Continuity and Finitude

Early in their reading lives, fans of corporate superhero comics (primarily Marvel and DC) learn an important lesson about the imaginary worlds they choose to visit on a monthly or weekly basis:  these fantastic realms are fundamentally unstable.

The early years of the Golden Age of comics (1938-1956) presented storyworlds that were not so much unstable as they were deliberately incoherent when developed over time.  So episodic were these comics that they functioned more like classic Warner Brother and Disney Cartoons than the comics of the Silver Age (1956-1970) and beyond.  The events of earlier issues had at best a limited effect on later installments; the comics were designed to be picked up and put down in almost any order, on the assumption that most of the (very large) audience consisted of casual readers.

Since 1956, with the second wave of DC superheroes and the introduction of the DC Multiverse, mainstream comics have relied increasingly on the concept of continuity.  With continuity, the events of a comic are thought to "matter," to the extent that they have an effect on subsequent stories involving the same characters or settings. Readers are invited to immerse themselves in fictional worlds where relationships develop, actions have consequences, and knowledge of previously published adventures can come in handy. The rise of Marvel Comics, beginning with the introduction of the Fantastic Four in 1961, made continuity increasingly rewarding by embracing serialization. This serialization was significant in terms of plot, of course, but even more in terms of character:  readers came to comics for action, but were just as likely to return for soap opera.

At first, continuity was less planned than it was accrued: there is little reason to believe that the comics creators of the 1940s or even the 1960s expected their characters and stories to be read decades later, let alone to be considered significant. At the intersection of corporate interests in exploiting intellectual property and the narrative logic of serialization,  comics are where the thrills of the never-ending story run up against the limits of human finitude. Introduced in 1938, Superman is older than 99 percent of earth's population as of 2025 (and will inevitably be older than everyone in the course of a few more years).  Most people cannot be expected to keep track of the details of their own lives after eight decades of experience; why should they have a handle on Superman's?

Corporate superhero comics are haunted by time.  On the most basic level of production, they have generally been subject to the unforgiving demands of periodical publication.  Over the decades, the Big Two companies (Marvel and DC) employed a number of strategies to cope with the inevitable hiccups in printing and scheduling: reprints; "inventory" stories ready to publish at a moment's notice if a creator missed a deadline; and the last-minute replacement of a writer or artist in order to get something, anything out, storytelling logic or aesthetic consistency be damned. Only in the end of the twentieth century would they resort to the most obvious (and costly) solution: delaying publication. [1]  But even then, a missed issue might be a blip for a company publishing dozens of titles a month. It would take the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 for the industry leaders to do the unthinkable: briefly suspend publication of the entire line, or release comics only digitally.

The comics themselves, once published, face temporal quandaries of a different order.  Serial publication always runs the risk of basic inconsistencies, leading Stan Lee to give Marvel readers "no prizes" in the 1960s for spotting an error.  Such errors are almost always minor:  Quincy Harker's dead wife in Tomb of Dracula 12 is referred to as "Sonya," but throughout the rest of the series she would be Elizabeth.  It's a mistake, certainly, but in terms of its significance, it is the narrative equivalent of a typo. More problematic are the inconsistencies that arise from the incompatibility of monthly publication and ordinary human time.  In most mainstream comics, Superman is never older than his thirties, and yet he has managed to meet or at least share the page  with as many as fourteen different American presidents during their terms in office, starting with FDR, moving through JFK and Nixon, and culminating in Obama and Trump.  If we add in the changes in fashion, aesthetics, and politics, the very existence of some of the stories in older comics can be a source of embarrassment, especially when it comes to the depiction of women and minority characters throughout most of the twentieth century. Older comics are at times a cross between an antediluvian family photo and a bad Thanksgiving dinner, where mortifying hairstyles and regrettable clothing choices are only the background for objectionable comments by your racist, sexist uncle.

Remember the days when we liked the guests the president invited to the White House?

Familiarity with a full or even partial run of a given superhero comic reveals the repetitions and occasionally tired tropes to which a long-running serial inevitably resorts.  Just how many times is Peter Parker's Aunt May going to collapse from a heart attack and end up at death's door? Or, for that matter, die (and come back)? How many times is Tony Stark going to lose his company, and/or fall off the wagon? How many times will the Green Lantern Corps be destroyed or disbanded, and the Guardians of the Universe killed or sidelined, before this squad of interstellar space cops is rebuilt yet again?  How many times will the Black Widow be confronted by some previously undisclosed incident or person from her increasingly incoherent Russian/Soviet past? And, more generally, how many times is a hero going to be injured/disillusioned/turned evil/shunted off to another world and pass their mantle on to someone younger, newer, and (more recently) belonging to a previously underrepresented demographic, before inevitably taking up their iconic role once more?

Equally problematic are the moments that break with the patterns established by decades of storytelling, when characters develop in ways that foreclose an entire range of narrative possibilities.  A married Spider-Man is not going on dates with new girlfriends, unless he and Mary Jane have embarked on the sort of polyamorous journey or experiment with non-monogamy that is likely to embroil them in the next Fox News culture war.

These moments when the characters drastically change their status quo highlight the general problem of time in serialized superhero comics, one that also reflects basic questions about the genre itself:  as action heroes, the characters must make choices.  Creators whose work interrogates the genre's premise examine the ethical and philosophical underpinnings of their right and perhaps need to make such choices, while the architecture of the industry requires the repeated undermining and even reversing of the effects of any choices made. The genre requires action, but the industry abhors consequences.

The tension between action and consequence is covered, at least in part, by Stan Lee's famous dictum rejecting change in favor of the "illusion of change:" Marvel's characters and stories must appear to develop, but never so much that they fundamentally alter a series' basic premise.  Roughly two decades before an infamous episode of Happy Days gave the world the phrase "jumping the shark," Lee gestured towards this very danger.

There are moments in superhero comics when the shark has been definitively jumped, but they are not universally recognized at the time.  As a lifelong reader of DC's Legion of Superheroes (LSH), I was one of the apparently few fans to treasure the run taking place after the "Five Year Gap," when writer/artist Keith Giffen pushed the already far-future LSH five years past its previous continuity.  The characters were allowed to age and behave like adults, the storytelling was marvelously (and, to some, bafflingly) complex,  and yet the connections to the previous decades of LSH stories were maintained and even intensified. But the series was hampered by changes in editorial policy, particularly the injunction against including Superboy even in past LSH adventures. The continuity was forcibly rebooted in issues 4 and 5, but in a fashion that continued to make for good storytelling and allowed Giffen and his collaborators (primarily the writers Tom and Mary Birnbaum) to build on what they had started.  When issue 20, which was part of a crossover with the Superman books, culminated in the destruction of Earth's moon, as a reader I was concerned that this might be a step too far; when the Earth itself was destroyed in issue 37, my first thought was:  they are going to have to reboot the series.  The Legion required an intact Earth in order to be consistent with its original premise. Sure enough, a little over two years later, decades of Legion continuity were erased as part of the line-wide Zero Hour event, and the Legion started from scratch for the first, but not the last, time.

Note

[1] Deadlines were a particular problem for Marvel in the 1970s, before Editor-in-Chief Jim Shooter pushed out nearly all the more independent-minded creators (who also tended to be the ones with the greatest difficulties meeting a deadline).  From a twenty-first century perspective, the frequency with which new writers and artists were tasked with wrapping up someone else's ongoing storyline is a rather jarring. Steve Englehart's debut on Marvel Premiere's Doctor Strange adventures had him completing the "Shuma-Gorath" story as its sixth (!) writer.  When Michael Morbius became the lead in Marvel's Adventures into Fear with issue 20, a multi-issue art was kicked off by Mike Friedrich, taken over by Steve Gerber in the next issue, who continued it until issue 25, when he was joined by Doug Moench, who concluded the story in issue 26. The black-and-white magazine Rampaging Hulk included a backup feature starring Ulysses Bloodstone for seven issues (Rampaging Hulk 1-6, 8, January 1977-April 1978). The first six were written by John Warner; when Steve Gerber concluded the series with issue 8, not only did he reveal that Bloodstone had been a dupe of his enemies all along before killing him off, but, to add insult to injury, showed one of the supporting characters deciding that he was too boring to be missed.  When DC comics became the home for more sophisticated storytelling in the 1980s, it took the unprecedented step of allowing an eleven-month gap between the 11th and 12th (final) issues, rather than have someone else finish the story. This must have been an excruciating wait at the time, but is now invisible to the many readers of Watchmen's collected edition.  Not that DC was consistent on this policy; rather than let an issue of Sandman be late, the editors brought in Colleen Doran to pencil an issue so quickly that she was embarrassed by her own work; later, they had her redraw the issue for its subsequent trade paperback reprints.

Next: Flash and Substance

Introduction: Why I Hate Flashpoint

From May through August of 2011, DC Comics suspended three months' publication of The Flash to make room for an event called Flashpoint. [1] Consisting of a five-issue miniseries for the main narrative, accompanied by numerous tie-in miniseries, one-shots, and issues of ongoing series, the story unfolded over 61 separate issues. Flashpoint was an alternate timeline tale, set in a world where the Flash never got his powers, where Wonder Woman's home of Themyscira was at war with Aquaman's Atlantis, and all the familiar DC characters took on new roles to match their changed circumstances.  In the last few pages, the entire DC universe was rebooted.

Stop, Flash. Just stop

As a story, Flashpoint was nothing particularly special. As a universe-altering event, it was a massive disappointment. Not because it failed to alter the universe; quite the contrary, the "New 52" that followed for the next few years was the most radical break with the past that DC had ever made. And this is saying something, because for almost four decades, periodically breaking with the past has been DC's signature move. But the way that the changes were introduced violated all the norms that had been established for significant reboots, which might have been worth it had the series offered anything novel in exchange. Instead, the failures of Flashpoint are a case study in exactly how continuity works in corporate comics, the connections to the superhero genre and its traditions of vigilantism and intervention, and the affective bonds that such comics rely on in order to give their stories value.

This book investigates all of these questions (and not just with Flashpoint), in the hopes of establishing nothing less than a Grand Theory of Corporate Superhero Comics.

But first, some background.

Next: Continuity and Finitude (on July 11)