Comic Book Concept Poll

Okay, I used to feverishly collect comic books back in the 80's; mostly Marvel titles but some DC and independents too.

One of the reasons I stopped collecting (other than rising cost per issue) was the impossible time-lines. Spiderman may have been around for well over 30 years but Peter Parker himself hadn't aged a day and was still shilling photos of himself to the Bugle.

Of course, now they're even worse... Now they're even worse. Canon doesn't seem to mean anything to the comic industry these days. Heck, DC is planning a company-wide toilet flush and pretty blue water reset in the next few months. In my opinion it's become almost impossible to feel invested in a character or story line because you never know if they're going to say "Ooops... our bad... it didn't actually happen that way at all.. in fact... in the NEW universe your favorite character has a sex change, loses all their money and reputation and becomes a homeless sociopath who will eventually become a villain.. and not a very important one either... think of the Vulture but without the as much dignity."

I'm curious if anyone feels the same way I do about it. Also, I'm curious about the potential for a comic book publishing company to take a stand on the matter and meet with success.

So, a comic book publisher makes the following promises:

1) We will come out with a number of different series based on heroes and characters in a single universe. There will be no multi-verse, no alternate earths or dimensions where everything is opposite, bizarro or painted fuschia... just the one universe.

2) Everything will be diligently recorded from the outset. We will actually WORK to record all material as canon and our writers will be required to be familiar with and adhere to past issues.

3) Time passes normally. A year in the real world will indicate a year in the comic book. This will be less a "each issue will take up exactly one month's time" and more a "our characters will age a year after they've been in print a year". Obviously some heroes will be immortal or will not age at the same rate as a normal human, but this will apply ONLY in cases where it makes sense.

4) Nothing happens in a vacuum. There will be extensive efforts to communicate between development/writing teams so that if the Empire State Building turns into a bowl of tapioca pudding in one of our issues, the other heroes in other series will know about it. Major events may not always result in cross-overs but there WILL be a commonality. We won't forget all these heroes exist in the same place at the same time.

5) When a character dies, they DIE. We will not cheapen our stories with fake deaths. This is not to say that obscure or mysterious "did they REALLY die?" events will not happen, but rather if we announce the death of a character and build the series up to a climax point... we promise not to bring them back a month or so later because we miss the revenue they were generating.

6) We will never... NEVER... do a "what if" series or single issue. We will leave the what ifs to our fans and dedicate ourselves to creating what really happens.

I could go on with other guidelines, but I think you all (those of you who read this far) get the general idea.

Would you support this idea? Would you want to read about a character who grew older at the same rate as you? Or do you prefer the way the industry works now; with no such thing as canon?

While a TON of those ideas are fantastic, I think that other ones limit a comic. One of the things I like a lot about comics is the vast scale of them... aka the Multiverse. I like that it is possible for a hero to team up with himself, or a hero alternate universe villain... what have you. I think it is important to be able to have some character, somewhere who can warp reality... and do crazy things in a universe.

Likewise, there really should be an occassional ressurection. Perhaps not in a cheap way so that you feel like you wasted yoru anticipation and disbelief that they died two issues ago... but to have dead characters interact with the universe either through reanimation or... here it comes again... a plane where dead characters reside (an Elysian Fields, mayhap?).

Also, with regard to time. I would love it to make sense that a hero began his career at 18, and 30 years later is 48, has retired from heroing and is now helping his son along in his footsteps... but that is not always practical. Sometimes a hero only is relevant and makes sense at 18 or 30 or 523... forever. Maybe that means that he is a poorly designed character, maybe it is the nature of comics to portray time unrealistically. I don't know.

I think that if such a company existed, it would be interesting, and certainly new and exciting. However, I feel that it would be impossible to hold to all those promises for the long haul.

I'm almost on the other side of the spectrum and agree with the original idea of the OP, if for any other reason, just because of the original runs of "Spider Girl".

That was a great series. May "Mayday" Parker, daughter of Peter and Mary Jane, was a really fitting continuation of the history and scope of the character of Spider-Man/Spider- Girl.

Peter had his 'happy ending' so there was resolution there. Now it was about his daughter, which was almost the same kid but with updated 'issues' (not in terms of comics, natch) and problems. We need that. That was the thing that hurt me most about 'One More Day'. I identified with Spidey as a kid, not for all the same reasons but because I was a kid. I grew up and eventually found the love of my life. Just like Peter, and that was a part of my adult life. It wasn't someone I expected either, but made me better from the experience... Just like Peter.

I won't get into how OMD messed up my view of the story, but I liked and bought two copies of the Spider-Girl series to express my feelings about it even before it became a 'thing'. One copy was for my teenage daughter who started to be interested in the Spider-Girl series.

Our heroes need to be rewarded and find our 'happily ever after', of a sort. New generations need to be born and experience the same things, because that's how it works. Trying to re-create the past only ignores growth, which is what makes them more than icons, it makes them fully-fleshed characters.

As long as the ones who come next follow the same ideals and paths, albeit a little differently, we'll keep reading, and so will the next generation.

That's my 2 cents, anyway.

Lyc, the 'look back on it' werewolf

Marvel already did something like this with their New Universe. It didn't last long enough to see whether retcons would start to creep in, but I did like the more 'realistic' feel to the world. I'm just not sure it's a concept that would grab enough 'casual' readers for it to be viable on anything but a very small scale.

Well...not counting having multiple titles for 1 character (like Spider-Man having 3 different titles at once)...

Spider-Man is going on 50 years old.

If they go with the route of 100 issues equals 1 year in the characters life (like Ultimate Spider-Man did...and personally, if your going to age a character this is the perfect way to do it)...that equals 600 comics for Spider-Man at 12 comics a year.

So, Spider-Man should only by about 22. We of course can go a little older if we count those times they did 2 issues a month.

Hmmm...if DC is going to go through with this relaunch...maybe they should go with the whole 100 issues equals a year deal.

That said, I don't want to see them get older quickly. First off, 12 comics a year isn't enough time to get a years worth of stories out of the characters.

Multi-verse can be fun. Just don't go overboard on it.

I like the idea of sticking to canon.

#4 is a great idea.

I can get behind the "don't hype the death if it's not really going to be that way" type of deal. But faking deaths is part of the genre.

So I'd suggest, unless you KNOW your going to keep them dead, then don't hype it as such.

Like if you kill off a major villain. Only hype it to the point of OMG THIS IS ACTUALLY GOING TO HAPPEN FOR SURE, if it's really going to be that way.

If it could be permanent, but you have that "maaaaybe not" type of deal going on...don't give so much hype.

Or hype it in a different fashion. "Spider-Man WILL KILL A VILLAIN" then later Spider-Man can learn he really didn't but goes through all that it entails untill found out

If I'm not mistaken, that's the VALIANT credo as written by Jim Shooter.

I think point #3 was much harder in practice than it was to preach. There was a point where they jumped Magnus, Robot Fighter and Rai ahead by (I think) 15 years, but I don't recall if that was before or after Shooter got the boot.

I miss Archer & Armstrong -- such a fun title. (Armstrong's story about how he got drunk and built Stonehenge to impress his wife one night was hilarious.)

I recently stopped at my buddy's comic shop and when I took my books to the register, he said something like, "I guess I won't be getting rich off of you," because of the few books I had in my hands. I replied, "That's because most comic books these days suck."

The problem is all the unmanagable multi-part crossover money-grabs the major companies do these days. Does more than two months pass at Marvel or DC where there isn't some "universe-wide" crisis that affects half the titles they publish? If you can't get people to buy the low-selling books, change the creative team or cancel the book.

Ironically it was probably the most successful universe-altering and continuity-fixing miniseries of all time that lead to this mess - Crisis on Infinite Earths. That was my jumping-on point to a lot of DC titles in the '80s and while I have followed some of their books off-and-on since then, I think this "lets restart everything at issue 1" deal is going to be my jumping-off point.

These days I mainly read independant titles like Irredemable, and the recently wrapped Echo.

Actually, with two exceptions, I can agree to this.

1. the aging thing. I'm not too worried about this.

2. I don't mind one off or 'what if' issues as long as its perfectly clear that they are not part of the main continuity and never will be.

Right now Roy Thomas just got a chill down his back...

In theory, all that sounds very sensible and would fix a lot of things people complain about in comics. But... on the other hand, if those rules had been followed then a lot of my favourite issues of comics would never have been made.

I think it would work better if every few years they jumped the storylines ahead a bit.

Give the writers three years to write stuff for the character as they are now, and at the end of the three years ALL the comics jump forward from whatever point they're at. Advance the world setting three years from the last jump, and decide what happened "off pannel" during the jump.

The writers know it's coming, so they can plan for it. They can have uninteresting advancement happen in the jumps so they don't need to waste time showing it. Have failing books end at the jump, and bring new ones in at that time.

The characters age with the passage of time, but the jumps gives you a chance to spend the entire three years NOT worrying about it if you don't want to. If HeroBoy gets his powers as a Junior in High School, you can spend the first three years telling the story of his Junior year. The next three, him trying to hide his identity in college. If the character doesn't seem viable after that, then end the comic or kill him (passing his powers on to his younger brother in Jr High).

I think people go too far.

All you need to do is put in a date code and stick with it.

The problem with DC and Marvel is that they don't keep things straight and they keep on making up BS about how they want to make the origins modern rather than just letting people assume that they take place in a period setting... or they want to work on a single character rather than expanding the universe and characters.

I personally agree with Cowman. I like my comics to be fun. On top of that I find all the cross-continuity in comics today to to be far too limiting and in most cases absurd. Dwayne McDuffie explained this far better than I ever could:
http://www.slushfactory.com/content/...AZTDOLwdfz.php

Restrictions that would stifle creativity probably aren't worth it in the long run. As long as each individual title maintains its own continuity, I don't mind there being, for example, three different Superman titles with three contradictory story arcs going on. To me, it's different writers and their take on the subject. If you want them all to jive, hire one writer and publish one title for each hero.

So basically you outlined the Hellblazer series.

I like the idea of the comic characters semi-aging. However, 12 issues equaling a year is too few. On the other hand 100 issues may be too long.
I rather like the idea of someone in the place keeping track of how long the stories last. If a particular story line takes a week to resolve, it took a week – even if that week lasted for 12 issues. If a character had a slow month, there goes a month. If the fight with the big bad of the story only took a hour of time, but took 4 issues to resolve, so be it. If after that hour long fight the hero is ambushed by another villain on the way home, and we have 6 more issues dealing with that, go for it. But keep track of how much time this is taking.

On the other hand, if the hero is transported to another dimension and time runs differently there, the hero experiences that story, but in the ‘real world’ a different amount of time has passed. This could get really wonky with time-travel stories, so you would have to really keep a tight reign on things. Yes, this could result in the hero having experienced five years of adventures while only a day passed back in the hero’s ‘native’ time. But this can also lead to some interesting stories when the hero returns to his time and has to deal with what happened on that adventure.

If you establish a character’s birthday three quarters through the hero’s year, then we should not see that character have another birthday for another year of ‘comic time’. Same thing goes for anniversaries in ‘comic time’

This would allow a hero character to be a high school freshman one year, and four ‘comic years’ later be a senior, with all the character has experienced in his or her adventures affecting how he deals with school life, and how the hero treats freshmen.

Sure, this would be a lot of work for someone, but it would add a lot of flexibility over the ’12 issues=a year’ while hopefully avoiding the ‘all that happened in a year?!’ incredulity of the 100 issues = a year. I mean seriously, think of how many things happen to your favorite character in 100 issues. Now try to cram all of that into a year. Does the hero have any downtime? But remember, none of this can happen if someone isn't keeping track of how long all of this stuff takes. So there would have to be an official "timekeeper" of the continuity.

Some other parts of that manifesto seem both good and too restrictive as well. No multiverse cuts off some interesting stories. As does the if he’s dead he’s dead. And limiting what-if stories to the fans seems strange as well. I rather like a lot of DC’s Elseworlds. And some of Marvel’s What If’s can be fun as well.

I've been thinking along similar lines (to the OP) ever since I started reading the Wikipedia histories of the major DC and Marvel characters. Within the space of 3 paragraphs the story is okay, but read the whole page and belief isn't suspended anymore. Its fallen to the ground, shattered, then ground to dust by the heal of the Juggernaut. In short, the whole is ludicrous.

So I've wondered for months if a comic series could be created with a hero/squad aging parallel to real time or close to it. Death is death, though it can be faked, there's no coming back from the "real" thing. I've not really thought about "what if" histories, but certainly nothing that has a reset switch or otherwise waters down the story impact.

Alternative history does play a role. Built into the concept is that every 20 to 30 years the series is obligated to end. Ride into the sunset. This becomes Universe 1. A new creative team then issues Universe 2, a parallel universe where the story has similarities, but can be told fresh, and from that RL generation's perspective. They then have 20 to 30 years to make it work. Rinse and repeat. This keeps the tale current fresh, and tight. There's not 3 comics and 2 videos in 20 years all with their own take on the character's origins. Fans would eventually compare universes, it would be inevitable, but the stories remain distinct.

Personally, being a fan of Dick Tracy and Prince Valiant comics, I would have loved to have seen these go through that process rather than making the characters grandfathers for decades and still fighting.

I pretty much don't like monthly comics due to how they treat time. They try to make time 'slower' in the comics so they don't have to age their characters too much, but they also reference current events and personalities in an attempt to keep the books relevent.

This causes contradictions. Example: in the 80's the Avengers comics reference Ronald Reagan; currently they could go Pay Barrack Obama a visit, yet we're supposed to buy that they only aged a couple of years.

I prefer mini-Series type comics that are self-contained, like Watchmen. Over the course of that series, we glimpsed the lives of characters over a relatively small window of time during a pivotal event. And now that story is done.

I agree that 12 issues is too short, and 100 issues is too many to count as a "year". Maybe 52 could be a good number, where each issue more or less represents one week of comic time.