The importance of being multiversal.
Aug. 29th, 2011 09:51 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alexandraerinSmallville touched on pretty much the entire Superman mythos in its decade-long run, having Clark Kent meeting Lois Lane, fighting Doomsday, and joining(?) the Justice League before there was even a Superman. Yet apart from some winking nods in the background, there was nary a mention of Wonder Woman or Batman, much less an appearance by either character. Not even a Bruce Wayne character. This probably resulted in more mainstream media exposure than Oliver Queen (Green Arrow, a character originally very consciously made in the mold of Batman) would otherwise have gotten, but it seems kind of baffling. Why hold back on the big guns?
Before that, the Justice League cartoon had to deal with what was dubbed the "bat-embargo", where access to the vast roster of long-established characters from the Batman cartoons that launched the DC Animated Universe was seriously restricted. Again, this gave more exposure to characters who might otherwise have continued to languish in obscurity, though surely some opportunities were missed.
Why these restrictions? Because top brass was worried about having competing versions. Batman, Superman, and Wonder Woman pretty much always have new media projects in the works, and the bigwigs were concerned about some combination of brand dilution or consumer confusion.
But this seems silly. It's not like there aren't conflicting versions out there already.
The thing that strikes me in all of this is that DC's universe is rooted in the idea of using a "multiverse" to accommodate different versions of the same character. The original golden age Superman who could leap tall buildings with a single bound came from one world. The silver age Superman who could fly faster than the speed oflight time plot the speed the last writer tried to set as his limit came from another.
DC erased that version of the multiverse in their "Crisis on Infinite Earths" plotline in the late 80s, which had the intention of cleaning up continuity and allowing the most modern incarnations of the characters to have a clean break and a reintroduction to the world. That didn't actually work so well from a clearing-up-confusion standpoint, and they've followed up with a series of variably soft and hard "crises" and "reboots" since then.
Apart from the big editorially mandated retcons with attendant criss-cross-crisis-crossovers, of course, there have been the incidental reinterpretations and re-envisionings along the way, the seminal events that get written and re-written... I think the story of the Joker's origin or of Batman's first encounter with the Joker is turning into a comic book version of "The Aristocrats". Not necessarily in the sense that every writer tries to top the last one (that's normal comic book writing), but in the sense that it seems like the story that every writer wants to tell with their own personal stamp or twist.
And the thing is, they're all pretty good. None of them are definitive, none of them can be definitive, but they're all good. When it comes to the Joker's origins, the "multiple choice past" is part of the character's personal meta-mythology. Occasionally the main ongoing story might pay lip service to this version or that version as if it were part of continuity, but it's like the references to where Springfield is on The Simpsons... there is no "truth" to be discovered, and every hint will eventually be contradicted.
So here's my question: why continue with the fiction of having one official version at all? As much as I would love it if new DC animated movies and shows like Young Justice were officially folded into the universe as the one anchored by Kevin Conroy's Batman, nothing has been hurt by the plethora of non-interconnected, contradictory animated movies and TV shows. Since Iron Man, Marvel has very conspicuously rushed animated movies to the shelves a year or two ahead of their live-action blockbusters without worrying that The Invincible Iron Man not only shows a different version of Tony Stark than the live-action Iron Man, but it focuses on the same story (his origin).
Around the same time Marvel started knocking it out of the park with movie adaptations, they launched their "Ultimate Universe" line, a second continuity that was muddled a bit at the beginning by seemingly conflicting mandates to bring characters back to their roots while exploring bold new takes on them, and to appeal to newer and younger fans while giving us dark and gritty twists on established characters. It was at its best when it gave us a fresh start on old characters (contemporary!teenage!Spider-man) and at its worst when it gave us edgy for edginess' sake (cannibal!rapist!Hulk).
And in that same era, DC undertook a somewhat similar endeavor, the "All-Star" line... the idea there was an anthology-ish imprint which would take an iconic character and give it to an iconic comic book writer to tell their own stories with, outside the constraints of creativity. Grant Morrison and Frank Miller were given the first go-rounds, on Superman and Batman. Morrison gave us his haunting and terrifically affecting love letter to the lost excesses of the Silver Age. Miller gave us The Goddamn Batman. The project never actually went any further than that.
So now we are on the eve of DC's rebootiest reboot ever. Everybody is younger. Everybody is supposed to have less baggage. By rebooting the whole line at once they have a chance to actually clean up continuity snarls in a way the previous reboots failed to do so. (After the first Crisis, one of the problems is that they didn't have "new official" versions of all the characters and their histories lined up, so new versions of some characters continued to interact with old versions of others until they got their own retcons.)
But that's not actually likely to happen, because we're being told that the basic history of the DC universe has still happened, it just happened when everybody was younger, and it happened in less time. Barbara Gordon was Batgirl as an adolescent, she was shot and spent three years as Oracle, doing the things that Oracle did only as a teenager rather than an adult and now she's out of the chair and taking her first steps into adulthood. Leaving aside the problematic aspects of abandoning the Oracle role: we're supposed to imagine the whole history of Birds of Prey happened, they happened in three years, and they happened with a plucky teenager occupying the seat of the capable adult we've been reading about.
This is not really... ideal. I can't believe that this "We're starting over! ...but not really." was actually anybody's baby. Rather I imagine a conflict between the creative desire for a clean slate and the creative desire to honor what's come before, the marketing imperative to keep things accessible to new fans and the marketing imperative to not alienate the existing fans... same sort of thing that made the early days of the Ultimate Marvel Universe such a messy mish-mash of "Big-time superhero coming through!" and "The madder Hulk gets, the hornier Hulk gets!"
So here's what we might term the "ultimate" question: if DC thinks they can sell Batgirl books with young Barbara out of the chair and in the suit, why can't they do it at the same time as allowing stories featuring the older Oracle Going To The Motherfucking Computer Bank Like An Adult? And also have stories with Cassandra as Batgirl and/or Steph as Batgirl?
They don't have to be the same continuity. Comic book fans aren't confused by this. Consumers aren't confused by this. Kids aren't confused by this. Kids have never been confused by this sort of thing. We grow up with different versions of the same story.
For every fairy tale, there's the Disney Version, there's The Other Animated Version (when I was growing up, this usually came in the form of an imported cartoon shown as a "Special Delivery" on Nickelodeon), there's The Retelling In An Otherwise Non-Fairy-Tale-Based-Cartoon, there's probably at lest one live action version... oh, and yes, there are books, too.
When we've already got the comic book of Batman, the animated series of Batman, the animated series of The Batman, five different men who have played Batman in movies, comics based on the cartoons... why must there be one true and central version of "continuity" or "mythology?"
One of the best-loved episodes of Batman The Animated Series even focused on this idea. It took its title ("Legends of the Dark Knight") from a then-ongoing comic series that played around with the idea of different continuities/mythologies. This animated series featured a young Barbara Gordon as Batgirl at the same time that Oracle was establishing herself in the pages of ongoing DC comics. DC published and sold comics based on the animated series with the Barbara Gordon.
So why does it seem so unthinkable to present us with two versions of the character now?
There are a lot of sidepoints I could explore here, about the nature of storytelling and how mass media and copyright have changed it... and how fan fiction falls into that. I might have another post in me about that, but for now suffice it to say that I've found myself drifting around almost 180 degrees from my youthful (under)estimation of the worth of fanfiction.
Before that, the Justice League cartoon had to deal with what was dubbed the "bat-embargo", where access to the vast roster of long-established characters from the Batman cartoons that launched the DC Animated Universe was seriously restricted. Again, this gave more exposure to characters who might otherwise have continued to languish in obscurity, though surely some opportunities were missed.
Why these restrictions? Because top brass was worried about having competing versions. Batman, Superman, and Wonder Woman pretty much always have new media projects in the works, and the bigwigs were concerned about some combination of brand dilution or consumer confusion.
But this seems silly. It's not like there aren't conflicting versions out there already.
The thing that strikes me in all of this is that DC's universe is rooted in the idea of using a "multiverse" to accommodate different versions of the same character. The original golden age Superman who could leap tall buildings with a single bound came from one world. The silver age Superman who could fly faster than the speed of
DC erased that version of the multiverse in their "Crisis on Infinite Earths" plotline in the late 80s, which had the intention of cleaning up continuity and allowing the most modern incarnations of the characters to have a clean break and a reintroduction to the world. That didn't actually work so well from a clearing-up-confusion standpoint, and they've followed up with a series of variably soft and hard "crises" and "reboots" since then.
Apart from the big editorially mandated retcons with attendant criss-cross-crisis-crossovers, of course, there have been the incidental reinterpretations and re-envisionings along the way, the seminal events that get written and re-written... I think the story of the Joker's origin or of Batman's first encounter with the Joker is turning into a comic book version of "The Aristocrats". Not necessarily in the sense that every writer tries to top the last one (that's normal comic book writing), but in the sense that it seems like the story that every writer wants to tell with their own personal stamp or twist.
And the thing is, they're all pretty good. None of them are definitive, none of them can be definitive, but they're all good. When it comes to the Joker's origins, the "multiple choice past" is part of the character's personal meta-mythology. Occasionally the main ongoing story might pay lip service to this version or that version as if it were part of continuity, but it's like the references to where Springfield is on The Simpsons... there is no "truth" to be discovered, and every hint will eventually be contradicted.
So here's my question: why continue with the fiction of having one official version at all? As much as I would love it if new DC animated movies and shows like Young Justice were officially folded into the universe as the one anchored by Kevin Conroy's Batman, nothing has been hurt by the plethora of non-interconnected, contradictory animated movies and TV shows. Since Iron Man, Marvel has very conspicuously rushed animated movies to the shelves a year or two ahead of their live-action blockbusters without worrying that The Invincible Iron Man not only shows a different version of Tony Stark than the live-action Iron Man, but it focuses on the same story (his origin).
Around the same time Marvel started knocking it out of the park with movie adaptations, they launched their "Ultimate Universe" line, a second continuity that was muddled a bit at the beginning by seemingly conflicting mandates to bring characters back to their roots while exploring bold new takes on them, and to appeal to newer and younger fans while giving us dark and gritty twists on established characters. It was at its best when it gave us a fresh start on old characters (contemporary!teenage!Spider-man) and at its worst when it gave us edgy for edginess' sake (cannibal!rapist!Hulk).
And in that same era, DC undertook a somewhat similar endeavor, the "All-Star" line... the idea there was an anthology-ish imprint which would take an iconic character and give it to an iconic comic book writer to tell their own stories with, outside the constraints of creativity. Grant Morrison and Frank Miller were given the first go-rounds, on Superman and Batman. Morrison gave us his haunting and terrifically affecting love letter to the lost excesses of the Silver Age. Miller gave us The Goddamn Batman. The project never actually went any further than that.
So now we are on the eve of DC's rebootiest reboot ever. Everybody is younger. Everybody is supposed to have less baggage. By rebooting the whole line at once they have a chance to actually clean up continuity snarls in a way the previous reboots failed to do so. (After the first Crisis, one of the problems is that they didn't have "new official" versions of all the characters and their histories lined up, so new versions of some characters continued to interact with old versions of others until they got their own retcons.)
But that's not actually likely to happen, because we're being told that the basic history of the DC universe has still happened, it just happened when everybody was younger, and it happened in less time. Barbara Gordon was Batgirl as an adolescent, she was shot and spent three years as Oracle, doing the things that Oracle did only as a teenager rather than an adult and now she's out of the chair and taking her first steps into adulthood. Leaving aside the problematic aspects of abandoning the Oracle role: we're supposed to imagine the whole history of Birds of Prey happened, they happened in three years, and they happened with a plucky teenager occupying the seat of the capable adult we've been reading about.
This is not really... ideal. I can't believe that this "We're starting over! ...but not really." was actually anybody's baby. Rather I imagine a conflict between the creative desire for a clean slate and the creative desire to honor what's come before, the marketing imperative to keep things accessible to new fans and the marketing imperative to not alienate the existing fans... same sort of thing that made the early days of the Ultimate Marvel Universe such a messy mish-mash of "Big-time superhero coming through!" and "The madder Hulk gets, the hornier Hulk gets!"
So here's what we might term the "ultimate" question: if DC thinks they can sell Batgirl books with young Barbara out of the chair and in the suit, why can't they do it at the same time as allowing stories featuring the older Oracle Going To The Motherfucking Computer Bank Like An Adult? And also have stories with Cassandra as Batgirl and/or Steph as Batgirl?
They don't have to be the same continuity. Comic book fans aren't confused by this. Consumers aren't confused by this. Kids aren't confused by this. Kids have never been confused by this sort of thing. We grow up with different versions of the same story.
For every fairy tale, there's the Disney Version, there's The Other Animated Version (when I was growing up, this usually came in the form of an imported cartoon shown as a "Special Delivery" on Nickelodeon), there's The Retelling In An Otherwise Non-Fairy-Tale-Based-Cartoon, there's probably at lest one live action version... oh, and yes, there are books, too.
When we've already got the comic book of Batman, the animated series of Batman, the animated series of The Batman, five different men who have played Batman in movies, comics based on the cartoons... why must there be one true and central version of "continuity" or "mythology?"
One of the best-loved episodes of Batman The Animated Series even focused on this idea. It took its title ("Legends of the Dark Knight") from a then-ongoing comic series that played around with the idea of different continuities/mythologies. This animated series featured a young Barbara Gordon as Batgirl at the same time that Oracle was establishing herself in the pages of ongoing DC comics. DC published and sold comics based on the animated series with the Barbara Gordon.
So why does it seem so unthinkable to present us with two versions of the character now?
There are a lot of sidepoints I could explore here, about the nature of storytelling and how mass media and copyright have changed it... and how fan fiction falls into that. I might have another post in me about that, but for now suffice it to say that I've found myself drifting around almost 180 degrees from my youthful (under)estimation of the worth of fanfiction.
no subject
on 2011-08-29 05:23 pm (UTC)But possibly my optimism has been maimed by too much contact with marketers as clients.