A couple weeks back I kicked off a column by mentioning how the eighty years of history behind American comics could be either a blessing or a curse depending on how you look at it. At that time I mostly mentioned the advantages, so let’s talk about the disadvantages for a minute. Within the stories comic books tell, that history is known as “continuity,” and continuity is more often than not convoluted as hell.
There’s many reasons for this. When you have thousands of creators working on the same characters over the course of decades, you tend to get many disparate, sometimes contradictory takes that can make a character difficult to understand. There’s also just the sheer amount of stories that rack up over time to keep up with, amplified by the fact that most of theses characters are essentially ageless, so you have to cram decades of printed stories into a year or two of their lives. It’ll melt your brain if you try to reconcile it all (which is why you should never try).
The two major (superhero) comic companies have very different ways of handling this. Marvel has essentially had one interrupted continuity since the sixties, telling one long story about these characters as they (very slowly) get older. Barring one or two ill-fated attempts, they never outright reboot characters from scratch and very rarely do they retcon bad or unpopular stories. Instead, if there’s a story Marvel doesn’t want to be a part of their canon, they just ignore it and pretend it never happened. This approach suits Marvel’s style because they’ve always been the company who crammed all their heroes into one city, having them pop in and out of each other’s books and adventures with little fanfare anyway; their whole foundation is built on the connections between these characters and their shared history. Of course, this does create characters and teams with histories you’d need a PHD to fully understand (especially the X-Men).
DC, on the other hand, is (in)famous for rebooting their line whenever they think their characters’ histories are becoming too complicated. Their first reboot was essentially unintentional. Throughout the 1940s DC created a deep bench of superhero characters whose names would be familiar to modern-day readers, but perhaps not their designs or secret identities. There’s the original Flash, Jay Garrick, and his tin hat; there’s the original Green Lantern, Alan Scott, trying to make a red/green/black/purple color scheme work somehow; there’s the original Atom, Al Pratt, a dude with an inferiority complex and atomic fists. By the late 40s and early 50s, though, superheroes had started to fall out of fashion, and one by one, these characters’ books were cancelled and they fell into obscurity (only Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Aquaman, and the Green Arrow survived and continued to be printed throughout the decade).
Superheroes began to become more popular again in the late 50s and early 60s. The DC writers, assuming that the previous generation of readers had aged out of the medium, decided to reboot these characters with new identities and costumes. Thus was born The Flash, Barry Allen, the scarlet-clad police scientist; Green Lantern, Hal Jordan, the intergalactic peacekeeper; The Atom, Ray Palmer, the shrinking scientist; all of whom caught on in popularity in a way their predecessors never did, becoming the iconic versions of the characters.
While most readers didn’t remember the original incarnations of these heroes, many of the writers did, and eventually they reintroduced the original Flash, Jay Garrick, in the pages of his successor’s book. They declared that Jay and the rest of that first generation of superheroes lived on a parallel Earth, Earth-2, and over the next couple of decades this led to the introduction of an entire multiverse, dozens of alternate Earths each with their own history and set of heroes, and DC was releasing titles set on several of these worlds simultaneously. By the mid-eighties, they had decided it was all too much, that everything had become far too convoluted. It was time to start over.
This took the form of comics first major “event,” a story called Crisis on Infinite Earths. At one point, DC thought they might perhaps use the massive scale of Crisis to wipe out their universe and reboot it from scratch, presenting all their characters as if they were brand new, never-before-seen. This didn’t end up happening for a number of reasons, though the greatest was probably The New Teen Titans. TNTT was then DC’s most popular title by quite a wide margin, and it featured characters like Nightwing (Robin the Boy Wonder, all grown up), Jericho (the son of the Titans’ greatest enemy) and Wally West (the retired former Kid Flash), all characters who needed history to exist, with their growth over time being their greatest appeal. If they rebooted their universe from scratch, their cash cow would cease to exist.
So, instead, the Crisis wiped out the Multiverse and created a new continuity with only one Earth, but every writer got to decide for themselves how they were going to approach their character’s history, and frankly, it was chaos. Though Batman eventually got an updated origin story in the form of Batman: Year One, his adventures essentially continued on as if nothing had changed. Superman was immediately given a new origin story, but one that took place in the past; his ongoing titles fast-forwarded to the present day. The Flash, Barry Allen, was killed off, with his sidekick, Wally West, taking up his mantle instead. Power Girl — originally the niece of Earth-2’s Superman — survived on this world with her name, personality, powers, and costume intact, but with no knowledge of her origin whatsoever because the writers decided it was just too complicated to come up with one. (I won’t even get into what they did to Hawkman, because frankly, I still can’t quite wrap my head around it.)
Infamously, Wonder Woman got a new origin story, but unlike Superman, hers took place in the present day, meaning that Batman and Superman had already had a decade of adventures without even knowing Wonder Woman existed. This caused a bevy of problems. She had been a founding member of the Justice League, leading to writers replacing her with Black Canary whenever those early stories were mentioned. Her sister, Wonder Girl/Donna Troy, was also a member of the Teen Titans (DC’s best-selling book at the time, remember?), and the book had spent quite a bit of time establishing her past and how she, a human, came to be adopted by the Amazons. Now, you had Wonder Girl hanging around with the Teen Titans for years before anyone even knew Wonder Woman existed. Her origin had to be completely rewritten and all references to Wonder Woman and the Amazons removed from her history, costume, and power-set, and to be quite honest, it gutted and over-complicated the character in a way she never really recovered from.
From there on, DC ended up having some sort of reboot every five to ten years, trying to fix the mistakes of the previous reboot only to end up with new ones to fix. In 2011 they launched their most ambitious reboot since Crisis on Infinite Earths, “The New 52,” which saw every single book published by the company cancelled, and 52 brand new titles all launched with new #1s, all set with these new familiar characters in a new continuity. Once again, they took that mish-mash approach. Before the New 52 began two of DC’s most popular and best-selling writers, Geoff Johns and Grant Morrision, had been in the middle of long, epic storylines with Green Lantern and Batman, so those characters once again continued on as if nothing had changed so that those stories could be finished, while Superman, Wonder Woman, and the Flash were essentially restarted from scratch. Big iconic characters remained while many of the newer cult-favorites vanished, and the scope of their world shrank for a while as the friendships and histories between these characters had to be rebuilt.
While a few excellent books came out of the New 52, DC’s line as a whole had lost the idea of legacy that had been its heart for several decades before, and in 2016 they attempted to regain this through the “Rebirth” reboot, which, in its own way, was just as much of a mess. The books that succeeded were the ones where the creative team just focused on telling good, heartfelt stories with the characters and concepts that had returned, while the more frustrating ones spent so much time trying to untangle the knots of continuity and explain how characters came back and how they all knew each other that they almost forgot to have story (the worst offender here: the new Young Justice.)
Okay, I’m sorry, I could talk about this kind of stuff all day, but really this is all necessary context, because I also want to talk about a writer who I think handles continuity brilliantly: Tom Taylor. I’ve enjoyed Taylor’s work for years now, and at both companies he’s created superhero stories with not only action and adventure, not only with actual moral and philosophical messages, but also with real heart and compassion and growth at their core.
There’s something special about the books he’s done for DC, though. Taylor seems to understand the spirit of the DC Universe — particularly that incarnation that existed before the New 52 — intrinsically, deep within his soul. While many Rebirth writers struggle to try to connect with that spirit or get snagged on technicalities, Taylor recreates it on a regular basis in books that, technically, aren’t even supposed to be in continuity.
Taylor does this by exploring history without getting hung up on details. Many writers use continuity like a bludgeon, devoting whole storylines to explaining a weird out of character moment in a single issue fifteen years ago or to untangling the knots of the last reboot, but Taylor relies on the broad strokes, especially the relationships. His characters feel like friends and colleagues, characters who have known each other for years with preexisting relationships, with long shared histories. He knows the continuity that has made the characters who they are today, but that’s his focus: who they are today.
And, yes, most of Taylor’s work for DC with their big, iconic characters has been outside of their main books, in franchises like Injustice and DCeased where he can hook up or kill off or craft actual endings for characters he never could within normal continuity, but it ultimately isn’t that freedom that makes those books so good, it’s understanding each and every one of those characters and the history that makes them so interesting. It’s the romance of Green Arrow and Black Canary, the growth of Harley Quinn, the eternal screw-ups of John Constantine, the father son relationships between Bruce and Damian Wayne or Clark and Jon Kent.
Or maybe it’s Jason Todd. My favorite single comic book I’ve read this year is Taylor and Karl Mostert’s DCeased: Unkillables 1. The three issue mini-series is a side adventure, a look into what a group of anti-heroes and villains were up to while the heroes were trying to save the world from a hoard of anti-life zombies during DCeased, and issue 1 uses Jason Todd as its viewpoint character. For those not in the know, Jason was the second Robin, taking up the mantle after Dick Grayson set it aside to become Nightwing and work with the Teen Titans full time. Jason was killed by the Joker after a scant four or five years on the job (as part of an infamous dial-in publicity stunt), and “resurrected” in the early 2000s as an adult. Furious that Batman never avenged his death, he became the Red Hood, a vigilante who fought to end crime by killing criminals.
Unkillables 1 uses Jason to explore the fates of the various Bat-family characters and reunite the survivors, but while doing so it also mines Jason’s history and standing within the Bat-family for both pathos and humor. When Jason finds the Joker’s corpse, he straps it to the hood of the Batmobile as a trophy, but also to help alleviate his own rage at never getting revenge on the man who murdered him. His discovery of Batman’s corpse is tragic, but also a reminder of the strained relationship they always had, one he’ll never really be able to repair or find any closure in. Jason’s mixed feelings are captured brilliantly in one perfect panel
And Taylor doesn’t just find these big, brilliant character moments either; there’s just as many subtle ones that are just as powerful. Cassandra Cain (going by Batgirl in Unkillables) gets her spotlight in issue 3, but still has a terrific moment in this issue when it’s revealed that Barbara Gordon has been killed. The moment is mostly there to convince her father, Commissioner Jim Gordon, to leave Gotham with Jason and Cass, but Taylor remembers that Barbara was Cassandra’s mentor as well, and takes the time to give us one close-up panel of Cass’s pained, horrified reaction. Taylor has a real respect for his characters and the relationships and history that makes them tick, and prioritizing them makes his characters and his worlds feel that much more compelling and personal. It’s a perfect use of continuity.
Within DC’s actual continuity, Taylor has also recently relaunched Suicide Squad. Now Suicide Squad isn’t a franchise I particularly care for. Every run since the original has been trying to chase and replicate that classic John Ostrander feel, with diminishing returns and increasingly senseless gore. Even the concept had been perverted, in a sense; the idea of the Suicide Squad is that every mission is a suicide mission and no team member is safe, but those core members (Deadshot, Harley, and Boomerang primarily) that need to be in every run of the book will never die, robbing the title of much of its tension.
Taylor solves all these problems. He flips the entire concept on its head, replacing the squad’s handler, Amanda Waller, with a new loose cannon stooge, Lok, with his own secret agenda; the team is as thrown by Lok as the reader, and both have to try to figure out his angle and endure his whims (he’s a very easy character to hate and root against). Taylor also shifts the focus away from those core characters (though they’re still present) to a group of revolutionaries who have been co-opted into the squad. They’re more expendable than the core group, yes, but Taylor doesn’t treat them like red shirts; he gives them unique powers and designs and dives into their backstories, perspectives and worldviews, relationships, and personalities. I’m rooting for them, and I could would love to see them elsewhere in the DC Universe, if they survive. Oops, looks like I’m invested, which is exactly what Suicide Squad needs. The new blood is doing it good. Tom Taylor’s got me reading Suicide Squad monthly; that’s quite an accomplishment indeed.
Okay, I’ve drifted quite far from my original diatribe here about continuity and reboots, but I think my point is this; if more writers handled continuity the way Taylor does — as something to be respected, something with power over these characters, but not as something to be fetishizied or obsessed over down to its very minutia — I think there would be a lot less need for these constant reboots, revamps, and attempts at re-engaging the reader. Find what makes these characters tick — especially their core relationships with other characters — and run with it. It’s both the way to use these reboots to their fullest, and to cut down on their need dramatically.
CHECK OUT
Let’s change lanes here for a second. A few months back I joined an email group called the Donald P. McMahon Project. Every Sunday, organizer Arthur Meyer sends out an email (BCC’d) to the 400+ members of the project, and each week one member writes an essay about their favorite album. There’s two rules: 1. No Beatles albums 2. No repeat albums. Meyer also includes a link to the album, an archive of previous write-ups, a collective playlist, and often sends out “Music Questions of the Week” and prints the various responses he receives from the rest of the group. The project has covered a truly diverse sampling of albums (far outside my typical scene, though it’s represented) and has had a great set of essays along with them. As someone fascinated by people’s personal connections to music, it’s been a lot of fun to be a part of.
This Sunday the project will be running my own essay on Saves the Day’s Through Being Cool. I’ll probably send out the essay here on my newsletter at some point in some fashion, but if you want to see it early, sign up to be a part of the Project! Although, of course, the better reason to sign up is because you truly want to be a part of the project, but it’s a really fun, low-key commitment that I think any of you who love music would very much enjoy.
To sign up, email arthurmeyer13 @ gmail.com and let him know you want to be a part of the Donald P. McMahon project! And tell him Spencer Irwin sent you! Seriously. He likes to know who recommended people to the project.
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!