Say What?! - Continuity Slave
The blogosphere has been abuzz this week about a few things, but chief among them is once again Grant Morrison, this time in repeat to his comments regarding Final Crisis #1 and its relationship to Countdown and Death of the New Gods. The conversation started here, but it's been touched upon here, here and here, among other places.
In today's world of the superstar writer and artist, is Morrison allowed to simply ignore the year's worth of stories and two series (one of which was quite literally a Countdown to Final Crisis) that played a role in his current book? Is it acceptable for creators to take so long to make a bok so as to require that much lead time? Is it too much to ask that when someone dies in one book they don't turn up as if nothing happened a few scant months later?
At what point does continuity because a beast on your back? Writers like Kurt Busiek and Ed Brubaker have shown that it's more than possible to use continuity yet not be a slave to it (Bru's Captain America is a superb example of this). At what point do we as fans become unreasonable in the demand for continuity?
Goblin
Posted to Say What? on 11 June 2008
· Comments (4)
Other stuff like this: Countdown, Final Crisis, Grant Morrison, New Gods, Say What
I think the simple solution to this is to just not let Morrison write comics at all anymore. His idea of following continuity is going to a flea market and finding some random, obscure Batman comic from the 60's, reading through it and saying to himself "Wow, this would make a GREAT comic book!" He then uses the obscure comic as the basis for 2 years' worth of stories that are so random only somebody like Pshycho Pirate or The Joker could make any coherant sense out of them.
The only times his comics really jive with the rest of the DCU are when he's given creative control to boss around all of the other writers, like with his DC One Million storyline. He ticked off so many writers by telling them what they had to write that month that DC won't let him reach that big again.
You know, I can't speak for any of his previous DC stuff, but what Morrison did for the X-Men was quite good. I know Goblin (and a number of people) hated it, but it really made the X-Men much more exciting. It paid tribute to continuity while at the same time it tore down established X-Men "norms."
My beef with DC is that it can't seem to create a self contained non-continuity laden event book since Identity Crisis. Identity Crisis worked because you didn't need to know each character's twisted, retconned pasts and you could enjoy the story.
Final Crisis #1 felt like an esoteric DC trivia fanboy Bingo game (yes! there's an obscure 60s character that goes unnamed!).
When your readers need to wiki the hell out of your book, that's when you have a problem.
i dont hate morrison. but i really dont see why he is placed on such a pedestal. his work is for the most part pedestrian. when he hits high notes, he hits them well. unfortunately, high notes dont really come all that often, and he hits rock bottom frequently too.
and its because of that, i feel he certainly shouldnt be afforded the superstar treatment and be allowed to take forever to write something. hell, he seems to have forgotten he was working on a wildstorm book.
BUT in this instance, i forgive. not because crisis is just so awesome. but because Countdown and Death of the New Gods was so bad. i would rather read something that harkens back to 52 than countdown. thats for sure.
I continue to blame Morrison for my lack of an actual Authority book. It's been one issue in two years now? And it wasn't even that good of a first issue.