I find that when I have a difficult challenge to face, it can be overcome more easily if I think of the theme music from Terminator 2.  That lets me pretend I am a steely-eyed, nineties Linda Hamilton who is working to prepare for a post-apocalyptic society and who can do pull-ups and stab someone in the knee with a pen if they cross me.

Sometimes the theme music from the animated Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles series works better if I’m feeling a little more jiffy.  Something about the exclamation of ‘Turtle Power!’ at the end just works for me.

Anyone draw inspiration from a similar source?

I wrote, a few posts ago, about selective continuity, the practice of admitting some parts of continuity into your vision of a character and setting other parts aside, and the way that that leads to wildly different visions of the same character.

At the end, though, I mentioned that often I will dismiss a writer’s version of a character, particularly if it is a character I like and want to keep seeing in a certain light, while being fine with that writer mucking up another character’s reputation.

I’ve seen this happen a lot in comics, and there seems to be a consistent excuse for it; that the writer him or herself is biased toward one character, or one type of character.

“Don’t read him, he always writes women as bimbos.”

“She hates that character and is using the comic to make them look bad.”

“He’s given an interview where he talks about how that’s his favorite character from when he was a kid.”

What better way to drown out continuity than with a resounding cry of “NO FAIR!”  There are, however, a few problems with it. 

The first is the way it tends to exaggerate creator’s preferences.  A casual mention of a character that a writer or editor liked or disliked as a child can lead to endlessly recurring denunciation by fans, who assume that any plot point is either meant to artificially build up or knock down that character.  I’m not a huge fan of Wonder Girl, but if I ever write Wonder Girl in comics, I don’t think I’d take a hit out on her just because of my lack of appreciation.  (And I’ve mentioned several times on this site that I think Batman is a jerk, a prick, and arrogant idiot, and a torturer.  I hate to see what kind of backlash that will bring about when I write Batman comics.  ((And I will.  I swear it.)))

The second problem with taking a writer out by questioning their intentions is that it often turns into a self-selecting point of view.  The few times when they did not adhere to their supposed pattern?  Flukes.  Fear of being mocked.  Or something prevented by the constraints of the story.  It’s never that their styles are more varied than critics will admit.

Finally, this view prevents readers from even considering a new take on their character.  You cannot imagine how much it pains me to write that last sentence, but it is true.  Characters often need to change or they stagnate, and seeing your character built up over time is a fun thing.

That being said, I do enjoy torpedo-ing a piece of bad, or obviously biased, writing from time to time.  Writers as well as characters can stagnate, and writers as well as characters can have bad habits.  (Of course I wouldn’t know about either.)  And fans are free, and often eager, to point it out.  Plus there is a air of good, old-fashioned village gossip to that kind of talk.  As long as it doesn’t escalate to torches and pitchforks, it can be a lot of fun.

I’ve written before about how, when following a character, you generally have to throw out the continuity you don’t like and read the continuity you do.

What I’ve noticed, though, is this trend tends to cultivate pockets of people who see very different characters.  This depends on a lot of things.  One is when you got to know the character.  People who are used to the warm and cuddly Batman of the 70s, do not like the colder Batman of today.  People, on the other hand, whose first impression of Bats was The Dark Knight Returns, wonder at how cuddly he’s gotten in the past year.

There are also different incarnations of each character.  Catman started out as arguably one of the more noble Secret Six characters.  But in Legends of the Dark Knight he was introduced as a psychotic murderer who slashed up women.

But things get a bit contentious when people drop or keep continuity based on how much they like a character.  We are all inclined to give more credit to those we like, in fiction and in life, and serial fiction gives us a convenient excuse for bad behavior.  I’ve gotten into arguments in which I can write off a character’s fall from the path of righteousness with an airy, “Oh, that wasn’t X-character, that was Y-writer.  You can’t trust Y’s writing.”  If I don’t like the character, however, Y-writer’s character choices seem perfectly trustworthy, and fair game to use in an argument.  Ah, the capriciousness of the reader.

Lately DC has been adding an eight-page back-up story featuring a new character to existing comic books.

The Question has been appearing as a back-up to Detective Comics, and the Blue Beetle has been added to Booster Gold.  I love the double feature, both because it gives me a chance to get to know new characters and because it allows ongoing stories of characters who, for reasons that pass understanding, don’t sell well enough on their own.

And now that I’ve pushed some minor characters, let’s get back to the five-hundred pound gorilla; Batman.  This is a guy who’s passed around to any title that needs a boost, from The Outsiders to the Blue Beetle.  (Tough beat on that last one, Battsy.  We all felt it.)

But what would be a different way to present Batman, considering he’s already in at least five books at a time?  I don’t know.  But I know what I want, and that is a return of the Batman: Black and White series.

Batman: Black and White, pitched by Mark Chiarello, was a series of 8-page Batman stories written and drawn by different artists.  The stories ran singly at the end of the newly-created Batman: Gotham Knights, and as 4-story collections.  The art and the writing are superb, the stories wildly disparate, running the gamut from gothic horror, to poetic meditation, to cutsy bat-with-a-baby stories.  There is a story in which Batman frees a genetically-engineered mermaid.  There is one in which Batman threatens someone’s life for killing his son’s cat.  There is one in which Batman is futuristic freedom fighter, and one in which he and an early Catwoman/Batgirl mash-up fight nazis, and one where he bleeds in an alley.

The stories are collected into three volumes, all of which are well-worth getting.  They are a must-have to any fan, partly because of the talent involved, but mainly because they add up to more than the sum of their parts.  The many takes on Batman, his motivations and his effects, his different eras and his absurdities, end up building something far more epic and sweeping than any planned Batman story I’ve ever read.  If I wanted to argue that superhero comics can be moving and artistic, these are the books I would present as evidence.

And if something like that were to come back, I would clamor for people to read it, no matter what book it was stuck to.

Yeah.  It’s a cheap, divisive, artificial question, but I’m still asking it.

DC or Marvel?

In Secret Six #11– oop, spoilers.

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I love the covers, I love the idea, I love the title.

And now?

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Recently there was a post on spoilers on io9, and a little dust-up over them at the new scans_daily, and it got me thinking about the popularity of spoilers in general.  The io9 post dealt with someone who asserted that spoilers were a status symbol among fans, and that’s why people love them so.  This concept is alien to me.  I don’t doubt that there are a few big men out there, bragging about their inside information, but fans can turn anything into a status symbol, from bagging and boarding to camping out outside a movie theater in order to ensure that you are the first person to get tickets to a movie that anyone can see two hours later.  Plus, the few people I’ve met who have legitimate spoilers just seemed happy to be able to share the information.

The scans_daily scuffle was more understandable to me.  Fans posted the last page of the latest Wonder Woman comic, in which a big change is made.  This change was what the last eight issues had been leading up to.  Creator Gail Simone showed up in the comments, annoyed that the point of eight months worth of comics was revealed abruptly online instead of at the end of the book, as she had intended.

I’ve tried my hand at creative work, and I can understand the frustration that creators must feel.  Working on a narrative is about building an specific experience.  You want your audience to have moments of enjoyment, frustration, suspense and revelation.  So have someone sum it all up with ‘the butler did it’ renders the whole experience, and your work, meaningless.

At the same time, I can understand very well why fans clamor for spoilers.  Most of the time, I prefer them.  Not all kinds of suspense are pleasant.  I can’t enjoy a story all that well if I spend the whole time wondering if I’m going to get stuck with continuity that I hate at the end of it.  The pacing of comics often compounds this.  Story lines are stretching longer and longer, meaning that a story can pose a question one year that won’t be answered until two years later.  I don’t want to pick up a story and think, “Wow.  The Christmas after next, when I figure out what the hell is going on, is going to be gooood.”  I want to know where I’m going so I can stretch out and enjoy the trip.

I guess who you think is  right depends on who you think has rights to a story.  Is it the creator’s to give out as they wish?  Or do fans have the final say in how they want to enjoy the stories they buy?

I’m not a fan of the later Bourne movies.  I think they skimp on the clever details of spy stuff and instead just show Bourne magically appearing places without explaining how he managed to be there.  I think the plots are shaky.  (Well, they were shaky to begin with.  He breaks into the ultra-top-secret headquarters in Paris, grabs all the guns and . . . gives them a good talking-to?  And that solves the problem?  Really?)  I think the camera is even shakier.  Shaky to the point where I couldn’t tell whether the struggles were between highly trained assassins or old ladies in a slap fight.

I have a friend who really likes the later movies, though.  And says so.  Usually to bait me into responding.  Which I do.  Vehemently.

During one argument, when I was getting particularly overheated about the idea that they were going to yet another Bourne movie, presumably called The Bourne Epilepsy, when he said, “You know, you don’t have to see it.”

And I realized that no, no I don’t.  I don’t particularly care about Jason Bourne or the movies in the first place.  Why was I even madly talking about how crappy the later movies were?

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A few weeks ago I made a post about how most comics had a ‘shoot-yer-henchmen’ scene, a depraved act of violence to show that the bad guy meant business and to angry up the reader’s blood.

Alert reader Alex Nuan sent me these:

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