This is kind of like saying, “You should be able to write a haiku with more than seventeen syllables.” Seeing how an artist operates within the constraints of a shared world is a large part of the appeal of the format. The idea of hundreds of different artists working on the same creative endeavor over the course of almost a century is almost unprecedented in art. From a purely literary perspective, the nearest equivalent would be religious texts, or outside that, maybe the construction of medieval European cathedrals, which took generations to complete. And the way readers interact with the text is fascinating in a pure lit nerd sense. All of Batman’s appearances in Detective Comics are part of a single narrative, spanning nearly ninety years, in which he’s always been about thirty-five years old. It’s a text that, in order to understand any one part of it, requires that we ignore most of the rest of it. That’s really weird. Imagine reading Moby Dick, where every chapter was congruous with its immediately adjacent chapter, but increasingly incompatible with each chapter beyond that. It would be an incoherent mess and/or a triumph of post-modern literature.
That said, stories where an artist is given free reign to rework and reinterperate a character are also important, which is why I like the idea of things like the Elseworlds imprint - it allows both concepts to exist alongside each other.
Actually it’s nothing like that. It’s saying that I can have two haikus about the same subject that are completely different.
As it stands, continuity is like a religion in that it’s a false religion.
Clearly, this is not what’s happening, particularly in DC. At the most surface level, you have the phenomenon of continuity reboots every few years. But you also have a nearly continuous series of small continuity changes ongoing, particularly in the longest-running series like Batman and Superman.
Every single time the story of Kal-El’s escape from Krypton or the murder of Thomas and Martha Wayne is told, continuity is changed. Joe Chill’s motivation is changed. The cultural and political conditions of Krypton are changed. The clothes are changed. The time setting is changed—in the current series, Thomas and Martha Wayne weren’t killed in the 1920s.
The stories are not being told as an encapsulated, internally-consistent series of stories over the course of eight decades. It’s not happening. So we should just stop pretending that that’s a thing, and give each subsequent creator the freedom to just remake the world at the start of each arc and not pay false obeisance to the god of continuity.
No, I’m happy with my metaphor as it stands, thanks. I’m trying to make a point about constraints being beneficial to the creation of art. I’m not sure how your rewrite even applies to your argument? Two stories can be in continuity with each other without being copies of each other, and “every story is its own continuity” doesn’t really do anything to prevent repetition - the Silver Age stories functioned very much like how you describe, with very little cross-story continuity, and the stories were massively repetitive.
I didn’t mean to say it was like a religion, just that the creation of the shared universe, as a generations-long collaborative exercise, is comparable to certain types of religious art, which were also generations-long collaborative exercises.
I guess my post wasn’t very clear, because I was specifically trying to call out that sort of sliding continuity as something that makes superhero comics specifically - almost uniquely - interesting. That’s what the Moby Dick metaphor was about? I do think you can overdo it - DC needs to lay off the reboots, and both companies should back away from the company-wide crossovers for a good long while - but that’s different from saying “no continuity at all.”
I think the closest comparison is probably the classical myths. Any story-teller worth his salt, back in the day, would tell stories about Hercules and Odysseus and so on, but all of the stories were different.
The part that’s really unique about comic-book superheroes is that there are two separate universes of them, that (almost) never interact directly. When the ancients encountered situations like that, they usually just said “OK, Zeus and Jupiter are the same guy”, and merged the mythoi. But even if people say that there’s some sort of correspondence between, say, Batman and Ironman, nobody would say that they’re the same character.
“No, I’m pointedly not saying that Batman is Daredevil, since that’d just be crazy talk; I’m just saying that Batman is Ben Affleck, and that Ben Affleck is Daredevil.”
In fact the limited continuity (in the Golden Age, interregnum, and early Silver Age) actually encouraged repetition. They felt OK actually reusing literally the same stories repeatedly. Sometimes just reusing the premise and basic plot, sometimes recycling the script with new art, and sometimes redrawing as little as they could for the minor changes that they did make. My favourite examples are Superboy and Supergirl’s first encounters with the Legion of Superheroes. Literally the same story up until the last page, with very minor alterations in the art and dialogue.
Superboy, of course, was replaced with Supergirl, the location changed from Smallville to Metropolis (through referring to it as such in dialogue and changing a handful of signs, but not altering anything else), and Saturn Girl, Lightning Lad, and Cosmic Boy were replaced by Brainiac 5, and, IIRC, Phantom Girl and Colossal Boy. Strangely, they did change the specifics of one of the gags - both stories had the characters visiting an ice cream shop with a list of ‘space’ ice cream flavours, which was slightly different in each. Given the reuse of the majority of the art and dialogue, changing that little detail was odd.
One I’ve not personally read either version, but is pretty much the most extreme version mentioned on TV Tropes Fleeding Demographic Rule page is Wonder Woman reusing the same story 11 months apart.
Archie Comics, in their old low-continuity titles, also did this a lot - they’d reprint old stories with minor changes (clothes, pop culture references, Archie’s car) to make them look new.
You don’t have to go nearly as far back as classical Greece or Rome for that parallel. The same thing happens with characters like Robin Hood, or the Knights of the Round Table, or, really, any popular fictional character in the public domain. Hell, that’s basically what Lovecraft did when he allowed other authors to use the names and monsters he thought up in his own fiction. But that’s closer to what Acsenray is talking about - a bunch of unrelated stories about the same characters, with no real concern about making all the stories match up. What makes Marvel and DC stand out is the central editorial control that at least makes some effort at keeping everything congruent with everything else. That’s why I was comparing them to religious texts and cathedrals. The Bible was written over the course of centuries, in many different cultural contexts, but purports to be a testament about an objective truth of the universe, and so people have put considerable effort into making all these different parts fit together. Similarly, a medieval cathedral was the work of generations, but all bent towards creating a single coherent creation, not creating endless, slightly different iterations of the same idea.
I reject the analogy to changing syllables in a haiku. Continuity is simply not a fundamentally indispensable defining characteristic of the medium.
I had started to write a post making some of the same refer ended to how characters like Beowulf, King Arthur, Robin Hood, Sherlock Holmes, etc., are recreated with every new iteration.
Continuity only matters for epke within the boundaries of a series with Robert Foeney as Holmes or Cumberbatch as Holmes or Jeremy Brett as Holmes.
Batman writers should be similarly free to keep or discard story and character elements whenever a story arc is finished.
That wasn’t really the point of the analogy, but okay.
This just seems really, really limiting. There’s nothing wrong with separate continuities for the same character, of course, but the idea that all media must follow this particular model is an unnecessary and arbitrary restriction. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with long-form, collaborative continuity. It produces stories that literally could not exist in other formats.
Also, is there any particular reason you think TV and movie continuity should be tied to the actors, but comic book continuity should be tied to writers? “I just like it better that way,” is an acceptable answer.
They already are, to a large extent, in the Elseworlds imprints and similar spin-offs.