Continuity, Shmontinuity: Elseworlds Comics Are Where It's At

 I'm sure I'll get no comments because I used the magic word:  comics.  Ewwww, we don't want to talk about that.  Really though this is an entry about storytelling in general.  Not that that will make anyone care either.

A couple of weeks ago I read Arion's review of Fantastic Four:  Life Story.  This is a non-continuity story, an Elseworlds story as DC used to call them.  I haven't read that story but it's similar in concept to Spider-Man:  Life Story, which I did read and love.  That miniseries used the concept of letting Peter Parker age in real time from the 60s to 10s and incorporated a lot of popular Marvel/Spidey stories like the Clone Saga, Secret Wars, and Civil War.

The cool thing about it and about the Fantastic Four version from what Arion said is that since it's not part of the official continuity, the authors are free to do what they like and they can change things or even kill someone off.  And in these comics, when someone is dead they stay dead; they don't come back from a parallel universe or time travel or Lazarus Pit or whatever stupid thing.

So like I was saying on Arion's entry it raises the stakes.  Or in some cases it creates stakes.  I mean you read a normal Batman or Superman or Spider-Man comic and if the character "dies," you just yawn because you know Bruce, Clark, or Peter will be back.  They always are.  When Marvel "killed" Ms. Marvel this year there was a collective yawn because everyone knew they were bringing her back, which they did like 3 months later.  It's like a joke in the Family Guy version of Empire Strikes Back when they're in the asteroid field and Peter (as Han Solo) says, "We have 4 of the 5 main characters here.  I think we'll be all right."  You know they aren't going to kill the main characters (at least not for long) just like you knew in Voyager or Gilligan's Island they wouldn't get home until the final episode or in Smallville he wasn't going to really be Superman until the end.  They can tease the audience but we know the deal.

In a non-continuity comic, you don't have that reassurance.  Characters don't have to stay the same age.  They don't have to survive.  Superman and Lois won't always be together.  Peter and MJ won't always be together.  In the case of the Fantastic Four one, Reed and Sue won't always be together.  Virtually anything can happen.  The only assurance you have like with the Spider-Man one is that he'll live until the final issue.  I mean it couldn't be "Life" Story if he was already dead, right?

Besides that, what I like about for instance some of Tom King's "Black Label" stories for DC like Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow (maybe eventually to be a movie!), Mister Miracle, or Strange Adventures is he can do things differently and have a complete story arc because there's no need to worry about carrying on for 1000 more issues.  There's no "event" to tie into or spinoffs with a dozen other titles.  It's all nicely self-contained in a few issues.  And the author can interpret or reinterpret the character as he/she sees fit.  Which for me as a reader makes it more satisfying.  I don't have to know much that came before.  I don't have to worry about collecting 15 other side issues to get the whole story.  I don't have to worry that what I just read will get retconned by the next author.  For someone like me who because of time/money can't be a full-time reader it's the best way to read comics.

But of course this doesn't only apply to comics!  Any long-running series can get burdened by continuity after a while.  I loved the Wingman series by "Mack Maloney" but eventually the books really started getting dumb as the author(s?) had to start finding new bad guys.  Then they basically did a soft reboot in book #9, another in book #14, and another in book #17.  Each time they didn't restart the whole thing but in book #9 the Nazis/Japanese have taken over America Man in the High Castle-style, #14 is a parallel universe where WWII is still kinda happening, and #17 is another parallel universe sort of like the original but not entirely.  Plus there was the spinoff Starhawk series set in space.

Since I stopped reading them a long time ago, I don't know how many times they've had to soft or hard reboot the Hardy Boys or Nancy Drew.  I don't know how many of those Mack Bolan Executioner books there are at this point or if they've soft/hard rebooted those.  There are a bunch of James Bond books, Jason Bourne books, and Jack Ryan books even though the original authors have been dead--about 60 years in the case of Bond--and again I'm not sure if they sometimes reboot those or they just keep droning on and on.

After the success of Timothy Zahn's Thrawn trilogy in the early 90s, Star Wars started pumping out books that were all supposed to be connected.  One problem with continuity is when you have different authors.  Some (like Zahn) are good and others (Dave Wolverton) are not.  A bad author can come in and like a relief pitcher in baseball just completely fuck things up and that's when you've got to do a corrective story or an outright retcon.  Like how they had broken up Luke Skywalker and Mara Jade so when Zahn came back in the late 90s with two new books, he got them back together.  And then Disney took it over so all those books got erased and they started over again.

In 2011 I decided to spin off the sixth Scarlet Knight book--Future Shock--into a self-contained story called The Night's Legacy.  It was my own sort of Elseworlds or Black Label or whatever thing.  Instead of setting it in the future, I just set it in the present and focused on Emma's daughter, Louise, who has to take over as the Scarlet Knight after her mother is crippled.  There were some good things about this experiment like being able to rework the characters a little and not having to include some other characters like the witches.  I had some creative freedom to really focus on the parts of the story I most liked, which was really Louise--now Lois--having to find her way as a hero in her own right.

I don't think I'd do anything like that for Chance of a Lifetime, but I could do something like that for the Girl Power stories where maybe I could just focus on one of the characters and redo the origin and stuff.  Maybe even not make it a gender swap.  I'd probably focus on Midnight Spectre just because she's my favorite--her and her girlfriend/sidekick Melanie, which I kinda did in Justice for All but not really.

Anyway, if you're not a comics reader, checking out the non-continuity stories is a lot easier than trying to read in-continuity because it is self-contained.  Besides the ones I've mentioned some good ones are Superman:  Red Son, All-Star Superman, Kingdom Come, Batman:  Vampire, and Gotham by Gaslight.  And while I've never really liked The Dark Knight Returns it's obviously a big deal as far as Elseworlds stories go.  Many of them are probably available from your local library even. 

Reading is FUNdamental! [/PSA]