Watching the Detectives

Chapter One:

Watchers and Watchmen

"I am the Watcher! For countless eons I have observed your world and recorded its significant events."--

What If?

volume 1, 26

"The morality of my actions escapes me." --

Dr. Manhattan,

Watchmen 

Chapter 4

Watching the Detectives

"Watching" is an unlikely metaphor for the avid consumer of superhero comics, since it suggests action that unfolds before the eyes of passive viewers; once the action starts, it will continue regardless of the audience.  This is not a case of the proverbial tree falling.  If the viewers walk away or close their eyes and ears, the show will definitely go on.

Not so for comics.  Reading comics, like reading prose, requires that the reader pay attention.  Though it neither burns calories nor advances step counts, reading is active. All the more so for comics. As Scott McCloud's influential Understanding Comics (1993) argues, comics can only function as a narrative experience though an operation that takes place in the mind of the reader: closure.  The gaps between comics panel are not just literal (the "gutters" or blank spaces found in most North American comics); they are a foundational part of the reading experience. The reader unconsciously fills in the gaps between the actions represented in sequential panels, inferring a relationship among them that is not usually explicit.  We take this process for granted, but it is easy to imagine a particular form of neurdivergence that could make this process impossible. If a ball is thrown towards home plate in one panel and a batter hits it in another,  we take for granted that a reader will connect the two actions, but that is only because we automatically make such connections ourselves. 

Watchers  would probably make more sense for film and television, and Marvel's Uatu has successfully made the transition from comics to video on more than one occasion, most famously as the narrator of the 2021 television series What If.  Yet watchers and watching in superhero comics persist. Uatu and DC's Monitor(s) were more recently joined by Tempus Fuginaut, a member of a race of godlike beings who protect the DC multiverse from incursions by the Dark Multiverse.   Before joining the Legion of Superheroes, Mon-el (Lar Gand) spent a thousand years trapped in the Phantom Zone, observing the DC universe but (mostly) unable to interact with it. The robotic Recorders of Marvel's Rigellian Empire do exactly what their name implies, though in a particularly annoying fashion (preceding every utterance with  headwords such as"Statement:" or "Query:"). In the alternate Marvel Universe of the Earth X stories, Uatu has forced the robot designated "X-51" (and also "Machine Man" and "Aaron Stack") both to watch for him now that Uatu is blind, and to take over Uatu's frequent narrative function by telling him (and the reader) what he sees. All of these characters are joined by other godlike figures who are more likely to supplement their watching with action (at Marvel: Eon, Epoch, Eternity, and at DC: the Phantom Stranger, the Guardians of the Universe, Pandora, the Quintessence).  There are also the occasional reader figures, such as Destiny of the Endless,  who, originally introduced as the host of one of DC's horror books, spends his entire existence reading from the book that tells all the events of the past, present and future. But the visual medium of comics seems to encourage representations of watching over reading.  

Nope, nöthing creepy about this at all

Watching, then, is what happens to reading when it is transposed into the medium of (superhero) comics.  It is a way to represent the role of the reader while only partially maintaining a readerly distance. Going back to Morrison's "fiction suit" metaphor,  the movement from reader to watcher involves donning a suit that is not quite a superhero costume.  This is not a matter of pure fantasy wish fulfillment, since the reader does not become the hero; rather, the reader is put into a different vantage point from which the view the action, while also weakening the boundaries between observer and hero.

These reduced boundaries are no small matter.  Because the watcher figures are located inside the fictional world, they have an option that the actual reader does not: they can decide to intervene. This, in fact, is at the heart of nearly all the classic stories about Uatu:  in the early days, Uatu deserves the title "Watcher" only in the breach.  But what is it that Uatu is actually watching?  Technically, everything, but we only see Uatu playing observer during events deemed significant. Indeed, Uatu's very appearance on the scene has become a kind of shorthand alerting not just the reader, but even the characters who are familiar with his function, to the import of the story in progress.  

Watchers want to watch what superhero readers want to read:  stories in which something bad happens (a crime, a disaster, a cosmic crisis) and superheroes choose to act.  If superhero readers are indulging in a fantasy of extraordinary powers and concomitant extraordinary adventures, watchers are satisfying a kink of their own:  sworn only to watch, they cannot get enough of watching people do.

Next: Those Who Can

What Comes Next

At this point, it looks like this book will consist of five chapters. The first, "Watchers and Watchmen," continues and fleshes out some of the ideas elaborated in the previous post.  Why are Marvel superhero comics so preoccupied with watching, as most obviously exemplified in the figure of Uatu the Watcher?  A genre so committed to the taking up the fight against evil nonetheless repeatedly pauses to consider the ethics of intervention, during a decade characterized by America's own foolhardy international interventionism and pop culture responses to the questions of transcultural responsibility (most notably in the original Star Trek). The chapter than jumps ahead to Watchmen, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' monumental deconstruction of the superhero genre, which also turns out to be an extended meditation on the advisability of standing back or getting involved.  

Chapter Two, "Meddlers and Editors," turns to the comics that appear to advocate a more forceful activism, whether through figures such as the Monitor, the "relevant" comics of the 1970s (Green Lantern/Green Arrow), ham-handed attempts at addressing contemporary tragedies such as the unbelievably awful 1980s DC and Marvel one-shots about the Ethiopian famine, and stories about superheroes taking over the world for its own good (such as Squadron Supreme).

We’re all about good writing and quality control here at “Reading the Superhero”

Chapter Three ("The Law vs Justice") examines the ramifications of vigilantism over many years of comics about Daredevil, a superhero whose day job is working as an attorney, the fascist ramifications of The Dark Knight Returns, and problematic, murderous antiheroes such as the Punisher and the Foolkiller.

Chapter Four returns to the cosmic scale of Monitors and Watchers.  "Crisis and Event, or, Punching Reality in the Face"  is an extended analysis of the reality changing crossover event, a regular feature of modern DC that has occasionally been used by DC and repeatedly satirized and deconstructed in a number of independent comics.  The Event raises the stakes of the conflict considerably, but also inevitably makes the nature of comic book reality the most important part of the story. And, yes, I end up bringing in Alain Badiou.

 Chapter Five will either be about the "Revolving Door of Death" (the ubiquitous trope of death and resurrection) or my attempt at a Grand Theory of the Corporate Comics Chronotope. Or maybe those will be Chapters Five and Six.  All my plans are subject to the whims of Monitors, Anti-Monitors, and my own internal Editor. 

Next: Chapter One: Watchers and Watchmen

This Looks Like a Job for...the Editor!

The ordinary superhero story usually invites reader identification; the hero acts out the intended reader's fantasy of power, intervention, and success.  This, however, is just one end of the spectrum.  In the middle is the superhero story that is more self-consciously mediated, whether through a focus on the media coverage of the hero (Spider-Man and The Daily Bugle, Superman and The Daily Planet), the point of view of the bystander (Marvels, Astro City, the "behind-the-scenes" series accompanying events such as Civil War and Secret Wars), or the introduction of elements of a moral panic, with experts, legislators, and grassroots movements criticizing superhero vigilantism (Steve Englehart's Secret Empire storyline, Legends, Civil War, Watchmen, Batman: The Dark Knight Returns).

I use the term "moral panic" not to delegitimize any critique of superhero vigilantes, but because most superhero stories cannot afford to feature a critique that the reader must take seriously. Not only does the genre depends on vigilantism being an overall positive phenomenon, but moral panics haunt the history of the industry every since Frederic Wertham's Seduction of the Innocent and the subsequent congressional hearings put most publishers out of business.

On the far end of the spectrum is the continuity-altering event, which often encodes the roles of reader, creator, and editor within the narrative itself.  Even without such events, corporate comics have, since the 1960s, managed to encode a reader figure into the story, whether as passive spectator or obsessive fan. In Marvel Comics, the bad reader is represented by The Collector, an Elder of the Universe whose obsession with his collection is monomaniacal. The act of collection can make him an antagonist within the story, but one with a limited range.  He is most significant as an obstacle to storytelling:  when he encounters a remarkable being (like, say, a superhero), his impulses is to capture them and put them on display under glass.  He is the comics collector who immediately puts his new acquisition in mylar bags rather than reading them.

Obsessive comics collecting is a bad look

The archetypal good reader figure is Uatu, Marvel Comics' the Watcher.  Introduced in Fantastic Four 15 (January, 1963), the Watcher lives on the mysterious "blue area," the only spot on Earth's moon that sustains an atmosphere.  One of a race of toga-garbed bald giants who have sworn only to watch, never interfere, the Watcher typically appears on the scene to observe an important event. Indeed, his appearance itself is a signal that the event is important.  Over time, his resolve to stay above the fray has wavered, and he has also taken on the role of narrator for a range of alternate history stories (more on the Watcher in Chapter One).  For the most part, however, his status as an observer renders him a model of the intent reader: the Watcher knows never to miss the next issue.

For the first few decades of its existence, the DC multiverse lacked a godlike reader figure of its own.  That lack (and its subsequent remedy) point to some of the very qualities of DC continuity that led to the decision to consciously revise it for the very first time. The DC multiverse was charmingly un-curated; new earths could be added when the corporation bought out a stable of characters from a defunct competitor (Earth X for the Quality characters, Earth-S for Fawcett, and, briefly, Earth-4 for Charlton), or simply at the writers' or editors' whim (Earth-3, run by villainous analogs of the Justice League).  The event in question, Crisis on Infinite Earths, not only rebooted the DCU, it set the pattern for all subsequent continuity-altering events and functioned as the gateway drug that got DC hooked on periodically fiddling with its continuity.  As I will argue later in the book, Crisis started a process that made continuity itself the star of DC comics.

In the run-up to Crisis, all the DC books featured cameos of a new character called The Monitor, who, together with his assistant, Lyla the Harbinger, had inserted himself into all aspects of DC life.  Initially, it appeared as though he might be an arms dealer or a supervillain, but the beginning of the 12-issue series revealed that he was a cosmic being as old as the multiverse, whose goal was to preserve it against the threat of his counterpart, the awkwardly named Anti-Monitor.  The Monitor cared for all the matter-based worlds of the multiverse, while the Anti-Monitor was connected to the Anti-Matter universe (long established in DC lore as a realm called Qward). 

The Monitor's role, like the Watcher's, is preservational, curatorial,  and, at least initially, reader-like.  Though neither monomaniacal nor malevolent like Marvel's Collector, the Monitor evinces pathos by serving as the in-story stand-in for readers who have amassed a large comics collection.  Though he tries in vain to protect the various Earths (i.e., comics) from destruction, they nonetheless fall, one after the other.  In the years since Crisis, one of the complaints about reality-altering events and reboots is that the earlier stories in the now-dead continuities no longer "matter."  For the Monitor, this is literally the case:  each world is part of a matter-based universe destroyed by a wave of anti-matter.   To drive the emotional loss home, each world is visited right before its destruction by Pariah, whose own universe was annihilated as part of an experiment he conducted that inadvertently set the Monitor's antagonist free and began the process of multiversal erasure. We are supposed to cathect with each new world, mourn, and move on. The Monitor himself is only able to save the last surviving worlds by sacrificing himself in order to keep them in a bizarre state of crossover and semi-stasis.

As the Anti-Monitor's name makes all too apparent, he is the antithesis of his "brother," the Monitor.  A force for destruction rather than preservation, he implicitly rejects any value that preexisting stories might have.  He could just as easily been called "Anti-Continuity," especially since his eventual defeat turns his overall success (the destruction of literally infinite Earths) into failure (their replacement with one Earth conveniently based on the ones with the most potentially marketable elements).  Within Crisis itself, the Anti-Monitor could be identified with the stories' creators, Marv Wolfman and George Perez, since they are the ones crafting an entire storyline devoted to the destruction of the DC Multiverse.  But the scope of their epic storyline is such that it derives from an authority that exceeds their own:  only the DC editors had the power to sign off on such sweeping changes.  In all the various followups to Crisis on Infinite Earths, the antagonist (usually bent on destroying/changing the DC Universe or Multiverse) represents a thoroughly editorial function, the in-story equivalent of the person or persons who impose their vision on an entire corporate storyworld thanks to their superhuman powers.

As a publication phenomenon, comics exist as flow:  when everything is working just right, one new comic follows another with predictable regularity. Or, if we switch metaphors a bit and borrow from E. A. Abbot's classic novel Flatland, comics are an every-growing ray, with a point of origin (usually a first issue) and a series of installments moving along the line in the direction of the arrow that conventionally marks its trajectory (possibly to be substituted by another point if the series ends and the ray turns into a line segment).   Any given issue is a point on that ray, in a fixed position between other points.  Living in three dimensions, the reader can see beyond the one-dimensionality of the comics ray, however, and therefore can jump back and forth along the timeline.  The ability to do so, combined with the awareness of the proper order of the given points, constitutes continuity in the consciousness of the reader.  The reader is also able to see multiple rays and segments that run parallel to each other, intersect with one another, or zigzag back and forth to interact with their fellows. Now continuity functions in two dimensions, but the three-dimensional reader can still see both. The creators and editors have an advantage over readers. They can add new points at the end of the line segment or ray that also occupy an earlier space: the retcon.

Continuity-altering epics and reboots such as Crisis on Infinite Earth introduce figures who, like the reader, creator, and editor, stand outside the two dimensions, but interact with them.  They are like the Sphere in Flatland, which intersects with the two dimensional world in a manner that the inhabitants cannot entirely comprehend.   Grant Morrison likes to talk about readers donning "fiction suits" to enter the secondary worlds of comics, and, in their continuity-preoccupied storylines at DC, combines the idea behind their "fiction suit" metaphor with more familiar metafiction in order to show authorial and editorial intervention. The reality-altering antagonist is the two-dimensional protrusion of the editorial function into comics continuity, taking the shape of a villain in order to accomplish its metafictional, catastrophic task.  How appropriate that Crisis reinforced a preexisting DC image of the creation of its universe as a giant hand with galaxies spinning in its palm; we are watching someone from outside the story reaching in to being it or change it.  When they watch from above, making suggestions only when needed, editors are monitors.  When they reach into the story to rearrange it, they have forfeited their role of engaged observers; they are anti-monitors.

Next: What Comes Next

Do I Dare Disturb the Universe?

Why does the form taken by a universe-altering crossover event matter? From a distance, of course, this does not matter at all.  We are talking about the periodic reshuffling of the worlds of corporate superhero comics.  But if we want to consider the workings of the corporate superhero comic as a set of texts at the intersection of art, commerce, and ethics, the signal failure of Flashpoint to meet the minimal threshold of a line-wide rebooting story reveals the underlying structure of such events, as well as providing important clues to the way the genre works as a whole.

The heroes' active, conscious involvement in the line-wide reboot demonstrates the fractal nature of the corporate superhero universe, transposing the fundamental ethical concern of the superhero genre--who should intervene in a crisis, and when--to the levels of continuity, fictional self-referentiality, and the roles of creators, readers, and editors. 

The superhero genre's built-in bias for action and intervention is so obvious that, most of the time, it hardly seems worth mentioning.  So many of the catchphrases developed by both Marvel and DC are precisely about the need to act:  "This looks like a job for Superman!";  "It's clobberin' time!" . This is not even counting the numerous calls to arms associated with so many heroes and teams, the less-than-edifying "Hulk smash!" and the oath recited by members of the Green Lantern Corps [1].  While these catchphrases are not the exclusive property of the Big Two superheroes (as attested by anyone humming the Mighty Mouse theme song, "Here I come to save the day"), they are nearly all declarations of intended actions. Again, this is no surprise: there is a reason DC's longest-running title is not called "Inaction Comics."

The emphasis on intervention is given a moral foundation by comics' most explicitly philosophical motto: "With great power comes great responsibility." Originally the closing line in Stan Lee's narrative captions to Spider-Man's first appearance in Amazing Fantasy 15, this adage about power and responsibility migrated throughout Spider-Man-related media until it eventually became retconned as a nugget of wisdom imparted to Peter Parker by his Uncle Ben. Once it was included as part of Uncle Ben's dialogue in the 2002 Spider-Man film, the phrase became a part of pop cultural history.  It is also the most explicit corporate superhero mission statement ever to achieve such indisputable memetic success.  The very existence of superpowers compels their bearer to put on a costume and either fight crime or commit crime.

You and me both, Doc

Only occasionally do the ethics of choosing to be a superhero become part of the story before the 1980s, when comics such as Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns call the very idea of vigilantism into question at the same time that they (along with Art Spiegelman's Maus, whose origins and status are far from the industry of mainstream comics) manage to draw sustained public attention to comics as a mature art form for the first time in American history. That same decade is, not entirely coincidentally, when crises and reboots become a standard part of the corporate comics repertoire. 

If, as I have argued elsewhere, Marvel Comics in the 1960s was dominated by the ethos of pop science fictional humanism (exploring the nonhuman or superhuman in order to extoll the virtues of humanity), and in the 1970s, by both an emphasis on subjectivity (the characters' inner lives) and transcendence (the superhero story as the vehicle for spiritual growth), in the 1980s, both Marvel and DC move in a direction that combines continuity-obsessed solipsism with an interrogation of the ethics of intervention.

Both superhero vigilantism and continuity revisionism take a functional or utilitarian approach to the problems they pose.  Vigilantism flaunts its impatience with social and legal institutions that are inadequate in the face of crime and corruption; what on the surface is mere escapism and wish-fulfillment ("Let's beat up the bad guys!") is implicated in a politics that readers might not as readily accept in the "real world."  Continuity revisionism implicitly declares the current narrative status quo irreparable within the existing framework: Something Must Be Done. The incompatibility of superhero vigilantism with the niceties of liberal, procedural democracy shares with continuity revisionism a frustration with the temporality of the world as it exists.  Both are predicated on the wish to cut to the chase and get a desire result.

They also share a complicated attitude towards agency and consequence. The superhero vigilante lays claim to an agency that has no clear external source, while the downstream ramifications of the vigilante's unilateral actions are only occasional explored, and usually within the context of a "mature" reexamination of the superhero idea. At the same time, superheroes have long been subject to the leftist critique that, even as they undermine institutions by acting outside of them, ultimately the entire point of all their efforts is to maintain the liberal capitalist status quo.  Why, after all, should we really care if a bank is robbed?

Continuity revisionism makes the superhero's dedication to maintaining the existing order both literal and metaphysical.  They are trying to stop something or someone from rewriting the rules and history of the world in which they live.  There is, however, a crucial distinction:  the ordinary superhero story nearly always ends in success, but the whole point of a continuity-revising event is to have the superhero fail.  Yes, they defeat the villain, and yes, they ensure that there is a universe (or multiverse) to protect once the adventure is done, but the cosmos they have known has been fundamentally altered.

Who is responsible for this alteration?  Here we come back to the multiple roles of readers, creators, and editors.  In most cases, the creators and editors began their relationship with comics as readers; this is one of the factors that helps maintain fandom.  The industry is filled with former fans, who, if they might no longer speak exactly the same language as current fans, are proficient enough to code switch.  Yet despite their common roots, readers, creators, and editors do not form a harmonious triad; if anything, their relationship is inherently antagonistic.  Some of this is an inevitable consequence of serialized narrative in any medium. For the story to continue to be viable, the storyteller has to succeed in intriguing the reader while failing to completely satisfy. The readers' frustration is not just a by-product; it is built-in part of the product they have chosen to consume.

Note

[1] "Avengers, Assemble!" "Titans Together!" "Teen Titans, Go!" "To me, my X-Men!" "Long Live the Legion!"  When Green Lanterns charge their rings, they recite the oath "In brightest day/In blackest night/ No evil shall escape my sight/Let those who worship evil's might/ Beware my power/Green Lantern's Light!"

Next: This Looks Like a Job for...the Editor!

Something Happened

Flashpoint was DC's own Age of Apocalypse. It, too, was predicated on a character's alteration of history, although this time it is about saving a life long-ago ended (Barry Allen's mother) rather than murdering someone who was supposed to survive (Professor X). In both cases, the alterations to the timeline extended far beyond the obvious: in The Age of Apocalypse, reality is destroyed because Phoenix was not around to fix the M'Kraan Crystal in X-Men 108, while the repercussions of Nora Allen's survival somehow included evens that preceded it, such as the death of Bruce Wayne rather than his father, Thomas, the capture of baby Kal-El's rocket by the military,  and others that seemed to have no connection with it, such as an abortive alliance between Atlantis and Themyscira that results in global war. [1]

The fact that the Age of Apocalypse was a localized event can be seen as an artifact of the way that Marvel Universe functioned in the 1990s.  The X-Men franchise was far and away the biggest seller; it did not, technically, exist in its own universe (continuity aside, that would have prevented money-making mutant guest appearances in other titles), but it did live in its own corner of the Marvel Universe (with its own editorial office).  The very next big Marvel event, whose seeds were planted in the immediate aftermath of the Age of Apocalypse, was a story that temporarily resulted in the mutants having the earth almost entirely to themselves.  At the end of the Onslaught storyline, almost all the non-mutant superheroes were presumed dead, rebooted and  transported to an alternate earth where they remained for a year. But the Onslaught storyline, though it was rooted in X-Men continuity, involved the rest of Marvel's heroes: when each of them "died" to stop the villain, it was a conscious choice they made, a last act of heroism. Had this truly been a reboot of the Marvel Universe, it would have at least involved all the affected characters.

If Flashpoint had stuck with what appeared to be its initial ambitions (to be a DC variation on The Age of Apocalypse), it would simply be another alternate universe remembered fondly by many, and inevitably revisited over the years. But instead, Flashpoint brought the extant DC continuity to an abrupt end.  Everything about this suggested a last-minute frenzy rather than carefully-laid plans.  DC had just finished a year-long crossover storyline called "Brightest Day," which, among other things, planted the seeds for a number of new storylines by bringing multiple characters back from the dead and by announcing the formation of a new Justice League International. In Flashpoint itself, the entire plot was wrapped up as one would expect of a well-wrought story: the protagonist (the Flash) undoes his own mistake and faces the consequences.  But the last eight pages take a sharp turn. The Flash has been running on his cosmic treadmill, realigning the timelines, when suddenly, in a two-page spread, we see multiple versions of DC characters in separate sections of the page.  The Flash says, "I see three timelines. Why?" Out of nowhere, the hooded head of a mysterious female figure appears, explaining, "Because the history of the heroes was shattered into three long ago.  / Splintered to weaken your world for their impending arrival. / You must all stand together.   The timelines must become oneagain.  /You can help me fix that Barry Allen, but at a cost." Whereupon the Flash wakes up in the world of the New 52.

Oh, sure, when you put it that way…

This is undeniably sloppy storytelling. If Johns and the DC team had really wanted to sell both the role of the mystery woman (subsequently revealed to be Pandora of Greek myth) and the possibility of a real reboot, both should have been introduced earlier than the last eight pages.  But this sloppiness is a symptom of the real problem.

There had been rumors of a line-wide reboot by the time Flashpoint came out, but they were difficult to credit, and not just because of the new storylines that were aborted before they could really take off. Flashpoint broke the unspoken compact among creators, readers, and characters that undergirded every reboot since Crisis on Infinite Earths.  It is not enough that reality itself be threatened; that threat must be represented on a meta-level, forcing the main characters to be aware of just what is at stake.  This is one of the functions of omniscient beings such as the Monitor (DC) or The Watcher (Marvel): they alert both the characters and the readers that reality and continuity have suddenly become excessively malleable.   In DC terms, this is what distinguishes an Event from a Crisis.  An Event is crossover involving multiple characters in a high-stakes fight, but leaving continuity mostly intact.  A Crisis is a paradigm shift, and for it to work effectively, the characters have to understand what is happening.  A character might not be aware that they are participating in an Event--their genre (superheroes) and their medium (corporate comics) send them from Event to Event like a pingpong ball.  But characters' knowledge that they are in a Crisis is part of the story.

Instead, both the readers and the heroes are mere spectators.  The Flash may have started Flashpoint, but in the end, no matter how fast he runs, he has been reduced to a bystander observing a process that he cannot comprehend in the moment, and will quickly forget when it is over.  Even worse, in the absence of the usual signs of the looming continuity change that fans have come to expect,  this was a betrayal of the readers. The readers, too, are hapless bystanders. 

Note

[1] Some of these deviations go far beyond the standard Butterfly Effect; Kal-El's rocket, for example, landed on earth before Nora was ever meant to be murdered. In the animated adaptation of the storyline, Justice League: The Flashpoint Paradox (2013), the main villain provide an explanation: “Break the sound barrier, and there’s a sonic boom. You broke the time barrier, Flash. Time boom. Ripples of distortion radiated out through that point of impact, shifting everything just a tiny bit—but enough. Enough for events to happen slightly differently“

Next:  Do I Dare Disturb the Universe?

Flash and Substance

Whatever else one might think about Zero Hour, it acknowledged that wrapping up this version of the Legion of Super-Heroes was a moment worth dwelling on, even if the main miniseries did not give the heroes from the future a great deal of face time.  The LSH issues that crossed over with Zero Hour showed the rapid diminishment of the Legion's cosmos, leaving only the group's founders (well, two versions of them--it's complicated) to remember their past adventures and say their farewells. As a story, Zero Hour may not hold together all that well; its plot is not all that coherent, and it depends on an earlier shark-jumping moment of its own (Green Lantern Hal Jordan's sudden transformation into a genocidal madman). But as a reality-altering event, it does the job it set out to do: revising and erasing timelines, changing the status quo, and giving a set of characters a dramatic sendoff.

Which brings me back to Flashpoint. As a story, Flashpoint is much more cohesive, thanks both to the guiding role of writer Geoff Johns and the alternate world setting, which requires planning and worldbuilding. But in setting up The New 52, Flashpoint had to perform the functions of a different type of story.  It had to motivate the reboot and anchor it within the characters' ongoing stories, but instead, Flashpoint was something that simply happened to them.

Like so many alternate timeline stories, Flashpoint is predicated on the importance of choice and causality.  This is quite different from the old DC multiverse, where parallel universes were essentially independent from one another.  Earth One, where most of DC's stories were told throughout the Silver and Bronze Ages, was different from Earth Two (home of the Golden Age heroes), but not because of a the ramifications of a specific event. Flashpoint is an alternate timeline of the type made famous by Ray Bradbury's 1952  "A Sound of Thunder," where a time traveler steps on a butterfly in the Late Cretaceous period, and the reverberations of this seemingly minor change in history fundamentally alter the "present" from which the travelers arrived (the United States is now run by fascists).

Such stories manage to valorize individual choice while also warning against its exercise: everything we do matters, but once we have done it, choosing to undo it leads to inevitable disaster.  While DC had been exploring its multiverse, Marvel had demonstrated a preoccupation with timelines and time paradoxes, even devoting an entire series (What If?) to one-off tales in which pivotal events in the Marvel universe resolved themselves differently ("What if Phoenix Had Lived?" "What If Spider-Man Had Joined the Fantastic Four?"). In the original run of What If?, alternate timelines were almost always worse than the original.  The hook was to imagine the Marvel Universe taking a different course, but the moral was that deviating from Marvel's established continuity was rarely worth it.

The first volume of What If? ceased publication in November 1984, but by that point, it was no longer the most exciting source of alternate Marvel timelines. that honor had already been taken by The Uncanny X-Men. In the first months of 1981, Chris Claremont and John Byrne raised the stakes by creating an alternate future rather than an alternate present or past:  the two-part Days of Future Past (141-142, January-February 1981) introduced a grim future in which mutants were all but exterminated; an adult Kitty Pride projects her consciousness back to her past (our present) in order to change a key event and prevent her dystopian future from ever occurring.  Claremont and his successors returned to this well frequently, primarily by moving the character of Rachel Summers (the adult daughter of Scott Summers and the then-dead Jean Grey) and Nate Summers (the adult son of Scott Summers and Jean Grey's clone, Madelyne Pryor) into the present day. Eventually, the X-Men introduced numerous other future timelines, crossing them with the present and each other with staggering but compelling complexity.

Marvel was productively messing up its timelines while DC was obsessed with tidying up its multiverse

In 1995-1996,  a few years after Claremont's departure from the franchise, the creative teams on the X-books put together the Age of Apocalypse, a  four-month-long event whose structure was later borrowed for Flashpoint:  all eight of the X-titles were suspended and replaced by alternate timeline variations on their characters and themes.  After Charles Xavier's son, Legion, an unstable mutant whose numerous personalities each had their own superpowers, travels back into the past and accidentally kills his own father before he can found the X-Men, the immortal villain Apocalypse decides to embark on world conquest earlier than he attempted in the main timeline. With no X-Men to oppose him, Apocalypse succeeds, and now the only hope for defeating him lies in a different version of the X-Men run by Magneto. For four months, the X-books explore this timeline, creating an extensive backstory while also building to a suitably apocalyptic finale. When the story is over, the Age of Apocalypse has been undone and the normal timeline restored. The only changes to Marvel reality involve the addition of a few characters who manage to escape the destruction of their world and become refugees in Marvel's main continuity (Nate Grey, the Dark Beast, Sugar Man and Holocaust).

Though the ending of the original story was supposed to undo the Age of Apocalypse and deny it any future, Marvel returned to this alternate timeline on a number of occasions, with guest appearances, specials , a miniseries, and even a short-lived ongoing title, while also making one of its characters (Blink) central to a long-running comic about time-lost heroes traveling to alternate Marvel Earths in order to fix them (The Exiles). [1]  As an event, however, the Age of Apocalypse succeeded in making the characters themselves the crucial part to the establishment and dismantling of the alternate timeline. The X-Men knew that Legion's trip to the past could destroy reality as they knew it, and the versions of them living in the Age of Apocalypse actively chose a course of events that would undo their own existence. The rest of the Marvel Universe was oblivious, but, then, the rest of the Marvel Universe was largely unaffected (once the Age of Apocalypse was ended, their lives continued on the same course as before the event began).

What Flashpoint did was something different. And it was a mess.

Note

[1] The Age of Apocalypse also established a template that the X-Men line would use again in Age of X and Age of X-Man.

Next: Something Happened

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)