder, or at least a version who doesn’t seem intended as a figure of fun in the stories. The comparative seriousness with which the team book was treated by 1960 means that you can’t quite have a Johnny Thunder type as a regular; trying to create an equivalent with whom the audience was supposed to identify is still perhaps too close to the tonal clash of the “mascot” idea that Johnny Thunder started with to work no matter how earnestly it was executed or how carefully certain stories were designed to justify the mascot’s continuing presence in the title.

Johnny was also less of an odd addition to the JSA because many of its members eventually had comic relief sidekicks of their own; it doesn’t strain credulity as much for Green Lantern or the Spectre to hang out with Johnny when they’re hanging out with Doiby Dickles or Percival Popp, the Super Cop in their own titles. The JLAers who had sidekicks had ones who were decently competent as heroes in their own right, which Snapper rarely accomplished.

I liked Snapper Carr in the robot Hourman series, thanks to Tom Peyer for making him likable.

I think this “Guy Who Doesn’t Know What’s Going On” thing is what made 52 work. Almost every story beat had one, and at the end of the series, most of them had discovered what was going on in their respective plotlines. I think it is also what makes Kurt Busiek’s Astro City one of the most entertaining titles ever published.

In a bizarre bit of writing that could only work in the looser atmosphere of 1940s comics, the JSA’s own charter explicitly made any member with a second comic a reserve member. Superman and Batman start out that way; when the sales idea works and the Flash and Green Lantern get their own quartery comics, they’re pushed out of the book for a time too. Of course, eventually the appeal of the team book becomes a sales engine all its own — something seemingly unforeseen by the creators — and Flash and GL are brought back in.

This is a bit off topic, but given it has often occurred to me that the Defenders was a concept that was more at home in the DCU than Marvel. A character who is too big a misfit and/or too minor a seller to make the JLA is still a plausible joiner. It is a more humorous concept about a super-team with a bit of an inferiority complex. Conversely, if you are too anti-social for the Avengers, then you probably are not going to be a member of any group.

One other difference, writers like Claremont and David eventually developed Kitty Pryde and Rick Jones into fully developed characters in their own right. I’m surprised noone tried to do this earlier with Snapper. It seemed that, for a long time, people at DC were just embarassed by him or something. Of course, him leaving did open up a slot or 2 for the Wonder Twins

“It seemed that, for a long time, people at DC were just embarassed by him or something.”

Denny O’Neil, who had him go bad and go away, has said as much - that basically he just wanted to get rid of Snapper, and didn’t much sweat the details of how or why, or whether they fit.

Personally, after reading All-Star Archives Vol. 1, I think people don’t realize how good they had it with Snapper Carr. A little bit of Johnny Thunder goes a looong way, and Johnny gets a *lot* of screen time in those early stories.

All Star Archives v.1 is kind of the peak of Johnny exposure, since All Star #6 is basically a story all about the green-suited little moron. It becomes a lot more reasonable thereafter, in no small part because the book doesn’t have to work so hard to justify Johnny’s presence once he’s a full member..

One quibble with the Doctor Who point: some of the best stories ever were from the year where Douglas Adams was the script editor… and he had Romana, a Time Lady, as the companion. It’s not ABSOLUTELY necessary, and can get borderline annoying if the character’s portrayed as too much of an idiot (*cough* DONNA *cough*).

Modern JLA-related point, though: Kyle Rayner was the gateway character for the 90s JLA, and served that role more effectively than most, because while he was the least experienced member, he wasn’t useless and so the reader didn’t hate him unless they were a HEAT nutjob. So you could use a conversation between Kyle and Superman to establish a villain’s identity or motivation, since it was more than plausible that Kyle had never heard of a Dr. Destiny or The Key.

I *think* Arsenal’s supposed to be that character in the current JLA, but none of the ex-Titans will ever work because they’ve been doing it for so long. Hawkgirl would be the obvious choice (sure, she’s a long-time JLA member, but that’s better than the alternatives), but so far she’s just been around as a love interest for Roy and little else.

(Busiek did something similar with Justice during his Avengers run, come to think of it)

Basically, when drawing up a team, make sure you have a rookie around to handle exposition. Your readers will thank you for it later.

Excellent post.

I think, though, that the POV character is a bit of a double-edged sword, because if you play them as too wide-eyed and inexperienced, then even the “newbie” audience members, for whom that character is meant to serve as a POV (or at least as an expository prompt), are going to want to see him die in a fire. Once it gets to this point, it’s pretty much become an unfixable situation, because if you suddenly graft levels of competence onto a character that had previously demonstrated little to none, in order to convince the audience that the character “deserves to be there,” then the audience often won’t buy off on it, on the grounds that it makes the POV character seem a bit too much like a Mary Sue. See also: Wesley Crusher.

On the other hand, if the POV character is too competent from the outset, then they arguably lose a bit of their value as a POV (and sometimes, even as an expository prompt). For example, even though I prefer Martha Jones to Rose Tyler - as long as we’re talking about Doctor Who companions - I suspect that part of the problem that a lot of Rose fans had with Martha was that Martha already had her sh!t together, well before the Doctor arrived in her life (which is one of the things I preferred about Martha, actually), whereas Rose’s life was pretty obviously idling in neutral before she met the Doctor. Likewise, Martha was a bit more intellectual than Rose, which probably also hurt her appeal with a lot of the Rose fans, since I sense that a lot of those fans were new, not only to Doctor Who, but also to sci-fi in general.

Personally, I’ve always despised overtly POV characters (with the Doctor’s companions perhaps being one of the only exceptions), because I NEVER identified with the people looking UP to the heroes - to me, even as a little boy, part of the whole point of Super Friends or Doctor Who was to imagine that I was the HERO, and NOT the sidekick. Somehow, even when I was new to these long-running fandoms, I managed to follow them just fine, without needing an expository prompt character.

Kirk: Good point on Martha - and I think they tended to go out of their way to avoid writing her as too smart because they were in fact afraid of losing the audience that was new to the series and only knew Rose (and Mickey) as clueless-companion-types. Martha was basically a trained MD, but they never took advantage of that background until she was written out and showing up on Torchwood. Similar situation to Liz Shaw back in the day*, come to think of it - she was overqualified to be the Doctor’s companion, and the relationship worked better with Jo Grant because she needed her figurative hand held.

And I just realised I goofed and named Hawkgirl as a JLA, rather than JSA member. My bad.

* First episode I ever saw had her in it, actually… of course, this was when YTV was re-running the early Third Doctor stuff in the late 80s.

I don’t have much to add, except to throw this out there: is it a coincidence that Doctor Who was at (maybe) its all-time worse when it had three distinct POV characters - Nyssa (the brainy Martha type), Tegan (the wisecracking Rose type) and Adric (the whiny Donna type)?

Not to say those 5th Doctor companions were as well-written as the ones from the current series, but they followed the same basic templates, and they were all shoe-horned in at once. The show was so busy trying to figure out ways for them all to be gateways into Doctor Who world for the viewer that it forgot to do anything else. It was a show about a bunch of uninteresting people.

Thinking about it, I think that the POV/Recipient of Exposition Character plays a number of different (but related and sometimes overlapping) roles that vary depending on the series.

When Snapper (and Johnny Thunder) first appeared in the JLA/JSA, they weren’t there to have the backstory explained to them for the benefit of the audience who had missed previous issues, because there weren’t any previous issues; in other words, they weren’t devices for exposition per se. Snapper was a plot device in the first JLA story, as Rick Jones was in the first Avengers story. Johnny, however, was there as a narrative device. The first JSA story is blatantly a bunch of unrelated solo stories connected by a framing sequence, and Johnny is the excuse for the framing sequence. Gardner Fox would use Snapper this way as well, at times, and sometimes this use would itself be a plot device. (There’s also the plot device of using Snapper as the outsider character who can defeat the villain because they weren’t affected by something that hit the heroes, which can work from time to time if a) it’s not overdone and b) it doesn’t make the real heroes look useless.)

A difference between characters like Snapper, a Doctor Who companion, and someone in Star Trek is the amount of exposition the series assumes the exposition device character should need to absorb. Snapper (or The New Guy on the Team) is useful for backstory in a super-team book, but he shouldn’t be necessary to provide other exposition to the audience on a regular basis; if a point of obscure super-science or alien culture needs to be explained, there’s probably someone on the team that reasonably doesn’t know it.

In the Star Trek universe, Gene Roddenberry sensibly decreed that the characters wouldn’t explain themselves all the time (”A policeman doesn’t explain how his gun works before he fires it”), which works if the SF conceits are handled reasonably consistently and the story doesn’t hinge on examining them too closely. The problem comes when the story requires the audience to be told something that all the characters (highly-trained Starfleet officers) should already know; in Next Gen, it took a while to sort this out, and the role fell to Troi a little too often (or, in early episodes, Data, of all characters). Wesley sometimes fulfilled this role in reverse, overenthusiastically telling someone something they already knew rather than needing something explained.

Doctor Who is more complex. Unlike a superhero team or Star Trek, it’s not inherently a premise that requires a group; it could be about the adventures of the Doctor by himself. However, the nature of the setting (often including esoteric invented rules about how time travel works) and the central character (who knows more than most of the characters in the setting, let alone the audience) pretty much requires someone who can receive exposition; the alternative is confusing the audience or having the Doctor talk to himself a lot for no good reason. (The key is giving the companion something to do and a personality on top of this function.) Also, there are situations where the Doctor’s alien point of view needs a human counterpoint; the companion can act as the audience surrogate in this situation. (This one depends on how the Doctor’s being written; Rose filled this role, but it goes back to the earliest human companions, as Hartnell’s Doctor was a rather distant figure.)

Very interesting discussion, thanks everyone.

So what is the earliest example anyone can think of in fiction? The obvious example to me is Dr. Watson.

Rick Jones & Snapper Carr also shared a scene (maybe only one panel) in Marvel vs DC, each having set up a betting booth & shilling their respective universes’ characters in the battles to come.

MRW, before Dr. Watson there was the unnamed narrator in the C. Auguste Dupin stories by Edgar Allen Poe, Holmes being based at least partially on Dupin.

I’d say Sancho Panza fills the role in Don Quixote; since Quixote’s particular brand of illogic means that he attaches a personal meaning to everyday people and things that the reader can’t really see, he needs Sancho Panza there as a stand-in for the audience to receive his explanations for who and what these “really” are. Watson is another perfect example, though.

It’s interesting that someone mentions Romana as being an example of a time when the Doctor’s companion didn’t need to be a vessel for exposition, because that’s one of the frequent complaints about the Graham Williams era; by turning Romana into another Doctor, you no longer have a character who can be intimidated by the dangerous situations. It’s just two super-intelligent Time Lords swanning about with their all-purpose sonic screwdrivers, laughing at danger. (This doesn’t mean it’s a bad era of the series…everyone knows there’s no such thing as ‘bad Doctor Who’…but it is one of the criticisms leveled at that period.)

Throughout Peter David’s works, there’s a lot of Snapper Carr/Rick Jones stuff…besides ones mentioned above, in Blasters, Snapper talks about/day dreams him being in a band, “with Rick Jones on guitar”.

I actually never wanted to be the Doctor when i was a kid…I did in fact want to be his companion…a companion who was also a Tomorrow Person with one of the teleportation belts!

I’d say it predates even Don Quixote by some distance; Dante’s Divine Comedy, for example, casts Dante himself in this role and is largely made up of Virgil and Beatrice explaining the afterlife to him (and his readers) at length.

Horatio, in ‘Hamlet’…heck, if you look at the Bible from the perspective of a work of literature, the Apostles play the same role to Jesus.

If only Johnny Thunder were in the Bible….