Legion World Forums LEGION COMPANION Dr. Gym'll's Cultural Rarities Lardy's Roundtable (Gym'll's Ed.): Grant Morrison

Steph, I would argue that the removal of Superboy LEAD to the constant ret-conning, but I think our discussion of the JSA has lead to a larger issue in comics: how should aging and the passage of time be addressed in serialized comics?

True, I don't think it was absence of Superboy that killed the Legion, but rather the lengths they went to explain/change things due to that absence. But at a point we split hairs.

As for aging in comics, that's a toughie.

Really I think the sliding timeline works best. For stories that really only work in a certain time...well honestly I can't think of that many that rule applies to. The few I can think of either a) aren't refernced that much so the time isn't a big throw off or b) you just suspend disbelief and live with it.

Honestly, as much as writers like to think comicbook reflect the real world, they really don't that often.

Now I think the big problem we get with timelines in the DCU (and since I read mostly DC that's who I'll use) is JSA and sidekicks growing up or characters growing up

with JSA the big problem is not that they are tied to WWII (and it would be hard to seperate them from that age, especially since they are seen as "Golden Agers" and the Golden Age is linked with WWII).

The problem with sidekicks growing up is that it ages the heroes. The biggest problem is that DC keeps adding more sidekicks (Damian as the "new" Robin would be the biggest example if that rumors becomes true). Heck, Damian's existance is a problem because he is pretty old, and since Batman was, well Batman, when he was supposed to be born you just aged Bruce (unlike Ollie who had his kid before his GA career, thus not affecting the "sliding timeline").

Then you have characters like Dick and Wally, both have become characters in their own right, but both have been aged considerably and when you begin to think about Bruce has now become a lot older.

However, I think a lot can be done with suspension of disbelief, you just don't think about how old someone has to be, the trick is to not "lock" ages in (so avoid big age benchmarks) but also be cognizant of the limits of your fictional realm when doing things (like introducing Damian).

I'm for aging in comics, but I think you need to be aware of your limits. When Dick grew up as Nightwing (because the Bat books didn't want him) he basically forced the "aging" of all his peers. When Wally became the Flash and thus a full adult (even though he didn't act like it at first) this really forced another "aging" of that generation.

The trick now for DC would be to keep the middle generation (Dick, Wally) as the early to mid twenties yet still viable characters (get much older and bam, you have a problem).

Then they intro Jason, he dies, but then comes Tim and following him (in the 90s) you get the "next wave" of teen heroes, none sidekicks but all his peers. Thus if DC were smart they would keep Tim perpetually a teen, because once they age him they age an entire generation and then they have two post teenager generations and thus Dick and all them have to be aged yet again.

I think you need to keep things in bands, the Silver Agers are always peers of Batman/Superman in age (and experience). The young adults are the former Teen Titans (Dick, Wally, etc) and the teens are Tim and his gen. Try to add another band and your "sliding timeline" doesn't work.

So then you treat each character according to the band they are in. No character in the "teenager band" can graduate high school (or at least attend college, because now you're either in the next age band or just too darn close)

If anyone in the young adult band has kids (which chould be avoided except in biggest circumstances because writers can't write babies forever and kids age characters) those kids need to be kept under a certain age.

Now main characters can age, but any aging effects to these characters need to be thought out a lot before implemented, because if you age one Silver Ager you age the others, remember, Superman and Batman are there at the begining, and even though Hal and Ollie should be older than those two, they appeared heroicly at the same time and it is too hard to remind fans that even though Hal and Ollie are older, that doesn't make Bruce and Clark older. Using bands mean you all kind of age or deage together, regardless of actual starting ages.

As for the JSA, the big problem for me is their kids (which weren't the JSA pretty old when the kids were intro'ed anyways?). That is the problem because you have characters that I really think DC thought would be perpetual background players and never thought that introducing "kids" to spice up the franchise would create such a headache since people would care about Alan Scott and Jay and all in 2009.

You need some flexibility otherwise characters become stale, but at the same time if you are going to have a shared universe you need to be cognizant of the problems you face with aging one character. besides, you can have growth without aging characters too much.

Suspension of disbelief is a big part of comics, so if you say that all of Batman's career has taken place in 10 years I'll buy it unless you show me that Dick has aged 12 years. So work with the leeway fans will give you.

Again, JSA is a problem, but I think that's because DC thought that no one would care about these old guys long enough for it to be a problem.

Oh, and one last thing, don't tie characters who can't age into specific events. I love Captain Marvel, but you CAN NOT tie him in to the "dawning of the Heroic Age" because Billy HAS TO remain as a minor (it's part of the central concept of the character).

And I realized that I haven't really answered the question, but I think there should be growth in characters and sometimes aging accomplishes this (Dick could not be the character he is today if he was still Robin, the teen wonder) but you have to be smart about aging because you want to avoid making the character too old or having to reboot or reset the character.

By this time, you probably know my solution.

Set a fixed timeline. Let everyone age in real time.

Restart the whole thing every ~20 years. Seriously, this shouldn't be a problem. You should expect total audience turnover within that time anyway.

Over very long time spans, I don't see any use in retaining the same continuity at all. And so there's no need for flex-time in comics anymore. In its absence, we can have tighter continuity.

My solution: have two lines of comics. In one of them, the issue of time and aging is neither addressed nor acknowledged. The characters are evergreen. In the other, characters age in real time, they hand down their legacies to junior characters (sometimes) and when they die they stay dead. Obviously, these two would diverge fairly quickly, but that's okay.

So, no one would buy into the JSA as a bunch of grizzled Vietnam vets then?

<ducks>

I agree largely with TK. Restart continuity every twenty to twenty-five years for the major characters. Relegate the old continuity to an "alternate earth" or something, where stories can still be told in it. That way you can still have some titles set in the old continuity after the transition.

Continuity is something writers use to tell ongoing stories. Readers seem to have more and more issues with it as it gets bulkier and bulkier.

Don't reset it, just forget it. If a writer wants to use something from previous history to build a story, go write ahead. If something previously written would contradict a good story, ignore it. Just let writers tell their stories and not worry about contradictions or incongruences.

I'm a fairly new reader compared to most of the folks on this board, and definitly in this topic. But you guys certainly have examples in your collections of incongruent stories. Does it really hamper your enjoyment?

I think we're all in full agreement, actually. Rather than doing a reboot in the same titles, as Crisis on Infinite Earths was meant to be, it would probably be more viable to launch it like Marvel's Ultimate line, keeping the original universe running at least for a while. But, as I've explained elsewhere, do it like Marvel originally intended the Ultimate universe: as a different fictional universe, not a different part of the same multiverse. The latter would eventually lead to crossovers, and to metafictionality bleeding over into the new universe.
As pointed out by Cobalt Kid here: http://www.legionworld.net/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic;f=8;t=001778 a worthwhile "Ultimate" universe has to have different possibilities from the main universe. Non-metafictionality combined with a fixed timeline (note that I don't say real-time - who says all series have to be set in the present?) would give DC that. And to go with it, an all-new set of writers.
If DC ever does anything even close to this, I will certainly abandon what remains of my interest in the old universe.
Even as a younger reader, I have to say: Yes. I can only ever look at comic stories on their own merit - and believe me, most of them aren't that good on their own. I'm drawn to long-running series - long-running coherent series. No comic I've ever read was part of such a series as far as I know. I love comics more for what I wish they could be than for what they are.
I want continuity to be something more than "pick and choose", and I want it to be worthy of that status.

Part of the fun of being a fan used to be figuring out inconsistencies. For example, the idea that Supergirl joined the Legion before Superboy originated in a single-panel discrepancy.

I think that a fictional universe should be by and large consistent, but allowing some things to remain inconsistent can be a boon. It allows fans to become actively engaged in coming up with their own explanations. (Anybody on this board ever win a Marvel No-Prize?) Do we really need to know, for example, why some Klingons have head ridges and others don't?

HWW:

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...Do we really need to know, for example, why some Klingons have head ridges and others don't?...

Make sh#t up !!

Sorry. Couldn't resist.

Actually, I don't need to know if it's just filler, but if it adds anything to the story at hand, then go for it.

While it's a hard pill for fans to swallow at times, when the next creative team comes on board, they have a right to ignore the last team's ridge-theory, or even substitute their own that's completely at odds with that of the last team. If they do this in service of a story that would have suffered without it, great.

Artists seem to get much more leeway on this front than do writers, which isn't really fair when you think about it.

Klingon ridges aside: I recently caught part of the Enterprise episode which retconned an explanation for the human-looking Klingons. Fair enough, but the worst part of the episode was the ending, wherein one of the characters says that even their descendents will have the same disease that erased the ridges. These descendents, of course, are the ones we saw in the original ST series.

Thanks, ST people, for pointing that out, 'cause, y'no, we're two stoopid to figger it out.

I don't give artists that kind of leeway, either. There should be rules that say "This species looks like this." Without that, all I can ever assume I'm seeing is an interpretation of the fictional world's reality, and can never fully engage with it. I want to believe I'm seeing its reality directly.

This is the same reason I hate flex-time. It prevents full engagement because older stories, to be accepted in continuity, can't be as they appear in the actual comics (that is, they took place in a more recent year than shown).

And beyond that, it's the reason I hate retcons in general. It's why I want a universe that takes a more literal and less conceptual approach, if you get what I mean.

Honestly, I'd say the whole problem with the passage of time is a bigger one for DC than it is for Marvel. Yeah, you occasionally have to scratch your head trying to figure out how old Peter Parker is and how long he's been Spidey, but it seems Marvel doesn't have as much generational diversity as DC. DC is absolutely littered with proteges, kid sidekicks and what-not while Marvel is not so much. I mean, you have your occasional New Warriors, New Mutants, Runaways, Power Pack and Young Avengers, but very few of them have close ties with Marvel's icons in a way that might age those icons by association. It's not totally absent, of course, but not as prominent.

I suppose part of this is because the Marvel Universe as we know it is about 20 years younger than the DCU in terms of continuous publication. And oddly enough, it seems that Marvel's younger heroes have a harder time catching on than DC's. Hardly any teen characters introduced at Marvel in the decades since Spidey debuted have really stayed prominent very long. Yes, you have the New Mutants characters still around in various X-comics but no one really graduating to headlining their own solo title. Certainly Marvel hasn't had anything comparable to DC's long-lasting Robin title. So that lack of teen characters with real staying power and headlining potential has kept Marvel from having to really worry about addressing generational concerns.

On the flipside of the age scale, Marvel's had only a handful of their Golden Age characters still around. Cap was solved by being frozen for decades and Namor is extra long-lived as an Atlantean. Bucky was presumed dead but was revealed to be kept in and out of suspended animation over the decades as the Winter Soldier. And the original Torch was an android. And there are really very few others for Marvel to worry about.

So in a way DC has been a bit more daring by developing younger characters and exploring the older generations but has gotten themselves into this mess as a consequence. We love those old coot JSAers. We love seeing our Robins, Speedys and Kid Flash's grow up and getting out of their mentors' shadows. And we love seeing who's gonna take their places as teen sidekicks and adventurers in turn. It's really a big part of DC's charm, I think.

The only solution, it seems, is to go ahead and continue to let these characters age, albeit not quite at the rate we are. Why the hell not?!? After all, it's a known fact that the average age of the current comic reader is climbing higher and higher. Who's to say in that context that we wouldn't appreciate seeing Superman and Lois Lane start to raise a family or watching Bruce wayne retire (or semi-retire) and let one of his proteges take over or let Barry Allen stay dead while Wally continues to carry on his legacy proudly?

I think the huge fly in the ointment here is the current boom in superhero movies. These are the biggest blockbusters of the day, and the studios are looking for icons to bring to the screen. The comics companies have their hands tied as to go too much against the visions on the silver screen would confuse any consumers who might possibly be bitten by the bug to try out their comics. This is despite the fact that this has not happened much historically. Watchmen aside, there's been very little evidence of more than a brief spike (and sometimes not even that) to sales of a comic starring the hero featured on the big screen. But I guess the reciprocal is that the comic companies fear that if their character isn't definitive or iconic enough, then the studios will pass over the opportunity to make a movie out of it.

So, I dunno, we may have to wait until the current movie boom passes to see some solution to the aging problem. Let's hope the comics will still even be around when that happens!

Dan Didio and I agree that the original Titans growing up have cause that aging issue we have today. Prior to that, even with the JSA tied to WWII, there were ways to circumvent the passage of time.

But now that all the Titans have had kids (swinging bachelor Dick excepted) how do we explain Bruce being in his mid 30's? He and Dick are the biggest problem really. All the others can stay somewhat young because of their powers- Supes being a solar battery, Diana being immortal, Flash tapping into the Speed Force- but even Bruce has to give up the good fight sometime around his 40's.

Well, if we just kill all the damn Titans, that would solve the problem, wouldn't it?

Actually, we'd have to make it so they and all their kids and lovers, etc. had never existed! No evidence must be left!!!

They need to steal one of the decent ideas John Byrne had and have Bats take a bath in the Lazarus Pit (after defeating the Serpent's Head once and for all) and becoming immortal, like the rest of his League buddies (since we've seen evidence that Superman, Wonder Woman, Martian Manhunter, etc. don't age, and that the Flash(es), etc. can also negate their aging in various ways.

Then it will be a moot point whether or not Bats is 'getting too old for this ****.'

I dunno. An immortal Batman just seems wrong on so many levels.

Er... Unless he's a vampire.

Yeah, that was an Elseworlds called "Red Reign".

Does anyone concur that my assertion that aging and the passage of time is MUCH more a problem for DC than for Marvel? I thought my post near the top of this page would've provoked some responses, but instead, the thread went DEAD for five days!

Thoughts?

Well Marvel doesn't really do the legacy thing. (They did with Legacy, and look how he turned out.) They are starting to get to that point tho'. But I don't think there was anything to debate with your comment Lardy. Marvel doesn't have the aging issue DC has.

With DC's use of teen sidekicks, that's been the biggest cause for aging. Even if the JSA were tied to WWII, you could say their... enhanced physiology would slow their aging rate. And their kids could feasibly be pushing 30.

Up until Young Avengers, Marvel's only really aging character would be Spiderman. And well, they've clearly fixed that problem haven't they... The New Mutants, while being the underclassmen, weren't as young as Dick Grayson. And they haven't aged as much either- Sam still can't drink if I recall an X-Men annual from a couple years back.

Captain America, Namor, Magneto- these characters have connections to WWII. But through cryogenics, reversed aging, and mutant anatomy, they've been able to remain active even into their 70's. For the rest of the Marvel U, it's a matter of tweaking origins ala` Heroes Reborn. (Not a fine example, but an obvious one.)

They should go the "New Look Batman" route and erase all previous continuity and have Batman and Robin just 'show up' again. They've "been around awhile" but no one knows them.

Internet fans would commit suicide by the dozens.

Honestly, Bruce Wayne not being Batman does not appeal to me. Its Bruce or bust. And let the entire DCU history and continuity suffer if need be. And obviously, most of DC, *and* Time Warner, agree with me. I'd wager so do most of the citizens of the United States of America that do not collect comics on a regular basis. Mainly because Bruce is central now to the history of modern popular-culture. He's beyond things such as 'continuity'.

Lard Lad, I think you said one of the few things that the internet can agree on.

I don't like the idea of an immortal Batman, it goes against the entire "idea" of the character (mortal man who has trained, but no special powers). To make him immortal disconnects him from all of that.

It's one reason I don't like the Lazarus pit, I'm fine with it being for Ra's Al Ghul (after all, villains play by different rules than heroes) but for anyone else to use it is just wrong in my eyes. I don't even like the idea that Black Canary supposedly got dunked, to me the Lazarus pit works if only Ra's can use it, but when you open up to everyone else in the DC it blurs lines or something.

Here, let me try to be coherent. To me, Batman, and his characters (Nightwing, Robin, Oracle, etc) work on two levels, the street level of the Bat-verse (Gotham and their respective cities) and the DC universe as a whole.

To me it makes no sense for Batman NOT to call on Superman everytime Joker breaks out of jail. I cannot fathom a Batman who is so arrogant that he won't use ALL the resources at his disposal to stop a mass murderer. HOWEVER, you can't have a superhero (or a protagonist in general) who is constantly being bailed out or helped by other heroes. He becomes incompetent. So Batman has to fight crime on his own. It is a situation that has to exist for the character to be viable.

Look at the other cities of the DCU, generally all their costumed denziens are powered, yet Gotham is crawling with NON-powered heroes, in fact I can't think of any Gotham based hero who has powers. It's because Gotham is a base for the more "realistic" non-powered stories whereas the rest of the DCU is for the powered set.

So that is the Bat-verse, in a way if Batman had been independently owned or with a smaller company (ala Fawcett) it would make sense to have Batman in a separate universe/earth as that is essentially how those characters operate in their own titles (or the "Bat" titles).

The DC universe Batman (and family) are the characters that interact with Superman, Flash, Titans, etc. Also very important aspects of the characters, and interesting relationships that shouldn't be gotten ride of for the sake of convince, but in reality conflict with the Bat-verse version of the characters. This is why you don't see the JLA, Titans, or anyone else visiting these characters in their own book on any regular basis (there is generally one issue every now and then, but I bet you can name all the ones in the last decade on one hand, and even fewer would be ones in which the Bat clan and the other heroes actually took out a Bat foe).

Ok, so my point is that DC has a very popular character that is important to the DCU, but also whose solo adventures don't work in the context of the DCU. We as fans buy into this conceit (just as we will believe that a man can fly) but as fans we generally don't want to see these two verses mesh. So an immortal Batman crosses into the more fantastic realm of all the other Bat characters (same with using all the advance tech the JLA has make Babs walk again, crosses a line). And that line into the fantastic is why I don't like the Lazarus pit.

So DC is kinda stuck with this problem. They could do a general reboot, but I am against that solution because a) it undoes a lot of character growth/movement (I don't want to see Dick as Robin again) b) characters will disappear (Tim Drake, one of my faves and c) you open up a whole new can of worms with whether you should have Clark end up and Lois (predictable but what many fans want as they see this as "right") or putting Clark with someone else just to "shake" things up and thus alienate fans who feel the relationship is "hollow" or whatever

Anyways, hope that makes sense.

Your comment about Batman existing in two separate universes really highlights my frustration with the Big Two books. I miss the different tones of Mike Grell’s Green Arrow and James Robinson’s Starman. Too often the books are generic super-hero fare- replace Hawkman for Blue Beetle, Aquaman for the Atom. Under Judd Winnick’s run, Green Arrow had a sidekick return, a son, a new sidekick and even a computer hacker working with him, Might as well have been writing Batman! Sad part of it all, I blame readers as much as the publishers- when DC tries with books like Manhunter readers don’t flock to it like I would expect.

Marvel is doing a great job handling Captain America- Bru writes a gripping espionage book, and Bendis has him in a standard super-hero title interacting with the rest of the universe. I wish we had more of that. I like the idea of the urban vigilante in Batman, and the adventurous Dark Knight in JLA or Outsiders. Give me the poor man’s Robin Hood in GA and the swashbuckler in Justice League.

With all the books out there, why can’t we have more variety in our heroes?

I'm not referring to anything as blatant as redesigning the look, ground-up, of a particular species. I'm talking about the basic stylistic differences in the way one artist renders figures and composes pages, as opposed to how another does so. One of my favorite things about the Heroes History page of Major Spoilers is getting to see back-to-back how a bunch of different artists interpreted the same characters-- though it still bothers me that frequently the page doesn't credit a particular artist: I often don't know whose work I'm seeing because it was either before my time reading Legion or after.

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This is the same reason I hate flex-time. It prevents full engagement because older stories, to be accepted in continuity, can't be as they appear in the actual comics (that is, they took place in a more recent year than shown).

And beyond that, it's the reason I hate retcons in general. It's why I want a universe that takes a more literal and less conceptual approach, if you get what I mean.

Uh, yeah. No argument there. Though to be fair, it hurts the integrity of a story in the distant future less than it hurts one set in the present.

I didn't mean for this to linger unloved for so long...


While doing some bathroom remodeling, it has occurred to me there is no reading material in my bathroom. There's a reason for that- I'm not one for reading in there. But I know many people that do. There's even a series of books- The Bathroom Reader- aimed at providing leisure time reading in the lavatory.

So I'm thinking of stocking up some older comics to put in there for folks to read. Something else else that would provide them with a complete story preferrably. What would you recommend as a great single issue story?