After reading the recent “I hate Batman” thread I got to thinking that half of Batman’s lameness comes from the fact that he exists in the same universe as Superman. If like in the “Nolan-verse” he was just a lone man fighting injustice he’d work much better as a hero.
The Doom Patrol: I started reading the reprints of the early Doom Patrol and one thing is immediately clear. These heroes exist in a universe without any other super heroes. The general sense of alienation and bitterness the heroes expierience wouldn’t even work if other super heroes existed.
So, which heroes do you think are ruined by being part of a universe?
“Ruined” is a little strong, but the early Sandman comics used the fact that Morpheus was in the same universe as other DC Superheroes, which was a little tacky.
Later in the series, the references to other DC stuff was few and far between, so apparently the author agreed.
IIRC, that was DC editorial deciding that the Vertigo characters needed to be off in their own little corner, not necessarily Gaiman deciding that his crew didn’t play well with others.
I’ve always thought that doing the whole “world that fears and hates them” schtick with the X-Men never made a lick of sense when they share a universe with groups like the Avengers and the Fantastic Four and where your average shlub can get super-powers by finding an enchanted bottle cap stuck in a sewer grate. It works much better in the movies.
Personally, it made perfect sense to me since bigotry is irrational. Why do we see prejudice against people with dark skin when anyone can get a tan ?
Ditto on X-Men.
X-Men works better if the rest of the Marvel Universe doesn’t acknowledge its paranoid view of the world. Or rather, the Marvel Universe works better if the rest of the Marvel Universe doesn’t acknowledge X-Men’s paranoid view of the world.
Moon Knight & Daredevil seem to do well ignoring everything else that Marvel publishes (including each other) without coming right out & admitting that they’re not in the MU.
Amethyst, Princess of Gemworld was actively wrecked when somebody (Giffen?) decided to tie it into Legion of Super-Heroes & Dr Fate (!). But it didn’t have to go that way. Still, there was no good reason to tie it to anything else DC publishes.
This.
I recall a couple of times in the 80s/early90s when it was implicit that Johnny Storm was a wee bit anti-mutant, and rightly called called on it (by Jim Rhodes & Wolverine, respectively). I also think that a big part of mutants’ PR problems is Charles Xavier’s fault–or whatever tone-deaf person decided (in story) to call them Homo superior.
Returning to the thread topic: I think Superman works best when there aren’t tons of other heroes around.
They came back for the wake.
Nice trench coat.
I have to agree. The **X-men **would do better in their own continuity, rather than the mainstream MU. Way back in the 80s I remember reading a comic book where **Iron Man and the X-Men **were featured. Storm told ***Iron Man ***that he didnot understand how the ***X-men ***felt since he could take off his armor and be a normal person, where they could not. WTF? They live in a shared universe with people that have super powers and mutations from everything under the sun. Storm, Wolverine, even Colossus and Cyclops can pose as normal folks easily! (Admittedly its harder for Cyclops and impossible without magic holograms por something for Nightcrawler, but you know what I mean).
Certain comics from my youth fitr the bill though, mostly from Jack Kirby. When Kirby created the **Eternals **I don’t think he meant for them to be part of the regular MU. There was even an adventure when ikarus fought a “cosmic powered Hulk”. The Hulk in that story was ambiguously made to be a prop come to life at a sci-fi convention (or something like that). So I got the idea that Kirby did not mean for the Eternals to be part of the MU but in their own continuity.
Also, there was **Machine Man **and Devil Dinosaur. Those characters made a lot more sense before being in the regular MU.
A shared universe hurts popular characters as well. The Hulk is the strongest one there is, right? Well, what about Thor and Hercules? They’re ***GODS. ***Any story where they fight the Hulk has to boilded down to a draw since you can’t say Hulk is the strongest one there is if Herc or Thor beat him up, but you can’t justify the divine power of those two and have the Hulk beat them. (This of course leads to the Hulk doing ridiculous feats of strength and yeah, I know, the madder he gets the stronger he gets, etc…it still gets a bit silly).
If it were up to me, the X-men would have their own seperate universe. Not being completely up on DC as I should, I would say the same for many the Doom Patrol. (I love that name…we even adopted it as our squad name at my second duty station).
Of course, sharing any universe with Superman is a stretch. I mean, if my my powers were to shoot flame out of my hands and you told me a b unch of robots warriors were attacking Washington DC I’d be like “Well, Supes will get there in like 3 seconds and beat them all up…gimme another beer.”.
I guess I’d be a really lazy Superhero. 
X-Men, for sure. Everything about their backstory and set-up is made nonsensical by the presence of other superheroes toward whom the public does not feel fear and hatred. Particularly since some of those other superheroes – especially on the Avengers – are also mutants and they do not suffer any backlash. (until they return to the X-Men, then it’s back in force.)
To the contrary, there were superhero references all over the place. In addition to their appearance in The Wake, as noted, there were:
- Matthew the raven was Matt Cable from Swamp Thing
- Hippolyta Hall was the daughter of Golden Age Wonder Woman, a member of Infinity Inc., as was Hector Hall before he was a ghost
- Etrigan, the Demon, shows up when Morpheus goes to Hell
- in fact, that whole whackiness of Hell being ruled by a Triumvirate was a callback to some old Demon plotline
- Mad Hattie, I believe, was from Hellblazer
- Wesley Dodds, the Golden Age Sandman is referenced a few times
- the JSA, fighting in Limbo, were part of Odin’s offer to Morpheus for the Key to Hell
- Element Girl was an obscure superheroine associated with Metamorpho
- Wildcat shows up in one of the Boys’ Own stories in World’s End
- Endless Nights has a story with extreme backhistory of the Guardians of the Galaxy (from Green Lantern) and Krypton’s destruction
- at one point Destruction flashes back to a talk he had with Death, under the crystal waterfalls of Krypton
Heck, there’s probably a lot more that I missed. Gaiman knows his obscure comics lore, and is quite fond of superheroes. The author was very much intentionally referencing the mainstream DCverse.
And Lyta appeared throughout the series. And Cain and Abel both appeared in superhero books before Sandman and many of the other residents of the Dreaming hosted horror books at one time or another. And the references to the Jack Kirby Sandman. And Element Girl complete with Metamorpho cameo. And Lucifer hints at Etragan being around during Season of Mist along with Jason Blood being name dropped a few times. And let’s not forget Prez.
Honestly Gaiman never forgot that he was in a shared universe when he created Sandman and he chose the elements he wanted even when the mature audiences books were pushed to the outskirts (it wasn’t Vertigo until about two thirds of the way through his run). The only real hiccup for him was when someone on another book decided to try to integrate Gaiman’s cosmology with other DC references and that doesn’t work at all.
ETA: Damn you, Lightray. Damn you to hell.
A lot of major DC heroes would benefit from not sharing a universe with anybody since that’s largely how they tended to be written until DC aped the Marvel approach.
In particular, as Jolly Roger points out, characters suffer from sharing a universe with Superman. Since Superman is permanently top dog thanks to editorial fiat, that really does a disservice to characters like Wonder Woman, Captain Marvel, Captain Atom, and other characters who should be top dog in their respective continuities. Batman suffers when you have beings who are essentially gods - like Alan Scott - operating out of Gotham City.
Most major DC characters benefit when they’re treated as the only hero in their own world, with Justice League being, for all intents and purposes, yet another world. I’m a big DC fan but I’ve never been into the concept of a “DC Universe,” really.
For all the talk of the X-Men seeming odd that they’re mistrusted while other heroes aren’t or whatnot, I don’t find it out of place in the MU at all. “Spider-Man - Threat or Menace” was a major newspaper’s headline after all.
The public is a fickle, judgmental, arbitrary bunch, and it doesn’t bug me at all that they can like the Avengers (even mutant members) while still finding reasons to hate/fear the X-men (even former Avengers members) while Spider-Man swings both ways, so to speak.
I can think of certain storylines that were hurt by having a shared universe (mainly ones that make you say “why didn’t the Avengers show up to help stop that X-Men villain from taking over the world other than this is an issue of Uncanny” or vice versa) but I personally don’t think that it often hurts the characters themselves. I like that Wolverine and Captain America met in WWII, or that Ulitmate Spider-Man dated Ultimate Kitty Pryde, stuff like that. In my view, shared universes tend to make more possibilities than limitations, at least with good writers.
I was thinking about this when watching the Fantastic 4 and Spider-Man movies. Where was the Fan 4 when Green Goblin, Sandman, Venom, and Doc Oc were threatening New York? Where was Spidey when Silver Surfer and Dr. Doom were in New York? Where was Daredevil?
I think that’s pretty easy to fanwank.
Spider-Man’s villains are way too small-time for the FF, who are off liberating the Negative Zone or something. Likewise, anything the FF deals with is way out of Spidey’s league.
In the same way, Spidey’s villains are way too much for Movie Daredevil to handle, so DD sticks to muggers and assassins.
The Spidey/FF divide is brought up semi-frequently in comics (Human Torch teases Spidey about stopping muggers while the FF are saving the universe), while in the Marvel U Spider-Man and Daredevil swap villains and have adventures together frequently (or did, before DD was sort of shuffled off into the Marvel Knightsverse). Writers tend to cheat when it comes to Daredevil and Spidey, with ol’ Horn-Head performing suspiciously well against Spidey’s villains (and Spidey himself) for someone without Spider-powers.
Heck, the first Despair was responsible for the creation of Krypton so it would be destroyed and its last survivor would get to wallow in misery. And J’onn J’onz never dreams he was in a shitty TV show about himself.
How about all of them?
I was the perfect age to get really into comics when DC did the whole Death of Superman/A World Without Superman thing. An older friend was into DC and loaned me the comics. In one bit, after Supes dies Lois is flying in an airliner when she sees someone fly by her window. "It’s Superman! He’s alive!"she thinks, then comes to her senses. “There are LOTS of superpowered beings around,” she thinks. “It could be any of them!” At that moment I lost all interest.
I grew up with Superman in movies and on TV. Christopher Reeves, George Reeve, Fleischer Studios, Filmation, even Superfriends (I wasn’t picky!)–I loved them all! I even had a cardboard picture book from when I could barely read that had Superman facing off against a different villain on each page. The pages were broken into segments so you could mix-and-match the scenes, having Superman using his superbreath against Luthor and his heat vision against Braniac or vice versa. I should have been able to jump right into the comics, and if I had, I would have spent thousands on them between then and now.
But I didn’t. As soon as I read that, I knew that this was a story about a world I neither knew nor cared about, one that was different both from my own and from the world of every other Superman story I knew. What happened to the surprise and disbelief?–“It’s a bird!–No! It’s a plane!” This Superman wasn’t the sole defender of truth, justice and the American way, he was one more schlub in tights and a cape from a cast of thousands! Who cared that he was gone if he was just one of many who could do what he did?
If you want to tell stories about a universe of superheroes, go ahead. Watchmen wasn’t about a particular team, it was about the whole world dealing with superheros and vice versa. (Same with the TV show Heroes.) But you couldn’t have kept it going by giving each character a magazine, even if it was set in the early days. A superhero, whether as an individual or part of a team, has to be the only thing standing in the way of evil, or there’s nothing special about him, nothing that makes you wish you could do what he does. A story set in a world overpopulated with superheroes is something different. Superheroes aren’t super any more, they’re just regular heroes with heat vision instead of six-shooters or swords.
This.
The problem is, a lot of superheroes (or at least the big ones) seem to have been conceived as unique (and I say that as someone with little knowledge of the real-life origins of the heroes, just how they’re presented) and aren’t part of a consistent universe. I think if you’re going to have a world full of superheroes, it works better if you have the details worked out - the X-Men by themselves work great this way. It’s partly about the superheroes, but a lot of it is about the world, the system. If you start tossing in every other superhero, it gets muddled. Sure, anti-mutant bigotry still works, but the fear doesn’t hold up when you have so many beloved superheroes whizzing about. Now, you want to go full-on and have superheroes in general hated and feared, then sure, that can totally work. It’s when different chunks of the universe have different rules that things fall apart.
That said, some of my favorite superhero stories are all about universes of heroes - to my mind, it’s the patchwork quilt effect of sewing individually-conceived heroes together that’s a problem, rather than the multi-hero verse. Hell, you can even get away with having very different kinds of heroes, so long as you don’t just ignore the consequences - Watchmen’s a great example. I just take issue when Superman shows up in Gotham City and it’s business as usual.
Grant Morrison’s excellent - and sadly out of print, I believe, due to an ongoing rights dispute - Zenith strip from 2000AD strip in the late 80’s dealt very well with the “lone super” concept: although Zenith’s parents were supers in the 60’s back when Britain had Cloud Nine, a whole team of supers, they’d apparently all either died out, disappeared or just lost their powers, so he was the world’s only extant super.
Trouble was, Zenith was his stage name, not a secret identity: he wasn’t a crime fighter or any kind of a hero but a rather dim, very spoilt and completely self-centered pop star who was completely unprepared to go toe to tentacle when the Elder Gods turned up. What happens when mankind’s last hope is basically Justin Timberlake with powers?
Plastic Man and Captain Marvel were certainly compromised by being shoehorned into DCU continuity, but not really ruined.
Hm. As a big fan of the Despair character… Where is this from? I’ve often been trying to track down a history of the ‘first’ Despair and what happened to him / her, and this sounds intriguing as heck!