| Posted: 01 June 2011 at 10:22pm | IP Logged | 10
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One of the more intensely disappointing elements of Crisis was that it kept the characters as the same point in their histories they were at before the series began, but made it so that we in the audience did not know what those histories were. Year after year followed of the "creators" gleefully filling in all of that backstory for us, as if it were a favor they just couldn't help doing for us!! "I know, readers... I know. We said there was no more Comet the Superhorse. Hey, I feel your pain. I loved Comet the Superhorse, too! (Well, not like that... snigger!) Here, then, is MY interpretation of how the Comet the Superhorse story now and forevermore took place in the New DCU!!..." And so we get Comet, the bipedial alien in a pink costume, or somesuch thing... Ah, but Writer X didn't get it, Writer Y complains... Comet wasn't about THAT... Comet was about THIS... And so he also writes a Comet tale (!), this one about Twilight-esque boy were-stallion who loves Kara/Linda/Angel-Girl, whoever, from afar... but K/L/A-G is caught up in a megalithic super-story about her race of angels going to war with the undead pantheon of an alien empire that has access to multi-dimensional tech that allows them to pull the pantheons of all worlds to their side... Not reckoning that "multi-dimensional", of course, is but a pale shadow cast by "the Infinite" from which the angels draw their power... Comet's tale is hardly begun before he, too, is caught up in the conflict, and meets all of his previous multi-dimensional counterparts, including pink bi-ped and the original Comet, and about twelve hundred different Biron the Bowmen, and of course, fiery-eyed Dark Comet, who manages to kill most of the others, and remain an ongoing menace in the K/L/A-G universe... Which all goes away mid-story when Writer J comes in, deems everything done previously to have been stupid, makes Supergirl a nice Jewish girl from Fresno named Brenda who wears a Super-pendant that gives her super-powers, and has odd dreams about an unseen prince riding towards her astride a white steed that seems perfectly clear to her... That dream haunts her... As does another, about an eerily similar stallion, one with eyes of fire... because, as Writer J tells Wizard Magazine, everything the last buncha guys did was stupid... 'cept Dark Comet. He wuz cool... Gotta keep Dark Comet. He's just reintroducing him in a way he thinks the fans will really dig! How do storylines like this happen? By constantly revisiting the past, bringing old stories and characters forward in "new, exciting" forms that "will clear up everything this time! We really mean it!" I believe the DC of the past 30 years would never have been possible under Julius Schwartz. The next time someone came to him with an idea for fixing the Legion or straightening out Donna Troy once and for all would presumably be the last story conference they were going to have with the man. Once a starting point is established, as this latest sales gimmick is supposed to do, everyone should simply Go Forward. Tell the next story that happens. Invent the next new villain for the hero to face. Do not strip-mine the past, out of some twisted "respect" for the work of your forebears. Do as those creators did. Come up with something of your own. Come up with something new.* Be Original. *Creators in the days of old would re-use cover ideas every five years or so. "The Death of Superman" is a classic Silver Age story, but it has a predecessor, some forgettable tale of a criminal impostor taking over after Superman is believed dead by the underworld. That cover idea, though, was revisited to wonderful effect later. What Jerry Siegel, Mort Weisinger, and company did was simply use the bare-bones premise of the first story to tell a new, very moving "imaginary" classic. They did something new with it. They were original. Another example is "Superman's Older Brother." Originally the story was that of Hal Karr, a big bruiser of a fellow who visited Krypton prior to its destruction, got a map from Jor-El, and flew to Earth where he crashed and got amnesia. This premise was reused, just a few years later, to create Mon-El in a Superboy story. The tales are different past that point, and fortunately, no one of that era felt a need to "reconcile" and "fix" this problem of Jor-El constantly running out his house to hand maps to visiting travellers who later crash and get amnesia just a few hundred feet away from wherever Jor-El's son happens to be at the moment. Mon-El's story is not the best example of originality, I grant you, but it is an example of going forward. Hal Karr wouldn't have had much going for him as a regular character, but Mon-El did. Once Weisinger and co. hitched his wagon to the Legion's star, his future was assured. One of the things that kept him a solid character was that no one felt the need to have him meet Hal Karr at some point and compare notes. E. Nelson Bridwell, a longtime comic fan and historian, did feel he had to reprint Hal Karr's tale in modern times, but fortunately no other fan-turned-pro took the bait and ran with it. Another way to put all of this: Let the fans be the fans. Let them Monday-morning quarterback every intricacy and nuance. Let them bring back the favorite "lost" characters and fold them into their own personal visions of what Superman REALLY means. That's their job as fans. To obsess endlessly over every jot and tittle and suggest elaborate ways in which everything can "fit" together. The job of the writer is to give them stories worth obsessing over. The job of the writer is to Be Original and Go Forward.
Edited by Brian Hague on 01 June 2011 at 10:36pm
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