Continuity Shmontinuity

In my infinite wisdom, instead of doing website homework, here I am at midnight, doing a quick update on what I think about comic books and continuity. Because I'm awesome (nerdy) like that (really lonely).

EDIT: this didn't turn out to be a "quick" update at all. Oh well.

Lets limit our discussion to continuity in the work produced by the Big Two, since those are the two companies that make mincemeat out of their own continuities on an almost monthly basis (gotta keep those prima donna writers/artists happy!) and charge $3.50 a pop for their troubles. The things that get fan(boy)s out of wack are usually character origins, powers (if any), relationships, events, etc. which seem to change at either a given notice, or disappear altogether. Comic books take the statement "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" and proceed to skullfuck it. They not only try their hardest to "fix" it, they break it again, fix it, break it again, pretend they never broke it in the first place during fan panels, then fix it by giving it a new origin or costume. Then they walk away while a city's worth of continuity and history lies burning in the background.

Now lets back up here. First of all, comics characters like Superman and Spiderman have been around for decades. There is such a thing called time compression, where the timeline of events in a fictional work that exists in our world for decades, and occupies a much smaller space of time in its own realm, faces problems related to character aging and development, parallels with real-world current events and so on. In the fictional world, Sherlock Holmes is always in that vague area of late 30's to early 40s, the kids from the Simpsons never grow up, the 4077 M*A*S*H* doesn't leave Korea for about 10 years, even though the actual main conflict lasted about 3 years. Such is the case in comics - characters are in a stasis, and it will drive you insane to contemplate it in terms of the real world. Holidays, birthdays, personal landmarks, all will loop, or be presented in a new way, every single time. It seems like a sort of trap of time, right? A prison of events. Groundhog's Day, but an entire life, contained, presented, then set skittering back to the beginning by the flick of a writer's pen.

The problems arise when readers want two things at once. We want someone with a backstory, a solid beginning. We want to know where they were born, what they were like as children, how they grew up and out and how they became the people we see today. We want a beginning and a middle - certainly not an ending. We want to be all caught up, and the action we see now is all en media res as far as we're concerned. However, the paradox here is that we also want new things to be happening all the time, but we do not want to see any obvious passage of time. This makes writing quite tricky. Writers want a beginning, a middle and an ending. Thats what they call a story. Fans are not logical or showered human beings. We want nothing of the sort.

When a fictional character ironically turns out to have a life of his or her own, there is no discernible way of making an end without evoking nasally whines of protest, or putting a stop to something that has too many roots in a variety of facets to simply pull the plug on and move on from. Unless of course, you opt for the eventual "alternate reality" story. The comic book writer's real release is in putting their unique take on how a character, or characters, should end. Some are done in such a spectacular fashion (take Kingdom Come, for example) that many would actually be happy if such an end were part of canon (and as it turns out, it is). But therein lies the paradox once again - we, the fans, wouldn't mind seeing an end, as long as there is an infinite amount of stories to still comprise the middle.

After the Silver Age, comics started probing real continuity, but still in a guarded way. Past events could be recalled by characters, and their effects could be felt in the "present" or help set up future events. Time was moving once again, instead of the characters occupying one very small pocket of life where their adventures would take place, before the status quo was restored by the next issue. As fans matured, and new fans inherited that maturity, this thirst for continuity grew stronger. I suppose it was meant to be something that the readers could relate to, to see characters have memories, and futures, and childhoods. At the same time of course, it gave the comics an excuse to peddle back issues or future issues, since the age of decompression was slowly dawning on comics as well.

Here's the thing though: the same person has not been writing Superman or Batman since they first came on the scene in the late 30's. Writers come and go, and since the Silver Age, they've had more influence on several aspects of the characters (costumes, powers, personalities), most importantly continuity. There is always that general continuity that is accepted as canon: Bruce Banner becomes the Hulk after a gamma radiation accident, Bruce Wayne witnesses his parents' murder, Captain America was a WWII hero and a recipient of the highly experimental super soldier serum. However, when it comes to individual writers, this continuity, and all the other things that come afterwards such as love interests, powers, encounters with villains, are all subjective to how they feel they would like to tackle the character. Even then, no writer ever stays the same person over the years, thank goodness. A writer depicting a character one way one year may not think the same 5 years down the line. With such changes, comes changes in continuity. Since its not the Golden Age any more, writers are given more range with what they can or can't do with characters.

It is nice to see continuity follow characters, especially given the amount of "big event" gimmicks we're encouraged to throw money at these days by the Big Two. At the same time I have to wonder, unless you're an ethereal being like Wonder Woman who will always be the same for hundreds of years, how old the Batman or any of the Green Lanterns supposed to be, if we're led to believe that most of the events we read about them participating in are counted as part of continuity. Thats one busy-ass year, if you think about it. I don't care how superpowered you are, a couple of Infinite Crises or Civil Wars every few months would age you horribly.

The cover for this is that years are imagined to pass for the characters, so that these events have a sort of "space" to occur in. Dick Grayson grew up and became Nightwing. Jason Todd is now a fully grown man too (despite what the super-punches to the reality walls would have done to expedite the process) and Tim Drake is the current Robin. Then how come Bruce doesn't look or feel a day over 35, maybe 42? By all rights, since Nightwing is about 24-26, maybe 14 years passed since his early days as Robin, Bruce should be about that age if not more, if we're to assume he starts being Batman around his mid-20s. Even that doesn't sit well, since we also have to take into account the apparent years he puts in to train mind, body and soul to become Batman. See? It doesn't work. 10 more years might pass, and Batman will still look fairly young, will move fast and his mind will be as sharp as a tack. This is why I respect Bruce Timm and his DC Animated Universe; even though it has a perceived bias towards all things Bat, it does have a beginning and an end (appropriately enough, with a Batman story).

Comic book timelines don't work because the readers and the writers are always at odds. While any writer worth his salt would like to take a work forward, the fans would like it to stay static for the sake of familiarity and comfort. Its funny that this sort of arrested development is what appeals to a demographic mainly made up of man-children (I am one of them) who hold on to that one part of their lives where they felt the most complete and the ideal versions of the person they've always wanted to be. We're never going to adjust to having a salt and pepper haired Superman on our comics covers (unless he's from an alternate history) because thats not what we're used to. We want our youth, and the symbols of our youth, to remain unchanged against the forces of time.

I don't understand the harping on about continuity then, if writers who have been entrusted to be custodians of the continuity we hold dear will undoubtedly have either a new take on the stories (otherwise why bother hiring them and putting their names on the cover?) or will simply be human and overlook some aspects of it? Fans have the luxury of pointing out inconsistencies, but the writers are the ones writing the history. Perhaps they leave something out for a reason, because they were never happy with it in the first place. Geoff Johns has expressed his distaste with the incarnation of Clark Kent to appear in John Byrne's much lauded (and still influential) Superman reboot of 1986, and that is why his Clark Kent eschews those traits.

It is simply pointless (but no doubt fun for most!) to debate continuity in comics, as the medium does not allow for regular continuity to occur because of its many constraints. It doesn't work at all to think of comics in terms of real life and how the latter is shaped, and also demand the time compression required to keep the characters timeless. Of course, other writers find ways out of it (either by foregoing dreaded decompression or - gasp! - just clever writing) and manage to weave stories that just stand on their own and entertain us for the 20 minutes it takes to read most of them. That was the initial escapist fantasy comics held; they were a day in the life of extraordinary people living lives certainly more unusual than ours, but no less extraordinary. We like to fool ourselves into thinking that we look for more than that in our entertainment media, but in the process of sweating over the details, we lose sight of the fun in reading comics, which can be quite disheartening. To me, at least.

Yeah, I like comics, deal.