Comic Book Resources

I’m almost the opposite with Thanos — after Infinity Gauntlet, I thought Starlin lost his way with the character precisely because it was clear that Starlin himself felt no one else should use him. Yet at the same time, I don’t think we got much beyond rehashes of earlier Thanos stories, with MU: The End being one of the most transparent. Starlin’s work with the character is still brilliant, definitive, and the portrayal up to that point, but by making him a top dog among top dogs I think Starlin turned him into a finished character, a guy the reader knew was untouchable when written “proper;y” but who was now no longer an antagonist character but just one of those invincible protagonists.

Couldn;t care less about Spiderman, and so have no opinion on the Clone Saga, but the Return of Supes is definetly well-loved by me.

Also, to be honest, I’m looking forward to you guys doing the Splash page again – I haven’t been reading it because I hadn;t been reading Wednesday comics, so on the occasions I do skim the column, I don’t know what you’re talking about, so I don’t read it. And when I try to skim Wednesday Comics, I am overcome by apathy.

Agreed on Giant Sized Old Man Logan. I had been mildly enjoying the Old Man Logan story, then that issue came out and I had to wonder why. GSOML reminded me why I hate comics that simply ramp up the gratuitous violence for no other reason than that its “kewl” or something. Plus, its not even properly “Giant Sized” as their were only something like ten extra pages of story (and I use that term very loosely).

As for personal canon’s, isn’t that really what everyone does, even those who are supposedly slavish to all continuity? I mean, even a continuity obsessive has certain runs they “count” less than others. The only difference is they fool themselves by creating elaborate justifications for why those issues count less, while you just admit straight out that its a matter of personal preference.

Blackest Night is hilariously stupid, from the plot that’s set off by Superhero Funeral Day to the characters who are murdered and immediately resurrected as DC Zombies. If it’s an experiment in making fun of fans who want dark, violent stories with their favorite superheroes, I wouldn’t be surprised. Actually, I would be surprised because that’s a really mean move for Geoff Johns, of all people, to make. How dare he make fun of people like that.

It really pays to ignore canon and continuity. As far as I’m concerned, Grant Morrison’s X-Men still stands and nothing weird and convoluted ever happened to undo it.

They continued to publish X-Men comics after Morrison left…?

Wednesday comics was CRAP. With the SOLE exception of Strange Adventures by Paul Pope, the stories were terrible and ended in a very boring way. I’m glad I read someone else’s issues. Otherwise it would have been a terrible waste of money.

Each issue should be dedicated to one character’s story. That’s the only way I’d buy volume 2 (if it happens).

Well, there’s technically a non-personal canon set by the publisher, usually very loosely, that exists out there in the world. To me, the idea of bothering with a “personal canon” is weird. There are stories I like, stories I think are quality, and stories I don’t like. I don’t worry about “preserving” Morrison’s run as some Platonic ideal of Animal Man, for example; if he appears in a later comic I don’t like, I just don’t like that later comic. But I don’t actually have to pretend the later, crappier stuff didn’t happen or “isn’t my canon” to enjoy the stuff I enjoy.

Speaking as a guy who actually got “Special Thanks” credit in a couple of early 2000s Handbooks for doing a continuity glance-over, I also have some appreciation for the geeky fun of trying to tie together the Official Canon — i.e., the books that the publisher claims are all part of some overarching and somehow coherent universe. Mark Gruenwald and Peter Sanderson seemed to have fun doing the same thing in the 1980s. It’s not a game of taste, but a game in spite of it. Sherlock Holmes fans have been doing that for decades, pretending Holmes is “real” and trying to make everything fit together; Wold Newton is another example of the same, as are its comic-book offspring in League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and Planetary.

So, yeah, I don’t really get the popular Net-phrase “personal canon.” Seems to me that the idea of individual taste is inherently opposed to the notion of canon. We don’t need the structure of canon or continuity to make or somehow justify the distinctions personal canon rests upon; it’s mainly flamebait when it does come up. (There’s also the separate issue of Netfans who pretend things they didn’t read don’t matter when other people refer to them, which is sometimes called “personal canon” in an entirely different sense of the term.)

I’ll grant that the publisher’s take s often just the EiC’s own personal taste made official, or the compromises of some writers and editors on their own, but I still find two problems with “personal canon” as a concept. First, there’s the fact that editors and so forth have at least been hired to make those decisions, that is, that their opinions have been ratified and bear some degree of actual binding force on other creators. Second, and more importantly, fans generally assert their own “personal canon” because the editor’s or publisher’s or whoever official’s stated canon isn’t to their taste; that also says something about the sheer meaninglessness of the “canon” part of the term.

Just call it taste, or critical judgement, or any of the perfectly accurate things it really is. Canonicity is a prop we toss aside when we’re confident and mature enough in our own tastes to proudly label them personal, to call them our own.

Chad when’s that next Young Liars article where you go over the entire series coming?

I sorta agree with you on the Thanos thing. I totally fell in love with the character because of Jim Starlin and the entire Infinity Gauntlet series (yes,even Infinity War and Infinity Crusade).

But have you read the great work that Dan Abnett andAndy Lanning have been doing these past years with those characters? Thanos unfortunately hasn’t been around since Annihilation, but Adam Warlock is now at the forefront of Marvel’s cosmic books, especially now with the return of Magus.

And yes, Blackest Night (and the entire lead-up to it) have made me do an 180 in regards to Geoff Johns. I loved the Sinestro Corps War but since then…it’s been pretty harsh (Violet Lanterns?!)

And finally, I think that Mark Millar has become by now the comics equivalent of Michael Bay.

Omar — It’s not something as official as I made it out to be. Putting it in those terms, though, is to remind people that they CAN choose what ‘counts’ to them and not necessarily feel like they need to read everything, even the crap. Sometimes, all it takes it someone pointing that out (even though it seems obvious to us).

Con — Since I did issues 1-17 here and then a large review of issue 18 at CBR, I won’t be returning to that series for a while, I’m afraid.

Dude — I’ve stepped in and out of the DnA stuff. Not sure what I think of their work with Adam Warlock — or if it really goes beyond what Starlin did.

Yes, the Spider-Clone Saga and the death/return of Superman are big parts of my Spider-Man and Superman continuities/canons.

I thought you said ditch the bad?

“There’s a fine line between batshit insanity and awesome insanity… and Mark Millar has no idea that said line exists.”

What, are you new or something?

Honestly, I hate the term “cannon” when it comes to comics, irrespective of the context. It is extremely subjective, since the publishers are not releasing lists of the old comics that currently “count” and the comics that don’t. At bottom, it is all a matter of personal taste and opinion. For example, we are expected to deduce that the arrival SUPERMAN: SECRET ORIGIN means that MAN OF STEEL and BIRTHRIGHT are no longer “cannon”. However, what about the subsequent issues that referred back to those comics?

The truth is that they probably don’t “count” until someone like Grant Morrison decides to structure a story around some obscure plot point that only they contain. Then, they do “count”, until someone like Geoff Johns comes along and write the next “definitive” origin that casts them back into the darkness. Honestly, who cares? The simple truth is that there is no “cannon”, except for the stories that you personally happen to like.

Dean…what, exactly, are things like the Marvel Handbook and Who’s Who or the DC Encyclopedia if not explanations of “what counts and what doesn’t?”

I agree with your take on continuity and cannon. It’s fiction, so none of it is real. Therefore even if someone else owns the character, there is nothing stopping your imagination and opinions from interpreting that character and their history your own way.

Good point about continuity changing on a creator’s whim. For example, why get bent out of shape about what’s cannon when Geoff Johns has been forcing his interpretation on everyone for years.

Since this mistake has popped up a few times: it’s canon, not cannon. One ‘n.’ Two ‘n’s is the weapon. Not meant to be a shot at anyone since it’s a word not often used. Sorry, the English lit snob inside of me demanded I post this.

That’s going to be really confusing when we talk about continuity in pirate comics.

I’m not arguing against interpretation and opinion, I’m saying that the word “canon” is a really weird one to enlist for the purpose of defending what is an essentially anticanonical idea.

For canon to mean, well, “canon,” it has to have some sort of referent or meaning outside a single person’s head. Geoff Johns reboots Superman, but he goes through an editor and publisher to do so, and someone pays him to do so, and his work ends up printed by DC as a canonical DC comic book. Your personal canon? It exists in your head, whereas DC’s “official” one exists in memos, and editorial policies, in short, in a vast number of objectively real organizational structures. It’s more real than yours is, and less “mere fiction.”

Go back to the origins of the word “canon,” really: the list of books in the Bible considered divinely inspired and “true” Scripture. Now, everyone has the right to believe as they see fit, even to argue about it. But “canon” has a lot more to do with big, organized churches than with individual conscience. You may skip the book of Job, but it’s still gonna be in any printed Bible you can lay your hands on. And no one takes you too seriously when you tell them Job “doesn’t count” if they can just point to it’s printed form, right there, in every Bible except the one you took scissors to at home.

The really weird thing is that we don’t get this with classic texts: no one sane or serious decides that A Portrait of the Artists as a Young Man “counts” but Ulysses “doesn’t,” or pretends that their love of Last of the Mohicans and dislike of The Deerslayer somehow resonates with the concept of a “personal Fenimore Cooper canon.”

But fans of ghettoized genre fiction are very comfortable with this; the existence of many soi-disant and vocally proffered personal canons only happens when the wider culture couldn’t give two tugs of a dead dog’s Warren Ellis idiom.

Actually, that happens all of the time. One work by an author is praised and studied often, while another is shunned and forgotten. Harold Bloom’s canon, for example: http://home.comcast.net/~dwtaylor1/theocraticcanon.html It’s an extensive canon, but one that picks and chooses with many writers. A personal canon is no different.

” Blackest Night is hilariously stupid, from the plot that’s set off by Superhero Funeral Day to the characters who are murdered and immediately resurrected as DC Zombies. If it’s an experiment in making fun of fans who want dark, violent stories with their favorite superheroes, I wouldn’t be surprised. Actually, I would be surprised because that’s a really mean move for Geoff Johns, of all people, to make. How dare he make fun of people like that. ”

Superboy-Prime, anyone? One of the main villains of Infinite Crisis being a whiny man-child having a temper tantrum of space-time-continuum-destroying proportions because his heroes were ” ruined ” could be read as a really nasty critique of internet fanboys. Perhaps Johns is now satirizing the other extreme of the ” fandumb ” side of fandom.

Remember that he’s been accused both of pandering to Silver Age Nostalgiacs as well as Superhero Gorn Fans, so Blackest Night might well end tilting the DCU back towards happier territory.

I am glad someone else thought Giant Size Old Man Logan…and doesn’t that title evoke the image of an elderly Logan that is the size of Toomazooma?…was such a disappointment. I thought the rest of it was a fun sort of “What If” alternate reality but then the violence went to 11 at the end. I hate it when talented artists like David Finch on Ultimatum and McNiven on this start to turn out the equivalent of splatter / snuff comics. Geez, I still can’t forget the image of the Blob disembowelling and eating the Wasp. It’s not that I’m overly sensitive …heck I went to the opening week of Romero’s Dawn of the Dead. At least there was some thought behind the story in Romero’s work. Plus it’s different seeing the image frozen in time so to speak in a comic book page than the quick cuts of a motion picture.

I have no problem with mocking segments of fandom, but when it’s the segments that have made your career… Then again, based on my one conversation with the guy, I don’t think he’s the mean bastard type like that.

canon — what counts and what doesn’t

cannon — weapons on pirate ships

I think I have a new signature line.

“Fuck Brad Curran. Just because.”

Dean…what, exactly, are things like the Marvel Handbook and Who’s Who or the DC Encyclopedia if not explanations of “what counts and what doesn’t?”

Blatant cash grabs from fanboys with more money than sense?

Dean…what, exactly, are things like the Marvel Handbook and Who’s Who or the DC Encyclopedia if not explanations of “what counts and what doesn’t?”

Who’s Who has not been updated in fifteen years, which is pre-ZERO HERO. Marvel updated more recently, but it has not had a complete edition since the whole Heroes Roborn thing.

In other words, they are out-dated concepts.

I have no problem with mocking segments of fandom, but when it’s the segments that have made your career…

Geoff Johns is odd dude that way. He is relentlessly retro in his sensibility and, yet, he mocks hidebound fans in INFINTE CRISIS. He is beloved for his clever way of working with established continuity and, yet, he has been involved with more hit-and-run continuity re-writes than John Byrne. Given his long established penchant for grim, gore-y books, it would not shock me if he turned DARKEST NIGHT into an argument against them.

My rant on people avoiding Wednesday Comics because the stories don’t ‘count’ is something I really believe in. I don’t care what a publisher says is official continuity or canon — I create my own. That’s what everyone should do: create your own continuity/canon! Recognise the good stories, ignore the bad! Who cares if no one else references it? Especially when the ‘official’ continuity/canon changes at the whims of whatever editorial regime in in place? How many stories have been retconned or explained away over the past decade or two alone? Characters killed, brought back, turned evil, turned good… almost always, things wind up where they began, so why not ignore the journey if you think it sucks?

I couldn’t agree with you more, Chad. I have discarded many stories and events from my personal continuity. For me, Tony Stark was never turned into a teenager, Batman never time-traveled through hypnosis (“Bruce Wayne: Murderer” also never happened), Johhny Storm never married Alicia Masters and the last of Spider-Man’s clones died in the original Gerry Conway/Ross Andru story.

Comics’ continuities are only enjoyable if we create our own continuity from the published stories. None of these half-a-century-old characters can work if we incorporate everything that was ever published about them as “canon”.

Actually, that happens all of the time. One work by an author is praised and studied often, while another is shunned and forgotten. Harold Bloom’s canon, for example: http://home.comcast.net/~dwtaylor1/theocraticcanon.html It’s an extensive canon, but one that picks and chooses with many writers. A personal canon is no different.

It’s vastly different for all sorts of reasons, Chad. Look, I’m about to get my PhD in English Lit; if you study novels that are explicitly interconnected, you study ALL of them. The kind of “canon” that Bloom is talking about has far more to do with teaching curricula than with critical reading and research.

Bloom’s concept of the Western canon is one of influence on the wider culture, stemming from his 1979 book The Anxiety of Influence. Bloom argues that this influence is the measure of aesthetic quality; a “personal” canon almost ignores that definitive criterion by virtue of being, well, personal. There’s a reason Bloom calls it the Western Canon, not the Harold-Bloom’s-Private-List Canon.

But no, scholars do not get to include and disclude novels based on personal taste untilt hey are very, very established scholars…and even then, they need damned good arguments for it. Moreover, a scholar of Fenimore Cooper is expected to have a solid working knowledge of all Cooper’s novels, not just the ones he or she likes. Ditto a Joycean, a student of 18th century slave narratives, etc. There’s a reason academics call them “fields of study.”

In any case, canon as applies to comics and genre fiction is very different. Even Wikipedia has separate entries for canon of this sort and the Western canon, and their disambiguation page does a nice job of defining that difference, to wit:

Canon (fiction), material that is considered to be “genuine”, “something that actually happened”, or can be directly referenced as material produced by the original author or creator.

Western canon, the books, music, and art that have been the most influential in shaping Western culture

The problem of the personal canon as some people misdefine it is that it mistakenly thinks these two things are the same: it wants to use “influential and important” as a synonym of “officially counted.” It isn’t. A personal canon, to the extent that makes sense, is one in which you DON’T CARE what’s official or not.

Also, to Dean and FunkyGreenJerusalem: I’ve helped fact-check the Handbooks. I’ve corresponded extensively and continuously with people who write the current Marvel Handbooks to the point of being thanked in two of the 200s-era issues. If you think they’re merely cash grabs, you have absolutely no clue how much work is done on them by the writers and editors. Hell, just go look at the Deluxe Edition OHOTMU from the mid-1980s, at all the essays and Data Corrections and the sheer amount of work and research that went into those things, and tell me it’s some lazy, undercooked project.

You disagree with the publishing philosophy behind it, and that’s fine; but please don’t denigrate the hard work of the people who research and write the stuff by slamming their efforts as some crappy “cash grab.” It’s rude.

” I have no problem with mocking segments of fandom, but when it’s the segments that have made your career… Then again, based on my one conversation with the guy, I don’t think he’s the mean bastard type like that. ”

I don’t think it’s mocking segments so much as particular extremes of ideology; just because every Geoff Johns fans isn’t a Superboy-Prime or William Hand doesn’t mean his work hasn’t ( probably not by Johns’ intentions ) been received by certain nutty individuals. I’m sure HEAT approves of Geoff Johns…

You know i’ve really found it interesting seeing different takes on Blackest Night because it truly amazes me how on a place like CBR, Final Crisis was generally praised while being an unreadable trainwreck of a comic that probably hurt DC for years to come. While Blackest Night has gotten more positive than negative, the attacks on it by some of the same people who praised the bastardization that was Final Crisis really says alot to me about these people and their taste in comics.

Now that was a hell of a random thought, I guess.

Put as briefly as possible: a canon that exists for only one person is not meaningfully a canon.

Omar — I know my English lit, too (only a Master’s) and I can’t really argue with your assessment. I would say that the official canon is, as you put it, reliant on influence, one that comes together as personal canons interact. A personal canon is meaningless to the larger world, but they build up to form the larger canon. Additionally, the personal canon matters in that it applies to the person who creates it. Is it meaningful? Maybe not beyond that one person, but it can be when it interacts with and influences the canons of others…

…or, I’m talking out of my ass. That’s certainly a possibility.

Nah, you’re not talking out of your ass; I just seem to encounter — elsewhere than CSBG — the sorts of fans who use personal canon as a dismissive gesture rather than as a critical one. I might still insist on some semantic separation of the term “canon” from a purely private or individual level, but that’s my own personal lexicon. (Wittgenstein would take me to task for proposing such a thing, come to think.)

Another way of thinking about this may be to say that superhero publishers are really invested — financially and legally — in maintaining the idea of their absolute textual authority. Reading doesn’t work that way, but intellectual property arguably does. Personal canon is an attempt to square that circle , at least from my perspective, and I’ve always been skeptical of how fruitful the effort is once the initial rhetorical usefulness of the phrase is exhausted in any given conversation.

I’d say that the problem most people had with Final Crisis was that it wasn’t a bastardization, but rather that it was such an inside-baseball Morrisonian kind of thing that it shouldn’t have been sold as a big goofy crossover for all comers.

Remember that he’s been accused both of pandering to Silver Age Nostalgiacs as well as Superhero Gorn Fans, so Blackest Night might well end tilting the DCU back towards happier territory.

People have said this about every single DC crossover in the past 5 years. It won’t happen. It will never happen. Why would they want to “tilt back to happier territory” when without fail their bestselling books are the ones where gigantic swaths of C-listers are brutally murdered or dismembered?

The only thing Blackest Night will do is teach DC that a gigantic crossover about zombie superheroes ripping out people’s hearts is the best way to get the #1 selling comic of the month, so they better find a way to top that for the next one.

If you think they’re merely cash grabs, you have absolutely no clue how much work is done on them by the writers and editors. Hell, just go look at the Deluxe Edition OHOTMU from the mid-1980s, at all the essays and Data Corrections and the sheer amount of work and research that went into those things, and tell me it’s some lazy, undercooked project.

You disagree with the publishing philosophy behind it, and that’s fine; but please don’t denigrate the hard work of the people who research and write the stuff by slamming their efforts as some crappy “cash grab.” It’s rude.

It’s not rude – these are books that just tell you what happened in other stories, with added power meters and such.
It appeals to the basest level of fandom – the need to know everything and have it all tied together – and regardless of the work put in, exist only to grab the cash of the people who this sort of business appeals to.
On top of that, the creators themselves – the people who actually write the stories these books need for material to compile – seem not only divorced from the compilation – but not beholden to it in anyway.

So basically, Funky, you don’t like those sorts of projects — which is fine, as I noted in my earlier reply.

Not sure why that means they or their readers are “base.” I’ve said before that the Handbooks were the first comics I really read or collected, since they seemed to promise a strange, cohesive fantasy world into which many ideas had flowed. I suppose I’m just the basest sort of fan, and always was.

Nor am I sure how anything you’ve said proves that they’re a lay cash grab after I pointed out how much work actually goes into producing them.

Again, I get that you disagree with the publishing philosophy behind such projects. But wen we’re talking about superhero comics publishing, calling something a derivative or interdependent work seems less like a criticism and more like an underlying condition of work in general. Nobody’s writing Spider-Man for art’s sake; and oddly, no one’s writing Marvel Handbooks out of some heartless and artless greed.

Again, I refer you to Wold Newton, to Sherlock Holmes fandom, to the many, many other places stuff like this happens. Your argument would seem to render vast swathes of both fandom and creative works in many media and genres “base.” And the poor support you have for this judgement makes me disinclined to agree with it, or even credit it as particularly intelligent.

Hells yeah, Boston Legal!

Wait, what are you guys talking about?

Not sure why that means they or their readers are “base.”

Well, they aren’t in it for the art of it – the best writing or for the panel layouts or line work – or for the character work… seems to me it’s just the ‘and then what happened and then what happened’ type mentality.
And so I said ‘base’.

Nor am I sure how anything you’ve said proves that they’re a lay cash grab after I pointed out how much work actually goes into producing them.

Well, getting people to write in and help free of charge doesn’t sound like the most expensive operation in the world, and in regards to the re-inning of Rawhide Kid a year or so ago, it didn’t seem as though there was that much editorial coherence to it.

So to me it seems pretty much like most crossovers or tie-ins – an attempt by the companies to declare ‘everything counts’, and then get B-list/C-list writers to fill in the blanks and milk fans for their money by telling them they have to buy it to understand what is going on.

But wen we’re talking about superhero comics publishing, calling something a derivative or interdependent work seems less like a criticism and more like an underlying condition of work in general.

Except to all those works that aren’t derivative or interdependent.

Again, I refer you to Wold Newton, to Sherlock Holmes fandom, to the many, many other places stuff like this happens.

This is the only type I’m aware of actually put together by the owner/author of the work.
Wold Newtown came well after the stories – and unless being put into a new work such as Plantetary or LoEG doesn’t interest me at all.

Your argument would seem to render vast swathes of both fandom and creative works in many media and genres “base.”

No, just the one’s that need to tie everything together, usually resulting in the powers of the individual stories to be lessened.

And the poor support you have for this judgment makes me disinclined to agree with it, or even credit it as particularly intelligent.

What does that mean?
Because I didn’t prepare an counter-argument for ‘Wold Newtown’ before you brought it up means that my argument isn’t intelligent?
Or is it because I don’t think tying stories together that weren’t actually written to go together is the most interesting or worthwhile pursuit?

I think that the point that Funky is trying to make (and I apologise if I’m putting words in his mouth) is that Handbooks, while perhaps difficult to make and enjoyable to read, do not really have any artistic merit, or at least no merit over the top of the stories they reiterate.

While I’ll agree it takes a certain skill to create a handbook, I can’t see that skill as being creative, rather it seems to me more historical. I don’t have a problem with historians, but I do have to question the necessity of a history of events that didn’t actually occur.

To me, the problem seems to be not so much with the handbooks but with a certain reading mentality they seem to feed into. While you yourself prove a definite counter-example to this, it does seem as if handbooks lead to readers taking a historical view of comics, where they care only about plot, treating plot points as actually events that need to make sense, and miss any thematic value the stories might have. I’d ask you, as a literary critic, this, would a handbook help at all in the literary analysis of a work? I can’t see that it could.

It seems to me, and I think to Funky too, that handbooks breed a superficial way of reading comics, with the sole concern being the literal meaning and no regard being payed to thematic meaning, seemingly the very opposite of an artistic mentality.

You don’t like Blackest Night, Chad? Don’t you know this is the first crossover event done right in who knows how many years? This is the highest level of comic book blasphemy against our Continuity Lord and Master, Geoff Johns!
Or something like that. Sarcasm aside, I was with you on the “not even gonna bother picking it up” bit you were advocating. Somewhere between Sinestro Corps War and Blackest Night I got bored of Green Lantern and I’m not even interested. Plus, even the glowing praise I’ve been hearing from fans isn’t making me interested in the slightest either.

From now on, I’m just going to point and scream ‘NERD!’, and then let Ted tell everyone what I meant.

He does a much better job.

Don’t you know this is the first crossover event done right in who knows how many years?

Sarcasm aside, the first one done right in years was ‘Sinestro Corps War’, so I’m a bit shocked to see the amount of distaste pointed at Blackest Night for just existing.
It makes y’all sound like me with Civil War, back before avoiding crossovers was the in the thing.
(And thus as the tides turn, I’ve decided to stick up for crossovers. Except Dark Reign. Fuck Joe Rice).

He does a much better job.

That’s alright, I’m sure you Sydneysiders are good for something. What you’re good for I’m not sure, but it must be something.

I dunno — I’m still a real sucker for fictional documents of any sort, which takes in the Handbooks, and more importantly, think it should be noted that at the time they were coming out the choices for figuring out where a character had been and how that character had been handled were limited in many cases to purchasing expensive back issues or reading those false documents. And in those days before the Internet,

I’d go farther and say that there’s a sort of craft in the particular way the Marvel Handbooks have always been written, a kind of wonderfully bizarre “just the facts, ma’am” tone in which the most absurd and fantastical events are described in the tone of an encyclopedia. Reading the entries that cover, say, Steve Gerber stories is in some ways more interesting after you’ve read Gerber’s stuff.

I’d still argue that Marvel’s Handbooks are and always have been a labor of love, with the exception of the horrible period when the faux-encyclopedic format gave way to what was basically an RPG character sheet. (The power bars, which are not the work of the current Handbook writers, are an unfortunate artifact of that. The Handbook writers, frankly, ignore those things entirely.) They’re also a particular style of writing; the original story the Handbook produces isn’t any of the individual stories accounted for in its text; it’s the effort at creating the deliberate illusion of a cohesive universe from so many scattered creative endeavors. That’s where the part that interests me comes in: not that Marvel’s or DC’s is some prefab, perfectly-planned universe, but that this is a stated premise almost always at odds with the rest of the line that the Handbooks and Who’s Who titles actually, insanely, and entertainingly commit to.

Personal canon? Hear hear! In *my* comics universe, there’s no such thing as “President Luthor” or “God-King [or whatever] Norman Osborne” or a Superboy who is anybody but a young Clark Kent.

Anything else would be, to be honest, too ridiculous to contemplate (which is one reason — in addition to the obvious fact that crap like BLACKEST NIGHT & Name-That-Crossover-Event is so awful as to be an insult even to a fanboy’s nominal intelligence, though of course by definition the vast majority will refuse to admit it to themselves — I ignore all but a very small handful of Marvel & DC superhero titles).

In short, continuity is pretty much frozen where it was when I stopped reading the comics in question — 1970ish for the mainstream DC Universe, 1978ish for the mainstream Marvel Universe.

I’m with Karindu; the Handbooks ARE a labor of love, they ARE entertaining to read in their own way distinctive from the one I read the actual comics, they helped fill in plot points back when the internet wasn’t around, and they did their best to explain the contradictions that careless writers and editors caused. It’s not any “baser” that any other comic book related project.

… the Handbooks ARE a labor of love, they ARE entertaining to read in their own way distinctive from the one I read the actual comics, they helped fill in plot points back when the internet wasn’t around, and they did their best to explain the contradictions that careless writers and editors caused. It’s not any “baser” that any other comic book related project.

Both things can be true.

Marvel could have made the decision to produce the Handbooks as blatant cash grab, while the people who actually made them really cared. If you personally enjoyed them, then no one wants to take that away from you.

However ….

The Handbooks worked along with Electra saga and SECRET WARS to create a mind-set that sucked a lot of the pleasure out of reading comics. Suddenly, there was an emphasis on old comics as historical documents for a fantasy world in which everything needed to fit together. Comics were judged less on whether they were good than whether they “counted”.

Worse, the stakes suddenly needed LIFE OR DEATH! A superhero fight was no longer a big deal unless someone died and it generally needed to be someone the reader cared about. Most of the people that followed Frank Miller were not talented enough to create their own characters to get bumped off, so they started rolling B and C-listers into their stories as cannon (and canon) fodder.

Finally, SECRET WARS shifted the control of plot in the over-arching universe from the individual writers and/or their editors upwards. Suddenly, the Editor-in-Chief was deciding to have Spider-Man switch costumes and it was up to the build a story around that. Sometimes those stories were good, but they were never anything other than arbitrary. Moreover, the EiC was seldom as a good a story-teller as the folks working under him. That, in turn, lead to the promotion of certain writers to “show runner” status.

That leaves us in the position that we are in. When you pick up an issue of, say, FLASH: REBIRTH and realize that Geoff Johns has a limited feel for Barry Allen, that rules having a readable Flash title for the foreseeable future. The editor is not going to come along, say “ooops” and hire someone with a more playful sensibility that will make it all go away the next issue. After all, everything COUNTS, Barry was brought back by the latest editorial fiat and the stakes have to be enormous. To paraphrase Dean Wormer, there will be no more Flash fun of ANY KIND!”

In fact, DC fans that do not resonate with the types of stories that Geoff Johns feels that he can sell to Dan DiDio have extremely limited options PERIOD. The same is true for Marvel fans, except Brian Michael Bendis and Joe Quesada happen to sit in those seats.

Comic news IS boring right now. Everything cool coming up I already know about. No “Surprise, Grant Morrison is going back to Marvel to finish his Marvel Boy trilogy” announcements, no teaser images of “The Forgotten FF issue by Waid and ‘Ringo”. Nothing ;_;

Dean: I agree with some of your points, but not others. At least for me, the Handbooks didn’t decrease my enjoyment of the regular books; if anything they increased it, because now I realized that the universes being described in them were even more complex and fascinating that they seemed in. If a character I knew only from TOHOTMU or Who’s Who was featured in a recent comic, I was intrigued because now I could see him or her actually in use! It never bothered me if a story “counted” or not- DC’s Elseworlds featured some of their best stories ever. It only bothered me when the comics THEMSELVES said something counted and then they dismissed them without warning, as was the case with the “Max is Evil” reboot during Infinity Crisis (which can be attributed to the “Superboy Punch” thing, but DAMN, that’s the lamest reboot ever.) I WILL agree with you that character deaths, once a powerful story device, are just now cheap shock value stuff that shows how little the current powers that be care about what we fans feel for the product they try to sell us. Instead they seem to have a “give the current favorite creator (Johns, Bendis, Morrison, etc.) free chart to do WHATEVER they want, screw logic, characterization and yes, continuity. Writers should be free to IMAGINE what they want, their best ideas often come that way… but it takes responsible editors to make sure their ideas fit within the larger scheme of things. Too little editorial control is as bad as too much of it.

Comic news is boring? How will Disney hack up Marvel? How will DC keep Superman with the lawsuit? How will Marvel respond to the Kirby lawsuit and what is the effect on their characters!
You’ve got corporate events that literally take years to play out whereas 3 years ago it was “I’m sick of megaevents syndrome” and rising prices”. Well both those trends are still going but its the Disney buyout and DC Entertainment that will have the biggest effect on the future titles that you will see published.

From last week’s random thoughts:

I’m a review/commentator/critic when it comes to comics, right? I tend to write pieces judging works on their content… Why is it that I’m expected (even implicitly) to have an opinion on the business side of things? Why should I have a comment on Disney/Marvel or the restructuring of DC when my expertise (if I have one) is the actual comics? Just wondering, because it seems weird. Like not talking about the business side of things is conspicuous even though I’m a literature guy… The two are related, but maybe I’ll stick to things I know about a bit.

Also, what am I supposed to say about those things that offer little information to discuss? I don’t want to speculate on those things and that leaves… what? When there’s news worth discussing, it will be discussed, but broad corporate changes with no specifics as to how it affects content doesn’t interest me greatly until content is affected.

“Trashed Blackest Night”? Uh oh. Someone might be retarded.

Pssst. It’s probably you.