I suppose if I READ crossovers, John, I might have known I was quoting a trite phrase.
I actually meant in the "Flash of Two Worlds" vein. I don't recall the exact phrasing, or if it was repeated across titles, but there was the idea of a correlation between Earths and comic book fiction.
The point of my comment was to poke gentle fun at the seriousness with which this thread has addressed superheroes. In all honesty, it's a trifle frightening. I mean, I LOVE comic books, but not at the level you guys apparently do. You actually REMEMBER all this stuff about the STORIES -- whereas I remember all this stuff about who drew them and when and where.
Don't worry. I immerse myself in the worlds as I discuss them, but I pop right back out. I'm probably more extreme than most, because software (and teaching) is often mostly a matter of getting inside an environment and making yourself at home there without getting lost. So I look at furniture and mentally sketch out better designs, listen to music and try to get an image of the person who wrote and/or played it, and watch movies with an eye toward where the set designers grew up--you can tell a lot by how Manhattan is represented.
I'm just as amazed that a lot of you can keep track of creators, something I've often found only peripherally interesting. Again, it's interesting enough that if something catches my eye, I enjoy pursuing iit, but unlike a lot of other things, if there's a dead end, I don't sweat it.
Granted, there is extended discussion of the creators, too, but the focus is on these fictional, malleable, constantly reinvented characters - none of whom is the one you first encountered in your youth and NEVER will be again.
It's true, but you could say the same thing about movies, restaurants, cities, or even friends. Different things (and different viewers) require a different mix of instances and transitions to be "interesting."
To explain what I mean, I can (barely) remember a handful of issues of comics I can point to where I can say "that's what the Flash should always be like;" they're instances that work for me. By contrast, I don't have that for Captain America; I know what he "should" be like, but nobody's ever pulled it off. And then there's Blue Beetle, where I don't find any particular character interesting so much as the never-ending reinventions themselves.
You can't go home again. Honestly, it's better to RECALL those good times than to expect to be able to relive them. That's the common fault of the fans turned pro who are running the industry. And that's what eventually got me to quit buying comics after 40 solid years of "every Wednesday."
Exactly. Every once in a while I've been suckered back in, but yes, I've been turned off by the drive to enforce some sort of single-minded ideal across an entire fictional universe.
I was too young to realize the significance at the time, but I recently revisited an issue of Green Lantern from the early '80s. In the letter column, somebody asks why GL didn't recognize a walk-on character in a recent issue, when they worked together in the big Showcase blowout issue.
The editor's response was that the Showcase issue not only didn't happen, but couldn't have happened, because it included characters like Space Cabbie and Binky, and there's no way such characters could exist in the same universe as the Green Lantern Corps. And further, said editor was busily working out a plan that would forevermore redefine the very nature of the canonical DC Universe so that only "serious" stories could possibly have happened.
The editor was Marv Wolfman, and that editorial response is essentially the pre-pitch version of "Crisis on Infinite Earths."
I point this out because it's (I think) exactly what you're talking about, in its way. The entire 1985-1986 output from DC is basically a result of Marv stomping his feet because he didn't think Binky was as real as a talking chipmunk with a power ring. The mind truly boggles.
I've got great memories of Marvel in the '60s and they can't take them away from me, even if I don't have the comics anymore. I don't WANT to have them. If I did, I'd re-read them and realize just how naive they were - but they were a product of their times and those times no longer exist. Nor does the man I was. In memory, I can recall the emotions and the joy of reading those comics, but I have NO expectations of EVER experiencing the same feelings again engendered by a comic book.
I've actually had pretty good luck going "back to the stacks." Books I enjoyed when I could still show my age by holding up my fingers actually seem to hold up pretty well, even with nostalgia taken out of the picture. Sometimes, I'll even pick up a book I hated when it was new, and I'll find that there were complexities to the story I didn't notice the first time through.
Consequently, what modern fan/pro writers do the puppets/clones/atomotans/progeny with the same names is of ZERO concern and even less interest to me. I have the memories. All that exposure to "modern" interpretations can do is to diminish those memories. I think I'd be a fool to allow it to happen.
I definitely agree. I never understand why someone would say "they've damaged my childhood by changing the direction of this character." You can't diminish a well-written story by merely contradicting it.
The only exception I can make to that are the stories that basically tell us "nothing matters." Narf mentioned time travel problems, but I can remember when DC introduced the idea of "Hypertime," which was basically that different worlds overlap, so sometimes you'll see something wrong in the comics which is really right. In other words, "all you droning fanboys should stop criticising us." Put into a context where details and history probably don't matter, it's hard to care about any individual story published in conjunction with the statement.
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Topic: Dynamite comics-project superpowers (Read 23800 times)
