Canon fodder: serial fiction and how it works

OK let's hive this off so as not to overwhelm the Avengers thread. Also cos I came up with a bad pun.

This is a thread for thinking about all aspects of serial fiction, from soaps to comic books to Charles Dickens. What are the pleasures of a text that never ends?

another limit case for shared universes might be something like grant morrison's new x-men, which reinvigorated the line like nothing in decades, but depended on enormous, universe-breaking ideas (there are now millions and millions of mutants, so you can write stories about them as a real minority, different mutant political strains and subcultures, mutant neighborhoods in major cities). practically, that only works if x-men was its own separate universe or if marvel was willing to embrace them and take the whole universe into strange new places. instead they largely ignored them for a short while and then brutally undid them with a magic spell that slashed the mutant population down to a couple hundred, leading to several years where the x-men concept felt more bounded and less interesting/relevant than ever before. they wouldn't even accept his contention that magneto was a psychotic terrorist, not an interesting ideological foil for the x-men, and therefore needing to be finally killed off. post-morrison stories revealed his magneto to not have been carefully infiltrating the x-men for three years under the masked identity of "xorn," but rather to have been a guy named xorn who posed as magneto posing as a guy named xorn. all to preserve what we are used to agreeing are the big interesting themes of x-men ("see, it's dr. king and malcolm x!") and the only themes it can really be about.

the other big restriction on the films, of course, is that they must all be tentpole blockbusters telling three-act stories more or less in the "action" genre. obvious maybe. but as with the star wars spinoffs where we were hyped a "war movie" and got a star wars movie where people wear camo, these things really undermine the idea that oh yeah it's this huge universe, you can tell all different kinds of stories! even in superhero comics, a real arc can be someone contemplating their own mortality or dealing with the death of a loved one. a whole issue can be a baseball game and people debating how far forgiveness extends. not to say these are all super sophisticated stories but in the movies you're just going to get a couple minutes of baseball as fanservice for those who remember the baseball issues, and probably some comic relief.

none of these are going to start with a daring night-time infiltration mission and then surprise you by evolving into a cancer drama or a couple struggling to work out whether they have a future after infidelity, or whether a person's terrible actions change how we think about their art, or how the memories of a lost loved one haunt a present relationship, or whatever. they won't even turn out to be other kinds of crowd-pleasers like rom-coms or disaster movies or buddy cop movies (though they may have flavorings of all these things, waiting for fans to declare that, shocker, i've realized this one IS REALLY A whatever type movie). they bring on "quirky indie directors" and often good ones - but ones known for coherent, talky, forward-moving narrative, and they manage them closely. from some of the blogosphere you'd think they were handing $200 million to alexander sokurov and crossing their fingers for box office gold.

again, i think individual action movies, made because the creators have a story they want to tell, have a little more flexibility here. fury road is about mutual redemption, the quest for liberation or at least a heterotopia for the oppressed, and the sufferers rediscovering their own humanity through caring about others. you can tell the filmmakers wanted to make a film about those things. the marvel movies start to feel like people with a room full of chess pieces of the characters and instructions to figure out something they could be made to do. oh we haven't put the hulk and thor together, who's a villain they could face... grandmaster! what's a comic we haven't adapted... "planet hulk" huh? hey this thing writes itself! (again i thought thor 3 was a total blast with a lot of creativity in it, so don't get me wrong.)

this is all obvious: no one would really WANT the films to be these other things, you can get them elsewhere... but i wish the more fannish reviews out there could recognize these facts, or at least give some sense that they have seen other kinds of movies and aren't just bamboozled by press releases declaring that this one is really dark, this one is really a comedy.

― noel gallaghah's high flying burbbhrbhbbhbburbbb (Doctor Casino), Thursday, 26 April 2018 15:50 (thirty-four minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

all of Doctor Casino's posts on there today have been extremely germane

Council of Nicea to thread

what mostly interests me is the way information control has changed over the millenia. you have top-down defined canonical works, you have IP control. in medieval times they would publicly burn translations and unofficial texts. nowadays we have IP lawyers.

I looked at the avengers thread for context, the review that sparked this convo seems good and otm & casino & others' posts following from that are interesting! It also confirmed for me that I have no interest in talking about avengers

One of my favourite things pretty much in any medium is a tv/film franchise that explicitly aligned itself with soap operas (and also, I think, with comics and serialised novels). For david lynch it's always been about creating a world and then living in it as long as possible, and I reckon the same could well be true of Anthony Trollope or David eddings or Ridley Scott - and I think the appeal to audiences is similar. What I love about twin peaks is how it takes that idea of the changing same and does really interesting and challenging things with it; the endless, irresolute recapitulation that review complains about is given a hellish thematic resonance (also, tp has a disdain for "canon" and constantly reconceives itself in a way that enrages fanboys with each sequel) (also imo even this and other territory claimed by prestige tv has its origin in the soap opera, where time is both ultra-compressed and ultra-elongated; tediously incremental and campily seismic)

The other thing this topic makes me think of is that thing certain Pomo authors do (Grendel, Pinocchio in Venice, acker's Quixote). I remember a Barthelme interview where he talked about them as kinda readymades: Snow White and the joker have this preexisting semiotic weight that you can build something weird/abstract/whatever around without too much extra work. I bet there are comics that do this.

nv’s mention of dickens in his initial post has got me thinking that surely it’s only a matter of time before someone comes up with a shared dickens cinematic universe

all out of copyright too! it’s candy just waiting to be snatched from a baby!

Given Hollywood's response to my similar observations about the public domain Oz books, you can look forward to Sam Raimi helming an uninspired prequel about the trees which were pulped to make the Pickwick Papers.

Alexandre Dumas to the thread.

Serialized fiction's great strength, imo, is the creation of heroic myths, centered around one or more characters who are subjected to endless tests of their strength, cunning and wisdom (so as to keep the storyline going), but who always manage to prevail (so as to keep the storyline going).

Disney owned Dickens-verse since Scrooge McDuck turned Thousand Acre Wood into child labor camp.

Alexandre Dumas to the thread.

Serialized fiction's great strength, imo, is the creation of heroic myths, centered around one or more characters who are subjected to endless tests of their strength, cunning and wisdom (so as to keep the storyline going), but who always manage to prevail (so as to keep the storyline going).

modern serials are all about the compulsive reboot
https://i.imgur.com/3g9GTDA.jpg

Bros Karamazov was published as a serial, but it was conceived as a whole and the serialized format was imposed upon it. My understanding is that Fyodor D hated the demands of serializing his novels.

Expanded universes are, strictly speaking, different from serialized narratives, which IMO probably require the existence of a mass media culture, whereas expanded universes are a lot older and can encompass oral traditions and the similarly squishy notion of continuity (I'm thinking Greek epics, the Bible, etc.).

Lots of serials are conceived as a whole! But as they are absolutely not produced that way, we can absolutely consider their serial nature and how it works

here's the other of my wall-o-text posts, thanks for the kind words y'all. promising thread.

***

the "perpetual struggle" thing only really bothers me when the films teeter on the edge of using their fantastical fictions to posit some kind of truly other existence or revolutionary change, and then have to back away or put that change in the hands of bad guys who have to be stopped (as in black panther) for fear of breaking the universe. to stay more or less in genre: the first matrix movie ends with something really thrilling: the rules have been broken, the possibilities are endless, and as neo hangs up the phone, as the credits roll, and on the way home, you're imagining a radical liberation of millions. (obviously the sequels wreck this but anyway.) even kinda shitty versions of this idea, all those movies where we meet a "rebellion" consisting of two speaking actors and eight extras, and they prevail at the end, have a glimmer of this. for another cartoonish actioner: the hero's actions in the running man are more consequential, and more motivated by altruism, than anything in these otherwise much better-made films.

this bigger change is a narrative possibility the marvel movies have thus far reflexively closed themselves off from. the inventions of tony stark and shuri do not transform the fabric of human life or the distribution of power or equity. the experience of being invaded by aliens or nearly conquered by a supercomputer rattles tony personally, but does not shift the politics of the planet earth as it does in (to name a way shittier but momentarily more interesting movie) independence day: resurgence. as in the marvel comics, which i was weaned on and love, the world hangs together and change is at the micro-level of the characters and their relationships (but not TOO much change or it's time for clones or demonic bargains to hit the reset button) which is why people care and want the next issue. 

it works perfectly well in comics which are serialized soap operas that you read for tens or hundreds of issues. i don't think it DOESN'T work in a string of tentpole blockbusters, but it works differently. there are only so many entries in the canon, they can only do so much, and the obligations on them to tell self-contained, satisfying stories, without disrupting the universe, sort of flatten out the stakes. we're going to get small, well-constructed but self-similar character arcs. people learn lessons, people learn to work together. iron man will remember to be a little less of an asshole, until next time. they're great spectacle and leagues more competent than most spectacle fare these days, but i think some of what i'm rambling about here is why it feels a bit flat overall, even though the last couple that i've seen (thor 3, BP) have been some of the most memorable and original of the line.

Lots of serials are conceived as a whole! But as they are absolutely not produced that way

Well, if the only identified difference between serialization and not-serialization is the fact that it is presented to the public in a series of chunks which fit together end-to-end, then our job is finished.

I like Leee's idea that older oral traditions with legendary characters are effectively a shared-universe, like it's always possible the next creator can embellish hercules's sixth labor or have him meet perseus or who knows what. Reminds me of an old buddy's argument that the Divine Comedy was "Biblical fanfiction." Of course, as previously pointed out, intellectual property rights and corporate lawyers change our relationship to this shared body of stuff - we can only await the revelation of the next chapter from the official ("canonical") sources, and other contributions are marked as amateur/fanfiction/unlicensed before you even open them.

I'm also reminded of this play I read about a while back, about a postapocalyptic future where the remembered plot of a single Simpsons episode eventually evolves into the basis of an unrecognizable commedia del'arte tradition around those characters (who have by then become archetypes)... lemme try and find that.

(The American lore of Paul Bunyan and Pecos Bill and other tall-tale characters might be a closer-to-hand example of the "legendary" model, and probably is more of an influence on Golden/Silver Age superheroes and their outlandish feats than is usually acknowledged. Tall tales are in no sense "serialized" or even sequential, but they involve multiple stories understood to belong to the same "universe" and depend on the audience not really needing a fresh intro to familiar characters, much as the nth Marvel movie can take Iron Man for granted as a type.)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr._Burns,_a_Post-Electric_Play

sorry I guess I'm wandering away from "serial fiction" and more thinking about multi-authored works around consistent characters etc.

https://i.imgur.com/ayCUmDz.jpg

sorry for hueg

/Lots of serials are conceived as a whole! But as they are absolutely not produced that way/

Well, if the only identified difference between serialization and not-serialization is the fact that it is presented to the public in a series of chunks which fit together end-to-end, then our job is finished.

than if we say "serials are 15-minute radio programmes where superman saves the day" and reject all counterexamplea

tell me when someone says this and we can gang up on them

What are the earliest examples of print periodicals devoted specifically to recurring characters, whether in serials or stand-alone stories? Frank Reade dime novels come to mind. Spring-Heeled Jack broadsheets?

Folklore/classical precedents are important, but it seems to me that what we now understand as serial fiction couldn't have emerged before rotary printing and other mass media.

xp lol Raskolnikov the Destroyer

the "and then and then and then"-ness of serials seem very much more tied to oral tradition than mass media.

Folklore/classical precedents are important, but it seems to me that what we now understand as serial fiction couldn't have emerged before rotary printing and other mass media.

True, but I think the terms being used are getting tangled, since this thread is talking about a couple different things: serial narratives and expanded universes (which is where the folklore/myth comparison comes).

I do agree that serialized narratives are intrinsically tied to technology, namely the way to distribute the narratives to their audiences (in addition to the appropriate literacy), be it a printing press or DVDs/SOD.

wouldn't the opposite be true -- that packaging narratives in discrete chunks allowed for and imposed the proliferation of self-contained stories?

I agree the roots of this kind of "and then" storytelling are deep in oral traditions. Products like soap operas, comic books, and Dickens seem to be what happens to this mode when it enters mass media. There's a built-in conflict between the endlessness and openness possible in oral narratives and the more structured histories created when serial stories move into print ... that tension is part of what makes e.g. comic book franchises so productive and so bizarre.

Reminds me of an old buddy's argument that the Divine Comedy was "Biblical fanfiction."

I've always agreed with this viewpoint, and the entertaining thing is that Odysseus appears in Alighieri's circles of hell! But I believe it's fairly accepted that he hadn't read the "original" story and was drawing off of the retelling in the Aeneid .

the "and then and then and then"-ness of serials seem very much more tied to oral tradition than mass media.

see: Harun Al Raschid in 1,001 Arabian Nights (although to a more significant extent perhaps Sherehezad framing device)

no idea about its relationship to print periodicals

yeah I think we may have to distinguish between "serial" as in a complete story that's broken into chunks (whether published as a trilogy, or weekly chapters with the intention of eventually compiling a novel) but which has an "ending," and "ongoing" (or a better term?) as in something that's permanently open-ended as in superhero comics. interestingly i think they involve lots of similar techniques and challenges (keeping the reader/viewer/hearer of the tale coming back - the scheherazade toolkit) but then some of the concerns that prompted this thread were sort of specific to "ongoing" - what happens to all that continuity and canon piling up behind the beating wings of the storyteller? does the form itself begin to impose limits on the kinds of stories that can be told? etc....

well one thing about 1,001 Arabian Nights is that while it is famously open-ended and theoretically infinite, there's also not really anything canonical established outside of the framing device and the fact that Harun Al Raschid was caliph at the height of Islamic culture. Everything else is relatively self-contained (or contained within a larger story which is contained within a larger story etc. lol)

so yeah it's not really a "serial" per se

I tend to think of serialization as a mode of distribution: an unbounded story can be serialized, as can a bounded story (e.g. Joyce's Ulysses!).

Which of course prompts one to think about the Netflix model of releasing their TV series.

... what happens to all that continuity and canon piling up behind the beating wings of the storyteller?

this is a question that really gains weight when back numbers start to accumulate on the shelf ... in oral traditions, different tellers, audiences, and occasions can produce variations and improvisations with no letters to the editor citing Fantastic Four #51

you end up with innovations like the "no prize"

spider-man in the comics is an interesting case of this, where marvel have twice (clone saga and undoing the marriage) attempted to symbolically de-age spider-man and basically delete decades of stories, on the premise that all that piled up history made the character feel too old and unrelatable to audiences.

as has been pointed out by many observers, this is sort of nonsense - teens had no problem relating to married spider-man because he was still SPIDER-MAN - and probably had more to do with *creators* who read the books in the 60s and 70s wanting to write the "younger" peter parker. i think it's a real question how many readers actually consume or feel burdened by *all* the history - pretty sure as a comics kid i was comfortable with the idea that there were countless yellowing bronze age issues of all my favorite characters, without feeling any necessity to read them to enjoy what's happening right now. at the same time there were must-read stories ("canonized" more than just being part of "the canon") that were hailed as really high-quality and also (or therefore) got referred to a lot in current issues. so when i got the dark phoenix paperback, i didn't really know or care about anything prior to the 120s of x-men, or between the 140s and circa #300 where i was currently reading. it was fine.

new viewers of long-running soap operas don't need to bone up in any capacity, right? just get hooked on the current thing and then get hooked on the *future* - in our next episode, "and then, and then..."

(a whole nother kettle of fish is the concept of "marvel time" where again audiences almost automatically accept that spider-man has had like ten thousand adventures, many taking place over multiple days or weeks, and yet still seem to be in his mid-twenties or maybe thirty years old. it's just a non-problem, as much as it would be for a campfire audience being told "one time, paul bunyan came upon a river so deep even he couldn't walk across it..." or whatever. except a certain kind of mind gets fascinated with trying to rationalize it...)

count me as someone who doesn't really draw a line between "modern" serialized fiction and the folktales of old

printable type is merely a technological step up. prior to that access to the production of texts was gated behind other technical skills. you had scribes, you had book makers, etc. ofc the every person couldn't spend all day writing folktales bc they had more immediate need to take care of, food, clothes and shelter. to even have access was a place of privilege.

imo the Holy Roman Empire was the first mass media campaign, however cynical the emperors who used Christian branding to hold together a culture, spreading the official documents and stories far and wide, stamping out unofficial accounts when possible, or assimilating regional folklore into canonical stories when that was too difficult.

I'm pretty sure this article is someone's doctoral thesis on fictional time: http://marvel.wikia.com/wiki/Marvel_Time

there are tons of evidence that people were writing their own tales of Jesus and the Saints and all kinds expanded universe stuff for the western religions. it's just that those people tended to end up tortured and killed symbolically as heretics, the texts burned/eliminated in public rituals to emphasize that the canon works are the only ones tolerated.

a really cool fact is that ancient Egyptian scribes and the people that did art for temples etc. also tended to do personal works in their own tombs when not working for the pharaoh or whoever

xp

That sounds wrong. The most popular expanded universe christianity stuff – hagiographies, Golden Legend, protoevangelium of James – doesn't get you killed. It just is part of the fabric of popular Christianity till the 16th century or so.* It is not canonical and it also what Christianity practically is on a day to day level.

*I say 16th century but I was taught at primary school that St Peter was crucified upside-down (source: Acts of Peter - not canon).

pretty sure as a comics kid i was comfortable with the idea that there were countless yellowing bronze age issues of all my favorite characters, without feeling any necessity to read them to enjoy what's happening right now.

Yeah, I get this - maybe you'd have to read a few issues back but not for decades. The problem comes when someone wants to write a story for the ages - literally in the canon, in the list of things that you have to read if you want to understand the context of the character. I mean, most of the time, the characters are a little too flimsy for that to start with.

ofc the every person couldn't spend all day writing folktales

you may already be saying what i'm saying in a different way but: folk tales don't have to be written and it's sort of their nature that they're of "the folk." they don't get transcribed until the 17th/18th century by bourgeois enthusiasts, but they're absolutely the kind of thing you could come up with and share and refine as a dirt farmer. long days plowing the field, maybe turning over a scene in your head, your imagination captured.... i mean i'm not a historian of folk literature mind you but it's the literal "writing" and the printing that was not accessible, not the creation of the things...

OTM. Folk transmission is kind of amazing and the non-literate kind seems to hit that transformation more quickly and thoroughly than you'd expect. I'm no expert, but this has always stuck in my head:

In 1953 the late Professor James Notopoulos was recording oral heroic song in the Sfakia district of western Crete, where illiterate oral bards were still to be found. He asked one of them, who had sung of his own war experience, if he knew a song about the capture of the German general and the bard proceeded to improvise one. The historical facts are well known and quite secure. In April 1944 two British officers, Major Patrick Leigh Fermor and Captain Stanley Moss, parachuted into Crete, made contact with Cretan guerrillas, and kidnapped the German commanding general of the island, one Karl Kreipe.

The general was living in the Villa Ariadne at Knossos, the house Evans had built for himself during the excavations. Every day, at the same time, the general was driven south from the Villa to the neighboring small town of Arkhanes, where his headquarters were located. He came home every night at eight o’clock for dinner. The two British officers, dressed in German uniforms, stopped the car on its way home to Knossos; the Cretan partisans overpowered the chauffeur and the general. The two officers then drove the car through the German roadblocks in Heraklion (the general silent with a knife at his throat) and left the car on the coast road to Rethymo. They then hiked through the mountains to the south coast, made rendezvous with a British submarine, and took General Kreipe to Alexandria and on to Middle East Headquarters in Cairo.

Here, in Notopoulos’s summary, is the heroic song the bard produced:

“An order comes from British and American headquarters in Cairo to capture General Kreipe, dead or alive; the motive is revenge for his cruelty to the Cretans. A Cretan partisan, Lefteris Tambakis (not one of the actual guerrilla band) appears before the English general (Fermor and Moss are combined into one and elevated in rank) and volunteers for the dangerous mission. The general reads the order and the hero accepts the mission for the honor of Cretan arms. The hero goes to Heraklion, where he hears that a beautiful Cretan girl is the secretary of General Kreipe.

“In disguise the partisan proceeds to her house and in her absence reads the English general’s order to her mother. When the girl returns he again reads the general’s order. Telling her the honor of Crete depends on her, he catalogues the German cruelties. If she would help in the mission, her name would become immortal in Cretan history. The girl consents and asks for three days time in which to perform her role. To achieve Cretan honor she sacrifices her woman’s honor with General Kreipe in the role of a spy. She gives the hero General Kreipe’s plans for the next day.

“Our hero then goes to Knossos to meet the guerrillas and the English general. ‘Yiassou general,’ he says. ‘I will perform the mission.’ The guerrillas go to Arkhanes to get a long car with which to blockade the road. Our hero, mounted on a horse by the side of the blockading car, awaits the car of Kaiseri (that is what the bard calls Kreipe). The English general orders the pistols to be ready. When Kreipe’s car slows down at the turn he is attacked by the guerrillas. Kreipe is stripped of his uniform (only his cap in the actual event) and begs for mercy for the sake of his children (a stock motif in Cretan poetry).

“After the capture the frantic Germans begin to hunt with dogs (airplanes in the actual event). The guerrillas start on the trek to Mount Ida and by stages the party reaches the district of Sfakia (the home of the singer and his audience; actually the general left the island southwest of Mount Ida). The guards have to protect the general from the mob of enraged Sfakians. Soon the British submarine arrives and takes the general to Egypt. Our bard concludes the poem with a traditional epilogue—that never before in the history of the world has such a deed been done. He then gives his name, his village, his service to his country.”

(from https://patrickleighfermor.org/2017/12/28/triumph-of-a-heretic/)

Sorry hueg

But also awesome.

That's fantastic.

it's interesting how these undeniably mythic characters like superman are inherently different from, say, the iliad or the odyssey or bible or whatever in that those stories are essentially closed while superman stories necessarily have to remain open because dc/warner brothers have shareholders

capitalism as a relentless driver for narrative, basically

counterpoints?

why doesn't herakles make landfall with the achaian hosts on trojan shores?

what happens to odysseus after the trojan war?

what happens to aeneas after the trojan war?

what does shakespeare have to say about all this?

the four gospels are a promethean sequel to the torah (which is itself a ripoff of hellenic myth)

who the fuck did james joyce think he was?

different from, say, the iliad or the odyssey or bible or whatever in that those stories are essentially closed

Strange to say, not only was the bible closed by the Council of Nicea (which got a shout-out earlier itt) for essentially political reasons, but the Iliad and Odyssey both became closed texts under the Athenian tyrant Peisistratos, who wanted canonical versions of Homer's texts to be used for political purposes, too. It is suspected that such characters as Thersites, the stereotype of the loutish common soldier who gripes about his betters who then give him a much-deserved hiding, were fixed into the canon at that time.

just wait till Superman v. Bloomsday

slowclap.gif

one interesting difference would be that the Bible or Torah or Vedas or whatever, a lot of those older narratives arose from commonly told folk stories or oral narratives, and were shared among people in a community, passed down generations, etc. whereas Superman was thought of by like one or two guys in an office on a weekend.

i don't think Biblical stories are "closed" either, just look at Christmas, a modern capitalist folk tradition famously incorporating many different elements from many different cultures into a synthesized "Christian" holiday

but the whole nature of ongoing serials is that lots of people make contributions - lots of things that are "core" to a character like Superman may actually come later, by other authors. kryptonite, for example, was introduced in the wartime radio serials, written by some other guy entirely.

I love this Count of Monte Cristo character flowchart (NB clearly all spoilers)

I have no idea whether Dumas worked out the awesomely intricate plot of Count of Monte Cristo beforehand, or just hoofed it as he went all along over two years of serialisation, but either way it's an incredible achievement.

noahdysseus. olias of sunhillow

Genuinely surprised that serialised novels haven't made a comeback in the Kindle age, it would appear to be perfectly designed for them.

Maybe Bezos ought to see if Oprah is interested.

but the whole nature of ongoing serials is that lots of people make contributions - lots of things that are "core" to a character like Superman may actually come later, by other authors. kryptonite, for example, was introduced in the wartime radio serials, written by some other guy entirely.

― noel gallaghah's high flying burbbhrbhbbhbburbbb (Doctor Casino), Sunday, April 29, 2018 8:25 PM (two days ago) Bookmark

yeah this is a good point. i guess when you get down to it nobody can own an idea. once it gets out, it is inevitable other people will join in and it will grow in meaning. things can be pulled in from entirely different media. perhaps in the end, the true canon is defined not from top-down from the authority figure/symbolic IP holder but through the larger social/cultural sphere, what meanings survive the ages.

this is why it always feels so dumb when dc/marvel (mainly dc) feel like they have to do big continuity reboots to simplify the backstory or drop bad stories. just don't reference the bad stories, they disappear. the "canon" is whatever people believe matters, and the "continuity" is just the stuff where people notice if you contradict it, where it damages the illusion of the characters and their world as having a consistent reality. like if two characters who dated for years in the 80s are depicted as meeting for the first time in a new issue, or if someone betrayed the team eight issues back and now they're back but nobody is commenting on it, that's a violation of continuity that pushes the reader out of the universe. if they flirted in one panel in 1966 and now are depicted as meeting for the first time, it's fine - almost nobody will have read both comics and how many of them will care?

the kind of fans that maintain wikia can still insist that it's canon that, idk, gambit belongs to a stupid thieves guild devoted to an immortality elixir under the orders of a Highlander, but if you just never use that stuff it doesn't matter. obviously a better approach would be to not use gambit altogether but you know what i mean.

I'm completely on board with that approach

I got into it with someone who was continuity policing on another site because the idea that every work needs to be explicitly or even tightly linked does nothing for the reader and is usually a negative for the writers.

I think the case in point was Marvel's Runaways show on Hulu and how, to them, it somehow mattered that it's explicitly set in the same world as other Marvel junk. The show has no real references to characters that don't appear in it, and while you could do a plot relying on the fact there are people with super powers out in the world, they haven't done that plot. I can watch the show and assume it's its own thing. Some producer saying it's in the same space means nothing because there is no actual linkage on screen. But if some authority says they're contemporaneous, then it suddenly matters because..

also, no one should use Gambit

idk, there's a very slavish attitude towards continuity that a lot of writers exhibit nowadays, especially if they were fans of the IP that they're working on. (Morrison's Batman RIP story where *everything* is in continuity was painfully eye-roll inducing.) Seeing how a writer integrates a 30-year-old story element into a story they're currently writing can be interesting, but in a way that's like watching someone put a puzzle together as opposed to an interesting story.

In my ideal world, continuity would be a la carte, i.e. it should rarely shackle a writer, who should feel free to abandon stuff as they see fit (which I think is the general rule of thumb that Doctor Who writers follow).

Genuinely surprised that serialised novels haven't made a comeback in the Kindle age, it would appear to be perfectly designed for them.

― Matt DC, Tuesday, 1 May 2018 19:23

They have in China! So many people reading the latest instalments on their phones in the metro, etc.

it's also abundantly clear that some serial concepts work way, way better outside a shared universe. x-men is absolutely one - the core concept of people getting superpowers by genetic accident, and there being disputes over whether that is exciting/scary, is rife with possibilities, many of which are closed off immediately (or become bizarre and meaningless) in a world that also has people who get superpowers from science experiments, government aliens, dying aliens etc. the runaways concept (kids find out their parents are supervillains) isn't really *harmed* by being in the marvel universe but it doesn't gain much either and maybe makes it feel less like its own thing. like if suddenly it was revealed that harry potter actually takes place in the same universe as the one from which dorothy travels to oz. pointless and vaguely diminishing to both.

constraints can be valuable to writing, one thing writers of an ongoing open-ended thing need to do is leave it open for the next person, leave them a free a hand as possible. at its worst this equals "nothing sticks" which turns off readers. but more generally you want to avoid things that seriously cage in the story possibilities and at least with the x-men, being in the coherent "marvel universe," which can never really seem to experience the radically, comprehensively transformative effects of a rising tide of superpowered humanity, has perhaps contributed to the actual history of the series, in which for vast stretches of time the main defining features of the team were that they were ragtag outlaws trotting the globe hunted by baffling conspiracies, dealing with political schisms in a galaxy of bird people, and disappearing up their own increasingly bizarre history of time-travel, rebirth as cosmic beings, bodies swapped by telepathy, conspiracies within conspiracies, etc.

in between of course claremont did a ton with the prejudice angle and morrison tried to open up the speculation on a different, mutant-filled world, but i think a lot of the gibberish stems from writers, including those two, not *really* being able to do all that much with this radical concept in a shared universe, so it's like, um... how about they fight cyborgs again, but this time they're under mind control?

I've been trying to workshop a "What about Bob?"/Captain Ron crossover movie in my head this week and I have no idea why

both have a patriarch trying to keep control of his family in the face of an antagonist the family is sympathetic to, I guess

one of the fuck yeah moments in the original dragonlance trilogy is weis/hickman neglecting to narrate prizing the dragonlance from the glacier, going instead with a poem. that lacuna signaled that like with ancient arcadian myth countless more legends awaited telling beyond the main storyline

and now I've discovered that Captain Ron was almost directed by John Carpenter

Escape from the Carribean

watched captain ron a month or two ago for the first time. my god it's the pits. desperately needed to be a whole lot more surreal or a whole lot less gross, one or the other.

it’s a halfassed family comedy from like 1991

the only redeemable part is Kurt Russell’s enjoyment of being a goof

the gorillas/guerillas is the only real script setup that lands

quarter-assed at best

at its worst this equals "nothing sticks" which turns off readers.

A citation is probably required here - apart from anything else, comic strips operate off a general knowledge of the characters (Spider-Man, Mandrake, Judge Dredd), which not only are compatible with nothing sticking, but are dependent on that.

hmmm, fair point... I guess I was thinking of things like character deaths getting reversed almost immediately, which has never much enhanced my own attachment to / faith in a series.

another issue: how much do you need to let the audience breathe, or get comfortable with a new status quo, before you throw some other change at them? apart from the value of leaving that status quo in effect until you've told all the stories you can tell with it, is there some value to just letting people process its arrival and enjoy imagining its possibilities? i'm thinking of early 90s x-men, where magneto "died" in december 1991 and was back for the summer crossover in 1993 with hints being dropped that spring. that's not a ton of time to even register that he's absent, given all the other things the x-men have on their plates (and the failure of the books to thematize said absence). then the outcome of that big return story is that he is rendered comatose, so his return, much built up for the reader, turns out to be a fizzle. the real change in the status quo you're supposed to pay attention to is that magneto takes away wolverine's adamantium, which DID stick for a while but wasn't built up to at ALL.

i think with serial fiction you kinda gotta let things sit for a second. even if you know the status quo the last writer handed you was actually lousy, maybe you gotta try and make it work for a while (even as you set up the elements for something different). ime there's a whiplash effect when you're reading something that keeps changing creative teams, dropping threads, setting up new shit that doesn't get explored... idk.

On the other hand, the Anatomy Lesson (though "except if you're 1980s Alan Moore" is an exception to a lot of rules)

I think it's worth noting that we are many of us buying TPBs now, through Netflix's "*splort* Here's six episodes of a TV show" model.