Canonizing Comics Article by aviewaskewed, 02:48 AM 28th Mar Disclaimer: The following column is entirely the opinions of the author (even at that we aren‘t sure), any similarity to the opinions of any other staff or affiliate of theendlesscrew.com is entirely coincidental and unintentional. Unless specifically noted otherwise, all creator comments have been gleaned from other sources and no creators have actually endorsed any aspect of this column. Hopefully everyone had a good Easter, and if you’re job closed, you got paid. My job closed, I didn’t get paid, so in retaliation, I’m going to work really suckily tomorrow. Yep, that’ll learn them…god I’m a tool. One of the things I grapple with, and I think that a lot of comics scholarship is grappling with at the present, is to what extent we can judge the stories of the past, as it relates to today. The usual view is to just say “The Golden and Silver Age stories are excellent, and they give us the foundations of today”, but honestly? After reading some of this stuff I see some as having a wealth of potential, good ideas and all sure, but the craft on them is crude, restrained, or downright dreck. It’s been very hard in comics to really create a way to make real scholarship that delineates like, “well, Batman started here, but the stories are pretty shitty especially compared to now”. There’s two reasons I think why we can’t honestly get our act together with that and really speak about comics as an art form on a peer to peer fan level: 1) We’re talking about fans after all, we’re talking about people who have made an emotional investment in characters who have a long and storied history, and as such, it’s hard to admit that there may have been entire times in the characters publishing history that we are looking at people working on it who were not giving us real work for the ages type of stuff. Another, related issue to this is that people do not want to admit what they read and held dear as kids in this medium could possibly have had it’s meaning or readability decay with age. The Justice League stories of the 60’s were good for the sixties, but there’s probably a damn good reason we don’t use the formula now, so maybe it’s time we admitted we’ve moved on since then, and look at such stuff as the roots of the current stories and traditions, and not so much as trying to prove it’s merits are just as good as now. 2) Continuity, we are so obsessed with continuity in this medium, so obsessed with making every story ever published count into the character’s history. I’ve said time and again that continuity is tricky thing, and we’ve actually become anchored to it, to the detriment of the medium. I have often said that the shared universe brought a lot of positive story-telling, and sales techniques in, but it also brought a lot of pitfalls in as well, and at multiple times companies have fallen into those traps. What I think we need to do in light of these issues, is that we have to stop worrying so much about continuity (especially at DC which has had to do numerous re-writes) and we have to enter in a word that is used in academia often in works where there is dispute about origin, authorship, or importance: canon. What I’m suggesting here is that we accept a fact of this industry that we’ve all purported to accept for years: Comics, until very recently (I‘d say about 20 years, maybe 25, give or take), were not a medium that it was considered widely that you could do real, lasting, artistic work in. Hell, at Marvel you have stories of original pages used to plug leaks in the ceilings, that’s how little stuff was valued. Comics were throw away periodicals, they weren’t designed to continue, they weren’t designed to have a flow, or lasting storyline until Stan Lee really began doing that, and it caught fire. We need to really accept that, not this lip service acceptance I see passed around where people realize that this is the history of the medium, but then turn around trying to find connections between material published now, and material published 40 years ago, because we’re demanding writers do that, and I think only a handful of really skilled individuals, with a great historical and creative knowledge of these characters can pull it off. I think we have in the past handcuffed creators with a demand that they draw connections to stories that were never meant to work beyond their original publications because nobody could ever see the super hero trend or ANY trend booming the way super heroes have in recent years, until the boom happened. Some publishers will immediately claim that if we begin a process of picking and choosing what counts, and making that public, we will harm the back issue market, and the ability to trade past stories because of the fact that we’re going to be saying that some stories have no value now because they are not in the larger tableau. Fair argument, but baseless I believe. Right now, I’m in the process of buying Archive Editions of the earliest JSA stories, not because I want them to fit continuity, but because I love the team, and I want to read everything published about them that I can. Sure, I want to read the stories that introduce some of the villains that have, and continue, to pop out of the woodwork now, but it’s mostly I just want to see where they started. The JSA is one of my great cases for the move from continuity, to canon, in comics. The JSA was around for the 40-50’s super hero boom, then left when it was over, then were resurrected during DC’s multiple earths, then suffered when those earths went away. We see on some levels already efforts by DC, and JSA writer’s to set up a JSA canon, choosing to fit in some stories and characters, things they can use, and then ignoring what they can’t. That’s what we should do across the board. We should have the publishers having their editors sit down, go through things, and create a canon for every character, and every book, and then pushing this structure out to the fan base. The radicals won’t like it of course, they’ll continue to try and make everything work together, but hey, there’s people out there who write scholarly comics texts using only he histories they like, and then leaving out retcons they don’t. So all I’m saying the publishers should do, is to just go and do what the fans are doing now, but on a more official level, a way of saying “this is OFFICIALLY what counts in the histories of these characters, and this is what does not” we already see it happening to a degree behind the scenes, what I’m proposing here is not a radical idea, it is in fact HAPPENING RIGHT NOW! All I’m saying is that I think we need to bring it out of the shadows, we need to embrace it, it will make the comics easier to read, it’ll make creators freer to create, and most importantly, it will allow people to very easily bring others into books with long histories, without having to explain massive amounts of confusing and conflicting information. Canon, not continuity, you read it here first. Back to Rants