Here’s a definition of the term, for four habituees of CS who don’t know.
And now back to the thread topic. What fictional characters who inhabit vast shared universes would be better off otherwise? For that matter, what characters have settings interesting enough so that you’d like to deepened with with more and more characters?
To answer my own questions:
Best served: Jack Bauer. I’d really like to see what life is like in CTU New York or Washington, DC. I have a sneaking suspicion each of those cities has even more melodrama than LA, and that Jack is assigned where he is because he’s the team wimp.
Worst served: Batman. The Gotham family books do damage to the already incoherent DCU.
Skald, please don’t send the bees after me, but your definition wasn’t posted in the OP. So, here’s a wikipedia link defining “shared universe”: Shared universe - Wikipedia .
Why would I send the bees after you for correcting one of my mistakes? I’m not that kind of villain; I want minions who THINK and ACT for the betterment of the organization. Frankly I am offended by your implication that my ego is so fragile, and in vengeance I am dispatching the bees sting all your friends until they turn blue.
I agree with you that Batman is ill-served by being in a shared universe, but it’s Batman himself who suffers, not the DCU at large.
The inflation of the Bat’s skills, in order to make him able to stand shoulder to shoulder with Superman and Wonder Woman cuts into part of his supposed appeal - he’s supposed to be ‘just’ a very skilled human, who was lucky enough to have millions of dollars inherited from his parents - someone anyone could be if they put in the effort, and had the lucky break of being the son of a millionaire - but in less than 20 years (how long he’s been Batman in continuity), he’s managed to become the world’s foremost detective, one of the world’s foremost fighters, one of the world’s foremost escape artists, more knowledgeable about tactics, history, science, engineering, literature, art, architecture, and any number of other fields than people who’ve spent an equivalent amount of time studying only them…
This is on top of the fact that his level of scepticism is entirely unwarranted in the face of the fact that he associates with the Justice League - for instance, despite knowing Deadman, he has, more than once, said that ghosts don’t exist.
Robin and Nightwing being allowed to be more modest in their skill-sets, and being useful as foils for the Bat’s scepticism, saves them from falling into the same trap.
The Punisher. The Punisher works best in a realistic setting with no superheroes. Having him interact with Spider-Man and Daredevil breaks the illusion and takes away from what he is at his core: a mass slaughterer.
However, sharing continuity with Archie comics vastly improves both properties.
My answer is John Constantine. His razor-edge deals with the devil himself lose a bit of their punch when you know there’s a bunch of guys in tights flying around punching out space aliens. I understand they’ve taken Hellblazer out of the regular DCUniverse, though, so that’s good. I wonder where that leaves Swamp Thing?
Remember back just before DC launched it’s Vertigo line? The universe was almost neatly split between the comic code titles and the “Mature Readers” books.
The only overlap seemed to be things like the Justice League standing around scratching their heads while the Doom Patrol would jump into the painting that ate Paris, or obscure silver-age-types getting killed off in Sandman…
I’d love to see what could be done with a Future History/Known Space mashup.
I think the new (post-Moore) Swamp Thing fits better into the Constantine universe, rather than the JL one. I’d add Sandman & Books of Magic in there, too.
Swamp Thing #129, Hellblazer #63, Sandman #47, Doom Patrol #64, Animal Man #57, Shade, the Changing Man #33, Death: The High Cost of Living #1, Vertigo Preview.
Captain Marvel has always been problematic. Not only does he not belong in the same universe as Batman, you can barely justify putting him in the same universe as Captain Marvel Jr; you can’t credibly use the same drawing style for both of them.
The Thing is the most versatile character in comics. He makes perfect sense in any setting. Sci-Fi, wrestling, supernatural, robots-fighting-monkeys, teen romance, Ben Grimm belongs in that story!
Most DC characters created before the 70’s or so suffer from being included in a shared universe.
Any character whose shtick rougly resembles Superman’s who isn’t Superman suffers from living in a universe where Superman will always be top dog, for instance. That includes characters like Wonder Woman, Captain Marvel, and Captain Atom.
Superpowers that would otherwise be impressive and land you the spot of most powerful being in the world just aren’t that great compared to Superman being able to juggle planets. That’s why you get characters either pushed to the periphery (Captain Marvel) or kept around as a C-list Superman stand-in who gets to spend lots of his time talking about how great Superman is (Captain Atom).
That doesn’t mean that it’s impossible to make these things work, but it certainly doesn’t help things. Most DC charactes work best in either their own little universe, or a silver age-style “We technically inhabit the same universe, but aside from the Justice League comic, we basically pretend that we don’t” arrangement.
By contrast, most Marvel characters gain a lot from living in the Marvel Universe. Since they were created with a shared universe in mind, you don’t really get the big guns stepping on each other’s toes.
Spider-Man, for example, gains a lot of fun by bouncing off his fellow heroes and their super-villains. One of his best stories is a fight against Juggernaut, after all. Likewise, stuff like S.H.I.E.L.D. is fun because if effects pretty much the entire Marvel U.
I’ll jump on the Batman bandwagon. It’s not perfect, but the film The Dark Knight kept almost everything I like about Batman and threw overboard almost everything I don’t like about him – especially the ever-fantastical nature of his universe and opponents.
Captain Marvel is another one, though I’d say that the whole Marvel Family has never really fit into the DC Universe. The essential nature of those comics just doesn’t fit, despite some interesting efforts over the years.
Speaking of Marvel, however, most of their characters benefit from the shared universe. I like that Spider-Man’s history is wrapped up with the Fantastic Four’s and Iron Man’s and Daredevil’s. This gets stretched (Wolverine’s secret mutant power: the ability to be everywhere at once), but because almost all those characters were introduced into the same universe, it works. (And IMHO, it tends to work even better in the Ultimate Marvel universe, where things are streamlined and more tightly integrated. Which probably gives the whole thing a finite shelf life. Ah, tradeoffs.)
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