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