The first was this interview with Marv Wolfman, comparing the remit for Crisis on Infinite Earths with the current DC reboot(which turned out to be the same old dosh with a new coat of paint on it, up to and including being written for the god damned trade--yet supposed to move single issues how, exactly?-- but if you believed that was going to be any different, you neglected to remember how to spot a Dan DiDio lie: If his lips are moving . . .it's probably bullshit) It's an interesting read, most especially for this pearl of wisdom from Marv:
The line I've been using since before Crisis is, "Continuity holds the best writer hostage of the worst." I believe continuity held to the extreme stifles creativity. Comics should expand your thoughts not restrict them and the more continuity that exists the smaller field you have to explore. I think you need to clear the field every so often and let the writers breathe. Let them come up with the wackiest, craziest ideas and not worry that ten years before someone did a story that prevents that new great idea from being done. Finally, to me, continuity of character is much more important that continuity of story ideas. You need to know and understand the characters and they need to be consistent so we can believe they are real. But there is a vast difference between consistency and continuity.
Thanks Marv. As a result, I take back half of the mean things I said about your run on New Titans following Titans Hunt.
In other news, by way of Colin Smith at Too Busy Thinking About My Comics talking about how utterly feeble Fear Itself's murder of Bucky was (if I spoiled this for you--too bad, and I don't care. In that order) he relates a story from a con panel wherein Matt Fraction said the following:
“You do that and it is the all-time greatest Captain America story. Put it up in the rafters. No one is going to ever touch it. You are Frank Miller on Daredevil if you have the Red Skull kill Bucky when you’ve done with Bucky.”
I'm gonna let the Miz handle this one in the only way he can:
5 comments:
(I almost accidentally typed this whole comment in caps lock. That would have been funny, but possibly for all the wrong reasons.)
Couple o' things:
1) I agree with that idea in theory, but in practice, it never works that way. Post-Crisis DC was all about explaining how the rewritten continuity worked way too often, and retelling older stories instead of new ones. it always made me wonder what the point was, exactly.
(I have a great Julie Schwartz quote on my blog that says something similar to Marv's quote, but perhaps even more concisely.)
2) I somehow knew Bucky coming back to life was just to kill him off again, but Marvel has managed to botch even that quite nicely.
(it would have been very appropriate, really. Marv was, after all, the master of the inappropriate hollering when he wrote comics)
1) I suppose so, and I have a feeling that, as we did with the Ultimate comics and the Post-Zero Hour Legion reboot a lot of retelling stuff with modern trappings, which is a shame. I wonder sometimes why comic creators don;t just allow themselves to play in the sandbox rather than having to take us through building and filling the sandbox.
(Julie was always good for a snappy pull-quote, eh?)
2) Yeah, good job Marvel on making Bucky look like even more of a placeholder than he already did. Jesus, do people even understand that it's not that you kill a character, but whether you kill them well?
"The point is that comics are fantasy, telling stories that didn't really happen. When you try to bring too much reality into fantasy, it has a tendency not to be entertaining. So if we're not consistent at times, you simply must excuse us."--Julius Schwartz
More here.
What makes it even better is that I am fairly certain the interviewer was Mark Gruenwald.
. . .and for all his continuity mania, I don't think Mark would ever have let things get to this point, really, do you?
That is one of the tragedies of our times - that comics have become so involved that we can't even imagine Mark Gruenwald being able to make heads or tails of them.
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