Outside Counsel

I grew up on DC comics. Sure, I read Marvel too, but Superman and Batman were my entry point. I'm not sure when I walked away from comics-- it seems to me that it was sometime around when Jack Kirby took over Jimmy Olsen, which was 1970. I'd have been in eighth grade, so that sounds about right. I got back into the form in the mid-80s, I guess, reading Chris Claremont's X-Men and the like on the subway. I stopped again around the time we moved to Buffalo, basically because there weren't any handy newstands, but from time to time I'd dip in, just to see what was happening. Last year I started following what was going on with the Doom Patrol, because I'd always liked them, and because the Metal Men, who I'd come to like, were the back-of-the-book second feature.

During my mid-80s delving into comics I read a lot of independent books, and I liked those best of all. Scott McCloud's Zot!, Mark Evanier's DNAgents and Crossfire, Max Allan Collins' and Terry Beatty's Ms. Tree,
a series called The Elementals.... and here's the thing: I never had a complete run, and I really never got in on the first issue of any of these. In fact, I think the same is true for most people who've read comics. If Superman depended the people who bought Action Comics # 1 for readership then possibly the most iconic character in American belles-lettres would be unknown.

The late 70's and early 80's were, it turns out, an unusual boom time for comics, and one of the things that marked that period was the introduction of an unusual number of new series-- and new publishers. The business model was moving out of the 1940's and into a world of cross-marketing that they couldn't have imagined. Like most, if not all commercial ventures associated with art forms there had been a great deal of exploitation of the creative people, and they were pushing back. Subsequent technological changes-- particularly in terms of distribution-- have worked quite a lot like the way those same changes have affected popular music (and movies, for that matter). Everybody is scrambling to get ahead of it, and one of the ways that DC Comics has decided to deal with the situation has been to re-boot its entire line. Their stated reason is that it is to make their line-up more accessible to new readers, who may be put off by the fact that there are years and years of unfamiliar continuity associated with each of their characters, and with the entire "universe" which all of them occupy. This is, of course, not an altogether new notion: from time to time both Marvel and DC have performed similar re-boots to straighten out continuity issues and boost sales. I guess Jim Shooter's Secret Wars was the first; DC's Crisis on Infinite Earths followed hard on its heels. I gather there have been others since. The problem with all of this, however, is that even if you accept the notion that readers bounce off of comics when they are unfamiliar with the continuity, the issue re-occurs at regular intervals. If you want to have reoccurring characters with a history then you are confronted with only two options: regular re-boots, or complex back stories. (There is no rule that says these narratives have to take place in a continuum, by the way: Donald Duck doesn't. You never see Stan Lee style footnotes in Archie comics explaining that Mr. Weatherbee and Mrs. Grundy went on a date in issue 231.)

It seems to me that DC has gotten it wrong here. I like complex back stories, and I always have. In fact, when I go to a super hero movie I hate it when they waste my time with explication. If you don't know that Peter Parker was bitten by a radioactive spider, or that Superman was sent to Earth when his home planet blew up it doesn't affect your ability to watch the Wallcrawler websling, or the Son of Krypton bend steel with his bare hands. Wasn't Wolverine more interesting when his past was mysterious? One of the pleasures of comics is that they have such extremely complex (and goofy) back stories that it is fun to puzzle them out. (It isn't all that hard, either. Let's face it, we're not talking Henry James here.) Although the internet has changed the means of distribution, it has also made being a fan- and catching up on back stories- easier than it ever was.

There isn't a new Doom Patrol book at the moment, so I don't really have a dog in this fight. Comics publishers can do what they like, but this experiment impresses me as wrong-headed.