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It’s All About Readability

No Fly Zone: Reboots and Readability
© Mania

Our friends over at Comicscape ran an interesting piece called The Three Cs of Comics (consistency, continuity, and confusion) as they relate to new readers. Chad Derdowski made light of the dense and daunting world of superhero comics and their tangled, decades-long continuity. Trying to explain pre-Crisis and post-Crisis Superman and which Superboy is which gets tiring. If you need a way to cut a date short, you’ve found it. Chad makes light of the situation, but he’s got a real love of superheroes. Most comic readers do, no matter how much they prefer Eightball (or claim to). But, understanding that, Chad points out some serious obstacles the genre has in attracting new readers.

Understand that there is nothing inherently wrong with superheroes. Hell, we’ve been telling stories about heroes since we fell off the bottom limb of the tree and walked upright. The problem is the rut the industry has landed in and continues to dig deeper. In short, fan-writers have been reworking the same cast of Marvel and DC characters that have been around for several decades. Sure, the two publishers pick up an extra mainstay character here and there, but they mostly work with the big guns the industry has always relied upon—Spider-Man, Batman, Superman, et al. Occasionally, you get something like Cable or the Punisher or Deadpool from the Bronze or Modern eras that stick around. But, it’s mostly the standby guys supporting the direct market. This is, in and of itself, not the end of the world. Ridley Scott has a new Robin Hood movie coming out in May. That story has been told a thousand times. There have been 22 James Bond movies. We still see endless retellings of King Arthur, Hercules, and a hundred other venerable stories in every media imaginable. The do-gooder urban vigilante in a costume is our modern folk hero. The difference is that instead of sharing our stories orally or in snippets of verse or the odd novel, we preserve them in ways that ensure they will be with us forever. We can store them digitally, claim copyrights on them, and otherwise keep them around. In a way, it’s fantastic. But on the other hand, it means that we’re beholden to what came before more than ever. No one owns Robin Hood. He, quite literally, belongs to the people by way of public domain. Somebody sure as hell owns Superman (though even that’s up for dispute at the moment).

There’s a reason why superhero comics reboot every so often with an all-new-all-collectible #1 issue. Marvel and DC know that seeing a series several issues in will immediately daunt would-be readers. When Invincible took off a few years ago, Robert Kirkman said Image suggested rebooting the series. He refused, and pointed out that anyone reading, say, Amazing Spider-Man probably jumped on somewhere in the middle. While he’s right on some level, it’s simply human nature to want to start at the beginning. No one likes to play catch-up. And, as Chad points out over at Comiscape, superhero comics require a huge amount of homework. And, the homework is fraught with years of convoluted storylines, sometimes made up as the writers and editorial staff went along. And, they were often written with ulterior motives—to consolidate multiple continuities, to correct an unpopular change in a character, or to make the comic more like a movie. Some of them are very good, but most—like most of any medium—simply don’t reach above average. Many are downright bad. Getting properly “caught up” like Marv Wolfman did when he wrote Crisis on Infinite Earths or Grant Morrison did for his run on New X-Men (the former reading pretty much everything DC ever published, the latter reading every X-trade available) would require more hours than most people have available. And, most of those comics aren’t worth the time it would take to read them. Most people jump in and figure things out, or they just avoid the series altogether—more the latter than the former.

Granted, comics can—and often do—ignore continuity in the service of new stories. But, there’s something wildly disrespectful about that, creating a catch-22 for ongoing superhero stories. If you call a series Iron Man, it’s kind of insulting to take the character’s World War II origins and update them to Vietnam to keep him young. Someone put work into that origin and cared about it a lot. It wasn’t written to be crossed out like this for something ostensibly better. But, in observing those older stories, we run into the same problem. However, there is an answer. We don’t mean to shoot down all long-form storytelling. It can be done. But, eventually, the stories start to repeat and only the truly faithful remain. That’s why we don’t cover superhero comics here—because they’ve pretty much been treading water since they were conceived. The only progress has been incremental. Most people have their time with them and then get out after a while. But, there are ways. Take our earlier examples. If you read or see a new variation on Robin Hood, you know the story you’re getting. We revel in the steps that a timeless tale takes from start to finish. And, no one accuses Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves from deviating from any sort of continuity. It’s an unapologetic rewrite of an old story that’s been rewritten for hundreds of years. Ridley Scott’s film will rewrite it again. And, there’s a reason why Sony is going to reboot the Spider-Man film series—because the character’s origin story is damned good. Everything after is just window dressing and variations on the premise created by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko. Superhero comics could learn a lesson here. If all of the Spider-Man comics were canceled forever, there would still be years of comics to read—more than most people could or would in a lifetime. Marvel and DC have, on some level, learned this with the Ultimate, All-Star, and Earth One lines, but they’ve only treated the symptoms and not the disease. The world needs new heroes. It needs new ones for our children to discover and claim as their own. And in time, those old heroes can be brought back for new variations on their classic stories. It seems counterintuitive, but think of how many times the Shadow, Zorro, and a host of other characters have been recast, rebooted, and rewritten for new audiences. End the story. Wait a while. Tell it again in a way that suits contemporary audiences.

That’s why we don’t cover superhero comics much here—because Marvel and DC are dragging out—but not respectfully retelling, as we described—the same stories over decades There is very little new to say about them. We like to cover new ideas and fresh faces. Those stupid Bud Light ads praise the beer for its “drinkability” (if by that you mean, “goes down like ice water,” then sure), but we want comics with readability. You shouldn’t have to know decades worth of stories to enjoy a comic. You should, like any good novel, be able to pick up the book and read. Most form of serialized fiction wrap up after a few years, leaving a body of work that someone could, without too much trouble, enjoy from start to finish. Long-running television series wrap up after a few seasons—or have the good sense to create standalone episodes. This isn’t so with American superhero comics, which insist on maintaining ties to their earliest stories. You know what else rarely ends neatly? Soap operas. That’s not a good model for American comics to ascribe to. By all means, make superhero comics. But, try creating some new ones with a beginning, middle, and end that don’t require a lifetime commitment to fully experience. Or, do like the James Bond movies and just create a series of standalone stories with only thematic ties—the same character in similar situations, but not necessarily supported by earlier installments.

That’s why we support the comics outside of the mainstream here at The No-Fly Zone. Outside of a few notable exceptions (Hellblazer comes to mind), most of the best comics—even the ongoing series—have a finite number of installments, and can be neatly purchased in a few issues or trade paperbacks. They aren’t endless stories written for people who have followed a character since childhood. They represent new and exciting ideas that everyone can experience. All storytelling in any medium should try to break new ground. And, it can do so with our cherished heroes—both new and old. It just needs to find a new way to do it.

Kurt Amacker is the writer of The No-Fly Zone, Mania’s weekly alternative comics column. He is also the author of the comic miniseries Dead Souls, published by Seraphemera Books. Dead Souls is available from the Seraphemera Books website, Amazon.com, and at comic shops everywhere. He can be reached at kurt_amacker@seraphemera.org.