American comic books have over eighty years of history and continuity. Depending on who you are, that’s either a bug or a feature; I fall squarely into the latter camp. There’s a lot of things I love about comic books, and about superheroes in general, but one of the first things I noticed about them as a kid which has stuck with me ever since and left me feeling awed was that sense of history. When I was able to get my hands on a comic book as a kid, more often than not I’d pick up the middle chapter of a storyline in progress, having missed the beginning entirely. Characters I didn’t recognize would pop in from other books where they were having their own adventures; characters would mention previous adventures they’d had together; there would even be editor’s notes letting you know which books or issues you could find those adventures in. It created a much more immersive world, and I wanted to know as much about it as possible.
Nowadays, with digital comics and archives, it’s easier than ever to find those old adventures; we also have Wikipedia now, which can fill you in on any character, backstory, or adventure you might have missed. When I was growing up, though, you had to dig through the back-issues box of your local comic shop and hope they had what you were looking for. It could be frustrating, though as any collector knows, oftentimes the hunt was half the fun.
Of course, when I was a kid I didn’t have the money or the transportation to do that either. If I wanted to fill in the blanks of the random issues I’d get from friends or the library, I had to use my imagination. Sometimes I really would sit down and come up with my own elaborate versions of these stories, but really, even just reading hints of what the adventure was would usually give me an idea of what the story was actually like, or, at least, what it could have been like.
As I got older and started going back and actually finding some of those back-issues, I was struck by something else entirely, the feeling that eventually led to me writing this article in the first place; in almost every instance, I liked the version of the story I had come up with more than the actual story once I read it.
This applies to more mediums than just comic books (though it’s most commonly happened to me there), so let’s look at the experience I had with the television show Parks and Recreation. I first started bingeing it on Netflix at the same time Season 6 was initially airing on NBC, so it had already had over five years of time to gain a reputation. I skipped Season 1 and started the show on Season 2 because that was the general recommendation. It was the right move — Season 1 is bad — but it took me a few episodes to catch up not only on who everyone was, but what was going on with them. Season 2 began with a few storylines from the previous season still unresolved, such as Leslie’s crush on Mark (ew) and their hooking up in the past, the pit in Ann’s yard, and Ann and Andy’s past relationship. I didn’t go back to watch Season 1 until I had finished the rest of the series, so the unknown origins of those stories were always lingering there in the back of my mind.
Maybe that built them up to be bigger than they ended up being. Or maybe it was just the bad writing (again, Parks and Recs is one of my all-time favorite shows, but Season 1 is…bad, bad enough that, if I had started with it, I never would have watched the rest of the show). But I thought maybe Ann and Andy would have some chemistry or we’d see what she saw in him or their final fight would be a blow-up, but, no, he just treats her terribly for six episodes then she kicks him out. Leslie and Mark was dropped so quickly in Season 2 because it was awkward and nonsensical and barely touched upon other than to create cringe-worthy moments between the two even in Season 1. The scenarios I came up with in my head were half-formed, but all felt a lot more interesting than what we actually got.
I feel like I can’t be the only person this sort of thing happens to, and I get the feeling that a lot of this phenomenon has to do with expectations. Going back to check out stories we’ve already heard about (or that friends have recommended to us after singing their praises) builds up expectations, and it’s hard for anything to live up to our expectations; even if it’s great, it’s not what we were expecting. In my time as a critic, one of the hardest (but most useful) things I had to learn how to do was to review the issue I actually read, and not compare it to the issue I wanted to read in my head. But it also has to do with the unknown. The unknown can be fascinating, because it’s full of possibilities. The unknown can never let you down, because it can be anything. Once a story has been told, no matter how good it is, that’s all it can ever be. It’s not surprising that this can sometimes be disappointing.
Occasionally, though, a story can use this effect to its advantage. One Piece did this with Nico Robin’s backstory, which it dropped hints about for nearly two hundred chapters before finally giving us a detailed flashback to her childhood. Characters spoke in hushed whispers about how dangerous she was as a child, that she blew up eight Marine warships on her own, and it whipped expectations into a frenzy among readers, many of whom wrote up elaborate speculations about how she may have done so. When we actually get to her flashback sequence, though, we discover that somebody else destroyed the boats, and the government framed her for it to make her seem more notorious to the public so that she’d be captured sooner (her actual crime was knowing forbidden knowledge that implicated the government). It was a deflating moment for a lot of fans, but it was also a smart storytelling decision, because it helped to emphasize how corrupt One Piece’s government is and how scared and powerless Robin actually was as a child. Just like the people of the One Piece world, we were misled into having the wrong impression of Robin, tricked into letting our imaginations run wild, led astray by the power of the unknown. That’s clever.
Most examples of this filling in the blanks phenomenon are personal, different for each person, because we’re all taking in different media and missing different pieces of it, but in the United States at least there’s one series that stands out to me because the experience is almost universal, mostly works to the series’ advantage, and seems to be largely unintentional. I’m talking about Dragonball Z.
Some background for anyone not familiar: Dragonball was a manga, or Japanese comic, which published 519 chapters over the course of 11 years. It was adapted into two different anime series, or Japanese cartoons: Dragonball, which covered the first 194 chapters of the manga up to Goku’s wedding, and Dragonball Z, which picked up from there and adapted the remaining 325 chapters. Z opens with no sort of recap or catch-up; it fully believes that its viewers have all either read the manga or watched the previous anime series, and in Japan that was basically true. In America, it very much wasn’t.
I’m not sure why America decided to air Dragonball Z without airing the original series first. Maybe it’s a rights thing. Or maybe they just thought Z would go over better with American kids than the original series would. If it’s the latter, they’re probably right; its propulsive action definitely appeals to American audiences more than the goofy adventure of the original series, which didn’t even really take off in Japan until its second arc. Either way, American viewers who started watching Dragonball Z back when it first debuted in the U.S. were, unknowingly, starting to watch a series smack-dab in the middle of its story, and like I said, Z does nothing to catch its viewers up or provide context for anything that came before.
One of the first characters we’re introduced to is Piccolo, who was the bad guy of the last two storylines in the original Dragonball preceding this, but who is never seen actually doing anything evil or villainous within Z itself; in fact, when we first meet him in Z he’s standing up to Raditz, the character who becomes the villain of the first storyline. It puts him into a heroic position, and make it shocking when he meets up with the rest of the cast and they view him as a villain. When we’re first introduced to the main protagonist, Goku, we’re supposed to be shocked that he has a son now, and supposed to be even more shocked a few minutes later when we find out that he’s actually an alien — but we don’t know the guy! That first episode relies a lot on Goku seeing his friends (Bulma, Krillin, and Roshi) for the first time in five years, and there’s unmistakable nostalgia to it that just feels confusing to first-time American viewers. A few episodes later, just as we’re getting used to these initial characters, Z digs into its bench and starts dragging out its supporting players, who appear in greater and greater numbers with even less context than the main players. Is that a guy with a third eye? A floating china doll? A talking cat and pig? Who are these people? How do they know each other? At one point they mention that several of these characters had already died before! Did I miss something? In retrospect, it’s an absolutely wild way to introduce a series to a new audience, and I can’t believe it worked.
Ultimately, though, I think that was part of Z’s appeal in America. Much like those comic books I picked up as a kid, when I started watching Z I was thrown into this fully fleshed out world* that I didn’t understand, even when all the characters clearly did, and it made me more curious to figure it out than anything. All these characters had backstories and abilities that were hinted at, but largely left unexplained and unknown, and as we know, the unknown is fascinating. I remember talking with classmates in sixth and seventh grade trying to figure out how all these guys connected, and that kind of theorizing probably did more to make us all die-hard fans than watching the story from its very beginning ever would have. (It helps that Z was a bizarre series anyway, especially as one of the very first anime to break into the mainstream in America. The fact that it was practically incomprehensible to adults was a feature to the kids watching it, believe me.)
*This creates an interesting contrast to the original Dragonball, which opened with a very narrowly defined world. Goku had never left his mountaintop home before, but the setting is slowly expanded for both Goku and the reader as Bulma helps him leave his home for the first time and they explore the world together, one new village at a time.
It didn’t take us kids long to learn that there was a “prequel” series in Japan that hadn’t come to America, and some of my earliest internet sleuthing was trying to find out what happened in it. It revealed some things to me, but left many others mysteries, and befitting the theme of this article, when I finally read/watched the original Dragonball, many of the answers I got after all that time felt disappointing.
Now, I guess this is where I interject and say that I actually quite like the original Dragonball. The potty humor and risque bits, especially in its first arc or two, don’t really land anymore as an adult, but it’s got a great sense of adventure and creativity that are often lacking in Z, and many of the fights are as thrilling and interesting as any from Z. But again, I had all this time to build the stories, the answers to these mysteries Z posed to me, up in my head, but they were never supposed to be mysteries in the first place. Dragonball wasn’t meant to be a prequel, and essentially turning it into one in America placed an amount of hype and pressure on it it was never meant to have. It was never going to be able to live up to those expectations.
There’s one moment I specifically remember shocking me by how different it ended up being from what I imagined. During my internet sleuthing, I read that during the first storyline with Piccolo as a villain, he deposes the world president and officially takes over the world, and also that he “executes” one of the heroes, Chaozu. That word choice really struck me, and with his new position I imagined Piccolo holding some sort of public execution. That’s so different from Dragonball’s typical tone or plots that it fascinated me. When I got to that part of the story, though, it turns out that Piccolo doesn’t depose the president until after his battle with the other heroes, and he kills Chaozu with a quick, one-panel, one-handed energy blast as Chaozu tries to protect his partner Tien.* It’s a moment that barely registers except to help drive home how ridiculously powerful Piccolo is, and how ruthless he is in comparison to any villain that came before him. In that sense it’s incredibly effective, but it ended up playing out so differently from what I imagined that it left me feeling a little empty and deflated.
*Piccolo’s first victim was Krillin, Chaozu’s rival/foil and the best friend to Tien’s rival/foil, Goku. This makes Chaozu’s death a bit of a parallel or mirror to the beginning of the storyline, and a way to make the fight more personal for Tien (who leads Earth’s forces throughout much of this storyline) in the same way it already was for Goku.
I guess that’s been kind of a running theme over my last few newsletters, the idea that context, presentation, and personal expectations and experiences can drastically change the way different people view the same piece of media. The way we approach a piece of media, and the other stories we’ve experienced before, are as big a part of determining how we experience a new story as the story itself is. That kind of power is pretty scary, but pretty cool.
And hey, I know this has been three newsletters in a row now with a heavy focus on manga/anime, and I feel bad about that. I try not to write about the same kind of things too close together because I know my readers come from a wide variety of different areas, and I don’t want to alienate any of you for too long by, say, focusing on one thing for a month at a time. I had a music subject I was originally going to talk about today, but I wanted a little more time to mull it over, so this was a back-up idea I felt a little more comfortable writing about. Next week: something different!
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Wait, didn’t this installment start out talking quite a bit about superhero comics? I sure drifted away from that, huh? Well let’s switch gears back to that for a minute, because over the last week or so I’ve quite enjoyed catching up on the new Stargirl tv series streaming on DC Universe (and later airing on the CW, though it’s not set in the same universe as the CW’s other superhero shows). I’m the target audience for this one, as I’ve been following this character in the comics for most of her career, and also because it heavily features one of my favorite superhero teams, the Justice Society. More than once I’ve essentially squealed in joy at little JSA Easter Eggs scattered throughout the episodes.
But why should you guys check out this one? Well, it stars Owen Wilson, who brings a really grounding presence to the ensemble. Stargirl/Courtney Whitmore’s actress, Brec Bassigner, is a great foil to him, all teenage rebellion and giddy energy, and she brings a real light, fun energy to the show. The effects are surprisingly good, and the pacing and worldbuilding is much better than most of the CW’s other superhero fare. Stargirl is trying to do so much and pulls almost all of it off, switching between being a show about a new step-family to a typical superhero action show to a high school drama to a study of parents and their children. That last element might be the most interesting, as we see both the heroes and their children and the villains and their children all thrown together into the same town, each with very different, very interesting relationships with each other.
The most recent episode, Shiv Part 1, is a stand-out for many reasons. First of all, it has the best fight sequence of the series yet between Courtney and the titular Shiv, but it also introduces the series’ first teenage villain, and immediately makes her intimidating, complex, and a terrific foil for Courtney, someone who lacks Courtney’s best personality traits but mirrors all of her worst. It’s really tense, tight writing, and I can’t wait for the next episode. Some of the costumes are a little silly, but that’s part of the charm; Stargirl is definitely worth your time.
ABOUT
“Do You Know What I Love the Most?” is a newsletter from Spencer Irwin. Spencer is an enthusiast and writer from Newark, Delaware, who likes punk rock, comic books, working out, breakfast, and most of all, stories. His previous work appeared on Retcon Punch, One Week One Band, and Crisis on Infinite Chords, and he can be found on Twitter at @ThatSpenceGuy. If you like this newsletter, please subscribe and share with your friends!