During the course of the comments thread on my post last week (and by the way, I’m just going to take half a second and digress to thank everyone who comments. Seriously, blogging is a writing gig that provides absolutely no financial recompense for most of the people who do it, but getting to hear so many people provide you with intelligent feedback on your work makes it all worth it. You’re all wonderful people, thanks!)

…in any event, during the course of the comments thread on my post last week, malakim2099 said, “Also, I would suggest this, because frankly the current status of comics bugs me. Let the characters age naturally. Or close to it. See, right now, if comics followed real chronology, Scott Summers should be the Professor of Xavier’s institute, Franklin Richards the grizzled field leader of the X-Men, etc. And that’s just a tiny example. The recent bout of “legacy” characters stepping in is a good thing (Steve Rogers as Director of SHIELD while Bucky is Cap, or Dick and Steph as Batman and Batgirl), but it’s a baby step in the right direction.” (They provided paragraph breaks, by the way. I condensed it slightly.)

And it’s interesting to me, because this is by no means the first time I’ve heard that statement, or some variation on it. The idea that comic book universes should age in real time seems to be a tremendously popular one in fandom, but everyone who espouses it seems to take it as self-evident. I’ve heard the idea dozens of times, but I don’t think I’ve ever heard a justification for it.

The reasons against it are pretty obvious, of course; for one thing, it rests on the false assumption that comics time and real time are actually equivalent, despite the fact that a comics story that can take a year to come out might only cover a week of real time. (Fun comics fact: Uncanny X-Men #164 to Excalibur #24 take place over a single 365-day period, according to Chris Claremont. (Kitty Pryde’s 14th birthday takes place while she’s in space, infected with a Brood embryo, while her 15th birthday takes place right after she returns from the Cross-Time Caper.) This means that everything during that span, including both Secret Wars, Iron Man’s losing his company during his descent into alcoholism and his subsequent return to power as CEO, Spider-Man changing his costume from red-and-blue to black and then back to red-and-blue, Captain America being stripped of his super-heroic identity by the federal government and returned to power, several line-up changes in the Fantastic Four, the entire invasion at the hands of the Dire Wraiths and subsequent war, the destruction of Xavier’s mansion and the seeming death of the entire team of X-Men, the Mutant Massacre, and the temporary conversion of New York into a demonic outpost of the Limbo dimension…all take place in one year. Gives a new definition to “annus horribilis”, doesn’t it?)

For another thing, it’s never going to happen because comics fans (especially casual fans) read a series for more than just the title. When you read “The Fantastic Four”, you’re reading about more than just four people who are pretty damned fantastic. You’re reading for the dynamic between Reed, Sue, Ben, and Johnny, and their various supporting cast members and villains. The idea that an FF book would be just as good if it was a teenage Franklin Richards battling Kristoff von Doom is strange and alien to me. And you can apply this to any title you’d care to name. I don’t want to read about Ben Reilly, coffee-shop barista and part-time super-hero. I don’t want to read about Grim and Gritty Cyborg Assassin Bucky, and putting him into a Captain America outfit doesn’t make him Captain America. I, like the rest of the world, could care less about Jared Stevens. I’m not saying there haven’t been good legacy books out there–I loved the John Rogers Blue Beetle run, Tom DeFalco did good things with Spider-Girl, and Wally West is pretty much the poster boy for a successful transition from kid sidekick to official hero, at least until Geoff Johns found out he could bring Barry back. But in general, I think that legacy book succeed despite being legacy books, not because of them. The Silver Age DC relaunches were a unique success that everyone assumes can be repeated easily and effortlessly, despite decades of evidence to the contrary.

But I’m a good listener, and this is an open-ended comments section. So please, if you want to see a legacy universe, explain your reasons to me. I’d love to know what makes the idea so appealing to so many!

ITEM! Digital comics are the next big thing! That having been said, Dani Jones echoes my sentiments here: it is beyond stupid that DC and Marvel have their own apps for comic viewing on the internet. I’ve said before that comics seem determined to make every single mistake the music industry did enroute to finding a model for internet distribution that works, but really, I didn’t think they’d actually do it so literally – right now we’re apparently at the “every company wants its own service to beat all the other companies’ services” stage, which worked for music about as well as you’d expect given that nobody cared who Beyonce and Coldplay happened to be signed with; they just wanted to download the mp3s. Comics have a slight advantage over music in this regard in that some portion of the audience does care about which comic company produces what, but given that I’m pretty sure the majority of the population doesn’t know or care that Spider-Man and Batman are made by different companies, it doesn’t seem like a growth strategy.

Then again, it’s comics and audience growth is treated as sort of an optional extra. They seem to believe that internet distribution of comics are basically found money: put up comic on app for purchase, you’ve already paid for it, so if anybody buys the damn thing hey that’s five bucks in your pocket you didn’t have before. Until that philosophy changes I don’t think we’ll see a coherent one-stop “iTunes for comics.”

ITEM! Justice League: Lost Generation is actually quite good. No, really, it is. Most of the Brightest Day stuff is actively terrible schlock, but this book has been really upfront in saying “yeah, we’re doing a sort-of Justice League International reunion” and more importantly has a good deal of the tone you’d expect from that: it’s a good midpoint between the banter and the drama that were both emblematic of the Giffen/DeMatteis period. (Everybody remembers the BWA-HA-HAs and forgets that Giffen and DeMatteis had some truly scary villains in their run – the Gray Man, the Queen Bee and Dreamslayer were all really great bad guys, and let us not forget how awesome Despero was as the big bad of that comic.) Judd Winick is knocking his dialogue out of the park, the plot is interesting and non-derivative, and the new Rocket Red is hilarious. The only thing missing is Guy Gardner, but since he is busy over in the quickly-losing-steam Green Lantern books it is understandable that he is not around. I’m really enjoying this comic.

ITEM! Bob Harras is DC’s new editor-in-chief. I really have no opinion about this one way or the other. Some people are enthusiastic about it because they like him; others are horrified because his tenure as EIC at Marvel resulted in a number of creative disasters. At this point I think DC’s level of creative-disaster-ness is about maxed out, so even if the Clone Saga and similar things were entirely Harras’ fault, I don’t think he can make things worse, so why not give him a shot?

ITEM! Zack Snyder to direct next Superman movie. I considered doing a fake script for it, but then I realized all I would have to do is take a bunch of panels from widely-loved Superman comics and paste them together in rough chronological order.

If I was to run a comic company, here’s how I’d do it. I’d start with a small staff of writers, a moderate-sized staff of artists, an editor (we’d have a small stable of launch titles, all of them family-friendly adventure stories, most of them super-hero comics) and an art director…and a few assistants for the latter two, for reasons which will become apparent. (And plenty of venture capital funding coming in, because you don’t expect this kind of company to turn a profit for a while.)

The art director is the key, because I’m going with the Archie route: We would have a house style, and all the artists at the company would be expected to conform rigidly to that house style. (Keep in mind that when I say, “the Archie route”, I don’t actually mean “looking like Archie”. I picture it as being something fairly timeless, a sort of Neal Adams/Jim Aparo hybrid. Something that you could still look at twenty years later and say, “Ooh, that’s nice.”) But the point is, we are not chasing big names here. If you come to my company expecting to be rich and famous, you’re coming to the wrong place.

Which isn’t to say that we wouldn’t have credits. On the company website, and on the inside front cover of every book, it would say, “(Insert Title Here) was produced by:” and it would proceed to list the writers, artists, editors, and art director that made the book possible. You would be able to say to your family, “Yes, I work in comics.” But you wouldn’t, y’know, be able to say, “I do all the work around here. Give me a raise.” This is not a place for rock stars. (Actually, you would, in a sense. Artists would be paid an hourly wage, but they would also get completion bonuses for every page they did that passed the art director’s approval. So the faster you draw, the more money you make.) To make up for the fact that I’m treating it like a job and not like a creative opportunity, you get the sorts of things you get in a job–hourly wages, health and dental, 401K, et cetera. This is a career for people who want a career.

The books themselves would be done assembly-line style. The writers break down the plot into pages, and each page breakdown is circulated to the pencilers to draw. They, in turn, pass the finished pages to the inkers, then back to the writers for dialoguing, then to the letterers, and then to the colorists. (Every step goes through an editor/assistant/art director/assistant, as well, just to make sure it all comes out nice.) Once the story is finished (all stories are thirty pages long, and entirely self-contained. No multi-parters, no exceptions) it goes up on the website, which is advertiser-supported free content. Anyone who wants to read the comic can do so there.

Or, if they don’t like that, they can read the magazine. It’d come out monthly, and be 120 pages long (90 pages of story, thirty pages of ads, contains three different titles.) This would be sold on newsstands, alongside magazines like Shonen Jump. For those who only wanted to follow one title in dead-tree format, there would be semi-annual anthologies, printed in manga-style digests, and cheap black-and-white “Reader’s Editions” that would be collected in eighteen-issue chunks. Oh, and the occasional hardcover “Best Of”. And, once there’s enough backlog material out there, cheap reprint editions that collect a few random stories together and can fit in supermarket checkout lanes, a la the Archie reprints you see everywhere.

So there’s my idea of the ideal super-hero comic book company. No big stars, heavy emphasis on the characters instead of the creators, self-contained family-friendly stories, and lots of reprinting. In short, the Archie model applied to super-heroes. So who wants to be the first to tell me I’m crazy?

“Yes, I’ve been on hold for ten minutes now already. Yellowjacket… Y, E, two Ls, O… look, do you really need me to spell it?… Yes, it’s all one word… Yes, I can hold another minute, but… dammit, they put me on hold again… Morty? Yeah, Yellowjacket here… good to hear you too, Morty… no, no, I’m not calling about the bar mitzvah. It’s about the cover… The cover, Morty… What do you mean, “what about the cover?” Have you seen it? Look at it, Morty! Tell me why I’m supposed to be happy!… Morty, it’s my goddamn comic magazine, okay? The first issue of Yellowjacket Comics. And where am I on the cover? I’m in a small box on the bottom left corner, Morty! Who dominates the cover of the first issue of Yellowjacket Comics? Some schmuck on a trapeze!… I don’t care if he’s a nice guy, Morty!… Because I am supposed to be the star of Yellowjacket Comics!… Because I’m Yellowjacket, for Crissake! …what do you mean, “trying to promote new talent?” I’m new talent! It’s my first issue!… Then put him in the little corner box! I paid my dues! Two years as a backup feature in Pow! Comics! Did Trapeze Guy ever do that, huh? How many sinners has he scourged?… oh, so you’re going to level with me now. Great, Morty… Artistic error. Uh huh… So pulp the run and put him in the corner! New cover!… Yes, I do know how much that would cost… I can always jump to Timely, Morty! They made a hell of an offer!… Come on, Morty, the guy can’t even fly! He’s a friggin’ acrobat! Who’s gonna read Acrobat Comics?… No, but I can glide, Morty, and that’s pretty much the same thing… says me, Morty!… Okay, I’m listening… Uh huh… uh huh… A radio show?… Seriously?… Well, even if it is only a biweekly backup, that’s not nothing. But can we talk serials?… Well, we won’t have to worry about sales if I’m actually featured on the cover of my own comic, Morty… Maybe he would make a good member of the supporting cast, Morty, but you don’t put Lois Lane on the cover of the first issue of Superman, do you?… Yeah… yeah… okay, Morty… Okay. Yeah, we’re not good, but we’re getting there, Morty… yeah, we’ll talk tomorrow, okay? I have to go, you know, fight some crime… best to your wife and kids too, Morty… yes, of course I’m coming to the bar mitzvah… you too. Bye.”

Previously, we discussed how time travel works, or doesn’t work. Most time travel in comics follows the “create an alternate parallel universe in which you are then trapped” motif. There are reasons for this. If you are creating a time travel machine, you don’t want it killing you, and traveling to the past is the sort of thing which makes it effortlessly simple for you to accidentally not exist all of a sudden: you accidentally convince an Irishman in 1843 that he should travel to London to find work rather than emigrate to America, and then all of a sudden you don’t exist because your parents met at a Ted Kennedy rally which never happened because that Irishman emigrating led to there being Kennedys (or at least that specific branch of Kennedys) in the first place. Sure, there might be someone present who’s kind of occupying your general space, but it’s not you, because you’ve ceased to exist. This is why smart people time travel in a way that generally keeps them detached from the effects of causality.

That having been said: it’s quite easy to muck around with the timeline you’re currently on. It’s mostly suicidal – if you’re worried about the effects on you. But what if you’re really, really powerful? And not really part of Earth’s timeline generally, say? In that case, mucking around with Earth’s timeline is kind of like playing with a four-dimensional ant farm. And if you’ve got goals beyond simply messing about, then you can be really, really dangerous.

It manifests itself when Dr. Strange notices that suddenly, people don’t recognize the word “obscene” any more. Or “road.” Or “unreal.” Or “dwindle.” He recognizes timeline alteration when he sees it; he’s made certain that changes to the timeline lag in their affecting of him. (It gives him time to notice changes and then figure out what to do. It wasn’t easy and he needed a lot of tutoring from the Vishanti to learn how to do it, but you don’t get to be Sorcerer Supreme by slacking.) In this case, after a day or so, he knows what’s wrong: every word invented by Shakespeare has disappeared from the English language. Along with all of his plays. Along with most knowledge of Shakespeare. So it’s pretty obvious what somebody’s done.

But it’s more than just a few plays. This isn’t a story about the power of stories. Neil Gaiman already wrote that.1 It doesn’t change history that much if Romeo and Juliet never gets written; it just means that A Tale of Two Cities or Jane Eyre takes its place in the Great Works canon. History dauntlessly2 marches on.

But this is the Marvel Universe, and that means history marches on, but there are key moments. In the history of the Sorcerer Supremes, there are countless magical standoffs. Most of them involved magic words. “But wait,” you say, “most of them didn’t speak English, or at least didn’t do magic in it.” And this is true and this is not true. See, magic words are sometimes a genuine pick in the lock of the universe, and sometimes they’re just a vehicle to sound impressive and gather confidence while your willpower and mojo do the heavy magical lifting and then they become that pick. And English differs from most languages in that it is completely and utterly an expressive language. There’s a reason it’s become so dominant: it’s easier to invent words in English, as well as steal them, repurpose them, mix their use. Really, plain old English is downright magical in many varied3 ways before you cast so much as a cantrip. Most of Earth’s premier sorcerers might talk about how they used the Incantation of Irix in the original pre-Sumerian, and it’s always good to have a little razzle-dazzle, that’s true. But for their everyday stuff – and when they don’t have time to think about how to pronounce pre-Sumerian, which is usually the most important moments – they use English.

Something wants to hobble the English language, one of the greatest weapons of its mystic defenders. Something wants to throttle it. And if you want to hurt modern English, you start by getting rid of Shakespeare, who invented nearly two thousand words and phrases, some of which are so mundane and common (“moonbeam,” bandit,” “scuffle”…) it’s shocking to think that a man sat down and literally thought them from nothing.

Which means that Dr. Strange has to go back in time himself and stop this assassination4 from ever happening. Luckily, he knows a spell that will set aside Ferdinando Stanley, who was not only the patron of William Shakespeare before Shakespeare hit it big, but also Lord Strange of the Barony of Strange.5 Can Strange – over the course of a decade in Elizabethan England – effectively mimic6 his namesake, prevent the actions of those who would interfere with Shakespeare’s most vital work, and not arouse7 the troublesome suspicion of John Dee, Queen Bess’ court magician?

1. About a dozen times. [↩]
2. Shakespeare invented this word. “King Henry VI.” [↩]
3. And this one. “Titus Andronicus.” [↩]
4. This one too. “Macbeth.” [↩]
5. Okay, he pronounced it “strang.” But it counts. [↩]
6. “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” [↩]
7. “King Henry VI” again. [↩]

Of IDW’s recent Archie comics collections, Archie: The Daily Newspaper Comics 1946-1948 is by some distance the best. First, it’s a real collection; it has all the daily strips written and drawn by Archie creator Bob Montana (who mostly concentrated on the strip, rather than the comic books, until his death in 1975) from the beginning in 1946 until October 1948, and nearly all of them have never appeared in book form — in fact, the originals are gone, and IDW had to find a fan who’d cut all these strips out of the original newspapers. Second, it’s got actual information to go with the comics: biographical stuff about Montana and MLJ Comics.

And third, the strip is good. It later became a funny but standard gag-a-day strip, but in the early years Montana did story arcs, some of them lasting for weeks, along with the individual gags. The energy of his drawing and writing is hard to resist; as the foreword points out, he liked to throw in jokes throughout the strip rather than just using the first three panels as buildup to a punchline. And because the series creator was doing the newspaper comics — which were more prestigious than the books — it was there that the characters really developed both in characterization and look; you can watch as he starts out with the more realistic early versions of the girls in 1946, and has the cartoony “modern” versions more or less down by the end of the book. (It’s something of a myth that Dan DeCarlo modernized the looks of the characters, though he certainly brought his own style to them.) Just as a comic strip, this certainly deserves its spot with the other entries in IDW’s “Library of American Comics” series, though since one of the other entries is The Family Circus you may consider that less than effusive praise (but that strip wasn’t bad at first).

In an anthropological sense it’s interesting to see which characters were more or less set in stone by these strips, and which ones were further developed by the comic books. Archie is pretty much Archie from the beginning, but Jughead still has a long way to go even by the end of this book: he didn’t become a genius con artist until he got his own book, and spends these years as mostly a standard sidekick. Dilton Doily pops up midway through and is fully defined by the end.

But what most of you really want to know is, were Betty Cooper’s psychotic tendencies something that she developed later after years of Archie-chasing, or just an inherent part of who she is? This should answer your question.

This isn’t actually her acting crazy, just ditzy, but I’m amused by the name of the girls’ football team and Reggie’s competing team.

If you’re wondering why Archie isn’t too concerned about Betty’s threats of physical harm (not to mention that warning shot into Jughead), you’ll find that out if IDW puts out a second volume of strips. As a strip from 1949 proves, Archie and Bart Simpson are both victims of casual parental strangling that would make anyone desensitized to violence.

A few Sunday strips by Montana (not included in this book) can be found at The Greatest Ape. Which also includes the daily strip which demonstrates what is known to all viewers of Looney Tunes cartoons: the defining characteristic of teenage girls in 1940s America was addiction to Frank Sinatra.

Update: A couple of other panels I wanted to highlight. One, also from the football-coach storyline, I just like because it’s the kind of deadpan Stan Daniels Turn joke that I always like, and second because it shows how Montana would sometimes put a fully-developed punchline in the first panel of the strip (which this is).

And this other panel surprised me because I hadn’t realized this word was uncontroversial in 1947 — or did it mean something else back then?

A few whiles back I did a list of “reasons I will love comics forever,” which were mostly awesome panels. I haven’t had a lot of those lately; there just aren’t as many moments in comics these days that make me sit up and go “yeeeEEAAAAAAH!” I don’t know if it’s because they’ve changed or because I have. Possibly it’s both. Aging, whether it be you or an artform, can suck in this regard.

But that having been said, I absolutely adore this bit from Prince of Power #4, a scene that is so totally comics that it really couldn’t have originated anywhere else: