Munchausen Weekend

Watchmen

(Yeah, more What If? posts are on the way, be patient. But this was good place-holder blog fodder, and probably wouldn't have been timely if I had waited.)

So, first thing's first: this isn't a very good movie, not really in any way shape or form. I have to echo most of what Spurgeon says here - the choicest, most damning quote of which is probably this:

The result is a movie that while it's mostly faithful to its source material, the moments it's not faithful jar to a noteworthy degree, and the newly synthesized take of old and new elements never takes on a life of its own.

Even if I agree substantively with most everything he says, I will still qualify that by saying that I enjoyed the movie quite a bit. I also enjoyed Ghost Rider and X-Men 3 a lot, too; those were both - by any objective measure - terrible movies, and yet succeeded in being enjoyable Ghost Rider and X-Men movies. Watchmen isn't quite a terrible movie, it's certainly better than Daredevil, but it zings along nicely.

The only things that really merit the comparison to Watchmen are recent mega-epic film cycles like The Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter, books with such a rabid and devoted pre-film fanbase that the filmmakers could afford very little leeway in terms of their adaptations. I still think that, despite their general amiability (and yeah, I got misty-eyed at the end of Return of the King, but who didn't?), The Lord of the Rings films were generally not very good - over-literal and just ponderous. Which is not to way the books themselves weren't extremely ponderous, but they were also many other things besides ponderous, including "very good" and "extremely interesting". I have neither read nor seen any "Harry Potter" related narrative so I can't judge those, but the fans of the books appear to be pleased with the films to one degree or another. It's an odd phenomenon, really - until very recently, there was no source material so sacrosanct it couldn't be fucked over by Hollywood if they so desired. But we live in a world where nerd rage can tank a poorly-received movie.

I knew the film was going to be very faithful, but man, the first third or so of the book is onscreen almost verbatim, minus the various secondary and tertiary subplots which we knew were going to be excised anyway. To the degree that the movie follows the source material slavishly, it works, which says a lot less about Zack Snyder's dubious skill as a "visionary" director than the durability of Moore & Gibbons' original. It's strong enough that if you basically put the panels onscreen with a minimum of elaboration, the story, pacing, characterization and subtext shines through even the most ham-fisted direction. But then, they have to start making choices, and those choices generally don't make for a better finished product - even if, on paper, they may have seemed like necessary choices. What to film and what to leave on the cutting room floor - not an easy task. This wasn't an actor's film - putting it mildly! - and although few of the performances were flat-out bad, Snyder obviously doesn't have a clue how to elicit natural emotion from flesh-and-blood human beings. Even the good performances are only as good as the script, and when the script falls flat in a heavily-choreographed effects bonanza movie like this there's no way to make up for that momentum. Otherwise, Liam Neeson and Ewan McGregor would have made The Phantom Menace the most universally beloved Star Wars movie ever.

So - yeah. They made some not-so-good choices. In fact, looking over the list of things they failed at, it's a wonder I actually did enjoy the movie. But again - I enjoyed Daredevil when I saw it, so perhaps my tastes are suspect. (Again, I know Daredevil is a horrible film, but I had fun nonetheless.)

- Basically, the biggest problem was gutting Ozymandias' story. First, by not spending much time at all on building his character, and by staging his few establishing scenes as ominously as they did, they might as well have put a giant neon sign on top of the screen saying THIS IS THE VILLAIN. Ozymandias in the book, regardless of his monomania, is still an extremely sympathetic character - you believe his idealism is genuine, in much the same way as Rorschach's very different kind of idealism is also nonetheless genuine. But in the film, by subtracting every meaningful bit of exposition from the later chapters, you are left with a cipher, and not the complex, overreaching, earnestly adolescent original. I mean, seriously, they left the Captain Carnage anecdote in, but they took out the Gordian Knot speech? That's pretty much the definition of "missing the point".

- Dan and Laurie are pretty insufferable. My girlfriend remarked after the film that she was waiting the entire running length of the film for Rorschach to stab them both in the face repeatedly - and yeah, I kinda was too. In the book, it's not so bad because they're both obviously over-the hill - Dan on the wrong side of forty, Laurie just about forty herself. No spring chickens. Their romance feels earned because they've both been around the block, and climbing back into costume isn't unambiguously awesome, it's kind of sweet but also kind of pitiful. But if the movie Dan had any discernible paunch it disappears the moment he steps into his costume, and Laurie doesn't look a day over 22. Laurie in the book is cute because she's kind of plain, hardly a "looker" in her drab every day get-up - and even, in her costume, already starting to show her age. The actress who plays Laurie in the movie - so uninteresting I can't be bothered to remember her name - looks like she's made out of the same plastic as her costume.

- One of the main - almost central - plot points of the book is the fact that Dr. Manhattan is the only unambiguously "super" super-hero on the planet. Everyone else, no matter how strong or smart they may be, is just a normal human. That's central: they're all mortal, and their relationship as mortal humans to Dr. Manhattan defines many of the book's central conflicts. After watching the film, my girlfriend - who hasn't read the book - asked me what the other heroes' powers were. I realized then that the movie had quite spectacularly failed to sell this astoundingly obvious point, because all the heroes spend half the movie jumping around like Jackie Chan, climbing walls and breaking people's bones with the minimum of fuss. You really can't tell that Rorschach and Nite Owl and Ozymandias aren't superhuman, because they move like Neo from The Matrix. Even the end, with Ozymndias catching a bullet, hardly seems like such a big deal - after all, he was wearing superhero-standard bullet-proof Kevlar plating, as opposed to the light tunic the character sports in the original. If the Watchmen are already supermen, just how much of a bigger deal is Dr. Manhattan? Obscuring this point risks obscuring the whole thing.

I'm toying with the idea on writing more, but not wedded to the idea. I think Rorschach actually comes off pretty well from the adaptation, and actually led me to rethink my opinion of certain aspects of the original book - a pretty neat trick for an adaptation. There's some thought that could be pursued further along those lines. Again, it wasn't a very good movie, but where it hews closest to the original it succeeds fairly well on its own terms. I wouldn't necessarily "recommend" it, but we don't really live in a world where that would make any difference - if you're reading this, you've either already seen it, are waiting for the second weekend to see it despite misgivings, or just don't care and are wondering why I don't post more pictures of Rejected Cereal Mascots.

So, yeah. Tell me what you want - blogging time is limited, so I can either write more about the movie or to back to talking about What If? U-Decide.

EDIT: After posting this earlier in the evening I spent some time looking at the viewer responses on the Yahoo movie site - here. My ambivalence about the film - not very good and at the same time oddly enjoyable - seems to be an unusual reaction, to judge by these ratings. People either loved it or hated it, with no in-between - and by hated it, well, I've never seen so much venom on any of these Yahoo response things. True, it's probably just a vocal minority - I don't think anyone walked out of the my showing - but then again, most of the people who were at my showing looking to be over thirty, and I didn't see anyone foolhardy to bring in a passel of kids looking for Spider-Man 4. From the sounds of it most people who hated the movie were totally buffaloed by the ad campaign into thinking it was going to be something it most demonstrably was not. (Incidentally, I loved the review that said the movie was a veiled Christian allegory, and I agree with the otherwise neanderthalic reviewer who said the insertion of blatant anachronistic Republican-baiting at the very end of the film was completely unnecessary.)

It's not like bad word of mouth is going to retroactively make the book any worse, but whenever I see these horrible reviews I think of the fact that Watchmen's reign as the evergreen of the comics backlist has probably come to an end - and my apologies to any comic book store owner who was using Watchmen as a ballast these past few months to help stem the tide of the recession. For better or for worse, the movie will probably mean that it will be many years before anyone can or will want to come to the book fresh. Which is a shame, because the book is still pretty damn great, and even if he's disavowed film royalties, Alan Moore deserves to make as much money as he can off the publishing royalties (which, last I heard, he has no problem accepting, seeing as they are for his actual work). I know a lot of people who don't think things like this matter, but you know, anything that would possibly inspire people to be less interested in opening the cover of a really good book is a crying shame. Bad word of a mouth for a so-so adaptation is definitely something that can kill interest in a book.

No Time For Fun

No time for blogging today, I'm afraid. However, rather than let you go without content all week, I'll post a couple questions / comments. Everyone's talking about an awesome film adaptation of Alan Moore's best comics work lately*, so I figured I'd get in on the action:

1. I recently watched Swamp Thing after not having seen it for about twenty years. I remembered it being incredibly awesome. On reconsideration, maybe not so much. It turns out that all the batshit crazy stuff I remember from the film only actually starts to happen in the last twenty minutes, and all the stuff leading up to that is . . . maybe not so much. Sort of like the Otis scenes in Superman, only with more guns and lasting over an hour. But then, that last twenty minutes is pretty damn weird, so there's that. That last fight in the swamp with giant wolfman Arcane - if the whole film had been like that, it'd be a classic.

2. Also, it is really weird how they tried to make Swamp Thing a kiddie TV star back in the late 80s. I'm sure I'm not the only one to point that out. Considering that the sequel, the USA network live-action show and the cartoon show came out after Alan Moore recreated the character, it's even more (a-hem) bizarre. Considering how weird people at DC get about media tie-in properties, it's amazing they were able to maintain such cognitive dissonance between the heavily merchandised TV and movie character and the weird, horrific comic book.

3. On that note, why didn't they make a comic tie-in to the cartoon show? It's de rigeur, and it has been for decades - every time you have a cartoon or live-action television show with a comic book character, you have to do a specific comic book tie-in (I know the cartoon show only lasted 5 episodes, but the USA network show was on for, what, three years? four?). Wouldn't it have been awesome if there had been a Swamp Thing Adventures animated-style comic being published in the late 80s alongside Doug Wheeler's run on the "Mature Readers" version?

4. If DC ever gets their shit together, I expect to see another Swamp Thing movie. I imagine the character still has some recognition, at least based on the way those two films were flogged to death in the early years of cable television (I remember there was a time when it seemed like HBO played Swamp Thing every damn day). Especially if the Jonah Hex movie actually gets made and does halfway decent - there might be room for more in the way of second- and third-tie unconventional non-super hero comic book stars. Any Hex movie would naturally be a western, and any good Swamp Thing movie made now have to be horror - but it remains to be seen whether or not movie audiences are enthusiastic to see superhero movies that aren't really "superhero" movies. They sure lined up around the block for Punisher War Zone.

Bonus Round -

4. Why does the Swamp Thing talk with so many elipses? Is it because his plant body has a hard time producing sound (that's always been my assumption), or is he, like the late William F. Buckley, just really damn ponderous?

---

* Yes I know the Swamp Thing movie predates Alan Moore's run. Allow me my little joke.

I Just Want Something I Can Never Have



So, you may be asking yourself, what's going on here? He said he'd be blogging about What If . . . ? but for the last two weeks he's been blathering on about wonkish continuity crap, not to mention kicking the long-dessicated corpse of "One More Day" around the block. I don't see the connection and it doesn't seem to add up to anything more than tangential ramblings at this point . . .

Oh ye of little faith!

There is only one thing that I can say about superhero comic books with absolute certainty - and really, I'm not just talking about superheroes here, but all established serial genre fiction fits in here as well. These stories can never end. Sure, they may have endings, they may have cancellations or deaths, but the one foe that not even the combined might of Superman, Batman, Spider-Man and the Hulk can ever defeat is the fact that they must go forward, forever, or at least for as long as anyone is around to renew the copyrights and buy the books. (Regardless of what shape the comics industry may resemble in another twn or twenty or thirty years, I don't see these characters ever really going away, anymore than Mickey Mouse or Popeye, and barring some kind of massive apocalypse, I don't see their respective fictional milieus fading away either.)

The only real endings these kinds of characters get are usually dictated by real-world constraints outside the remit of the stories themselves. The original Valiant line, ROM, Neil Gaiman's Sandman - these stories and characters all got to enjoy their endings, but only through unusual circumstances. The Valiant characters' origins are so heavily wound up in the original Gold Key heroes that they could never be put back together again without massive disfiguring alterations. (That is, of course, barring a third party once again accruing the rights to all these characters, an extremely unlikely proposition at the present time.) Marvel quite simply doesn't have the rights to publish ROM anymore, but if the rights situation ever cleared up I believe Rom would be back in his silver space armor within six months. And Sandman - like Watchmen - is one of the very, very few marketable properties that have ever been "retired" by the Big Two out of anything resembling deference to their creators - although, while DC may honestly wish to honor Gaiman's wishes, the fact is that these books are so much a cornerstone of the company's self-image that they are probably just too afraid of sullying the brand with knock-offs. (As opposed to something like Batman or Spider-Man, Sandman and Watchmen owe much of their perceived value to an ill-defined, amorphous concept of "quality", the kind of intangible intellectual Q-rating type aura that could conceivably be sullied if, say, they hired Chuck Dixon to write The Further Adventures of Daniel, Lord of Dreams. It's an open question whether all the tangentially-related but still not technically "real" Sandman spin-offs released in the decade following the series' end actually diluted that aspect of the brand - I would argue that they did, but that's another argument for another day.)

But, perversely, because the vast majority of these characters can never, ever actually experience an ending, the fanbase and creators have become increasingly obsessed with eschatology. This is no mere speculation: practically every month sees the release of someone or other's attempt at writing "the definitive ______ story", inevitably a story of said character in an alternate future, struggling against mortality and fighting his final battle against insurmountable odds. Why are these types of stories so enduringly popular? They don't "matter", only in rare circumstances, and yet these types of speculative eschatologies are ubiquitous enough that one could almost become convinced that the stories were intrinsic to the very idea of contemporary superhero comics.

Here's the thing: they just might be.

The longer any milieu exists, the more elaborate and intricate the structure becomes. The fact that nothing ever really ends in superhero comics - leastwise, the only things which can ever be said to "end" are so tertiary as to be almost totally insignificant, like US 1 - means that the the longer the milieu continues, the more complicated the rationalizations for maintaining the status quo become. The status quo might be properly understood to represent whatever is most necessary, most intrinsic about each and every character, or what has come to be regarded so. What is and is not intrinsic is, of course, open to debate in every example - but between commercial, editorial and creative concerns, a conventional wisdom usually develops over time. More than anything else, the status quo is built on custom, and custom can change over time. But it's a long process, and as with any kind of milieu, corrections are inevitable and necessary.

The marriage of Peter Parker and Mary Jane represented a conclusive end to one of the most intrinsic elements of Spider-Man's status quo. Whatever your opinion on the matter - or if you have no opinion whatsoever - the end of the ongoing romantic soap-opera represented the end of one of the primary sources of conflict for the Spider-Mythos since the strip's very beginning. This is not a question of whether or not "One More Day" was or was not a mistake - simply taken on a mechanical level, the Spider-Marriage represented a significant departure from the characters' core principles. Peter Parker is the ultimate "Hard Luck Hero" - but if he's married, that puts the concept into a different light. Problems that may have seemed slightly less serious to an unmarried man become significantly more weighty to a married couple. The tone of the stories necessarily changes, because married life is itself an entirely different tone from single life.

(For comparisons sake, look at the marriage of Superman and Lois Lane. Every now and again I'll hear someone say that that marriage should be undone as well - but honestly, it hardly seems pressing. How many good Superman stories - intrinsically Superman stories - can you not tell with a married Superman? Unless you're proposing a return to some kind of Lois Lane / Lana Lang love triangle, or a completely unnecessary relationship with Wonder Woman, there's simply nothing that is lost by merely having Superman be married. It grounds the character, I think, and adds far more than it detracts. He's always been a little bit older than Spider-Man anyway - not so much a tentative twenty-something but a confident thirty-something. He shouldn't be tomcatting around - single Superman never did that, notwithstanding whatever extraneous Superdickery he used to get up to in the name of teaching Lois and Lana some humiliating lesson or another. I'd be surprised if that marriage is ever undone, and I have yet to see a convincing argument for it's undoing.)

In other words, the Spider-Marriage is just a big old What If . . . ? that got out of hand. The whole point of What If . . . ? - as well as old-school "Imaginary Stories" and some (but not all) "Elseworlds" - is that it acts as a safety valve for the regular milieu. What could never really happen in the milieu, at least not without irrevocably changing something important? Well, let's look at that, let's begin with that as our point of departure, and then proceed methodically from there to dissect exactly what would happen if, say, Spider-Man had joined the Fantastic Four back in Amazing #1, or Daredevil actually had shot the Kingpin during "Born Again". Once you depart from the expected status quo, the sky's the limit - and for the very best (or, leastways, most interesting) issues of What If . . . ?, that usually means putting the amps all the way up to 11 and watching everyone kill each other .

The above comic, What If . . . ? first series #42, is one of my all-time favorite Fantastic Four stories. It's a hell of a downer - basically, Susan Richards dies giving birth to Franklin, as a result of Annihilus delaying Reed's return from the Negative Zone with the MacGuffin that they needed to stabilize the birth. After the funeral Reed just falls apart, despite everything Ben, Johnny and even Namor can do to help. Ultimately, Reed decides to return to the Negative Zone and destroy Annihilus, killing himself in the process.



What is the point of this story? Despite the fact that is dismantles the Fantastic Four pretty conclusively, it's also a pretty convincing argument for just why and how the Fantastic Four work. By taking apart the status quo in an alternate universe context, the story highlights exactly how the concept should work in the mainstream milieu. The group's linchpin is family - once you take that family apart, the group can't function. The preservation of the nuclear family dynamic is the operating principle behind the Fantastic Four.



My favorite Superman stories are actually "Imaginary Stories" - "Superman Red / Superman Blue", the original "Death" - essentially What If . . . ? in all but name. From their point of departure with the mainstream milieu, these stories take the series' premise to its ultimate logical conclusion. Both stories, far from being superfluous "Imaginary", are pretty close to definitive. What is Superman about? What is at the heart of the character, from his roots to the present day? Optimism and hope. Both of those stories - and, hell, even Alan Moore's "Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow" - take the concept as far as it can go. Superman could change the world if he wanted to - and even in death, just the idea of Superman is pure enough to withstand and overcome the corrupting forces of the "real world". If there is one thing Grant Morrison gets 100% right about Superman - and to his credit, he seems to understand the character better than just about anyone else - it's this idea, that Superman is nothing more and nothing less than a radiantly pure Platonic ideal of nobility and charity. It's so simple even a small child can understand it.

It's such an astoundingly simple idea, at its heart, that it's no surprise that sometimes the garden-variety run of Superman stories obscure the premise pretty badly. Just as there have been lots of Fantastic Four stories that stray far from the idea of family, and lots of Spider-Man stories that stray from the idea of heroic, almost pathological self-sacrifice (often to the detriment of his own well-being, an idea that just doesn't play the same when he's also responsible for someone else), there are lots (and lots and lots) of stories that treat Superman like just another schmuck in a costume. And, in fairness, you can't play these characters' most basic concepts as strongly as this in every story, or "core strengths" can easily become "one-trick ponies" - if every Superman story were about his meta-fictional awesomeness overcoming evil through hope and diligence, well, it'd get old pretty quick. But the beauty of alternate universe stories is that, when done right, they can illuminate some pretty essential facets of these characters' existence. The reason these What If . . . ? stories still fascinate is that they cut straight to the heart of any given character's appeal. If The Dark Knight Returns is still considered by many to be one of the defining Batman stories, its quite simply because - to a lot of people - it says something pretty damn essential about the character of Batman, something that probably couldn't have been said as easily in the context of the conventional milieu.

More to come - including a defense of the often unfairly maligned Kingdom Come. No joke.

My Drivers License Officially Lists My Age As 'Old As Dirt'

I was thinking about this today and felt a pang of old age when I realized it was ten years in the past. Then I went home, checked the CD and realized it had actually been 12 years, not ten, and felt even older.



So awesome it doesn't even matter that they're ska. So awesome that you can even overlook the blatant LDS references in the lyrics ("Pioneers and patriarchs / Patriots and matriarchs / Staking out the promised land"). Back in the days when you had M2 playing music videos 24 hours a day - and weird ones, too. Of course, I am old enough to have liked M2 because it was a reminder of how cool MTV had been in its earlier years. (I know people have been complaining about MTV not playing music videos since about 1985, but damn, they don't even play the late night insomniacs block anymore!) You kids today - with your YouTubes and iTunes - don't realize just how great it was to live in a world where you couldn't just pick whatever you wanted to see and hear at the moment you felt the urge. There was still some romance in hearing a song you hadn't heard before on the radio and painstakingly tracking it down later. Catching the tail end of a gnarly music video and then flipping back to the station compulsively for two weeks in the hopes of catching the thing from the beginning. Seeing a fleeting mention of some weird band or obscure album in SPIN or Rollling Stone and then waiting months before you could actually find a copy of said obscurity in an out-of-town record store and then take the blind plunge, popping $16.99 on the counter for something you had never heard before and had only a fleeting fantasy of an idea of what it sounded like - half the time you'd end up with unlistenable garbage, the other half you'd stumble upon something that would change your life, maaaan.

During the recording of Remain in Light, the Talking Heads came across a magazine review of a then-obscure late 70s British punk group and were utterly fascinated by the description of the music. They decided to record a song that represented what they thought the band might sound like.

... David's contributions to this song were said to be influenced by things he had read about a British group called Joy Division. He had never actually heard their albums, but he had read about them. ...*

The result was "The Overload", which probably sounds closer to Magazine but still pretty far out for either Joy Division or the Talking Heads.

We don't live in a world where such a thing could happen today. Within 30 seconds of reading about any new artist, I can log onto YouTube and Wikipedia and know everything about them and their sound, watch the videos and bootleg concert footage, read the Pitchfork critical blowjob and the subsequent Pitchfork backlash, and then realize the band have had their entire career arc on my computer screen in about the time it took me to type this post.

Oh well.

In other news: Hey you kids, stay off my lawn.

The Stories Your Letters Demanded



In the comments to my last post, Theolonius_Nick makes an interesting assertion:

You talked a few days ago about picking at the sore rather than letting it heal, and that's exactly what's going on in OMD. I don't think by this point in time the issue is whether OMD is legitimate or not. Readers have already decided for the most part it's not. I think most readers just want to accept the new status quo and forget about how we got here (in your system, they want a passive correction). I know that's how I feel.

The problem is the Spider Braintrust seems to think with OMD they have some great mystery going on and readers are eagerly awaiting the next installment to dig out clues (an active correction). In fact, by dribbling out the little bits of explanation over months and months, Marvel keeps reopening the wound. In this case, I'd rather live with the cognitive dissonance than keep being reminded of the continuity problems, again and again and again.

Looking back over my own words, I think that Nick is probably more correct than I was in his assessment of the situation. It's important to recall my previous words to the effect that the relationship of every individual reader to all milieu corrections are subjective. The reasons for this are not hard to understand, and they offer a means to understand exactly why the Brand New Day status quo has left so many readers unsatisfied - an answer which, itself, addresses many of the logistical and methodological problems raised by ongoing serial fiction.

There is one of the aspects of producing ongoing serialized fiction that the practitioners must find most aggravating above all others: no matter which philosophy a writer or editor assumes in reference to the strict continuity or lax consistency, there are always going to be people on either side of the divide who are invariably more invested in the question than you. As much as you (or I!) may dislike the writing of Jeph Leob, his attitude towards consistency must be freeing, and in fairness his strongest moments have come in venues where his lax attitude towards strict continuity has been an asset. Contrariwise, Dan Slott's mastery of Marvel continuity appears to rival Mark Waid's knowledge of DC lore, and as a result his stories almost invariably draw strongly on a direct connection to prior stories. Either approach can work or not work, depending on context or creator. But problems arise when both Jeph Loeb and Dan Slott are set to work within the same milieu at the same time.

(This is not to say that it would ever be possible or desirable to impose a consistent policy across an entire active milieu - barring an entire line - such as pre-Unity Valiant - written by a single person, there are going to be inconsistencies. These inconsistencies can work to the milieu's strengths as much as not, which is why, for example, the mid-90s DC line was strengthened by the presences of James Robinson's Starman, Garth Ennis' Hitman and Jerry Ordway's Shazam! (three of my favorite titles I plucked essentially at random). Three more dissimilar titles you would be hard pressed to invent, and yet they all coexisted, and even crossed-over (within reason) with each other and other DC Universe titles. Rather than detracting from each other, the existence of each book within the greater milieu created a context in which each title could either participate in or ignore the line's greater mega-story (as in the case of Hitman's notorious anti-crossover crossovers with Final Night, DC 1,000,000 and Cataclysm). Each of these books could easily have existed outside of the confines of the DCU. The fact that each co-existed owes as much to commercial demands as creative decisions, but each creator used the context of the DCU as a springboard for their own ambitions, and in each case the books were made stronger by, rather than weaker from, their association with the overarching milieu.)

One of the key problems with Brand New Day probably stems from the fact that Marvel simply had no experience executing that kind of serious active local course-correction before. One More Day was a story specifically designed to negate previous stories - hardly a new thing, certainly not for Marvel. But the difference between something like Avengers Forever and One More Day is that whereas Avengers Forever functioned as a broom cleaning out cobwebs - essentially fixing 30+ years of Avengers continuity and setting it neatly in order for the benefit of later creators - the Spider-Man story didn't really "fix" anything. I mean that purely on a mechanical basis: there were no glaring inconsistencies or garbled continuity issues for which One More Day existed to untangle. On a functional level, the Spider-Man books were actually remarkably streamlined. The aftermath of the Clone Saga throughout the late 90s and early 00s (really, up to the beginning of JMS' run on Amazing) had represented one long, slow, car-crash of a correction, piling passive neglect atop active, ham-fisted retcon until the books had become little more than footnotes to themselves. Every attempt to create new storylines - Joey Z! Senator Ward! Is MJ dead or just missing? - floundered because the continuity was so garbled. It actively drew attention to itself at every turn, resisting all attempts at consistency, until a new editorial regime flayed the titles within an inch of their lives as a means of returning "back to basics". JMS' new direction on the flagship, for good or ill, got people talking about something other than the long senescence of the late 90s.

As unsatisfactory and downright painful as it may have been to see the Spider-books flailing through the better part of the decade, the damage was contained. Rather than rewriting the rules of the universe as a means of getting out of a fix, they insisted on writing their way out of the corner - even after it became obvious to all involved that such a massive course correction would have been better for all concerned. But still: that was how Marvel chose to deal with these issues, and on the whole it worked: there were lots of bad books under the water, yes, but by the time they got to where they wanted to go, a loose attention to consistency enabled most of the bad to be forgotten in favor of the good.

The problem with an active universal course correction is that, rather than merely sidestepping the problem, the story mechanism has to actively draw attention to the problem in the first place. The original Crisis was a story about how unwieldy and counter-productive the multiple-earths concept was - wrapped in the context of perhaps the best multiple-earths story the company ever told. It was a neat trick, putting a tired concept to bed with one last hurrah, while explicitly marking the dividing line between "then" (pre-Crisis) and "now" (post-Crisis). The only problem was that by drawing such intense attention to the problem, the company courted disaster when complications inevitably arose (not so far) down the line. Active universal course corrections demand strict obeisance or they crumble - the moment people started going back to pick the scabs of Crisis (ie, the moment anyone used Hawkman), Crisis was an immediate failure. If you write a story for the express purpose of writing another story or stories out of the milieu, you must follow the consequences of the emendation to its logical conclusion and thereafter obey that conclusion. In other words: once done, it cannot be undone, and should be regarded as an inviolable fixture.

Marvel undoubtedly didn't think they were producing the kind of active universal correction One More Day turned out to be. Or rather, some of Marvel - JMS, from comments made in his exit interviews, clearly understood that a story like that had to immediately establish its conclusions, put them in the past and follow them without hesitation, otherwise it would be an immediate mess. It is no coincidence that JMS is a science-fiction writer - he was able to see the consequences and eventual setbacks of a sloppy correction, because that's what speculative fiction extrapolation is all about. It may have been unpalatable for Joe Quesada to create, instead of the vague and unsatisfying One More Day, a more methodical and specific "Crisis on Earth-Spider", but the alternative is the comic book equivalent of an unfunded mandate: the dangling, inconclusive retcon.

A massive story like Crisis can inspire many types of stories in its immediate aftermath, with individual titles and families of titles responding either actively or passively to the milieu-wide changes. As long as all the titles can be said to possess a kind of general consistency with each other, they can be as disparate in execution as they please. But by ostensibly isolating the effects of One More Day to a local scale, the long-term consequences of the storyline became more pronounced on the universal scale. You simply can't have Spider-Man showing up in, say, Iron-Man or The Avengers without some acknowledgment of the new status quo. To their credit, all the non-Spider-titles who have dealt with Spider-Man in recent months have assumed the attitude of passive correction, attempting to silently readjust the character's altered state to meet the demands of each individual story. But these kind of passive corrections only create bigger problems, because the underlying thesis behind One More Day has yet to be completely elaborated. Imagine, for instance, if Crisis had ended, not with one earth conclusively in place of all previous alternate earths, but a bare intimation of some kind of drastic continuity change without providing the exact mechanism by which this had been achieved. (Oh wait, they did that, it was called Final Crisis.)

If you have to do a universal correction, you have to make sure everyone has their stories straight, and you have to go forward without looking back. To return to the beginning of the essay, it is possible - and desirable - to create a milieu in which both Jeph Loeb and Dan Slott can play well. But it is necessarily, within the context of every individual story, for each writer to be consistent within their own framework - either more or less consistent, just pick an approach and go with it. The problem with One More Day and Brand New Day is that it tried to be all things to all people: a complete continuity transplant for the strict constructionists, and a much more vague, hand-wavey sleight-of-hand for those with a more passive attention to consistency. Either approach would probably have worked, but doing both at the same time means neither are successful.

I seem to have put a lot of balls in the air with this one - so, as always, to be continued.