And as a result, there are times when the industry sets ridiculously low standards for itself, and trots out the "we're only comic books, don't expect much from us" line of reasoning.
For example, take Flushpoint. Obviously there's a lot of controversy over DC's big move. And a lot of that controversy is over the wisdom/desirability of rebooting the DC Universe's fictional history yet again.
[DC officials can continue to hem and haw and try to claim it's "not really" a reboot all they want. But the solicits tell us this a world where Superman was "the world's first Super Hero," and there was therefore no Golden Age and no JSA. There's really no way you can tell us that isn't a reboot, even if you resume it in media res. Man up and admit it, DC.]
Now me, I generally oppose reboots, you all know that. I think they're usually pretty bad ideas, show a real lack of creativity, and break the show's/creators' unspoken contract with the audience.
Yes, there are counter-examples, reboots that work. But please note that there is a huge philosophical difference between, say the new Battlestar: Galactica, which rebooted a thirty-year old TV show, and rebooting a comic series that had brand new stories just last month. There is a huge difference between rebooting a "dead" intellectual property and on that is currently ongoing.
And, as sure as the suns rises in the east, many of the defenders of the Flushpoint reboot choose to blame the readers for actually caring what they read about. Here's a series of Tweets, from various comics professionals. I'm not naming names, because I don't want to get into a tit-for-tat argument here; I'm just interested in examine the ideas. Here we go:
"I hope this reboot retroactively revises the content of my back issue collection. Otherwise the stories won't "count."
"When DC reboots Batman, it won't render my old Batman issues meaningless because I enjoyed them and they meant something to me."
"Readers only worrying about comics that "count" is part of how we got into this downwards sales spiral."
Gotta love that last one. I would have thought that the price of a comic book increasing over 1000% over the past thirty years, or short-sighted decisions allowing comics to lose 99% of their retail outlets over that same time, or the increased emphasis on violence and gore, or bizarre editorial mandates to continually reboot their product might have had a heck of a lot more to do with downward sales. Nope, it's actually the fault of fans who care about the stories they're told. Mea culpa.
Blaming the "fanboy mentality" has always struck me as pretty absurd, especially since DC has been in the grip of that same mentality themselves. There has been no consumer demand to keep redrawing Hawkman's history, or keep rebooting the Legion, or to bring back Barry Allen. That's all been DC's brass.
It's also DC brass who has, with every press release declared with bated breath that the reboot is "history-making" and "unprecedented." So, DC can get excited, but when people who think it's a bad idea get just as excited they can be dismissed as fanboys? Quite the double standard.
And yeah, the argument patronizing as hell. We do know the stories aren't real, we do know the older stories still exist. C'mon, that's not the argument that anyone is making. Set up a decent straw man, at least.
But perhaps more importantly, if other "legitimate" media tried the same tactics, they would never get away with blaming the fans.
Consider this hypothetical: J.K. Rowlings releases the 5th Harry Potter book, and in the first few pages declares the events of the 3rd and 4th books never "happened;" she declares that the series was getting too "complicated" and she was resetting things. What, exactly, do you think the reaction to that by media and fans would have been?
Of course, those are her books, and she can do what she wants with them. And yes, books 3 and 4 would still exist, even if overwritten. But somehow, I doubt people would be as forgiving of the "history-making" move, and instead we would here a lot more media outcry worrying about the fans who invested so much time and money following Harry Potter.
Obviously, a large part of that is because people think that books "matter" more than comics. And I suspect you wouldn't see as many book industry officials denigrating their own work by declaring "reboots happen-get over it." You would have serious discussions over what, if anything, an author owed her fans.
Second example, non-hypothetical this time. For those of you youngsters out there, Dallas was once the biggest prime time show in America. Go figure. But it was huge with a capital H. But Patrick Duffy, who played the "good" brother Bobby Ewing, decided he wanted to leave the show, so in the last episode of the 8th season, his character dies in a car crash.
So they went through the 9th season, and life went on. Bobby's widow, Pam, re-married, people lived and died and hooked up, children were born, things blew up. But rating started to slide for various reasons, and so the producers prevailed upon Duffy to return to the show.
But how? Well, there were any number of ways they could have done it--this was a soap opera, after all--but they way they chose? In the vary last scene of Season 9, Pam wakes up, and finds Bobby alive, taking a shower!! And how did they explain it? The first episode of Season 10 revealed--and I'm not making this up--that EVERYTHING that had happened in Season 9 had been a dream of Pam's. Never happened. None of it. The babies who were born, the people who had married or died, the things that blew up...magically undone.
Fans were upset. The show became a laughingstock (well, relatively more so) with critics. The creator of the show dissed the move as disrespectful of the fans.
And no one was dismissing fan concerns as "fan entitlement," no one tried to say, "Well the old stories still exist, so get over it."
Why? Because TV is "more important" than comics. Because in that medium, people understand and respect the emotional and intellectual commitment fans have to serial fiction. Because they understand that, on some level, creators have a social contract with the audience not to arbitrarily and repeatedly say "never happened," and that doing so has negative repercussions.
Comics creators, though? They don't respect their medium or their fans. They'll pull stuff that would never happen in other media, and if people complain, they'll trot out the "it's just comics, get over it" meme.
If you want to defend the reboot, great. If you want to discuss whether it's a good idea or not, great. But in your defenses, please don't denigrate the medium as not important, and don't mock the fans for the emotional and intellectual investment they've made. Hell, maybe even acknowledge that your comics work might be important enough for people to care about. "It's just comics" and "the fans shouldn't care so much" or just really, really foolish arguments to make. Comics should be as respected as other media, and dissing your product and your fans to defend (what I feel is) a dopey move is just counter-productive and sad.
Thus endeth the rant.
13 comments:
Well, yes and no. While I think there's merit in what you're saying, you are comparing apples and oranges, and I don't mean that books and tv are different media.
The thing about superhero comics is that the characters have already been re-invented many times, either within their own continuity or on television and film. It's part of the genre (as opposed to the medium) by this point, so "rebooting" is simply an expression of the "each writer/artist has its own take on any given character" concept.
TV shows are not like that, and Dallas' reboot could not be justified by a "the stories exist" as shows at the time were not kept "in print" (syndication aside, I suppose). Fans have been accepting of re-imaginings after a number of years however (BSG, Star Trek), but not in a mid-progress reboot (Dallas). People do accept heavy retooling between seasons though (Wonder Woman and Alias come to mind, but Doctor Who is a shining example) though no retroactive changes are usually made (here I could cite Primeval though).
As you can see, it depends and there are examples both good and bad for a variety of media (some book authors do reboot their characters constantly including Kafka, Auster and Moorcock). Do comics have an inferiority complex? Definitely. Is it warranted? I say yes given the nature of the monthly "rag" and the way editorial works, which makes American comics often cheap and devoid of artistic merit. The industry sets itself up for a fall with its 20-page chapters, disposable format and seeming service to the more lucrative movie/tv industries. Look at how Fantagraphics or Top Shelf treat their output. They treat comics as an art form, and consequently keep books in print, make books that physically can stand the passage of time, and stay out of the creators' way.
Siskoid--I think there's a substantial difference between the "each writer/artist has its own take on any given character" concept--say the 1970s "new" Superman--and a reboot. Sure, Clark had a new job, but they never claimed he had never worked at the Planet, that Lois never existed, whatever.
That argument of "everyone has their own take" could just as easily have been applied as a defense of the new writers/producers of Dallas, but probably would have been just as laughed out of town.
And, I fear that the "everyone has their own take" as a defense of a full reboot is essentially unlimited--there no reason why, then, that every single issue of Superman couldn't be a reboot from the previous issue's continuity. That may be acceptable from some standpoints, but I personally don't want to read what would be essentially a new Elseworlds story every single month.
There's a reason why a shared universe with a (relatively) consistent continuity is one of our most popular storytelling forms (as opposed to anthology titles, which almost uniformly fail). In general mid-stream reboots not only reject that, but in DC's case, denigrate it.
Which again is only true of mainstream superhero comics. The lack of a shared universe has never hampered Tintin's popularity or Sin City's or Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles'.
It's mainstream comics which has fetishized the "alternate version" either by catering to other media (there are how many different Batman continuities in film and tv now? and don't these often cause editorial to adjust or reboot comics to represent the current movie continuity if it's popular enough?) or simply because the soap opera nature of comics and variety of writers and artists working on them (books usually have single authors, and tv shows, though they have various writers, are working from a show runner's vision). In my above examples, Tintin, Sin City and TMNT had a single creator (or team of creators). There is no tendency to "reboot" your own creation. The "shared universe concept" is what attracts these revisions. The characters belong to an editorial entity that often makes decisions based on marketability. New artists may want to put their own spin in the look. New writers may offer completely different directions that pay homage to or disrespect the work done before. And though not a "reboot", I see no difference between the Byrnification of Superman or Spider-Man's de-marriage and what JMS did in Grounded or by turning Spider-Man into a totemic spider avatar. Some re-inventions occur in continuity while others take different starting points.
The root of the problem is the medium itself (by this I mean the very strict medium of American superhero shared universe editorial-owned monthly comics, not sequential art in all its forms). If the medium itself is not going to change, we'll have reboots - soft, hard and invisible - forever. I embrace it as part of that medium, and only ask that within those parameters, we be given quality.
Likely, Flushpoint will offer some quality stories - even some that could not have been told in today's DC continuity - as well as crap (which we have in today's continuity anyway). Quality is all. I just wish the medium would change to skew things TOWARDS quality, which a reboot like this doesn't address in the least. That's where it's wrong-headed.
Tintin and Sin City doesn't take place anywhere that would have a shared universe. Sin City is an anthology of sorts (from what I've heard of it) and Snowy and Captain Haddock aren't going to be able to hold a full series by themselves. (A Snowy one-shot or Haddock mini might.)
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, however, has shared its space with both Usagi Yojimbo (who not only has appeared in both cartoons but wasn't even published by Mirage) and Fugitoid, a mini that showed up in the Turtles comic, making a shared universe (or multiverse in Usagi's case), with the Triceratons from Fugitoid becoming a regular threat to the Turtles. (I'm not sure if they used the Turtles comic to finish the Fugitoid story or it was to set things up for the story arc where they met.)
The problem with a shared universe as large as the DC and Marvel universes is that there's a lot of continuity to maintain and the editors (including the EIC) haven't always been up to the task. In the past Marvel waived it off as part of their "No-Prize" or tried to explain it away at some other point. DC just restarts everything, which is pretty much giving up.
Excellent thoughts all around. I just want to point out that the new Star Trek was no reboot at all. They had a very well thought out explanation for the alternate history, which included time travel creating an alternate reality. I don't see that here, yet, and even when they do some of the changes that are being made are so radical that I can't see this story making sense, or making me very happy. No JSA? Really?
Forgive me for a slight disagreement, Nick, but the "time travel creates an alternate timeline" fig leaf doesn't mean it was any less of a reboot--just one that had a "explanation" for the changes that resulted in what they wanted to do all along, Star Trek with young actors. It may not have been a "cold" reboot, but it was a reboot none the less.
After all, Flashpoint will create the exact "mess with the time stream" excuse for DC.
Yes, but with no sense of any type of continuity. I have not been reading any of flashpoint because I have been suffering from Crisis Fatigue since Final Crisis, but it would seem like DC is stretching the idea of time, then folding it and crumpling it up into a ball. It is very confusing.
One item that has kinda bugged me in the last day or so was how Gail Simone explained that the changes to Bat Girl/Oracle were intended to improve the writing. The idea that Oracle was making things too easy on the Bat Family writers was a major motivation for the change. The problem here is that the writing to correct the problem is horrible...Well presumably horrible when you consider the vast changes made in the blink of an eye.
The difference between Star Trek and this DCU reBOOOt is that Star Trek had a viable, although somewhat prosaic, explanation for why their characters history was rewritten. I don't see that here.
"We do know the stories aren't real, we do know the older stories still exist. C'mon, that's not the argument that anyone is making. Set up a decent straw man, at least."
Most readers certainly do. But there absolutely are readers who consider stories that are set outside of continuity (or are removed from current continuity) as invalid and not worth reading. Between almost two decades of comics retailing and the same amount of time working in the industry, I have met alot of these people.
And I do blame those specific fans when their slavish devotion to the rules of a fictional universe prohibit their potential enjoyment from something they consider outside said rules. Particularly if it is something they enjoyed previously.
But as you say, that's only a part of the problem. Everything else you mention is certainly substantial. Which I suspect is why the original poster of that last Twitter post you quote specified "part". That qualification deserves attention. Just because we criticize one corner of the issue doesn't mean we are ignoring the other three corners. There have myriad grotesque missteps throughout the history of comics. I don't think anyone is really sweeping those under the rug.
In short: I don't think it's disrespectful towards the average fan to point to the extremist fan and say that their behavior is extreme. And I certainly don't think it's disrespectful towards the medium to remind said extremists that enjoyable stories from the past remain valuable, regardless of their status within continuity.
Yes, comics have more shifts in continuity than most other mediums. But then most other mediums do not have as long running of continuities and aren't operating on as narrow of a profit margin with as high of a cultural bias to fight against. Comics are comics. And whether the reboots are good or bad, we cannot hold them against how other mediums develop or how other mediums are treated by their fans.
But in regards to continuity alterations in other mediums: Tolkien rewrote the Hobbit so that it would match the Lord of the Rings. There are two versions out there. Tolkien even turned his first version into a fiction within the fiction to make his new universe work. It happens.
Landry--
Thank you for the note. It's always nice to hear from somebody in the industry.
Please allow me two brief notes. First, regarding people who refuse to read things "that don't count," I have no experience with any such people, but I'll yield to your obviously more vast experience. But let me observe that I think that a large part of that might be attributable to poor marketing by the comic book companies.
People buy Elseworlds books. People buy MAX books and Ultimate books. Exiles lasted over 100 issues despite not having any heroes from Marvel-616 and never crossing over there substantially. Clearly, there isn't some mass rejection of everything that isn't "canon."
But I never saw any promotion from DC for Supergirl Cosmic outside of the Johnny DC books. I never saw Marvel do any promotion at all for Thor the Mighty Avenger. These books got "ghettoized" as kids books, and the Big Two did little to correct that (while I should note that the blogosphere reacted with great enthusiasm to those titles). If those guys would have put 1/10 the promotion in those books as they did publicizing the latest Green Arrow book or the latest costume redesigns, I have little doubt they would have sold substantially better, even if some troglodytes decided not to buy them "because they didn't count."
Second point: the "high cultural bias" against comics is partly because of the constant reboots and un-deaths. What do you think the potential comic reader thinks when he reads in USA Today that character A is dead, and 6 months later reads another gushing press release in the same paper that he's back? How does that potential reader feel when he reads in the LA Times that Final Crisis was the event that was establishing the new ground rules for the DC Universe...and then two years later he reads that DC is chucking it out? There's no incentive for new readers to latch on when comics' own press machines constantly trumpet that they're constantly changing everything--this time for reals!! Why waste the time and money when it's all going to be redone shortly? Deliberately advertising the fact that you're no more credible than Bobby Ewing in the shower is no way to go. Yes, "comics are comics," but one of the points of my post was that until they stop the reboot-rehash-repeat cycle, until they can become more mature in their storytelling tropes, they'll never transcend that.
I wrote a whole bunch of stuff, realized I was rambling and boiled down my thoughts to a more direct and succinct point: Here it is:
Absolutely agree. 100%. Though I would say that (in addition to your points) the bias runs deeper. But I think you know that well enough and it doesn't really change what we're talking about.
For the record: I do love reboots. I love seeing new versions and I love seeing the characters start over from scratch. But that is a personal preference. I doubt that the majority of rebooted material will appeal to me. But then, I'm hardly the target audience.
And I can't help but wonder if DC is looking at the critically low number of comics readers and asking themselves if the 50,000 or so die-hard fans are the target audience anymore. IF they can create a new branch of DC that reaches a much larger readership at the expense of the pre-existing readership, should they?
That said, the real key to mass appeal isn't devotion to pre-existing continuity or rebooting from the ground up. It's about creating good comics. Are these new DC books good? None of us really know that yet. It will be interesting to revisit this topic around October 1st.
And look, I ended up rambling again. Curse you. If I miss my deadline, I'm blaming you.
Great, now America will hate for for delaying one of your books. :-)
Just recently I saw a reboot of a book series and I was floored by surprise. It's not something you generally see in books. I read it and nearly threw the book away a half dozen times in disgust. It wasn't that it was a bad story, but it was a very different story pretending to be a story I new and love. For the life of me I could see no reason for turning the main character, a rugged individualist with his own sense of honor, into a LAWYER.
The point being is that reboots 99% of the time don't work. You can't recapture the same magic with a different spell. In the case of the comic industry it has become a naked strategy of desparation and will remain so no matter how much the blame the fans.
Lazarus Lupin
http://strangespanner.blogspot.com/
art and review
"Great, now America will hate for for delaying one of your books. :-)"
I was going to post that Supergirl: Cosmic Adventures art with an explanation that the series was almost greenlit, but I missed the deadline because of you. Unfortunately I was sleepy when I finally constructed the post and forgot my plan. Ah well.
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