A Comic Crisis Flashpoint

Originally published August 11, 1995, in Comics Buyer’s Guide #1134

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson

One never knows what’s going to get reactions out of people.

I’ve written any number of annuals over the past years. One of them I wasn’t happy with at all. A couple I thought were OK. And a couple I was really pleased with.

Yet none of them received much of a reaction until recently.

And it got a reaction, not because of its content or themes, but because of the only thing that matters: continuity.

In the recent Aquaman Annual, I decided to do a series of four short stories (plus a book-end framing sequence) that revolved around a consistent theme: perception—how people perceived Aquaman as an individual. It’s a theme I’d explored more explicitly in the first issue of the Aquaman: Time and Tide miniseries (wherein he is deemed a hero by grateful airbreathers and immediately gets sucked into the entire love-hate relationship with the populace that celebrity always brings.)

So I decided to build the “Year One” annual around that subject by producing a quartet of stories about how Aquaman was perceived from all quarters: from gods to demi-gods to super-mortals to mere mortals.

[Spoilers follow:]

Triton sees him as a punk; Poseidon sees him as an upstart pretender; Mera sees him as a confused and uncertain monarch; Aqualad sees him as a way of impressing chicks (OK, so it wasn’t Garth’s finest hour); Superman thinks he’s self-aggrandizing and slightly nuts; humans think he’s a superhero and bend over backwards to please him; a couple of young gods see him as a means of amusing themselves; the sea-creatures (personified by one whale in particular) see him as a friend and ally; and Diana, the future Wonder Woman sees him…

Well…

That was the problem.

In the first of the stories, Arthur is in his mid-teens and happens upon Themisyc— Themyscri—Paradise Island, just as Triton (son of Poseidon) is trying to ravage a young Amazon named Diana. Arthur intercedes and is at first mistaken by Diana for a minion of Triton. She responds to his rescue effort by punching him out.

Undeterred, Arthur goes toe-to-flipper against Triton to hold him off while Diana goes for help. Arthur eventually escapes, and Triton goes back to the surface only to find a brace of Amazonian arrows ready to filet him. Triton demurs rather than take on the Amazons.

Diana waits around until later when Arthur emerges from the water. He stays a distance from her, they chat for a bit. He admits he’d like to kiss her. Diana, who figures this is the standard male reaction to seeing females (based upon her mother’s experiences with Heracles and her own experience with Triton) says drily, “I know.” Arthur then turns and swims away. End of one element of the overall annual.

And this poor little story has been removed from context, bludgeoned, pounded, excoriated, and even apologized for (but not by me.)

Why?

Steve Trevor.

As everyone familiar with Wonder Woman knows, Steve Trevor was the first resident of “Man’s World” that Diana ever encountered. As a consequence (no matter which version of the story you adhere to), Diana left Paradise Island to go to Man’s World and become Wonder Woman.

And, as I developed the annual, I gave passing thought to that meeting but didn’t see how it bore on what I was doing, for the following reasons:

1) There were stories of Diana’s youth in the past—stories I grew up with—that gave her companions such as Merboy and Bird Boy. In Diana’s history there was already a tradition of her associating with males before Trevor (and that’s not even taking male gods into account.) So as far as Diana’s perception went (which was the theme of the annual) the water-breathing young guy with the fins on his calves was in the same category as demigods and super-mortals such as—well—herself.

I was aware, of course, of Crisis on Infinite Earths, which posited that none of those earlier stories had occurred. But, to my mind, people misunderstand the intent of Crisis. All it did was give the DC universe a tabula rasa. Just because her friendship with Merboy and Bird Boy no longer automatically “happened,” it doesn’t immediately follow that they automatically didn’t happen. Just that it hadn’t been established yet in the current continuity (which in itself became so snarled since Crisis that they had to do another miniseries just to try and straighten it out).

In other words, if we look over Diana’s 50-year history, association with males of various species before Steve Trevor is not unprecedented. So in this case the Merboy’s name is Arthur. Big flippin’ deal.

2) Steve Trevor is a human man. Arthur is not—a fact that will be made even more prominent and underscored more forcefully over the next ten issues or so of Aquaman as we explore not only Arthur’s origins, but Atlantis’ as well. (Yeah, sure, he’s called Aquaman. But he wasn’t at the time, and besides, that was a name that humans came up with for him.)

3) Man’s World. Man’s World. The place where those barbaric and enslaving males resided. That’s what the Amazons were always talking about, and that’s where Diana went. Did the ocean floor also count as Man’s World?

See a lot of men residing down there? Drowned corpses maybe, but otherwise no. So there ya go.

So not only was the story in the clear as far as perception went, but it was also in the clear as far as fact went. Steve Trevor remained the first human man, resident of Man’s World, that Diana ever met. The fact that she was surprised by his pleasing and non-monstrous aspect is in no way invalidated by her meeting with young Arthur.

My own reasoning was that after all the things Hippoli—Hypoli—Diana’s mom had told her about the barbaric residents of Man’s World, she would have expected someone who looked monstrous. So she was struck by Trevor’s not conforming to what had been built up in her mind.

It was run through proper channels at DC, no one had any problems with it, and it saw print.

And Wonder Woman fans went ballistic.

They told me I’d violated continuity. That I’d destroyed Diana’s origin. That I’d undercut Steve Trevor. How dare I? Who the hëll did I think I was?

If I’d kicked the pope in the crotch or been revealed as the Unabomber, I couldn’t have gotten a bigger and more violent reaction.

I put forward all the responses, all the thinking that went into the story, just as I’ve outlined them for you. Some fans reacted reasonably. Others still fought it tooth and nail, rejecting my explanations for any number of reasons.

I was, to put it mildly, not regarded well.

It caught me utterly off-guard. I mean, here was an annual that I thought folks would cotton to since it was meant to be evocative of the early days of DC lore. But apparently I’d gone too far back. On the one hand I was slammed because I’d “violated 50 years of history,” but when I pointed out that history incorporated her friendship with an aquatic male, they turned around and said that didn’t count because it was “pre-Crisis.”

Geez, guys, it’s not like I cloned her.

For that matter, it’s not as if I were planning to set up a series of young Arthur/Diana stories. I took pains to make clear in the annual that he never again found his way back to Paradise Island. It was a chance encounter between an Amazon and a merlad, nothing more.

What amused me the most was that while I was being pilloried, the Wonder Woman editor stepped forward, apologized profusely, and said we shouldn’t have done it. At which point some fans announced that I was off the hook.

Well, no.

The editor was off the hook. He said he was sorry, fans who had gotten their way applauded him, and he went off to sin no more. In the meantime I was still out on a limb fighting, pausing only long enough to say, “Wait a minute, what’s that sawing noise?”

Of course, it didn’t help that DC’s latest timeline places Diana at about 10 years old at the time the incident with Arthur would have occurred. That gave fans something else to crab about, since the plot merely indicated that Diana was “young” and the artist drew her looking like Cindy Crawford. But even this shouldn’t have been a problem to anyone willing to cut some slack (which few seemed willing to do.) One definition of “Amazon,” after all, is “any tall, aggressive, vigorous woman.” So she’s a 10-year-old of Amazonian build.

Indeed, it’s a kick that fans were willing to accept the concept of an Amazon princess, made from clay, who was super-strong, could fly, and bounce bullets off her bracelets—but they drew the line at the notion of an early bloomer. Anyone who claims, “An Amazon couldn’t look that mature at age 10,” is right up there with the network executive who rejected a line from My Favorite Martian by claiming, “A Martian wouldn’t say that!”

The place where fans did have a point was questioning how Arthur and Diana were able to talk to each other, what with the potential language barrier. I figured that either young Arthur spent a year on a Greek fishing trawler that he doesn’t talk about much, or else Diana speaks fluent dolphin. Either way works.)

I didn’t see a lot of fans complaining the story itself is bad, although a handful claimed that Diana was out of character. To which I say, “Oh yeah, people at the age of 10 act just the way they do as adults. There’s plenty of basis for comparison.” What they complained about is that the story was written at all, hinging on tenuous claims of continuity violation.

I suppose the most ironic thing of all about this is that Wonder Woman is, by design, a mythic figure. The very myths that she evokes are rife with contradictions and changes. A story happened one way in one telling, and is contradicted by a subsequent telling. Hëll, the Greeks couldn’t even agree on the Amazons themselves: According to myth, they only had one breast in order to facilitate archery. But in some Greek art, they have two breasts.

Don’t give me this “fifty years worth of continuity” stuff. How many fans are up in arms because Neil Gaiman’s Sandman violated thousands of years worth of continuity? Orpheus’ father is not Morpheus of the Endless, but rather the god Apollo (or perhaps King Oeagrus of Thrace, depending what you read—which proves the point even more.) Whoopsie. There goes the entire “Kindly Ones” story arc.

Or check out the local movie theaters, wherein First Knight is presently unspooling. Some folks say that Richard Gere shouldn’t be in the movie. Well, technically, if unswerving and implacable continuity is the aim, Lancelot shouldn’t be there at all. Lancelot du Lac wasn’t a part of Arthurian tales until several centuries after the stories first originated. He was added in by the French, in keeping with the popular French literary theme of the cuckolded husband. (There is, however, no truth to the rumor that the French Lancelot’s first words upon seeing Guinevere were, “Hey laaaady, pretty laaaaady.”)

So we must ponder whether we should hold literature and myth to the standard of comics—or comics to the standard of literature and myth?

I prefer the latter approach.

Which is why editors and fans have a hopeless job in trying to keep everything consistent and inviolate. Myths—even modern myths, such as comics lore—cannot be controlled. They are guided by the limits (or lack thereof) of human imagination and ingenuity. Like the dinosaurs of Jurassic Park, they can’t be contained, but instead go stomping where they will, smashing through fences and making new roads for themselves.

Audiences want to see something different, something new—while at the same time clinging to the inviolability of what’s gone before. The latter stance is understandable, but people must realize that it’s a hopeless mindset. The only thing that remains the same is that nothing remains the same. (Except, God willing, the First Amendment, but that’s next week’s column.)

Emerson, quoted at the beginning of this piece, also said, “Speak what you think today in hard words and tomorrow speak what tomorrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict everything you say today.”

Which, to my mind, is more than enough to justify the upcoming story in which Diana, at age 15, encounters a fallen airplane populated by the entire Green Bay Packers offensive line.

Truly, a story of mythic proportions.

(Peter David, writer of stuff, can be written to at Second Age, Inc., PO Box 239, Bayport, NY 11705. He wonders how Ralph Waldo Emerson and Todd McFarlane would have gotten along.)