I endorse this! However, I would give writers the right to re-imagine old stories, however they have to retell them in their own style. Let’s not let all good work go to waste, just all bad work.
And if bad work is being created replacing good stories…
DON’T BUY THE F’N BOOKS.
Enough people don’t buy, the message will get through.
Related to both this and Fenris’ don’t break other people’s toys rule is the…
Our Worlds At War Rule: If you absolutely must have a big, company-wide crossover or summer event or whatever, you are not allowed to make your Big Menace seem more menacing by killing off scores of characters within one crossover. This way we avoid things like The Atom, Dr. Mid-Nite, and Hourman in Zero Hour as well as Maxima, Guy Gardner, and Hippolyta in Our Worlds at War.
Exception: Crisis on Infinite Earths-type events where continuity is going to be rebooted anyway.
Another Rule:
The Superman is great. We get it. Rule: Superheroes have better things to talk about than how awesome other superheroes are. The entire DC Universe does not need to yammer on about how amazing Superman is and how in awe they are of him and blah blah blah everytime he’s mentioned.
Also, under no circumstances should other, normally compotent or threatening, characters be portrayed as moronic wimps just to make a hero look better.
For examples, see the first six issues of Superman/Batman: circle-jerk “gee, Batman/Superman” is so great" dialog and Superman and Batman taking on about 5 zillion DC villains at once without breaking a sweat (and Batman beating Lady Shiva with one punch).
Someone please explain what is wrong with John Byrne? My comic book collecting is 20 years behind me. Back in the 80s he was someone to read, what happened?
The example was meant to illustrate how often a reboot should occur (say once every 20 years), not how to do it right. The LSH had been mucked up pretty badly by the time Zero Hour came around.
I agree that the changes you list created a big mess, but I wouldn’t really consider them reboots so much as partial retcons. When they did those things, they tried to preserve some elements of continuity, while changing others. I would consider the reboot in the middle of volume 3 to be the only whole hog reboot.
Though I agree with you generally here, I don’t see a problem with Bats taking out Shiva. Under ideal circumstances, with both in peak condition, in unarmed combat, Shiva beats pretty much anybody except Batgirl. However, she was mind-controlled at the time, which could easily slow her enough for Bats to get in one good punch, which is all he needs to take down any normal human.
I’d like to modify the reboot rules. As Fenris suggests, it should be universe-wide, and everyone restarts at year one. As others have suggested, characters should age at a regular pace, say 2 or 3 years real-time per year of continuity.* My addition: Have a preset time for this particular incarnation of the universe to exist. I’d make it 25 years/300 issues at the most. The creative types could go in knowing that they had a long, but limited time to tell their stories, but they’d also go in knowing that their characters were free to grow and change. Characters could be killed off permanently with the knowledge that they could be brought back at the next reboot.
More rules:
The Know the Bible rule.
Writers and artists should know the basics of the characters they are writing and drawing. For example, Huntress is 5’ ll" tall. She should be drawn a head taller than 5’ 4" Black Canary in Birds of Prey, not roughly the same size, and roughly the same height as Nightwing, not a head shorter.
The Outclassed is Outclassed, Baby rule.
Spider-Man outclasses virtually any normal human by such a large degree that it’s difficult to take any confrontation seriously. Kraven, The Punisher, Tarantula, etc., shouldn’t even lead Peter to break a sweat in battle (this is one of the best things about Bendis’ writing on Ultimate Spider-Man).
*With longer form storytelling, using three to five issues to tell one story, which sometimes takes place over a few days, this would mean that with a 3 to 1 aging ratio, characters might have only five or six storylines per in-universe year. This might seem to be too slow a pace. I don’t think that would necessarily be true. It would just mean a different perspective on how the heroes live their lives. It would imply that the characters don’t spend the majority of their time in-costume, and that the major, life threatening / life changing events that are shown in the books aren’t everyday occurrances for these people.
My take is that after he was given the OK to do whatever he wanted with Superman, he decided that he didn’t have to play well with others.
This has led to him doing wholesale retcons that make no sense (his current disaster is DOOM PATROL–per Byrne, the DP has never appeared before. Despite the fact that A) well…they have, post-Crisis and B) Other character’s backstories Changeling/Beast Boy has a 50 year history that’s dependant on the Doom Patrol and is tied into Titans) or rewrites that are so ungodly bad that they’re ignored while they’re coming out (SPIDER-MAN YEAR ONE where Spidey is bitten by a spider and then blown up in a nuke that goes off in downtown Manhattan–even writers during the 12 issues of the mini-series ignored it. For some reason Byrne has stopped looking forward at where he can take characters, but has decided to try to look backwards to “fix” characters.
Byrne seems to think that only his vision of a character is legit such that he’ll do wholesale damage to other people’s stories (20+ years of the Demon rhyming thrown out with one line of Byrne’s or a 15 year-long story of The Sandman gradually reforming and realizing that his life could be better thrown out in a really dumb back-up story where it turns out that Sandman is related to Norman Osborne because they have the same haircut and Sandman’s reformation is undone) and his vision seems to be “How did the character look when I, John Byrne, was 16…” Thus in a brief span of time we get Peter and MJ’s baby murdered, MJ moves out, Aunt May comes back to life (as does the Goblin), Peter moves back in with Aunt May and goes back to school. Which, except for the “Gwen’s dead” bit, is just like it was in 1973.
What’s sad is that when Byrne isn’t trying to “fix” continuity or “fix” characters and just tells a damn story, he can be damned good. His WORLD’S FINEST Elseworlds was tons of fun and he wrote the second-best (behind Busiek’s JLA/Avengers) DC/Marvel crossover ever (1940’s Batman/Captain America).
If I were an editor, I’d tell him "John? Love ta have you on the book. One rule. You don’t get to touch the character’s backstory. Ever. Or discuss their continuity. Ever. Every story you tell must move the characters forward. This means you can’t “go forward” by undoing something that someone else did.
Fenris
The guy obviously knows how to draw and he seems to understand the characters well enough to write them competently. His run on Fantastic Four ranks among the best post-Kirby, up until the end when he was ejected from the book in mid-storyline. Hey, that could happen to anybody.
In fact, it happened to him several more times, including on both of his Avengers titles, usually after he had the characters act really gross and do sexually-inapproriate things (Superman and Big Barda brainwashed and in a porn flick? Scarlet Witch, brainwashed, mutilates Wonder Man’s genitals?). He has a lot of, well, icky preoccuations, but he could always justify it by pointing to his stellar sales figures.
Until Spider-Man, Chapter One.
This should’ve been like printing money: Comics’ most popular artist-writer, Marvel’s most popular character. What’s not to love? Well, a couple of things went wrong. He arbitrarily changed the history of the character, he disregarded (or outright mocked) the work of other, more respected writers (a long-time bad habit), and he turned in a really poorly-written book. Sales dropped off pretty seriously and I don’t know anyone who stuck through all twelve issues. It wouldn’t have been so bad, except that the vastly superior Untold Tales of Spider-Man was cancelled to accomodate Byrne’s conceptually similar series.
Then there was the Marvel: The Lost Generation mini that he did with Roger Stern. It was a cute idea: Take the years after the Golden Age and before the Silver Age, create a new Marvel lineup out of whole cloth, make another 12-issue miniseries out of it and release the stories in reverse order a la Citizen Kane. It had some interesting ideas, but essentially, it was another mini that warrented cancellation midway through.
He’s had a couple of successes in the last 15 years, like Batman/Captain America and She-Hulk, but these aren’t the kind of high points that his early successes(Iron Fist, X-Men) would warrant.
Plus, he shoots his mouth off on message boards saying idiotic things. He quarreled with editors, and the publishers came over time to side with the editors in these squabbles. He’s a talented guy who burned out the goodwill fans extended him early in his career. I guess it’s dumb to expect cartoonists to be gentlemen, but most of the others seem to manage it better than he does.
My .02 -
The shit or get off the pot rule. Or in this case, publish or get off the pot - don’t let books rot in limbo. Either publish them on a reasonably timely schedule, or just cancel the damned thing. Planetary is the inspiration for this, as it currently ships once every four to seven months. Ditto for things like the Rising Stars debacle, Powers’ “no new issue for three months, then three new issues in two weeks” pattern (should be cured now that it’s switched to Marvel), and so on.
Yes! YES! Three Reader Years Is One Character Year!!! Whenever I sketch out my own fictional comic book universe, I use this rule. Now, it’s not hard and fast. You don’t need every three issues to be one month apart or anything. But it’s all about having a point of REFERENCE so that things make sense. You’re writing Batman, and want to reference the whole AzBat debacle and think… hmmm… 1994… ten years ago… and so Batman says “when Jean Paul Valley took my place three years ago…” So simple!
Yes, this would mean that, since post-Crisis continuity technically begins five years after the arrival of the new Superman, and since it’s been about twenty years since Crisis, that means the characters have been at this for 12 years. Yes, that makes Batman in his mid-to-late 30s. Yes, that means in ten to fifteen years you’d have to have Bruce Wayne retire. But that’s good storytelling.
If comic books are going to be myths for our times, let’s have them be myths that stay with our times. Let them grow, let them age!
One Universe, One Level of Technology. Nothing ticks me off quite as much as having laser cannons and flying cars in Metropolis, and tommy guns and classic cars in Gotham. What, is advanced technology only legal in Delaware?
I know it’d be hard to write a Batman story if the bad guys could use the same weapons that Intergang has to fight Superman. Well guess what? Good writers are proven by their ability to write in hard situations.
Supporting Casts Are Important. One of the things I hate most about the current Superman titles as opposed to the Jurgens/Stern/etc era in the mid-1990s is how the entire supporting cast has suddenly vanished. In the mid-1990s, we got some well drawn characters in Jimmy Olsen, Perry White, the Kents. But now it’s all big fights and stupid action, and we never get to see any of those characters. They’ve all reverted back into some sort of caricature of where they were decades ago.
You’ve got 22 pages. Hell, Superman gets 88 pages a month! Keep these stories going. They help ground the super heros in the world around them. Have a few fewer splash pages and more characterization and nuance.
Keep Ron Marz Away From Green Lantern. Kyle sucked until Marz went away. He sucked again when Marz came back. Marz is a putz with no ability to develop a character. Marz deserves colon cancer, not a job writing comic books.
More Characters Should Turn To Oracle. She should be the central information broker for the entire DCU. Need to find something out? Call Oracle. Even if you’re Green Arrow, or the Teen Titans. Of hell, even if you’re Damage (where are you, Damage)?
Shake Things Up – Permanently. The status quo needs to go every now and then. Do things that are brave and impossible to take back. DC did this several times in the 1980s and 1990s, with great results. They killed Jason Todd. They married off Lois and Clark. Hell, even the fact that Speedy was on speed way back when still gets dealt with. That’s cool. Those big milestones are important. But dammit, make them milestones. Don’t have Tim Drake quit and then have Spoiler play Robin for like two issues and then swap back to the old status quo. Be careful when you shake things up – but when you do it, do it for good.
And if you decide to kill off a character with a rich and important history, do it permanently and with respect.
There are things I’ve been impressed with. The DC Universe is what I mostly read, as the above probably indicates, and I’ve been impressed with the way they’ve handled the US political situation in the DCU since 2000. When Luthor was elected president in Superman, it became a part of every book. He left office in a very stupid manner in the lousy Superman/Batman book, but even that has played out consistently. This month’s Wonder Woman includes her meeting with President Horne, the same guy who took over in Superman after Pete Ross resigned.
But dammit, the next time we see Pete Ross, it better be clear and remembered that he’s a former president of the United States. You can never take Pete back to where he was before. From now on, he has to always be Former President Ross. Frankly, I wish they’d left him as president. I didn’t see the point in having him step down.
Also, as an aside… is there any chance that we will ever see the end of the Rising Stars series?
Byrne is so much of an egomaniac at this point that he wouldn’t accept such restrictions from an editor. And then he’d get his message board loonies together and get them to set fire to that editor’s house.
I read an insightful comment (I unfortunately can’t remember where) about JB recently that said editors keep hiring JB because they keep hoping they’ll be the guy who gets the credit when JB’s talent kicks in again.
Nobody does.
That statement is cruel, foolish, & distinctly against Board rules.
As mentioned in the stickies.
Of for :rolleyes:.
Do you spend all your time combing through long posts looking for things to get offended at? It was obvious hyperbole.
undefineYES! YESI! YES! NO F**KING CROSSOVERS!
If I wanted to read all those titles I’d be reading all those titles to begin with.
I like the Jean Grey Rule as well!
‘You’re in a Universe’, Marvel version: If you set up a bit of world-detail in one part of a universe, don’t ignore it in the rest.
Example: Mutants are hated in the Marvel Universe. When a mutant - even the most human looking mutant - uses his powers in an X-book, he’s immediately pegged as a mutant. But when was the last time you saw Spiderman - or any other non-mutant superhuman whose origin isn’t public knowledge - accused of being ‘Mutie Scum’?
Fenris, I know this is going to sound stupid, but that thing with the Flash running around town checking smoke detectors actually got me to go home and check my own smoke detector battery…
Ultimate Spider-Man? 
The Ultimate universe seems to be a lot better about following this rule than the main Marvel universe. I meant to comment on that - it was actually the fact that The Ultimates DOES deal with anti-Mutant feeling - making it a bit of taken-for-granted world-detail - rather than restricting it to Ultimate X-Men (I haven’t gotten around to Ultimate Spiderman yet) that brought it to mind.
Good to know they keep it up in the whole line.
In the Marvel universe, the term “mutant” generally refers only to genetic mutants. Somatic mutants like Spider-Man, the Hulk, or the Fantastic Four get a pass, and are generally lumped in with other non-mutant superbeings like Thor or Iron Man. This is probably because they’re relatively rare anomalies, while the genetic mutants are assumed to represent the next step in human evolution and are assumed to be poised to replace normal humans. Somatic mutants don’t pose the same threat.
Yes, but in the Marvel universe, no one knows Spider-Man’s origin, so the general public does not know that he is not a genetic mutant.
Exactly.
Quoting myself
The red part’s the important portion for the example.
Take two characters, each in their respective books.
Wolverine pops his claws. Dozens of people who’ve never heard of him cry mutant - despite the claws - or at least the adamantium covering them, which is what the people will see - not being part of his mutation.
Spider-Man starts climbing walls and picking up cars. Dozens of people who have never heard of him don’t even entertain the notion he might be a mutant, despite the fact there’s nothing about his powers that suggests he’s not.
Either people wouldn’t automatically assume Wolvie’s a mutant - and there are certainly enough known non-mutant superhumans in the Marvel U for that to work - or they would assume that Spidey is.
Disagree–it’s fairly consistant. People assume you’re NOT a mutant unless you tell them otherwise.
Wolverine generates anti-mutant hysteria because he runs around with the “radical mutant group” the X-Men. And he’s got that “X” on his belt-buckle which is a symbol for “Mutant”.
A kinda parallel assumption would be the way most people in the '60s would NOT assume that the average black person was a Black Panther…unless they were wearing a tee-shirt with that upraised fist emblem on it.
Or the way a gay person could stay closeted in some redneck town…unless they started wearing rainbow flags or pink triangles on their chest. The symbol means something.
This also explains why Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver, Dazzler (in her Disco Dazzler days), and other non-X-Book mutants don’t get 1/100th the shit that average X-Men do. They’re not wearing the “X” (or calling themselves “The Brotherhood of Evil Mutants” anymore) so the vast majority of people just don’t care–they go back to the default assumption that they’re just “super-heroes” and not mutants (despite the fact that Scarlet Witch had a “Time Magazine”-esque article written about her being a mutant marrying a synthizoid…people apparently have short memories.)
Fenris