Originally published August 22, 1997, in Comics Buyer’s Guide #1240
So… we were talking about myths.
At this point, Star Trek has reached nearly mythic status. One of the tests for that (and I may have discussed this in an earlier column; if so please forgive me, but I’ve been doing this gig for a lot of years and I’m bound to repeat sooner or later) is that discussions of key elements can be held without qualifiers.
For instance, if one were to ask, say, “Who was Napoleon Solo?” (to pick a contemporaneous program) the answer one would get (if one were rewarded with something other than a blank stare or a half-hearted guess such as “Han Solo’s brother?”) would be something along the lines of, “He was a character on a TV series called The Man From U.N.C.L.E.. There’s possible variants, sure, but that’s the most likely answer, I’d think.
But if you were to ask, “Who was James T. Kirk?” the reply you’d likely get would be, “Captain of the U.S.S. Enterprise.” There would be no qualifier, no further clarification, and no acknowledgement that one is discussing a television show. To rank as myth, a concept, characters or stories must take on a life of its own, its origins either lost in antiquity or simply irrelevant.
Star Trek fills that bill rather nicely. Comic books are likewise a sort of modern mythos being spun as we go. Superheroes are such strong archetypal characters and concepts that they continue to appeal and to attract fans even after all this time. And Star Trek and comics also constitute prime examples of that mythic pastime called “consistency” or “continuity.”
One of the knocks on the new Disney Hercules was that Disney played fast and loose with the existent myths. Putting aside that Disney did not use the proper Greek name “Heracles,” but on the other hand used all the Greek names for the other gods (Hermes instead of Mercury, Hades instead of Pluto, etc. Although that was probably a wise idea. Can you imagine a Disney film where the villain of the piece was named Pluto? For that matter, when they showed Cerberus, they should have had the three-headed dog sporting three Pluto heads. Talk about your in-jokes. Although I was the only one in the theater who laughed over Hermes’ obsession with floral arrangements. Didn’t anyone else get that? Doesn’t anyone recall the symbol for FTD florists? But I digress…)
Keep in mind that this wasn’t like Pocahantas, wherein Disney mucked with history, upgrading a pre-adolescent heroine into a shapely babe and giving her a hot romance with John Smith. This is a movie based on a character of myth. Yet some people complained that the movie wasn’t “really” how the myths went. And you find yourself scratching your head over the absurdity of the statement. Hello? They’re myths. They’re not true. None of it really happened. Or anything that did happen was embellished in the retelling to the point of creating a mythic figure.
There’s a nice turn on that in the film Braveheart, wherein an assembled army of Scotsmen refuses to believe that William Wallace (Mel Gibson) is in fact the legendary freedom fighter because Wallace in-the-flesh doesn’t match the stories of the warrior reputed to be seven feet tall, capable of slaying the British with bolts of lightning from his butt. This dovetails with genuine stories of Wallace, recounted by a poet whose tales of Wallace’s feats are so extraordinary that some historians tend to discount them, reasoning that they couldn’t possibly be true. Which is kind of unfair: It means that genuinely extraordinary people can’t ever get their due.
Comic book fans have a name for it, however. It’s called “continuity.” It is the obsession the bug-a-boo, the raison d’etre for many folks when it comes to their enjoyment of comics. If the story doesn’t match up precisely with what has gone before, there will be flurries of letters, e-mails, discussions, and demands that it be straightened out. There are still fans who are annoyed with me because I won’t do stories untangling or explaining the origin of Supergirl… a remarkably convoluted backstory exacerbated by the fact that she comes from a “pocket universe” (whatever that is) that now never existed in the first place.
Fans want to know how this can be. There’s two answers to this: (1) I don’t know and (2) I don’t care. Say that she’s left over pocket lint from the pocket universe and leave me the hëll alone so I can tell the stories I want to tell. But some fans get annoyed over this because I’m not telling the stories they want to tell. My response to that is, fine, tell your own stories then. It’s a grand tradition, after all. It’s where myths come from, and myths absolutely, no two ways, don’t give a dámņ about continuity.
Hercules played fast and loose with existing myth. The young Hercules, for instance, is shown a mast from Jason’s ship, the Argo. Nice trick, considering that according to myth, Hercules was on the Argo, sailing side by side with Jason. His origin is different, the (rather cursory) telling of his labors is different, and by the way, Pegasus was not formed from a puffy cloud, he sprang from the blood of the slain Gorgon, Medusa, and later aided the Greek hero, Bellerophon, in slaying the Chimera.
Why did lopping off Medusa’s head result in the birth of Pegasus? Beats me. But if that story were first being told in a Marvel or DC Comic, you could bet that Pegasus’ first appearance would only be a prelude to a much more involved, detailed, secret origin of Pegasus one-shot. In the telling of myth and lore, audiences simply wanted to know what happened. Nowadays audiences have to know why it happened. People don’t want to take things on faith anymore.
Look at Star Trek, if you will. If there’s any one modern mythos that has spawned a more continuity-concerned base, it’s Trek. Why, when Scotty came out of the transporter beams in Relic, did he act as if he thought that Kirk was still alive, when in Star Trek Generations, he was present at Kirk’s believed demise. Well, uhm, he was confused. Well, uhm, deep down he always believed that Kirk was still alive somehow. The truth is that the writers weren’t going to let a line of dialogue in one episode of a TV show several years previously torpedo an entire sequence in a motion picture. The further truth is: It doesn’t matter.
Except to the fans, it does matter. This is not to take away from spirited and entertaining discussions among fans where discussing discrepancies is more of a mental exercise than anything. There’s certainly a large element of fun in that. But some folks take it waaaay too seriously. And that’s not limited to the fans; Paramount officials have been known to distinguish between the TV series and the line of novels by declaring, “The TV series is Star Trek fact, while the novels are Star Trek fiction.” This prompted at least one fan–speaking on behalf of all fans, I think–to declare, “Geez, and they tell us to get a life.” And boy, were there noses out of joint at DC when the Star Trek/X-Men team-up was announced. DC reps, back when they had the license, had proposed a Star Trek/Superman meeting, and the proposal was shot down by the then-licensing officials with the declaration, “But… Superman isn’t real.”
And yet many fans want stories in the book to “count.” To be part of “canon.” To be “real.” Because those stories become important to them, and to them they are as vital and significant as those stories which the guardians of “Star Trek fact” consider the one, true Star Trek.
And there are “protectors” of comic book canon as well. Fan protectors who will raise a ruckus the moment that there is a threat to the precious continuity, or the moment that a new creator puts a new spin on the character. They will cry foul, claim that it’s only being done for filthy commercial purposes. Maybe it is. Maybe it isn’t. The point is, if the story is interesting, who cares? Storytelling should be about surprise and the unexpected, and it is the height of absurdity to reject a concept or twist or spin out of hand on the basis that it’s never been done before.
I was on a panel at San Diego recently where continuity discussions came up, and it was pointed out (by Mark Waid, I think, although I may very well be wrong, and if so I apologize) that DC, for instance, used to revel in contradictions. There would be a story about the origin of Wonder Woman’s invisible plane, and then, six months to a year later, there would be a story about the origin of Wonder Woman’s invisible plane that would completely contradict what had gone before. It could be argued that the reasoning was that the turnover in comic book readership was such that you’d likely be writing stories for an entirely new audience who will be curious as to the background of the plane, and why just recycle the same story? More likely, the creators simply didn’t care. They figured, “I have a neat idea for a story! I’ll tell it!”
Now, when DC creators get a new and better (in theory) notion for an origin, it’s a whole big deal. It requires intercompany crossovers to justify it. Fans have created terminology to accompany it (“Reboot”, “Retcon”). Yet shouldn’t comics, which arguably have achieved in some instances mythic status, be allowed the flexibility given to all myths. Indeed, rather than obsess about continuity or become angry when stories are redressed for new audiences, shouldn’t we be celebrating part of a long-standing tradition?
William Irwin Thompson, in his book The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light, writes of the organic nature of myths, stating that it is the right and obligation of those telling stories to adapt to new audiences and concerns, stating “Forms of knowledge change as society changes.” When one looks at those who obsess about what can and can’t be done, what should and should not be done, desperately trying to keep an organic story to some sort of universal constant, they are setting themselves up as caretakers of something that should not be constricted. Thompson writes:
The structural anthropologist urges us to ignore the orthodox who labor so patiently trying to eliminate the apocryphal variants from the one true text. The priests of the Temple of Solomon works to construct the canon of Biblical literature, and in this work the dubious folktales of the peasantry were dismissed, but for us a legend or a midrash (a folktale variation on Biblical stories) may be a greater opening to the archetypal world than the overly refined redactions of the urban priestly intelligentsia. Once we are freed from the quest for the one true vision of a myth, we are also freed from the concern for determining the exact provenance of the variant. How can one tell where a myth comes from?
Thompson goes on to note,
It cannot be too strongly emphasized that all available variants should be taken into account… There is no one true version of which all the others are but copies or distortions. Every version belongs to the myth.
And added:
But there are also other reasons why all the versions of a myth must be considered, and these reasons have to do with the applicability of information theory to the study of the myth as noted by the anthropologist, Edmund Leach. Every message goes from a Sender to a Receiver through a transmitting medium, but every medium of transmission inevitably distorts the message, and so along the way the signal picks up noise. What the Receiver must get is a mixture of noise and information. If there is only one message, then the Receiver has no way of sorting out the noise from the information; but if the message is sent over and over again in ;many different ways, then the Receiver can line all the versions up in a single imaginary space, see the common structure, and sift the information from the noise. For a structuralist like Edmund Leach, the structure is the meaning. Genesis, for example, is about incest taboos; all the rest is noise and mystification. But one man’s noise is another man’s information… Every new school of thought teaches us something and adds a new tool to the scholar’s kit.
In the case of comics, in the case of Star Trek, we do know the origins. They’ve been thoroughly documented, sometimes ad nauseam. But what we’re seeing is something truly exciting: The embracing of something with specific origins and the transformation of that into mythic status. A hundred years from now, it is not impossible that characters such as Superman or Captain Kirk may still be part of the gestalt human mind, but that their origins may be hotly debated. Just as the origins of stories of Men in Black are also debated (some pegging it as far back as four hundred years ago) before Lowell Cunningham put his own spin on a myth that, once again, goes to a core notion: The world is a confusing and contradictory place, and it would be nice to know that there’s some sort of structure holding it together—be it black-clad men, a guy in a blue and red suit, a man in a starship representing a vision of a future in which we are harmonious, or a divine being overseeing the entire mess.
And as for me, all I can think of is that six-year-old Ariel looked a little disappointed as they rolled the closing credits for Hercules. I said, “What’s wrong, honey?” And she looked up, a bit confused, and said, “Why wasn’t Xena in it?”
And so the legend continues.
(Peter David, writer of stuff, can be written to at Second Age, Inc., PO Box 239, Bayport, NY 11705. At least, that’s the myth.)
• 
This is not to take away from spirited and entertaining discussions among fans where discussing discrepancies is more of a mental exercise than anything. There’s certainly a large element of fun in that.
Indeed. Something that has had as many stories over nearly 5 decades as Start Trek can’t be expected to be consistent. But it sure is fun when someone comes up with a nice explanation for a discrepancy.
I remember the “Ha! Nicely done!” moment of pleasure when someone (ahem!) cleared up the “James R. Kirk” tombstone from one of the very first Star Trek episodes. It’s kind of a nice payoff for being enough of a Trekkie to know of the inconsistency.
Having recently rewatched that episode, I am left wondering – what was the fanwank?
Sir,
I believe that the correction came from one of the “My Brother’s Keeper” novels involving Gary Mitchell. In the story, they said that Gary Mitchell’s nickname for Kirk was James “Rhinoceros” Kirk because he was so stubborn. By putting the R on the tombstone, Gary Mitchell was rubbing in that it was still him, not some different creature who was killing Kirk.
fred l, I was thinking of Q Squared but our host. He was James R. in one of the timelines/tracks that criss-crossed in that novel.
Or, more apropos (see what I did there?) for the forum, given the “someone (ahem!),” there’s the bit in PAD’s [i]Q-Squared[/i] that places “Where No Man Has Gone Before” with all its inconsistencies with later episodes into a parallel timeline where his name IS “James R. Kirk.”
–Daryl
Yup!
And some authors can have fun by mucking around with continuity. During Grant Morrison’s run on DOOM PATROL, he changed the Chief from the brilliant leader of the group to sociopathic scientist who deliberately exposed the group to more and more dangers just to see what would happen. And the brilliant thing is that Morrison didn’t change any of the DP’s history, yet the Chief’s new and sinister motivation still made sense.
Reminds me of Englehart’s run on Captain America in the ’70s. (Yes, folks, I’ve been reading them since then.)
He didn’t change anything established about the Falcon’s origin, yet made it quite different than we’d thought it was.
In Philip K Ðìçk’s novel Flow my terar, the Policeman Said, the generic term for space opera movies is “captainkirk” (s in “There’s a new captainkirk opening at the Rialto tomorrow.”), which is also the generic term for the hero of such.
Argh.
“Tears”, not “terar”…
There’s a lot of complaining going on now with the new 52, though some of that is simply that books coming out within weeks or months of each other are contradicting each other.
The latest being that Tim Drake was never a Robin and never figured out who Batman was despite being shown as a former Robin in Batman and Robin earlier.
I think complaining about the inevitable glitches in continuity that will happen inevitably over time is pointless. Even the major changes should be recognized as part of the nature of comics (i.e., long term serialized stories).
But making major contradiction like that in two nearly contemporaneous issues seems overly lazy on the part of DC editorial.
This, unfortunately, is not new for DC…In 1994, when talking about “Zero Hour”, Dan Jurgens was talking about how titles in the post-Crisis DC universe said, “I don’t think you should have to read every DC Comic since 1965 to enjoy a DC comic”, but then cited how Hawkman had two vastly different “first appearances” within months of each other and how “that’s just screwing over the fans.”
The sad part is it’s not the first time Lobdell’s got it wrong in the new 52. The first Issue of Red Hood and the Outlaws. Arsenal is asking Starfire, if she remembers her time with Garth, Dustin and Vic.
Vic of of course meaning Cyborg and founding member of the Justice League who was never part of the Titans, and as a matter of fact according to later revelations, there never was a Titans, before the current series also written by Lobdell.
Isn’t this something they should know before restarting the DCU?
Didio and Lee claim that the plans for the reboot were well over a year before it actually happened, but if that were true shouldn’t they have a better idea of what actually happened?
And again I’m reminded of just why I buy far fewer comics than I used to.
Well, that’s just a shame..there are a lot of excellent books out there
Oh, I’m sure there are. And I’m always glad to here recommendations.
And I do still buy books, just far fewer than once upon a time. Certainly in part due to my changing tastes and what I enjoy being a little different than what I used to enjoy. But also largely because of a generally declining quality of the books published by DC/Marvel.
I used to collect a lot of DC/Marvel titles. I still have almost all of those books, re-read them frequently and continue to enjoy them. When I’ve picked up recent titles I’ve not.
So it isn’t that my tastes have migrated away from superhero titles. It’s that the vast majority of current superhero titles aren’t as well done.
“The latest being that Tim Drake was never a Robin and never figured out who Batman was despite being shown as a former Robin in Batman and Robin earlier.”
That’s not true. Tim was never shown as Robin in Batman and Robin.
“Vic of of course meaning Cyborg and founding member of the Justice League who was never part of the Titans, and as a matter of fact according to later revelations, there never was a Titans, before the current series also written by Lobdell.”
That’s not really true, either. Tim says something about this being the “shortest incarnation of the Teen Titans ever.” And Flamebird said she was a Teen Titan in Batwoman. Nowhere does it say there was no Titans team before.
As for Vic, being in the Justice League does not preclude him being a Titan, as well. And anyway, the name “Teen Titans” is never mentioned in that conversation in RHATO. It just says Starfire used to hang out with Vic, etc.
The new 52 has actually been remarkably good at keeping continuity straight between series.
Although, the “never figured out who Batman was” doesn’t add up, considering he hangs out with Bruce and Ðìçk and Damian out of costume. But then, this news is based on something Scott Lobdell said at Comic-Con. The actual comic hasn’t come out yet, so we’ll see how it goes.
That would be beyond disappointing..I have always felt that Tim Drake, ever since he was crafted by Chuck Dixon in his early stories was a terrific, unique Robin
I remember back when ST fiction was just beginning in the ’70s, and the debates would rage as to whether these were ‘real’ Trek, or just ‘sorta’ Trek. I always felt that “The Price of the Phoenix” and “The Fate of the Phoenix” should have become canon… 😉
One of the interesting things that I have observed, though, is that in later series some of the events in the novels DID become canon, often through little references or minor characters. It was always fun to see them show up.
I am still waiting to see Captain Piper!
The two “Phoenix” novels in early ST fandom were written by a devoted fan of Ayn Rand who indicated in interviews that she assumed Kirk, Spock and Roddenberry were also Ayn Rand acolytes. That explains why the characterization of Kirk would appeal to William Shatner, as the author claimed it did, but be utterly incompatible with actual canon (like City on the Edge of Forever) and Roddenberry’s expressed philosophy. None of this should surprise anyone who understands why Randites call themselves “Objectivists”, but in my mind, these books really illustrate the dangers of giving every writer a free hand to remake established iconic characters through the prism of their own deeply held beliefs.
When TNG came out, I was hoping that John Ford’s The Final Reflection would be canon. No such luck.
I do still use “Komerex, tal khesterex?”, though. A friend of my wife’s (whom she’s considering cutting out of her life) seems to be more khesterex than komerex.
“The young Hercules, for instance, is shown a mast from Jason’s ship, the Argo. Nice trick, considering that according to myth, Hercules was on the Argo, sailing side by side with Jason.”
Interestingly enough, on the accompanying cartoon show, Disney’s Hercules did get a chance to sail with Jason. Who was Jason voiced by? None other than Captain Kirk himself, William Shatner.
“Why did lopping off Medusa’s head result in the birth of Pegasus? Beats me.”
It had something to do with Pegasus being the son of Poseidon in his form as the horse-god. Poseidon and Medusa being something of an item. I doubt Disney cared. They just knew they weren’t likely to do Greek myths again and had to include the most iconic creatures.
The thing that gets me about these “myths” is that movies seem to have become more mythic than many of the books they’re based on. For example, everyone knows the Wizard of Oz, but when it comes up in conversation and I start mentioning stuff like Ozma and the Patchwork Girl, I start to lose people. Same seems to go for anything conerning Frankenstein, Tarzan and fairy tales in general. I know why it is. There are more “shared experiences” in movies, but I’m tired of getting strange looks.
This is an instance in these reruns of earlier BIDs where I’m reminded of instances from my life that have little to do with the subject of the column.
In this case, I’m reminded of a cousin, a girl who was the closest in age to me of any of my cousins. She was a tremendous fan of “The Man from U.N.C.L.E.” and got very angry with me when I told her that the series probably wouldn’t have existed had it not been for James Bond. (I didn’t know at the time that the name “Solo” was taken, with premission, from a character in “Goldfinger” — if memory serves, he was the mobster who is killed and then put in a car that’s crushed into a cube.) I told her that U.N.C.L.E’s adversary, T.H.R.U.S.H. was inspired by Bond’s foe S.P.E.C.T.R.E. and the gadgets in the TV show were varitions of Bond’s gadgets. Of course, along the lines of what Peter suggested where few today would remember Napoleon Solo but know Captain Kirk, everyone today knows who James Bond is. I haven’t seen this cousin for a long time now.
Let me throw out a hypothesis (My idea, which is mine. Ahem! AHEM!): Fans of character/concept X get more upset about continuity violations with characters/concepts that are still “curated” by a copyright holder than they do ones that are in public domain. Why? Because there is more of a sense that a favorite aspect of a character or concept or its history may be thrown out never to be touched on again.
Example: Sherlock Holmes fans may argue (sometimes bitterly) over the relative merits of various post-Doyle interpretations of the Great Detective (see debates on the Laurie King novels, or the relavtive merits of various Holmes’s of the large and small screen.) But nobody gets overly bent out of shape, because nothing post-Doyle limits the ability of anyone else to do the stories *they* want to do.
But with “curated” characters…whoa! Did George Lucas say that Greedo shot first? J.J. Abrams is rebooting “classic” Trek? Them’s fightin’ words!
I have a friend who is deeply, deeply angry at DC for a bunch of their New 52 stuff, because a lot of the stories which he felt really defined the character of his favorite hero, Tim Drake, no longer apply. The character DC now calls Tim Drake can never (well, at least until the next reboot) be the same character as the one he loved. Nobody can do new stories exploring the relationship between Tim Drake and his adopted father, Bruce Wayne — there is no such relationship going forward.
Do U think there should never be changes in the continuity of “curated” characters? No. But there is that danger, since almost every version of a character is somebody’s favorite version, that your going to piss them off, because you’re not just telling an alternate version of the myth, you’re cutting off the version they loved.
Actually, PAD, I really thought your retcon of the Abomination in the somewhat over looked mini-series “Destruction” (I think it was called…), in where it is revealed the origin we all ow and love of the charactor was all a government cover story to hide the ruth. Really cuaght on though, even ad a comic made out of it.
Oh, and also, did anyone else here now that the (fairly) new BBC series “Sherlock” is actually adapted from actual, “real,” Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Serlock Holmes stories? Having never had any interest at all in this character before this current series, I didn’t until my sister told me last week. I have since bought the all orginal books (that sounds a bit grand; I found a 2 paperback “Complete Sherlock Holmes” collection for $12.95. And it was half off) because I guess I want to see how the Orginal holds up to the remake. And if I don’t like the books, I’m going to keep right on watching the show. A good myth out grows it’s origins.