For a number of reasons, I really didn’t want to do a “Brand New Day” post.

First, this is nominally a DC-oriented column. Second, I haven’t read Amazing Spider-Man since 1989, and don’t plan to anytime soon. Third, the comics blogosphere seems to have burned out on “BND.” Fourth, I did kinda talk about it, albeit so subtly you might not have noticed, last week.

So this is not really an essay on “Brand New Day.” It gets back to DC eventually. You’ll see.

Until then, let’s start with an excerpt from Paul O’Brien’s review of ASM #546:

When DC do this sort of thing, they rewrite history, literally altering their universe to reflect the new reality. But Marvel have opted for a weird hybrid approach. […] In this way, Marvel are trying to have their cake and eat it, by asserting that past stories are still “valid”, while simultaneously emptying them of any continuing meaning….

In order to think that this is a good idea, you have to have a rather bizarre and obsessive attitude to continuity. The only advantage of doing it this way, instead of just rewriting history wholesale, is that it preserves the formal validity of earlier stories as part of present day continuity, even while denying them any meaningful place in that continuity. In other words, you have to ascribe a talismanic significance to the importance of retaining these earlier stories as part of the canon, as an end in itself. This is a very strange way of approaching the problem, and delivers the worst of both worlds.

While I don’t know that I would call it “bizarre,” I do agree that the shared-universe approach means being at least a little obsessive about continuity. Lately I’ve been throwing around pretentious-sounding terms like “continuous chronicle” and “continuous narrative” to describe DC’s varying approaches to its shared uni/multiverse. To me, being consistent is part of being continuous, and before you know it you’re a continuity cop.

DC is, of course, just trying to replicate the community-building Marvel has found so effective. Marvel’s experience with a single continuing macro-narrative, grounded largely in the Bullpen’s creative output from 40-50 years ago, gives it an advantage. DC, by contrast, wants to reconcile characters and stories going back as far as 70 years from all over the creative map. Thus, the smaller number of sources makes the Marvel U. look more cohesive, regardless of whether it actually is.

However, by sticking with the particular macro-narrative that describes its shared universe, Marvel makes all its old stories “important,” regardless of their artistic merits or their cumulative effects. That sounds like the “talismanic significance” O’Brien describes, which makes preserving Marvel’s macro-narrative an important concern. Obviously DC doesn’t share that concern, at least not to the same degree, because it’s gotten comfortable with its own arsenal of time-tweaks. The fact that Marvel thought a Wally West Secret-ID Restoration Maneuver would serve Spider-Man better than a more mundane explanation is, to me, illustrative of the pitfalls of serial superhero storytelling.

My understanding is that Spider-Man needed two basic “fixes”: make him single, and restore his secret identity. The latter is a harder fix than the former, if we take magic out of consideration. Just for the sake of argument, though, let’s say that both are reparable without using magic. That still leaves a lot of leeway. I wouldn’t rule out a story arc where, I don’t know, the Fantastic Four and/or the Avengers construct some elaborate scheme, perhaps involving a Clark Kent robot, to convince everyone that Pete was just doing Spidey a favor by “unmasking” and then fighting all of Spidey’s villains with all of Spidey’s powers. Whatever they might be, the solutions themselves aren’t important. The point is, the marriage gets traded for the secret identity in a story arc which bridges the post-Civil War Spidey with the single-and-anonymous Spidey Marvel wants. Marvel evidently needed the story pretty quickly, too. Hence, “One More Day.”

I’m not going to get too much farther into the briar patch of altered continuity. My question today is, when should an explanatory story arc be published? In other words, when do you need to explain? The answer for the Big Two seems to be that, in order to preserve the macro-narrative (and especially the sense that things are happening as we speak), these events must all proceed in regular sequence. “One More Day” is the prerequisite for “Brand New Day,” and Final Crisis requires Countdown. The story matters less than the fact that there is a story, even if that story is just a setup for the real story.

It doesn’t have to be that way, but apparently that’s the way it is. Besides, DC got burned the last time it tried something different.

I liked the idea of One Year Later mostly because a) it emphasized that, after Infinite Crisis, the characters needed to recuperate; and b) it skipped all of that recuperation in order to get right to the good stuff. During the Year of 52 (May ‘06-May ‘07), DC pulled off what seems to me a pretty unusual, even remarkable feat: it abandoned that strict sense of “order” and let the superhero books go off on their own directions.

Compare that with the current Year of Countdown, in which everything was supposed to be synchronized with the weekly “spine,” so that events would proceed in sequence until Final Crisis was ready. Trouble is, those events haven’t been that compelling, and Countdown has felt more like a placeholder. While the Earth-51 story of the past few issues has been pretty decent, that only points up how little seems to have happened elsewhere in the miniseries. Part of the problem, to my way of thinking, is that Countdown took its own importance for granted.

And part of that, I think, is Countdown’s timing. Obviously DC wanted to capitalize on 52’s goodwill by scheduling Countdown to start immediately after. In order to do that, DC needed to emphasize Countdown’s importance in the Great Scheme Of Big Events. Thus, it became a year-long lead-in. (That in turn put DC in a no-win scenario: the more relevant Countdown is to Final Crisis, the more inaccessible FC appears; but the more irrelevant CD is, the less it’s “worth” to DC’s apparent target audience.) More to the point, it couldn’t afford not to be a weekly year-long lead-in. It could set up Final Crisis and be its own Event, so presto! Nwodtnuoc raeppa!

Except … what if DC had just taken a year off from its Crisis churning? What if Marvel had done its own time-jump, presented Spidey’s neo-retro status quo without preamble, and held off filling in the blanks?

Look, sooner or later, the rest of DC’s superheroes will find out about the whole Monarch vs. the Monitors thing, because Donna, Ray, et al. will have to tell them. Essentially, that explanation will boil down to a few sentences, at most, summarizing Countdown and all of its setup. That makes me wonder why, at the end of 52, DC didn’t just advertise — a la Geoff Johns at the end of “Sinestro Corps” — “Final Crisis Coming In 2008, See You Then.”

To some extent that’s a rhetorical statement. I know a lot of people are enjoying Countdown; I know DC’s glad to have something to talk about every week; and I know the underlying marketing strategies. Still, what’s going to stand out on the shelves at Barnes & Noble in a year or two? If those hypothetical B & N browsers are interested in a good superhero story, what’ll they want to read? If the trend is towards more self-contained, collection-friendly stories, you’d think the serialized stuff would be similarly self-contained. Would you buy four volumes of Countdown or one of Final Crisis? The One More Day collection, which ends with Spidey’s deal with the devil, or the Brand New Day collection, which is ostensibly more accessible?

If you have to read every story — if you’re invested in the “talismanic significance” of those stories to your choice of shared universe — then you’ll get ‘em all; and the Big Two will thank you. (I say this as someone who’s bought all of Countdown so far, plus a good bit of the spinoffs, if only so I can talk about ‘em here.) However, I don’t know that the Big Two can reliably cultivate those kinds of completists. That hypothetical B & N browser who gets the two volumes of “Sinestro Corps” might be willing to wait for the “Blackest Night” trade and skip the in-between collections.

Nevertheless, the Big Two have developed their overarching storytelling styles (and their marketing habits) to such a point that Donna and company can’t just disappear for a year, flitting in and out of various regular titles. That worked for the proto-viral marketing of Crisis On Infinite Earths where, starting a couple of years ahead of COIE #1, the Monitor and/or his satellite would pop up mysteriously in random DC books. A comparable Viral Countdown would have required more top-down editorial involvement, but it might have made the story itself feel more important, and it might even have encouraged readers to try some ongoing books.

It never would have happened, though. COIE was conceived in an era where newsstands were still a factor and miniseries were relatively new. Whether by design or through adjustment, Countdown occupies its own corner of the superhero line. It aims to be its own “brand” or “franchise,” but I think it can be ignored … and that may be its worst flaw.

If the appeal of a weekly series lies in its immediacy — in the sense that you don’t have to wait a month for the cliffhanger to be resolved — then Countdown wasn’t a bad idea. It plays into the linear storytelling underlying the Big Two’s shared universes. One issue builds on the next, and so on, such that by the end of the year the reader is whipped into a froth (welcome, Google searchers!). We fans accept this method of storytelling, I think, because it gives us that something to talk about, and even (sorry in advance) a little mystery to figure out. However, when you remove those participatory elements, and especially the anticipatory elements, what’s left needs to be compelling on its own. Otherwise, it’s just process. It’s the difference between 52 and World War III. One was a coherent story, the other was just perfunctory. One was somewhat suspenseful — was Booster really dead? Where’s Ralph, post-52? Whither Charlie? — and the other was an orgy of carnage and unrelated plot points.

Again, part of the appeal of One Year Later and “Brand New Day” is the notion that all the preliminaries are over, so the stories people want to read (and tell) can begin in earnest. Why not just go ahead and tell those stories, and supply the preliminaries later?

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 17th, 2008 at 12:00 pm and is filed under Comic Books, DC Comics, Grumpy Old Fan, Marvel, Version 1.0 Blog@. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.