In a recent Usenet post which does not seem to have made it into the Google Groups archive, I made this point:
Alan Moore did contradict some previous continuity on Swamp Thing, but he worked very much within the stories set up by Wein & Wrightson in the 1970s and then Pasko & Yeats in the 1980s. One of the most amazing things about Moore's Swamp Thing is how it is so firmed rooted in its predecessors but grows into completely new fields.
[Plant allusions are hard to avoid when discussing Swamp Thing, so I didn't even try.]
These stories were root in not just earlier Swamp Thing, either, but the DC universe in general, and built on them and gave back to them.
Which brings me to mind of something:
After a panel I attended at the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts on some comic book superhero matters (in, I think, 2000), I made the comment from the audience that the "Brit pack" writers--notably Moore, but also emphatically Morrison and Gaiman and some of the others to a smaller degree--approached their shared-universe work with a sense of respect that managed to make the universes bigger by pointing out the unexplored connections and wandering down into neglected neighborhoods and gentrifying them. The best single example in my estimation is from Morrison's JLA, when he "revealed" that Johnny Thunder's Thunderbolt was one of the imps from the universe of Mr. Mxyzptlk. This is the type of connection which enlarges both ends--it makes Thunderbolt and Mxyzptlk part of a larger storyverse in a way that they weren't before. It's like discovering that someone you met online is an old friend of the guy who shares your office, and gives the stories some flavor of the depth of reality. The DC universe is a big toybox, and Moore, Morrison, and Gaiman were, to my eyes, playing with the toys in a way that would make them more interesting to the next group of people to take them out of the box.
It was gratifying that the next comment from the audience was Gaiman saying, in effect, "Yeah, that's what we were trying to do".
Posted by Kevin J. Maroney at July 11, 2004 10:20 PM
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I disagree with the idea that connections like that make the world larger. In my opinion, they make it smaller.
Dark Horse's Star Wars comics do a similar thing. Their stories seem to be comissioned by pulling the names of two minor SW characters out of a hat (say, Watto and Lobot) and writing a story about how they met. That doesn't make the universe larger, it makes it smaller. By tying everyone together, it shrinks the world, limiting the number of beings in it.
When the guy who now shares your office is someone you met online, people say, "Huh! Small world!" instead of "Wow! Interestingly expanded larger world!" because that's the perceived effect. Out of all the millions of people on Earth you never met that your new office mate could have been, it was someone you already knew. A chance to increase the number of people you know failed. That's not expansion, that's contraction.
Which is not to say I don't thoroughly enjoy the Brit Pack authors, but I think the whole "expanding the universe by tying everyone together" thing is a complete fallacy.
I think a part of the difference here is in the fact that the Star Wars universe _is_ small, comprising only five films, essentially. [With the expanded universes of the books or comics being focused, to an unhealthy degree, on those kinds of increasing interconnections rather than new stories about new parts of the universe. And not really counting, anyway.] While the DC, or Marvel universes are really, really big, with tens of thousands of comics of material. Maybe the interconnections don't make the whole thing any larger, but they do make the small neighborhood of, say, JSA-land look like a part of something bigger.
This is also why seeing the Alien mounted head on the Predator ship in Predator II was the coolest part of that movie, no matter how badly they mess up the concept this summer...
Yeah, it's a matter of opening up doors between bubbles. In the real world, or in the Star Wars universe, interconnections just bring things closer. But when you have two things you didn't think were connected and now they are, that makes each of them bigger. The guy you knew from email was already in your world, it's just gotten more tightly bound into it when you find he's down the hall.
Connections within a story = smaller world
Connections between stories = larger world
Setting aside the argument over "smaller world" vs. "larger world", the reason I like continuity is that if done properly, it's FUN! Now this comes from a reader of mostly indy and alternative books, with just one or two Marvel/DC universe books on my list. But I did grow up on those books, and part of the fun was knowing that these characters were all connected in a way, or a hokey villain in one book could be used in a clever manner in a different book.
It's that whole "sandbox" metaphor all writers like to mention in interviews, i.e. "I wanted a chance to play in the Batman sandbox..." There are thousands of characters and hundreds of established concepts/worlds/institutions in the big Marvel and DC universes, and sometimes it's just plain fun to revisit them with different character combinations or a different POV.
Which is why as bad as it may sound, I'm not all that supportive of new books from the big two that are set in their "own continuity" for the most part. Not that I'm a continuity slave or care about it that much, quite the opposite. (I can't stand the folks that constantly bitch about "they disregarded the continuity from ASM #285, page 4". So what? Was it a good story? Then shut up!) It's just that a book published by Marvel, set in the Marvel universe, but one that doesn't interact with said universe, seems kinda pointless. If I wanted that, I'd read an indy book. And I do.
Every once in a while I'll jones for a big continuity superhero-fest, and I'll pick up Identity Crisis or JLA/Avengers. But for the most part I don't see the point of a book like Runaways, which to the best of my knowledge didn't really delve into the Marvel U with the exception of a Cloak & Dagger cameo. That concept would have probably been better served (and more successful) as an Image or Dark Horse book.
Anyway, just my 2 cents...
We're talking important people in the DC universe. Saying something like Superman should never meet Batman or any of the other heroes is like saying the President of the US should never meet the Prime Minister of the UK. "Important" people do meet each other. That doesn't make it a smaller world. Also the smaller characters or alter egos that do know a lot of people are in positions that would lead them into forming these connections. It's all in how you look at it really. If you take Elongated Man and make him Plastic Man's long lost cousin thats another thing. :)
To go back to Aliens and Predator (mentioned above), continuity was the one thing that movie actually got right. Even if you knew nothing about either property, you would not get a false impression of one or the other from this movie. (Note: I have not read much of the comics, so if the movie dropped the ball on that front, I stand corrected.)
The main problems with the movie were all related to the general stupidity one expects of action movies.
In general, I favor continuity. Without it, a story, especially when segmented like comics are, can lose its way. And, constant revisions can often destroy what makes a property viable in the first place. I have come to dread any company trying to make an old character/property more current. (I was dismayed to see the Mirror Master snorting coke in a recent issue of the Flash. Flash enemies were supposed to be fun, not drug-addicted thugs.)
I tend to agree about the whole StarWars Universe being shrunk. I have been given to understand that the comics do count. BUt, in any case, it is tiresome to see that everyone and their mother and inbred cousin crossed paths with a member of the Skywalker family at some point.
Peter David's "Skippy the Jedi Droid" was a good parody of this. But, David should not have had such an easy time with this parody.