Conecdote: Canonicity
Feb 08[What’s a Conecdote? It’s an anecdote…from a con. Duh.]
So I’m at dinner in Hell’s Kitchen on Friday night with about eight other people. We’re all talking comics, and someone utters the ‘F’ word: Final Crisis. I’m suddenly the only person in the room defending the book and getting piled on by everyone, including maybe the waiter. “It was ambitious, if flawed, and it has some really amazing moments,” I protest, but nobody wants to hear it. The counterpoints stack like Tetris blocks and I am finally broken. And it is this that broke me:
“‘Darkseid always hated music’? What? Where was that established? What issue did that happen in? Because I think that Morrison just made that shit up.”
Tom Brevoort frequently talks about how it’s better for continuity to serve the story than for the story to serve continuity, and this is a prime example.
A few arguments and/or possibilities:
1. He’s Darkseid. Why would he LIKE music?
2. Pied Piper. Countdown. Just saying
3. Darkseid not actually Dick Turpin, but actually John Lithgow from Footloose. No, wait. That’s dancing. How great would it have been if Superman beat him with the power of dancing?
NYCC 2009: Alert Nerdian for Sunday, 2/8
Feb 07Tweets from our correspondents on the show floor! A beautiful day in The Bottle City! Cosplay is fun, lady cosplayers are funner!
Don’t forget: Hard copies at NYCC. Scope out the freebie tables. Follow @AlertNerd, @SarahKuhn and @TheOtherJeff for the latest from the show. Follow @castewar and @MattSpringer cause we’re not at NYCC and we’re lonely.
NYCC 2009: Alert Nerdian for Saturday, 2/7
Feb 07Tweets from our correspondents on the show floor! Chris Claremont rewrites the universe! Dodongo!
Alert Nerdian for Saturday, 2/7
Don’t forget: Hard copies at NYCC. Scope out the freebie tables. Follow @AlertNerd, @SarahKuhn and @TheOtherJeff for the latest from the show. Follow @castewar and @MattSpringer cause we’re not at NYCC and we’re lonely.
NYCC 2009: Alert Nerdian for Friday, 2/6
Feb 06A lil’ teaser preview issue for day one.
We Are The Enemy
Feb 05I’ve been thinking about comics. Because that’s basically what I do with most of my free time. In particular, I’m thinking about Grant Morrison’s (maybe not so) drug-addled, oft-quoted goal of making the DC Universe “sentient.”
On the surface, that quote makes no fucking sense, but beneath it hints at the sort of depth that the best of GMozz’s ideas plunge into. It seems insanity and promises greatness. We like the idea because it embodies exactly what we like about the comics we read – especially if you are, like I am, a devotee of the really out-there Kirby, Haney, Kanigher and Mantlo stuff that may not make sense but is indisputably awesome in the current and original senses of the word both.
After reading Final Crisis, that zany quote from everyone’s favorite alien-abducted magus makes a bit more sense. Sense because the entire (if slightly veiled) point of the event’s endgame is that the story keeps going on without us. It is its own entity, telling its own story. Storytelling – or more aptly – a kind of Platonic ideal of Story – is the very premise that Superman Beyond is constructed on. Final Crisis #7 is framed as a bedtime story told to children.
The more interesting bit of meta-commentary seeded here is Morrison’s painting of the reader – the fan – as the enemy of The Story. In fact, DC’s been doing that since Infinite Crisis when it revealed that the good-hearted fanboy who saved the universe in the first Crisis had transmogrified into a sullen, nitpicking murderer hell-bent on changing the universe into what he thinks it should be/needs to be (and ultimately decides that what he really wants is his universe back – an echo of the fans that say things like, “The Detroit JLA is my Justice League and I won’t read any other version”). In Final Crisis and its infinite lead-ins, the Monitors serve the same function – nattering and infighting over which version of which character or legacy is the canonical one.
Are we really the bad guys? Sometimes, when we lose sight of what we love about comics, we can sure seem that way. When we focus too much on the Creators (to the point of either trashing or deifying them unfairly) and not on the Story, or when we’re mean instead of actually critical about a plot twist that we don’t like, we are. Because it’s easier and more fun, I suspect we don’t celebrate what we love about the artform nearly enough. But then, maybe the creators need a thicker skin.
What do you think? Are comics fans hurting comics?
