Entry tags:
So-called 'continuity'
1. Greetings on this shortest, darkest, most miserable day of the year (by which I mean yuletide due date, of course.)
I unexpectedly got mine in shape to post yesterday, so I'm way less panicked than I was planning to be this morning, and thus feel like I'm flapping around at loose ends (I know, cry moar). Now I just have to decide if I want to do more Yuletide or if I want to just lay back and read comics until after Christmas.
..and if I want to hang with family on Christmas Eve after all or if I want to spend the day in my pajamas watching the rest of AtLA.
2. WXPN, my current favorite radio station, did its morning show as a non-Christmasy winter music set to celebrate the solstice. I approve (and will probably be looking up a bunch of them when I get home.)
3.![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
chordatesrock asked about how the MCU compares to comic universe. There are many ways to compare them! The super-basic answer is the comic universe is so vast and complicated and ever-changing that it's frankly impossible to compare it to anything other than itself. And the MCU isn't (yet.)
But I'm going to pull out one small part of it, and talk about serial storytelling.
Serial storytelling is something I have very strong feelings about, probably mostly because I was someone brought up in a house where you read books as you found them at the library, you read comics as they appeared out of a friend's or relative's attic, and you watched TV only when you had nothing better to do.
So for most of my life, the idea of experiencing an entire series, in order, with no gaps, was just a dream, a dream unattainable.
People like me are something anyone who is producing a serial has to deal with. (For purposes of this discussion, we're defining a serial story as a story that is released in multiple parts, that are designed to make up a single narrative when put together, that are designed so that they can keep going as long as the audience is willing to put up with them. So: TV series, radio shows, novel series, newspaper comics, comic books, etc.
Anything that puts out multiple parts that are meant to be one narrative is going to face the problem of audience members missing parts. There's several strategies for dealing with this:
1. You can make it so that characters, settings, themes, etc. carry over, but any individual installment is completely stand-alone (like Star Trek:TOS or most newspaper gag strips.)
2. You can put in a recap of important stuff at the beginning of each segment (like Carry On My Wayward Son)
3. You can assume you will captivate your audience so hard that they will do whatever is necessary to never miss an installment (like soap operas, or the Arabian Nights)
Of course there are plenty of variations on this, but basically, most serials have used some combination of those three strategies to deal with the problem of selling one story in many parts. If you don't use them, you risk losing your audience as they miss parts of the story and give up.
In the last couple of decades, though, new technology has given us a new strategy:
4. Make your previous installments so easy to find that anybody who wants to can catch up (webcomics, TV shows with old episodes streaming, fanfic WIPS.)
Strategy 4 has ushered in a whole new era in storytelling, especially in TV shows with their turn toward complex season-long arcs, that I'm starting to feel like some of the old ways of doing serials are getting lost, and we're all the poorer for it. (Okay, also I hate the trend toward long arcs in TV shows. Just because I can catch up on fifteen hours' worth of backstory before watching your latest thing doesn't mean I want to.)
Anyway, back to Marvel.
The two big superhero universes, 616 and DC's main continuity, have been struggling with trying to do organized serial storytelling on a scale nobody's ever done before. Here is a super-quick and shamelessly inaccurate summary of the history of superhero comics continuity:
Back in the day - really up through most of the Silver Age - most comics were meant to be stand-alones. They were richer and deeper if you knew more of the history of the character, but if you picked up any given issue of any given comic, and you were at least vaguely familiar with the main character, you could follow the story and things would basically make sense, and any little detail you needed could be footnoted. (At least, they'd make sense for certain values of Golden Age comics.) These were also the days when there was an entire rack of comics for sale on every streetcorner, not coincidentally, and comics were as mainstream as they've ever been.
Over time, though, this horrible thing called "continuity" started to creep in. Maybe you didn't have to have read the previous issue, but there was so much complicated worldbuilding taken for granted, and so much history in the relationships, that you really needed to be pretty familiar with the mythology. And then there were more and more two-issue, and then multi-issue, and then many-many-issue arcs.
Before you could blink there was so much backloaded continuity that even the editors couldn't follow it, and DC decided to nuke the whole thing from orbit, thus initiating the "company-wide crossover event", for which I will never forgive them. Anyway, DC doesn't so much have "continuity" these days as "chronic retrograde amnesia on the command of its evil overlords", which gives it something in common with Bucky Barnes, anyway. It deals with the problem of the audience having to follow by periodically wiping the slate, luring new people in with a new beginning, and then praying they'll be willing to read everything from there on in order to keep going. Then when enough of the new audience are lost and annoyed, they wipe the slate again.
Not sure how well that's working, but okay.
Marvel, on the other hand, deals with its shedloads of continuity via carefully maintained denial. If there's something in their past that they'd rather ignore, they just quietly stop talking about it, or tell the story a slightly different way every time until nobody remembers what it originally was. This has the benefit of not annoying all your old fans by throwing the a-babies out with the bathwater, but it doesn't really solve the problem of how to make your stuff accessible to people who are not going to be reading every comic you publish every month.
I'm not really sure what the solution to that problem is, for universes that are trying to do what DC and 616 are doing. As much as I moan about missing the days of stand-alones, when you didn't have to commit to a deep and long-term relationship just to consume a damn story, a lot of the really cool stuff I like in Marvel (and liked in DC, when I was active there before New 52) was stuff that only worked because of the depth of continuity, the ability to pull in literally thousands of established characters who all have individual relationships with each other.
I think part of the problem I've been having with 616 is that they keep wanting to have their cake and eat it too. I'll start following a series that's mostly stand-alone, like Hawkeye or Runaways (and many of these new stand-alones are specifically designed to be welcoming to casual readers, who may come in at the middle or miss an issue or a trade here and there) but then as soon as it gets successful or established, they'll be like: hurrah! Time to starting mixing it up with the latest massive crossover event, so that the solo book stops making sense! The readers are trapped so they'll have to start buying fifteen new series!
Which, screw you, Editorial, aside from the fact that most giant crossover events are objectively bad, I'm going to drop the solo book before I start reading 15 others just because you're being manipulative.
Meanwhile, the MCU is off on its own, inventing a whole new way to do serial storytelling, and whoever is in charge of it over there seems to be trying really hard to make something that works, that really truly works, both as a series of stand-alones and as an intricately connected single narrative (with the added complication of the sub-series also working both as stand-alones and narratives.) And to keep the TV series centered in canon without being required at all in order for the pan-movie arc to make sense. That is a lot of balls to keep in the air, but so far, they seem to be managing it, and I don't think anyone's done anything like it with movies before.
I want to say this way of handling continuity is something inherent to the cinematic release format, but I suppose it's not, really - the Hobbit movies have certainly proved that you can release major action movies that don't stand on their own and people will still go.
They seem to be basing the general structure on what print comics were doing back in the Silver Age, where each major hero would have a solo book, and then also appear in the team book, and the solo books and team book, while theoretically taking place in the same continuity, could be read separately without the reader feeling like they'd missed anything. (It looks like they may be planning on basically the same structure for the Netflix miniseries as well.)
I really like that structure - it lets you have some of the complexity of a massive universe, without putting a huge burden on the audience, or getting so excited about continuity tricks that you lose track of telling a coherent story. And it worked for the comics for a very long time, more or less.
I live in fear of the day they give up on keeping the movies stand-alone-ish, though. I fear it's going to happen. Cap II was already way less able to stand on its own than Iron Man III or Thor II, and I haven't a clue how they think they're going to do Civil War in a way that works on its own. And the PTB keep comparing the structure to "crossover events" rather that to "team books", which scares me.
Does that, uh. Does that answer your question?
I unexpectedly got mine in shape to post yesterday, so I'm way less panicked than I was planning to be this morning, and thus feel like I'm flapping around at loose ends (I know, cry moar). Now I just have to decide if I want to do more Yuletide or if I want to just lay back and read comics until after Christmas.
..and if I want to hang with family on Christmas Eve after all or if I want to spend the day in my pajamas watching the rest of AtLA.
2. WXPN, my current favorite radio station, did its morning show as a non-Christmasy winter music set to celebrate the solstice. I approve (and will probably be looking up a bunch of them when I get home.)
3.
chordatesrock asked about how the MCU compares to comic universe. There are many ways to compare them! The super-basic answer is the comic universe is so vast and complicated and ever-changing that it's frankly impossible to compare it to anything other than itself. And the MCU isn't (yet.)But I'm going to pull out one small part of it, and talk about serial storytelling.
Serial storytelling is something I have very strong feelings about, probably mostly because I was someone brought up in a house where you read books as you found them at the library, you read comics as they appeared out of a friend's or relative's attic, and you watched TV only when you had nothing better to do.
So for most of my life, the idea of experiencing an entire series, in order, with no gaps, was just a dream, a dream unattainable.
People like me are something anyone who is producing a serial has to deal with. (For purposes of this discussion, we're defining a serial story as a story that is released in multiple parts, that are designed to make up a single narrative when put together, that are designed so that they can keep going as long as the audience is willing to put up with them. So: TV series, radio shows, novel series, newspaper comics, comic books, etc.
Anything that puts out multiple parts that are meant to be one narrative is going to face the problem of audience members missing parts. There's several strategies for dealing with this:
1. You can make it so that characters, settings, themes, etc. carry over, but any individual installment is completely stand-alone (like Star Trek:TOS or most newspaper gag strips.)
2. You can put in a recap of important stuff at the beginning of each segment (like Carry On My Wayward Son)
3. You can assume you will captivate your audience so hard that they will do whatever is necessary to never miss an installment (like soap operas, or the Arabian Nights)
Of course there are plenty of variations on this, but basically, most serials have used some combination of those three strategies to deal with the problem of selling one story in many parts. If you don't use them, you risk losing your audience as they miss parts of the story and give up.
In the last couple of decades, though, new technology has given us a new strategy:
4. Make your previous installments so easy to find that anybody who wants to can catch up (webcomics, TV shows with old episodes streaming, fanfic WIPS.)
Strategy 4 has ushered in a whole new era in storytelling, especially in TV shows with their turn toward complex season-long arcs, that I'm starting to feel like some of the old ways of doing serials are getting lost, and we're all the poorer for it. (Okay, also I hate the trend toward long arcs in TV shows. Just because I can catch up on fifteen hours' worth of backstory before watching your latest thing doesn't mean I want to.)
Anyway, back to Marvel.
The two big superhero universes, 616 and DC's main continuity, have been struggling with trying to do organized serial storytelling on a scale nobody's ever done before. Here is a super-quick and shamelessly inaccurate summary of the history of superhero comics continuity:
Back in the day - really up through most of the Silver Age - most comics were meant to be stand-alones. They were richer and deeper if you knew more of the history of the character, but if you picked up any given issue of any given comic, and you were at least vaguely familiar with the main character, you could follow the story and things would basically make sense, and any little detail you needed could be footnoted. (At least, they'd make sense for certain values of Golden Age comics.) These were also the days when there was an entire rack of comics for sale on every streetcorner, not coincidentally, and comics were as mainstream as they've ever been.
Over time, though, this horrible thing called "continuity" started to creep in. Maybe you didn't have to have read the previous issue, but there was so much complicated worldbuilding taken for granted, and so much history in the relationships, that you really needed to be pretty familiar with the mythology. And then there were more and more two-issue, and then multi-issue, and then many-many-issue arcs.
Before you could blink there was so much backloaded continuity that even the editors couldn't follow it, and DC decided to nuke the whole thing from orbit, thus initiating the "company-wide crossover event", for which I will never forgive them. Anyway, DC doesn't so much have "continuity" these days as "chronic retrograde amnesia on the command of its evil overlords", which gives it something in common with Bucky Barnes, anyway. It deals with the problem of the audience having to follow by periodically wiping the slate, luring new people in with a new beginning, and then praying they'll be willing to read everything from there on in order to keep going. Then when enough of the new audience are lost and annoyed, they wipe the slate again.
Not sure how well that's working, but okay.
Marvel, on the other hand, deals with its shedloads of continuity via carefully maintained denial. If there's something in their past that they'd rather ignore, they just quietly stop talking about it, or tell the story a slightly different way every time until nobody remembers what it originally was. This has the benefit of not annoying all your old fans by throwing the a-babies out with the bathwater, but it doesn't really solve the problem of how to make your stuff accessible to people who are not going to be reading every comic you publish every month.
I'm not really sure what the solution to that problem is, for universes that are trying to do what DC and 616 are doing. As much as I moan about missing the days of stand-alones, when you didn't have to commit to a deep and long-term relationship just to consume a damn story, a lot of the really cool stuff I like in Marvel (and liked in DC, when I was active there before New 52) was stuff that only worked because of the depth of continuity, the ability to pull in literally thousands of established characters who all have individual relationships with each other.
I think part of the problem I've been having with 616 is that they keep wanting to have their cake and eat it too. I'll start following a series that's mostly stand-alone, like Hawkeye or Runaways (and many of these new stand-alones are specifically designed to be welcoming to casual readers, who may come in at the middle or miss an issue or a trade here and there) but then as soon as it gets successful or established, they'll be like: hurrah! Time to starting mixing it up with the latest massive crossover event, so that the solo book stops making sense! The readers are trapped so they'll have to start buying fifteen new series!
Which, screw you, Editorial, aside from the fact that most giant crossover events are objectively bad, I'm going to drop the solo book before I start reading 15 others just because you're being manipulative.
Meanwhile, the MCU is off on its own, inventing a whole new way to do serial storytelling, and whoever is in charge of it over there seems to be trying really hard to make something that works, that really truly works, both as a series of stand-alones and as an intricately connected single narrative (with the added complication of the sub-series also working both as stand-alones and narratives.) And to keep the TV series centered in canon without being required at all in order for the pan-movie arc to make sense. That is a lot of balls to keep in the air, but so far, they seem to be managing it, and I don't think anyone's done anything like it with movies before.
I want to say this way of handling continuity is something inherent to the cinematic release format, but I suppose it's not, really - the Hobbit movies have certainly proved that you can release major action movies that don't stand on their own and people will still go.
They seem to be basing the general structure on what print comics were doing back in the Silver Age, where each major hero would have a solo book, and then also appear in the team book, and the solo books and team book, while theoretically taking place in the same continuity, could be read separately without the reader feeling like they'd missed anything. (It looks like they may be planning on basically the same structure for the Netflix miniseries as well.)
I really like that structure - it lets you have some of the complexity of a massive universe, without putting a huge burden on the audience, or getting so excited about continuity tricks that you lose track of telling a coherent story. And it worked for the comics for a very long time, more or less.
I live in fear of the day they give up on keeping the movies stand-alone-ish, though. I fear it's going to happen. Cap II was already way less able to stand on its own than Iron Man III or Thor II, and I haven't a clue how they think they're going to do Civil War in a way that works on its own. And the PTB keep comparing the structure to "crossover events" rather that to "team books", which scares me.
Does that, uh. Does that answer your question?
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Bwahahaha! This made me laugh out loud. It is so true.
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Yes, this, so exactly. I gave up on Wonder Woman and Birds of Prey for any number of reasons (not least the desire to stop giving money to the DC management, and that even Simone's writing can redeem DC's way of drawing all women), but their interruption of every fricking standalone book's storyline with the crossover plots basically killed it for me. I will *never* start buying another title just to know what's going on.
Marvel does this less often, but often enough. In Marvel's case, I just suck up that I don't know what's going on in, say, Carol's life unless someone points me at scans. It's pretty well known this doesn't work for television, and that doesn't cost the viewers any money. I don't know why they'd expect it to work for comics.
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Marvel does it often enough that of four current series I'm trying to follow in trades (Captain Marvel, Hawkeye, Loki:Agent of Asgard, and Guardians of the Galaxy, all of which ought to be aimed at casual/movieverse fans) three of them have been interrupted by giant crossovers before they made it three trades in. And not even in a "Well, I don't know what's going on in that part of their lives" way, I can deal with that, in a "Uh. You were building toward some kind of climax there. And then... suddenly we're not mentioning that storyline in this title anymore? Uh, wtf happened, I am so confused."
...according to my friends who work in the business side of the industry, they do it because it does work. :/ Like. Not in a good or sustainable way. But they've already chased away enough casual fans that a significant proportion of their current comic-store buyers will pre-order all fifteen issues, and since their internal stats and industry tracking are still based almost entirely on pre-orders of floppies at comic stores, it makes their numbers look REALLY GOOD, at least for that month.
And having your preorder numbers look really good for a month is much more important than building a more robust base of readers, right?
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Next year I think I'll just volunteer to beta in fandoms I know. And post the long-delayed second half of the multifandom Christmas fic I started last year (based in the Antique Bakery universe--what better setting for the holidays than a superb French-style patisserie in Tokyo that also caters on Christmas Eve?
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I'm seriously considering skipping next year - it's fun, but I've done it ten times, that should be enough, right? - and the level of stress around the people who take it WAY too seriously keep ratcheting up.
On the other hand, if I quit, that's letting them win. :P
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