| Posted: 19 June 2014 at 5:59am | IP Logged | 4
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I was chatting the other day with Terry Austin, and in our telephonic meanderings the notion of compartmentalization came up. The way superheroes start out as "specialists," but if they stick around long enough, the borders start to be erased.The Batman I "met" in 1956 was still primarily a detective, but within a very short time he would be flying to alien worlds, traveling between dimensions, undergoing grotesque physical transformations -- in short, a whole catalog of story ideas that had traditionally belonged to Superman. Even Spider-Man suffered from this. The character had been around fro about a dozen years when I joined Marvel, and by then this "street level" character was traveling thru time, flying to the Moon, journeying to the Savage Land, etc. There are times when a bit of fudging on the exact parameters of a particular character or title's borders can be fun. As I showed when handling their book, there's no real reason the Fantastic Four can't find themselves up against a magical foe. And, indeed, such stories can serve as springboards for logical guest appearances and crossovers, as someone who IS a specialist in a given field can be called in to help. Modern writers and editors seem unconcerned with such compartmentalization, and I think the characters are lessened because of it.
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