By fnord12 | August 6, 2007, 11:45 AM | Comics | Comments (2)| Link

Marvel Continuity - it's been there from the beginning

I see these sort of comments a lot on the comic boards and blogs:

Also, given that the really strict inter-book continuity didn't come until the Thomas/Engelhart/etc. era of the late '60s and early '70s, it's pretty disingenuous to claim it's a foundation of the Marvel Universe. Stan and Jack (and Steve) were pretty much making that stuff up as they went along, and would frequently change/ignore things on a whim.

It's totally wrong. While the second wave of Marvel creators definitely kicked up the 'shared universe' thing a notch (almost going too far by having, for example, the X-Men fight a random group of second tier super-villains from other heroes' rogues galleries), the original Stan Lee written stuff was extremely tight.

I've just read through all my Marvel comics from 1962 to 1967, which is pretty much the pure Stan Lee era (Roy Thomas starts creeping in during '66), in chronological order, and it was much more rewarding that i thought it would be. I didn't expect to really see the tight inter-book continuity until the Jim Shooter era but it really is right there in the beginning. Stan Lee was creating an actual universe from the very start. It is one of the two distinguishing features of the early Silver Age marvel books (the other being the increased realism / flawed hero concept).

Other than building an overall brand loyalty (gotta follow all the Marvel books because you don't want to miss a part of the story), this wasn't directly a marketing thing. Referring back to older issues of other comics in your line or having Spider-Man villains appear in an Iron Man story may have sent readers back to the newstands looking for older issues but in the days before comic book shops they weren't likely to find any, and even if they were i don't believe Marvel would have seen any of that money, having already sold the issues to the newstand. Stan also did the more obvious "Spider-Man appears in an early issue of Daredevil in order to increase sales on a new book" stuff, but we're not talking about that here.

This post was sparked by an article on Comics Should Be Good advocating that if a writer doesn't like something that happened in a character's history, they should disregard it (the line quoted above is in the comments). It's one thing if Captain Vegan eats a meatball sub in issue #7 and we think that was bad writing and we never again refer to the fact that he ate that sub. It's OK because that doesn't mean it didn't happen; it just means that we don't have to keep picking at that old wound. It's not ok if Captain Vegan gets turned into a giant warthog in his own series, but the writer for The Dirty Hippies, of which Captain Vegan is a member, doesn't like the idea so he does not depict Vegan as a warthog in his book. This causes a... discontinuity, in the most basic sense, between the books - the two versions of Captain Vegan are no longer the same character and instead of the two books depicting glimpses into a substantial fictional universe, i'm just reading a bunch of crappy comics about guys/warthogs in tights eating meatballs. If you have no interest in telling stories that are part of that universe, if you just want to make an artistic Vertigo-style self-contained Meatball Oddessey, that's easy. Simply don't write for in-continuity characters. But self-contained books have a much harder time with sales. One of the reasons for that is that the concept of the shared universe is actually quite popular among current comic book readers. So don't go screwing it up.

Sorry for the tangent. The relevance is that while i like to defend continuity on its own merits, others, rightfully, bring up the fact that for the Marvel Universe specifically, it is one of the foundations and therefore to start dropping that concept is to basically remove one of the appeals of Marvel. (I don't read DC comics regularly but i'm somewhat aware of the crises that they have from time to time and i know that they started at something of a disadvantage in that they had been publishing stories of varying degrees of silliness since the Golden Age whereas Marvel got to come in and basically start things from scratch, under the direction of a single writer, in the 60s. I think it's possible that DC and other comic companies may in fact benefit from what the Comics Should Be Good guy is advocating here but i'll leave that to other, shorter, individuals to discuss). So i'm trying to show what type of continuity is under attack and also show that it has been there from the beginning. I don't know if i've succeeded because this post is turning out to be very long and full of asides and it's getting near quitting time.

Here is an example of the what i consider to be tight continuity within the early MU:

• Within the first few issues of the Avengers, the Hulk joins the team, and then quits because the other members don't trust him. He quickly turns around and teams up with the Sub-Mariner (a Golden Age character re-introduced to the MU in the Fantastic Four) to fight the Avengers. The Team-Up doesn't go very well and the Hulk and Namor go their separate ways.
• Soon after, in a great two issue arc in the Fantastic Four, the Hulk finds out that his partner, Rick Jones, has left him to hang out with Captain America. The Hulk returns to New York to extract vengeance on Cap and the Avengers, but bumps into the FF instead. Later, the Avengers show up because they feel responsible for him, having driven him away and stolen his partner. This is the first meeting between the FF and the Avengers and it is written as such.
• A year or so later, a new roster of Avengers go off and try to recruit the Hulk onto their team at the direction of Iron Man before he resigns (both because he and the other original Avengers feel responsible for the Hulk and because the new team is lacking in raw power). However, they wind up not finding the Hulk because he has recently been captured by the Leader (as depicted in his own book). Instead they wind up in conflict with a different monster - one of the Mole Man's pets (the Mole Man was originally introduced in the FF).
• Meanwhile, in the X-Men, Magneto proposes a partnership with Namor, but Namor is hesitant because the last time he entered a partnership with someone (the Hulk) it didn't work out very well.

There is so much interrelated, cross-comic stuff in the above example that i feel sorry for anyone who just reads a run of the FF or Avengers instead of reading it all together, because they're only getting a percentage of the over-all story that is being told. We are drawing on plot points and/or characterization from 5 books (Hulk, Avengers, FF, Tales to Astonish, X-Men) plus Namor's Golden Age stories. The reason that it works so well is because Stan Lee keeps track of where all his characters are, what their motivations are, and considers how their past experiences affect their current decisions. He gets some of the details wrong, like calling Bruce Banner Bob all through one of the FF issues, and this is what people point to when they say that Stan Lee played fast and loose and that early Silver Age continuity wasn't tight, but in terms of the stuff that matters, he is totally on the ball. The Avengers' guilt in driving the Hulk away, the Hulk's distrust of people, and Namor's skepticism in taking allies are pieces of characterization that develop across various books and over time.

Some other, hopefully quicker, examples:

• Paste Pot Pete is released early from jail in an issue of Strange Tales because he helped the Avengers figure out a way to dissolve Baron Zemo's Adhesive X in an Avengers issue.
• Hercules, travelling across the country in between two issues of Thor, winds up facing the Hulk in an issue of Tales to Astonish. Hercules' appearance in the TTA story is not advertised in the Thor issues, nor are the Thor issues even referenced in TTA.
• Having been deported in an older issue of Amazing Spider-Man, the Chameleon and Kraven the Hunter sneak back into the country and wind up on the property of Stark Industries in an issue of Tales of Suspense. Kraven is captured by Iron Man and jailed. In order to rescue his friend, the Chameleon takes advantage of the fact that Captain America has very recently joined the Avengers, and he impersonates Cap in order to get Cap and Iron Man fighting. Note that this issue of TOS is building on stories from two separate sources: Spider-Man and the Avengers.

Does that fact that Marvel started off with a strong sense of continuity between books dictate that it must always have a strong continuity? Is it possible to keep up what Stan and others accomplished now that we have multiple writers, multiple editors and an ever increasing back-story? I would argue (again and again) that it is valuable and possible, but we can debate that. But stop saying that there was no sense of continuity in the early Marvel days. There was, and it was very strong.