Why did aughts writers ignore continuity and make shit up?
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Thalidomide Vintage Ad Shirt $22.14 |
Why did aughts writers ignore continuity and make shit up?
Why did aughts writers ignore continuity and make shit up?
Thalidomide Vintage Ad Shirt $22.14 |
|
Thalidomide Vintage Ad Shirt $22.14 |
They thought they were better than the readers and all the talent that came before them.
Every writer from every era has done this.
To that degree? Nope.
No, arguably this kind of thing was rampant during the Golden Age, when lots of people couldn't keep things consistent from issue to issue. But that's a fricking bad metric for modern comics to use because the Golden Age was back when people were trying to work things out. Aughts Marvel is an established universe with decades to work from
>Why did aughts writers ignore continuity and make shit up?
Why not? It worked for Silver Age DC.
Silver Age DC was still relatively consistent about characterizations despite their mistakes. The problem with aughts is that not only is continuity ignored, but also consistent characterization with things before the aughts or even during the aughts is ignored
Bendis considers continuity as a strait jacket imposed on him by lesser writers. There's even a quote where he said this that I can't track down.
The editorial environment of the time was basically encouraging them to disregard past continuity and characterization and just do whatever they want, and for writers using the same characters to not even bother coordinating with each other. As bad as people like Benis were, they were only able to do it because the role of editorial was completely deballed by the people running Marvel and DC.
That was entirely because of Quesada and Jemas.
Brevoort ironically enough was one of the big holdouts before he got the message from higher ups.
>That was entirely because of Quesada and Jemas.
True, the damage those two did to Marvel is incalculable, and DC basically followed suit.
>Brevoort ironically enough was one of the big holdouts before he got the message from higher ups.
For all his other flaws, he's been the only editor left for more than 20 years who actually knows the history and continuity, but he wasn't going to risk his career over it. If the EiC says the writers can do whatever they want, all the editors fell in line like good yes-men.
Brevoort's thing is that he's a company man. He has his own opinions but often times buries them in favor of just going along with whatever Marvel wants. Though his opinions can also be dumb.
Strict continuity is mostly a product of Silver Age Marvel because the idea of things happening in one book affecting things in another was revolutionary at the time. It got a little looser in the mid-70s Goodwin/LenMarv era and got back on track after Shooter was promoted. Gruenwald was hired explicitly as a continuity guru to help keep things straight (he ran a fanzine based around continuity prior to Marvel) and he had a big board noting where every character was and what they were doing and shit.
It mostly got looser in the 90s as marketing took over and you'd get Wolverine in a dozen books a month.
If they do what they want, it might get adapted into a movie!!!
The idea of strict continuity is a relatively recent thing, because adhering strictly to continuity can get in the way of storytelling when there's too much of it. For a very long time the vast majority of stories in comics, tv, radio, etc. were procedurals with no guarantee that the audience had any knowledge of the other stories, so continuity wasn't considered as important as retaining the things about the stories the audience liked and that made them different.
>The idea of strict continuity is a relatively recent thing
In capeshit? Absolutely not. The plots were episodic, but editors actually tried to keep writers from making up contradicting nonsense.
>In capeshit?
Writing in general, but early capeshit had it too. I gave myself a headache the other day trying to understand what happened early on with The Shadow.
This, but saying so enrages the kind of nerd whose one topic of conversation was rendered useless by the advent of fan wikis.
>The idea of strict continuity is a relatively recent thing,
>recent thing
Mark Grunewald is turning over in his nonexistent grave.
Wrong. For serialized things it was always important. Since Sherlock Holmes and Three Musketeers. It became more onsessed with prior issues beimg avaible. But you cant give Tarzan suddenly the ability of a chameleon and make him a reptile man from inner earth.
Otherwise you get shit stories like the bible where God being able to defeat Satan in one tale and the next he cant stop Satan from corrupting people.
If you don't want strict continuity then... Just don't have it?
Why don't more writers just do a White Knight kind of thing and establish their own snapshot universe for their story to take place in? If the writer doesn't like to worry about the story that happened before them, why would they want to saddle the next writer with THEIR luggage?
>The idea of strict continuity is a relatively recent thing
They hated him because he spoke the truth.
>They hated him because he spoke the truth.
And then retconned it.
>continuity
It literally doesn't matter.
Your life doesn't matter
I think the ABC line and Seven Soldiers are a lot better than the more popular Bendis Daredevil and Ultimate Spider-Man.
same
>Ultimate Spider-Man.
Probably the worst example as Bendis established almost all of Ultimate Continuity.
I didn't say otherwise.
Strict adherence to continuity always struck me as pointless when the stories that exist in it usually rely on characters not using their established abilities correctly or villains with arbitrary and unjustified threat levels somehow getting away with the plot until it's time for them to lose.
Only readers care about or keep track of continuity
So the people who buy the books
>Only wonks care about or keep track of continuity.
No, just the No Prize candidates.
So the people who buy the books, then
No, just the aforementioned No Prize candidates.
So the people who buy the books.
Nope, the aforementioned No Prize winners only.
So the ones who buy the books.
A vanishingly small number of readers who simply do not matter.
If sales have been increasingly down over the decades since they said continuity doesn't matter, wouldn't that meant those readers mattered?
There has never been a context in which they have mattered, and there never will be.
Really, because they claimed getting rid of continuity would help comics
It didn't
>Really
Yes. Continuity wonks are completely inessential, both to fandom and to the medium itself.
We know, grandpa, your hatred of continuity in the 00s didn't really help fandom or the medium itself
You're the most boring part of any comic-book conversation, and you always will be.
Your ADD is not anyone's problem
Your crippling autism isn't anyone's problem.
It's clearly now your problem
Because they were nerds who came up with the idea that editors and continuity were shackles preventing unbound creativity like Kirby, Ditko or the '70s Marvel guys had. While bad editors are indeed a problem the appeal of cape books was in part the idea of a continuing shared narrative that you were getting bits and pieces of depending on what you read. Companies stopped caring because people like Bendis sold and the idea of producing good comics and keeping with continuity and characterization didn't matter so long as something was broadly recognizable for IP and branding purposes which is where Stan's "illusion of change," coined when Marvel started getting licensing deals in the late Silver/early Bronze Age came from.
Doing whatever you wanted so long as the character was still semi-recognizable or you were creating valuable new characters for media adaptations was an inevitable end point after the editor and sales driven '90s boom and bust; both a response but also a continuation as licensing, not comics themselves, became the money maker.
>editors and continuity were shackles preventing unbound creativity like Kirby, Ditko or the '70s Marvel guys had
That's not wrong. The problem is these guys had almost zero creativity.
Also it was a reaction very specifically against the old way of doing things at Marvel, where stories were constantly referencing other stories. The Kurt Busiek Avengers run, which was M arvel's most successful comic in the era just preceding Quesada's, had an amazing number of stories that were done to clear up unfinished business from early '90s Avengers comics that nobody read; the less successful comics also did this all the time.
Quesada's predecessor Bob Harras got fired in part because the X-Men comics had become so impenetrable and continuity-heavy, and that was blamed for the fact that they didn't pick up any new readers from the X-Men movie. (I know this is almost certainly wrong because the X-Men in the early '90s picked up a lot of readers from the cartoon; the difference is that X-Men comics in 2000 mostly weren't very good. But that's what they thought.) And the success of "Ultimate Spider-Man" seemed to point the way toward what they could do by having less strict continuity and hiring an indie writer who didn't do the traditional type of Marvel writing.
So Bill Jemas wanted to "modernize" Marvel, which included discouraging Marvel Method writing (which was still the dominant method at Marvel right up until the turn of the century) and hiring indie and British writers who had usually not been very welcome at old-school Marvel. And it meant to stop doing so many references to older stories -- Jemas apparently went way overboard with that idea, but it has stuck to this day, though Al Ewing and a few other modern writers have sort positioned themselves as a throwback to the older way.
Good post, unappreciated
>the difference is that X-Men comics in 2000 mostly weren't very good. But that's what they thought
X-Men between Onslaught and the Morrison era is probably the single most dire the X-Men ever were prior to Krakoa. Like Austen is bad but he's not as bad as Davis scripting editorial plots or the Neo and Psylocke getting jeeted on. Though that mostly applies to the main books. X-Force, Generation X and some of the solo spinoffs like Deadpool and Gambit were all pretty good.
>Even comparing Dream's End to morrison shit
Now that's just wrong.
Yes, that entire multi-year stretch of comics is unreadable trash. The only redeemable thing about it was Rogue's ponytail/big yellow X costume.
X-Men has quite literally never been good.
You were literally never good.
A famous moment in the "continuity nerd" tradition of Marvel writing is when Roy Thomas took over from Stan Lee as editor and one of his first acts was to assign the Captain America writer to do a story explaining why there were Captain America comics published where he was fighting Commies in the '50s, even though the Avengers in the '60s said he had been frozen since World War II.
If you asked Stan Lee or Jack Kirby why they didn't acknowledge those stories, they would have looked at you like you were from Mars. Assuming Lee even remembered editing those stories, they didn't sell and were quickly forgotten so who cares? But in '70s/'80s/'90s Marvel you were supposed to care.
This isn't automatically a bad way of creating stories. The story that came out of the Cap retcon (the '50s Cap was a different guy and he's become the nightmare version of what our Cap could have become) was the best story he'd had in years. But today's viewpoint is more like the one from the '60s, which is that stories that weren't popular don't count.
In theory this would be ok, and I was even on board with it in the early 00s, but the problem is that:
>the people who complained the most about following continuity proceeded to put out some of the worst comics
>the things that they want to keep in-continuity aren't even popular (ie OMD)
If things worked the way you suggested most 00s/10s storylines would be thrown out by now, the way late 40s and 50s Cap was no longer considered canon by Lee and Kirby. Instead you see Marvel recently revisiting Secret Empire yet again despite the reception that got
It was considered cool to do the opposite of what Jim Shooter did because he was seen as a bully and a danger to creativity.
Unfortunately he was also completely correct about many important things, when it comes to managing a giant continuity comprised of the works of countless writers.
Continuity's all well and good, but does it matter when even the writers paying attention to it have spent decades coming up with absurd and convoluted nonsense to retcon the things they didn't like?
Is Bendis a israelite?
Lmao hopefully with the current events liberal leftist lunatics will start dropping comics and geek culture
Yeah, I remember someone pointing out he's of a lesser type, though.
Lazy, untalented, no decent editors riding their ass.
Alan Moore never ignored continuity and worked with what he has giving, if he didn't want to follow continuity he made the story be set in a alternate universe, unlike Bendis that retcons everything and has no respect for what other writers did before
>Alan Moore never ignored continuity and worked with what he has giving
Read his original plot for Watchmen (back when he was supposed to be using Charlton characters, not making up copies of them), he planned to completely ignore their origins and all their 1960s story arcs, especially in the case of Ditko's The Question.
I dint recall Ditko's Question having an origin. Did he?
>dint
lol
Yes or no?
Bendis can't even keep his own continuity and plots straight in the same story. He also did stupid shit like ending Secret Invasion with Dani Cage's eyes turning green not because he actually had a plot idea for it but simply because he thought it would be really funny to end the story on a Thriller reference that he never intended on going anywhere with.
probably because shit got really fricking dumb in the 90s and capeshit needed new life invigorated into it