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Hate Mail Vol. 1 Issue #02

By | March 15th, 2010
Posted in Columns | % Comments


Wherein Our Hero is Surprisingly and Uncharacteristically Chipper (or how I learned to stop worrying and write a continuity rant)

So, it was my birthday this week, therefore I was noticeably less spiteful and full of rage than I normally am…which of course makes churning out this column somewhat difficult. However after stretching my mind a bit and recalling a conversation I had with Matt earlier in the week I realized there IS something that bugged me enough to justify at least a mini-rant.

As it happens, this rant has to do with the aftermath of the thing I ranted about in LAST week’s Hate Mail, namely the Justice League Rise and Fall Special (which is the functional aftermath of Justice League: Cry for Justice and sets up at least the next few months, if not years, of the Green Arrow mythos.) Although to be fair, I’m really just going to pick up on an almost insignificant detail of the issue and use it as a flimsy pretext to rant about a much more prevalent issue…not about how certain characters were, while not blatantly apparent in the aforementioned Cry for Justice, now acting VERY out of character, how the art was largely sub-par and LARGE amounts of DC History were overlooked both by the characters in the book but by author J.T. Krul as well.

No, I’m gonna talk about how…

Wait a sec, SPOILERS!

No I’m gonna talk about how Green Arrow arrowed Prometheus to the wall.

What’s that you say? Why, Prometheus was shown laying in a bloody pool on the floor during the admittedly incredibly powerful, if not unnecessarily bloody end of last issue and then again ON THE COVER OF THIS ONE? And having him arrowed to the wall in this one is not only an incredibly noticeable continuity error but not nearly as powerful or well constructed as his initial death? Yes, all of this is unquestionably true. Now, there are more than a few logical explanations for this, namely Cry for Justice #7 being so late and the art contained within more than a little scattershot (to put it lightly), thereby making it difficult if not impossible to ensure visual continuity between issues, but that doesn’t really excuse the fact that an incredibly noticeable continuity error was allowed to slip through and see print. The fact that it was so noticeable is what highlights what I’ve seen as a serious issue in comics over the past few years…lack of respect for continuity.

Now, granted, DC has been MUCH better about this than Marvel has, even going through almost silly leaps and bounds (wall punching anyone?) to make their own continuity make sense and remain intact, meanwhile over at Marvel characters are changing last names left and right (and no, I don’t mean Rachel Summers becoming Rachel Grey either…since that was deliberate and probably the last stroke of genius Chris Claremont will ever have.) However, it largely seems to be a much less important issue than it rightfully should be.

After all, what is continuity? Why is it so important? The answer is that when creating a universe that is revealed in serialized increments, it is absolutely VITAL that these increments feed off each other and are based upon and, in a lot of ways, brought into life by one another. Simply put: certain things have to flow or nothing will make sense and people will stop reading. Now, a lot of people have argued that extensive allegiance to continuity, ESPECIALLY 60 year-old continuity, makes comics unreadable to a new audience. While this is potentially true, I will make the claim that it isn’t continuity that causes this disconnect, but rather POORLY MANAGED continuity. After all, if a company doesn’t care about their characters enough to keep their stories straight, then why should ANY reader?

There is no easy solution to this, other than to say “do your gorram homework!” to anyone even thinking about writing the continued adventures of established characters, but really that isn’t quite enough. Loading up a comic with captions explaining the who’s and whatfor’s is NOT your goal…you have to be able to NOT ONLY create intriguing new stories for the characters that NOT ONLY respect and expand upon what’s come before, but often times you must RELATE what happened before to your readership in a way that is not heavy handed, but that almost serves a purpose in and of itself. In order to make this work, and work well, continuity has to almost become a beat in the story itself.

Continued below

Geoff Johns has effectively mastered what I am, admittedly flimsily, trying to describe here. His work, ESPECIALLY with the JSA, is just as much about the history of the characters and the universe which they inhabit as much as they are about what said characters are actually DOING. DC past is just as important as DC present, in this case, and that ultimately helps propel all the characters Johns touches to progress naturally and move their stories forward logically.

So there you go, my two cents CDN on continuity and why it matters.

I’ll probably be bitterer next week, never fear.

Joshua Mocle pretends to actually be a journalist but rather, he is closer to being three ducks in a man costume. He still manages to hold it down better than 3/5s of the staff of CNN though. To read his rants about things that DON’T have to do with comics (AKA punk rock and burritos), go here.


//TAGS | Hate Mail

Joshua Mocle

Joshua Mocle is an educator, writer, audio spelunker and general enthusiast of things loud and fast. He is also a devout Canadian. He can often be found thinking about comics too much, pretending to know things about baseball and trying to convince the masses that pop-punk is still a legitimate genre. Stalk him out on twitter and thought grenade.

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