Thursday, January 15, 2009

Witless Dictionary #5--Ouroboroisty

Because no one thought to stop it, here it is again. Another installment in a continuing series of hot and juicy definitions that, with any luck will aid you in your understanding of just what the hell I'm on about just about every other day.

Ahh . . .who'm I kidding?

Ouroborosity--Term used to describe the ever-increasing habit among writers of superhero comics to cannibalise older stories or even flat-out retell them to no real great effect. The overall effect of this, of course, is to grind any and all forward momentum for a character or his or her respective title to a halt as readers have to endure the grueling feeling of deja vu and general futility (after all, it is the comic equivalent of reheated leftovers) that ouroborosity inevitably engenders.

10 comments:

Diana Kingston-Gabai said...

Two words: INFINITE CRISIS.

Another two words: SPIDER-MAN. (Seriously, have they done anything in the last five years that wasn't a retread?)

Kazekage said...

I think, if you do a story with Spider-Man lifting a huge object off your shoulders and it's not the mid-60s and you're not Stan Lee and Steve Ditko, you probably should be blackballed from comics.

Seriously. Haven't we all seen this way too many times, now?

Diana Kingston-Gabai said...

I think Marvel is learning the hard way that its old iconography is having shorter and shorter effects on the reader - no one bats an eye when the X-Mansion is destroyed yet again (which was probably the impetus for changing the setting in the first place), or when Spidey puts on the Black Suit. Older readers have seen it before, newer readers don't understand what the big deal is in the first place.

Kazekage said...

Moving to San Fran was a step in the right direction, I think. You can't blow up the mansion anymore (Although, seeing as how it's the jump off point for Wolverine and the X-Men, in another medium with some things shuffled around--even the familiar can set up an intriguing premise) and I think the movie was an acknowledgment that it's well past time for any change that doesn't involve a move to Australia.

How we square this with Spider-Man being reset 25 years back so the same exact stories can be re-told I don't know, unfortunately . . .

Diana Kingston-Gabai said...

To be fair, you could say that one potential up-side to the reset is that it got rid of all the junk that had accumulated in the last five or six years: bone claws, animal totems, Gwen Stacy playing Hide The Glider with Norman Osborn, Iron Spider, public outing... not a single one of those changes had any positive effects, so while they went and threw out the bath, the baby, the linoleum, the sink and the deed to the house along with the bathwater, at least we're back to some semblance of sanity from which, presumably, matters can proceed along a more reasonable course. Though, of course, seeing as how Quesada's still running things and he's the twit that authorized those ridiculous changes in the first place, how far they'll get is another matter entirely.

Kazekage said...

The problem with that is, in disregarding all the continuity barnacles, they've called attention to them all over again by making the disposal of so many idiotic character changes, thus encouraging the impulse among comic fans to obsessively pay attention to every single continuity detail.

Events make me insane sometimes. Why not, rather than rejigger continuity in some big event that basically says "Forget all those times we lied to you before, we will tell Good Stories starting NOW." Just . . .tell good stories.

Diana Kingston-Gabai said...

Because, sadly, that's what Marvel thinks a good story is: the promise of a better story yet to come.

Kazekage said...

Well, DC's not all that different--remember how long the ram-up to Final Crisis took and how many books were sold as self-contained, but were just extended trailers of contradictory bits promising a slam-bang story that never exactly came, did it?

Diana Kingston-Gabai said...

Not only that, they kept changing the reading list... I remember there was a huge dust-up during "Infinite Crisis" because there was a whole side-storyline in "Wonder Woman" that, as it turned out, was critical for understanding the story, only it hadn't been listed anywhere (and, of course, made DiDio's claims of self-containment even more ridiculous).

Kazekage said...

Oh God, I remember that--was that the one that was stuck in-between the OMAC project miniseries? God, that was awful, and the fact that history's shown us it's gotten less organised, comprehensible, and enjoyable since then.