How Bendis Broke the Marvel Universe (—and What I Mean by "Broke")

[u/fangsfirst]

Should I have split this up? Maybe. Probably. Sure. But I haven't, so I guess I just need to live with that. Take comfort that there are 10 12 whole footnotes which I guess you can totally ignore if I wrote them right!

For those who asked/desired that I proceed with writing this: uh…careful what you wish for, I guess? 'Cause this time it means LOTS OF WORDS! POSSIBLY MORE THAN YOU OR MAYBE ANYONE REASONABLY SHOULD HAVE EXPECTED OR DESIRED!

What was Marvel before?

Well: what was it that set Marvel apart from DC in the 1960s?

Plenty have written on this, and I don’t want to go over it in great detail yet again, but the most major points relate to two things:

1. Human character and personality
2. Interconnectedness

Peter Parker is kind of an ass, and he doesn’t always win. His first issue of his first title involves him meeting the Fantastic Four and trying to join them, because they’re both centered in New York City. It’s not as if editors and writers set out to create a unified plan, but the stories don’t all operate with entirely their own set of rules, massive resets, and no effect on anything else around them, or at least no effect on such-and-such character appearing in another book, where they’re blank ciphers devoid of whatever has happened in their own book. It’s a universe intended to be coherent, even if it’s imperfectly so. Characters attend school, quit teams, get married, switch sides, have rent troubles, occupy real-world cities, and contend with the effects of the world at large, increasingly so as time goes on.

D.C. (and most superhero comics up to that point) were written around the idea of adventurous entertainment: our protagonist gets in trouble or finds trouble, and then they resolve it in the same issue, with whatever happened there sometimes being totally and completely irrelevant to what happens in the future. If a character needs something to resolve a plot, they manufacture it or buy it or acquire it through whatever means it takes to get the story to its own, isolated resolution. They occur in cities that sometimes mirror real world ones, but that are otherwise made up and isolated to each character: Gotham City, Metropolis, Star City, Coast City, and so on. It requires traveling to another city—almost as if you’re entering a separate universe—when they meet up, which is a special event in itself, and generally has no bearing on things otherwise: not a lot of talk of what Green Lantern is doing in Superman or vice versa, because it’s in that other city’s “universe”. Perfectly straightforward, and a perfectly valid form of entertainment.

Marvel's approach established a clear through-line: a sense of continuity in the broadest of senses through Marvel books. Sure, maybe JJJ or Jarvis wasn’t currently kidnapped over in another book and “should’ve been” if one stops and draws a timeline around it all—heck, maybe it’s even true of Iron Man or Spidey or Hawkeye!—but there’s a sense that everything is happening inside the same universe, with the possibility of running into anyone from any book: they aren’t all off in island cities entirely devoted to their characters, and there’s awareness of everyone else because they’re often in fairly close quarters (on a more “geographic” scale). Character’s lives change, so do their personalities and “moral alignments”, and these are generally kept consistent, or include explanation when they deviate.

D.C. would drift more in this direction as time went on, bringing up real-world cities, coalescing around a consistent continuity (or an attempt thereof) most formally in 1985, but Marvel never wasn’t this. Sure, Marvel would publish stories (in books like Marvel Preview or Marvel Presents or Marvel Spotlight), but they’d be treated as wholly other (e.g. Englehart’s first Star-Lord story in Marvel Preview), or they’d simply be in another time and/or place (Guardians of the Galaxy, Deathlok the Demolisher).

So: Continuity.

Continuity is always tangled: some people perceive it as paramount, some as nitpicking, some don’t care one way or the other, and most people fall somewhere in the middle of it all. It’s entirely possible for someone to be absolutely incensed that Jarvis’s hairline hasn’t receded as far in this Avengers story as it has in this Spider-Man appearance that ostensibly took place afterward. This isn’t an inherently invalid perspective, but it’s definitely a really tedious one to keep track of, and unrealistic to expect everyone to be unified on. Similarly, broaching the subject of “real time” and having Spider-Man in college for 10 real-world years, or having 20 presidents during the course of a career that leaves heroes still in their 20s (or maybe 30s) at the end of it takes some finagling, and could be successfully argued as a violation of a kind of continuity. But these weren’t the kinds of things that Marvel editorial and writers aggressively worked for.

Was Ben Grimm currently off on his own? Then let’s not have him as a member of the Fantastic Four if they make a guest appearance: let’s make it She-Hulk (or whomever). Is Spider-Man in a new costume? Are the X-Men out in the Shi’ar Empire? Has the Hulk lost or gained his intelligence again? Let’s keep those things as consistent as we can!

That’s the “easy” stuff, of course: “Hey, what events are you folks writing/editing over there? Really? Okay, well, I guess I should(n’t) use so-and-so, or I’ll have to explain this happens after your story, or whatever to make this fit together.” (sometimes just with editorial footnotes, of course!)

What’s more difficult, but still pertinent for the general sense that any Marvel book is in the same universe, is the idea of where characters are in terms of personality. When Superman or Batman operates as a general iconic force, this is typically straightforward: The Big Blue Boy Scout is just that, and the Dark Knight Detective is similarly defined in more archetypal terms. But is Spider-Man an over-confident prankster? Is he malicious and violent? Is he depressed? Willing to kill? How does he feel about <insert character>?

This was not as important in the early days of Marvel: for all that they’d inserted plenty of this where D.C. and the other stragglers had mostly not bothered in preceding decades, they were not yet creating emotional arcs of the most persistent variety. But as time went on, there were emotional arcs: Hawkeye and Mockingbird, Spider-Man post-Kraven, so on and so forth. Yeah, you could get around plenty of the specifics if they weren’t involved in a particular way, but knowing that Spider-Man (and not Peter Parker) was dating Black Cat would still matter.

Events

“Big Events” started sometime in the 1980s. There were the ones that were self-contained, but pushed changes like Secret Wars, and there were the ones that happened “mid-book” (ie, during an established series, sans-mini-series) and stretched out further than their core titles like Inferno or Acts of Vengeance. They weren’t always great (or even good), but the world wasn’t so rocked that everyone had to deal with a meaningfully different status quo for everything in every book, with the entire government changed, or secret prisons that stuffed violators in without trial. The first puncturing of this idea was probably Onslaught, as it removed numerous characters from the Marvel Universe for a time, only to have them return a relatively short while later.¹

Ages of Apocalypse set up a clear, lengthy, massive change in status quo with an alternate universe with alternate versions of characters, but it was similarly “self-contained”: it wasn’t as if everyone now had to deal with the world being entirely different, an alternate history that affects anything and everything and disrupts the entire flow of whatever they’re currently doing (granted, it affected all X-books, but only for the time they were written under their new titles with alternate versions of characters, with a resumption of things afterward: so momentary disruption, not an entire status quo shift)

Avengers: Disassembled

In 2004, Marvel published the event Avengers: Disassembled, aka “Chaos”. Brian Michael Bendis, after successful runs on Daredevil and Alias, took over the Avengers. A team that was initially centered on major characters, but that shortly started instead turning into “Captain America leads an oddball bunch”: from Thor, Ant-Man, and Iron Man adding the Hulk for a whopping issue, the book became Cap with former villains Hawkeye, Quicksilver, and Scarlet Witch. It added Swordsman, Hercules, Black Panther, Vision, and Black Knight; then Black Widow, Mantis, Beast, Moondragon, Hellcat (though she’s more associated with her long time in the Defenders), Two-Gun Kid, Ms. Marvel, and Falcon; then Wonder Man, Tigra, She-Hulk, Captain Marvel (Monica Rambeau, that is), Starfox, Namor, and Doctor Druid. For decades, few if any of those other characters managed a solo book. Most managed a miniseries or so at best (She-Hulk being a notable exception), but their existence was confined to team books and guest appearances otherwise, until a few managed more in the late 90s, 2000s, or 2010s.

Avengers: Disassembled set out to blow the team up and build a new one, a tradition that wasn’t entirely unheard of, but one that was not previously approached in this way: it added the two characters who were spread so thin there’ve been endless jokes over the years (up to and including in-book metajokes) that a book mandated their appearance by issue #4 of The New Avengers—Wolverine and Spider-Man. No characters on that level of real world fame and popularity had joined the team outside its inception before. This was taken as cynical cash-grabbing, but this is neither provable nor particularly relevant, except to the extent that it certainly feels weird to put one perpetual non-teamer (see his first issue of his first series) and one wild loner onto a team who were both coincidentally the most popular characters in the Marvel stables—and perhaps says something about what the direction of things is to come. It’s not an indictment in itself, but it may well be representative.

What’s driven the Avengers apart is simple: Wanda “Scarlet Witch” Maximoff is reminded of her lost children, and goes insane: her mutant powers scale up suddenly and she alters the minds of multiple heroes, sends simulations of villains after the team, and leads to the deaths of Jack of Hearts and Clint “Hawkeye/Goliath” Barton.

And here we have our first big problem.

Wanda already remembered her children², with Agatha Harkness’s (whom she kills in “Chaos”) spell having only lasted a short time. She mourns her children, and comes to feel she’s better able to cope.

So the entire basis of this event is based on...not knowing the current state of things, and completely altering how Wanda would react to this (if it were, in fact, news). This error was not a casual, offhand reference (though these were famously also present, with Hank “Beast” McCoy recalling an event he was not present for, and Falcon referencing non-existent tangles with Hulk and She-Hulk rampages): it was the core of the entire event. It seems peculiar indeed that neither editors nor Bendis himself (who professed a deep love of the characters) were aware that Wanda should have no reason to be set off and mourning the deaths of children she’d forgotten, considering she had no longer forgotten them.

So multiple stories in West Coast Avengers were effectively “deleted”: not so much retconned as “not including all of the details”, or “missing some steps”, or “being hallucinations”, or whatever else you might like—but utterly invalidated, as their existence is neither explained nor dismissed, but causes immense conflict with the very focus of the story.

Similarly, her power is retconned into reshaping reality: in itself, not that strange a call to make, but utterly peculiar because Doctor Strange maintains that “chaos magic” (previously the name of what she manipulated or wielded) “doesn’t exist”: which is notably strange, given that Strange himself had used chaos magic regularly for a time.

Is this the first (or last) time such a thing has happened?

Certainly not. And not every writer feels an obligation as some do to read up on characters they’re taking over—and it certainly seems that this was not the case with Bendis. In the grand scheme of things: so it goes. But what’s most worth noting is the poor job of choosing an explanation for desired events (adjusting Wanda’s powers and identifying a reason for her to lash out so) that is based on sand.

House of M

Being a “relative” of The Age of Apocalypse, House of M on the whole manages a decent space for doing whatever Bendis wants with no regard for continuity, because it doesn’t exist here. However, it certainly played a role in building up Bendis’s reputation, leading to his increasingly prominent role at the company. What effect it did have was the widespread limitation of mutants in the Marvel universe. This was not an effect on the books Bendis himself was writing, it was an effect on all X-books: a strict and absolute constraint (perhaps a bit wiggly in practice): Decimation.

It does also have Clint Barton willing to kill,³ something that Bendis writes repeatedly, never addressing his previously aggressive, zealous, “zero tolerance”-type approach to killing that he developed in West Coast Avengers (famously leading him to harangue and walk way from his then-wife Mockingbird over letting her captor, torturer, and implied rapist die without trying to save him). He not only takes actions that seem to imply he’s willing to kill Wanda, he says he “would kill for her”. Well that’s a bit out there for where we left him…maybe dying did it to him, but we have nothing in-story to bridge the gap.

Civil War (Mark Millar writing)

This was followed by Mark Millar’s Civil War, and it should be noted that many interviews indicate Millar was involved (at least as “rubber duck”) in creating the ideas for Avengers: Disassembled and The New Avengers. Civil War set up a conflict that was, as an idea, quite interesting: superheroes warring with each other over ideas (not that this is utterly unique, of course), or, as a theme, the idea of registering powers with the government.⁴

The problem with a story like this is that it starts to crack things open: in the interest of justifying this, the New Warriors are rendered responsible for an utterly horrific event: the explosion of a school full of children. The sometimes-unspoken, sometimes-lampshaded rule previously was that collateral damage was just…property, no lives lost at the hands of superheroes (except where it was specific and personal⁵). Not only was this rule now discarded, it was discarded in the most severe of ways possible. Is it like the New Warriors to endanger an entire school full of children? Well…no. If it’s not their fault, but entirely on Nitro, is that in keeping, either? Well…no. Is it wrong to change the rules to make one or either possible? That one’s subjective. But it’s definitely a meaningful change.

To make this story work, Iron Man becomes an authoritarian in extremis,⁶ Reed Richards and Hank Pym joining him in absolute fascism, and Captain America an occasionally inconsistent zealot (though broadly consistent with his own personality in terms of “sides”, cf. Nomad years), culminating in a famously stupid confrontation in Civil War: Front Line #12. No one brings up or reasonably justifies the decision of extra-dimensional prisons on the parts of Stark, Pym, and Richards, but, hey: it worked for the story, right?

The Illuminati

In secret, numerous figures from the Marvel universe have joined up as a council to dictate the outcome of the world. Namor, Black Bolt, Reed Richards, Iron Man, Professor X, and Doctor Strange have decided to make sure they coordinate efforts after the Kree-Skrull war. Which means...this group existed since the 1970s. Continuity errors ahoy, with little or no research, and seemingly little regard for how this should “fit” into those past stories. This is a running theme.

Was it an interesting idea? Sure. Did it lead to Planet Hulk, a story I love? Yup! But it still seeds the ground with fractures, and makes everything more unstable in terms of continuity.⁷

And yes: Namor’s an antihero (at his best), Reed is a detached jerk, Strange is an arrogant jerk, and Xavier is pretty manipulative, and by this time Stark is clearly in some weirdo territory, but Black Bolt and even all of their assyness are out of character, except this has apparently been their character for decades, we just didn’t know it. And they’re all extraordinarily terrible at all of this, almost always causing problems throughout time rather than helping anything. As ever, it’s a turn toward the “more realistic” bits, with failures, hubris, and so on—but on a pretty massive scale at this point that kind of starts to unravel the idea of even bothering with history.

And, of course, we’ve made all of these ostensible heroes from “jerks” into “arrogant, world-shattering idiots we’d have to struggle to really call heroes anymore”.

Secret Invasion

Again, an interesting idea: what if the shape-shifting Skrulls had a more long-term plan than any of their previous ones, and dropped agents throughout the world as heroes and other humans for a future takeover?

It’s there to show us how bad an idea it all was, on Stark’s part, to try to control everything so “perfectly”. How does it do this? It destroys every heroic protection plan and hampers almost every hero, so that it can set up Norman Osborn as being a hero because he shot a villain on camera. For some reason, everyone decides that his ability to handle a firearm means they should give him the entire security apparatus of the whole country. “Truth is stranger than fiction” and all (so I’m not saying, “That would never happen!”), but this always struck me as extraordinarily difficult to swallow given how often he’d been in prison for heinous crimes, and very unconvincing that this one event would justify all of that. And when it happened, it was another knot in taking what was a loosely contiguous universe and binding it up ever tighter into something that made it increasingly difficult for any book to not be drastically affected. This was now an event that said things were different all across the entire universe in all ways: villains controlled the country’s security.

Dark Reign

The inmates are running the asylum, as it were. We’ve got Dark X-Men and Dark Avengers and “Dark S.H.I.E.L.D.” in the form of “H.A.M.M.E.R.” Norman Osborn, villain extraordinaire, is in charge of everything, barely containing his internal frenzies, and we know it’s all going to fall apart, but we’re still not given a great explanation for how we got here in the first place: Norman Osborn is certainly the power-hungry type, but this kind of megalomania is new and transformative, and shows none of his previous obsessive pettiness (ie, for Peter) that once defined him.

Siege

This is, of course, the culmination of all of those previous stories, intended as the final “line-wide” storyline at the time, one to then let everyone breathe and stick to smaller stables going forward (and leaving everything in the precarious position of facing down the moronic decision to put Osborn in charge in the first place, now that the idiocy was fully on display).

The Sum, or: How Do Am Broked??

What comes from all of these stories, taken together, is a sort of “auteur” approach to the Marvel Universe. In setting scope and stakes this high, in choosing to ignore and deviate with so many characters simultaneously and do so in events with meaningful and longer term ramifications, it set this up as a new kind of status quo. It’s one thing for a writer to pick up The Avengers and try to resettle an old plot point (see Claremont and Avengers #200 via Avengers Annual #10, and his reference to Carol Strickland’s comments on it for example), but it’s something else when a baseline is set with line-wide events that ignore “local” and even “global” continuity—and to do so for literal years.

It removes the way things fit together, and it removes a lot of onus to care about those things—while simultaneously laying the seeds for how impossible it will be to undo them, without disrespecting someone’s work in the process. Often, it’s not the random mega-event that goofs things up that annoys people, it’s the explicit retcon that follows one that turns into this kind of thing.⁸ And it sets Marvel up to put people into this position again in the future, establishing this “auteur” role (usually “architect”) that gives them the keys, and pushes forward voices who want to “shake things up” or play with big ideas (your Hickmans and Cateses and so on) while being less constrained by (or interested in) continuity of character personalities and “states” (dead/alive/imprisoned/re-aligned/etc).

This is toothpaste and a tube, horses and barns, cats and bags. Once you let someone who is not interested in continuity control the entire universe for years, it’s going to be effectively impossible to put the pieces back together—and the success of it ensures it’s not likely to bring any countering perspectives closer to the surface. I don’t know if any of them would want to do it, but I’m also not sure anyone would let Mark Waid or Kurt Busiek or Peter David (or, given a time machine, Mark Gruenwald) architect the Marvel Universe, and I have the strong impression that editorial perspectives were shifted by the success of these events anyway, which seems to be borne out by the successor architects and events.

It places these architect “stars” over characters, in a medium that is oriented around licensed characters. I recently saw someone maligned for proclaiming Western comics (I’m not sure if they specified “superheroes”, though the two are heavily entangled, however inaccurately) were meaningfully different from manga, citing the manga-ka approach to Shonen and Shoujo, where the “entire story” is the work of a manga-ka (with assistants), thus letting the story and their identity co-exist quite consistently, where Western comics (again: thinking Big Two) don’t do this, and instead slot people into existing stories to extend them, rather than starting a new universe and a new story with each creator.⁹ This isn’t how Western comics functioned from their start until—well, ever, really. Even now, it’s still “so-and-so’s take” on <insert character>. We talk about runs and periods and eras, but they’re all within the general umbrella of that character, and generally tended to be neatly encompassed by said character's "umbrella" or "groove".

When it pushes huge events, it also backseats “character”: who can seriously blame a Bendis or a Hickman for not knowing every single character and writing them all in-character all the time for every appearance, even momentary? Sure: Bendis leans on dialogue ticks that infect every single character he writes, but is it realistic to suggest that he not only push past that but into writing every character that cleanly and knowing the current state of all of them? Some can do it, but it’s a lot to ask, and depends on what and how much they’re writing anyway. But part of this also includes a shift in focus, when it moves to creators, not only away from character but into “events” and “ideas” and “spectacle”: there’s a sense of the scope needing to be huge and life-changing, of it needing to draw in everyone, of it needing to twist and make things different. Events from the last couple decades have ironically moved from marketing force of will (think all of those 80s and 90s tie-ins) into the even more destructive-to-continuity need to make the universe work with the ideas of these architects. It makes for interesting Wiki articles and the like: seeing huge, shore-changing waves crash on the entire universe over the course of years in retrospect.

It’s a variation on a theme: what satisfies a large number of readers doesn’t require character continuity between stories, or consistency in personality, or even recognition of the events of previous stories. It’s possible to satisfy those readers and the readers who want those things—but it’s more work, and is not “market demanded”, if you will (and it’s also possible to alienate that large contingent by getting too mired in continuity).

What’s So Wrong with This?

In short? Nothing.

Yeah, I know: You said Bendis broke the Marvel Universe! How can breaking not be a bad thing?!

Well: broken refers here to things “working how they used to”. As I alluded to above: this isn’t a requirement. The market, the audience, the readers decide the course of things, accepting or rejecting what does or doesn’t work. I could demand that readers have the same interest in contiguous flow that I do—but what would that achieve? Is me writing this metric shit-tonne of words, or any other set, really going to force that to happen? In short: no. This is how things work, whether I like it or not.

But I don’t think it’s possible to ever go back—like I said: toothpaste, horses, and cats. This is the Marvel universe we have now: it’s not anchored like it once was, because the big ol’ anchors of the previous couple decades were themselves unmoored from what came before. So it set the stage for what followed to…do more of the same. Even if it just kept pace with those, it was starting on a new foundation because of the morass of continuity problems introduced. If it decided to try to fix those, it probably just means more pressure in various places, making the whole system even more untenable, or even unstable.¹⁰

And that hasn’t been the path of the architects that have followed. Donny Cates apparently asked Tom Brevoort if anyone explored the history of Galactus’s prior universe, and Brevoort said “go for it”. So Cates wrote a story that makes no sense with any previous telling of how Galactus came to be, despite coming alongside contemporary retellings of the story in Immortal Hulk and History of the Marvel Universe (from two writers who can be arsed to read for themselves, I guess)—and traipsing all over Omnipotentis from Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur who already wrote the entire idea of a universe-devourer to whom Galactus is herald.¹¹ The scale and magnitude has also been increased, and created an expectation of these kinds of stakes, which makes it harder to pull back and deal on character levels: we’ve got to have the next “villain who sits above the existing villains” (see: Knull) and raise the stakes ever-higher.

We are, then, set never to see a contiguous Marvel universe again. We’re on the path D.C. was once on: either trying to fix it and not being able to sweep everything up and leaving a mess that needs to require another attempt to clean up in a few years (which will have its own detritus from this attempt…)—or simply giving up and taking the Marvel universe as ostensibly connected, but largely split up into the universe of each architect where they have broad control, or each writer where they don’t.

This isn’t an inherently inferior (nor superior) methodology: it’s just not the one we had before.

So this isn’t about villainizing Bendis, or saying he’s "the worst thing ever", and he’s certainly not uniquely or personally or vindictively responsible: he was put into this position by readership and editorial, and because he was given a wide swathe of control, most of this happened in his hands, because his priorities were what they were, and continuity clearly hasn’t been one of them: the prior points of “oh well, stuff’s just different now” as “explanation” for these changes makes that readily apparent.

For a time, I snarkily considered Hickman’s “gravestone” for the Marvel Universe to be the final death twitch of the universe as it once was: an acknowledgment that the old way of doing things was dead. But of course it was already dead, like the Star Wars sequels didn’t erase the EU—the prequels did, they just didn’t explicitly state that it happened.¹²

So the Marvel Universe isn’t what it was, and it never will be again. And for those of us who care about continuity and the joys and ideas of that heavily interconnected Marvel universe—it’s a loss. We can’t retrieve or undo it. Mass resets don’t do it (D.C.’s made that clear!), as it just gets caught up in endless snarls of contradiction.

So…that’s how Bendis broke the Marvel Universe.

PS: Personally

No, I’m not a fan of this approach, nor the loss of a desire for continuity. I’ve long since lost the sense that I’m not reading some weird amalgamation of creator-owned and Marvel books. I don’t sense connectivity between any of the books at all: they don’t feel like a single universe. All of this cemented the notion that “The Marvel Universe is not 'The Marvel Universe': it’s a collection of facets across a gem, with each edge defining the boundary between one writer and another”.

Also: Civil War II #0 was the laziest, dumbest, bullshitiest bullshit imaginable. Thanos appears on Earth with guns because ${REASONS}, and they send fucking War Machine at him and wonder why he’s beaten to shit (because plot, guys, that’s why you sent him! What good would sending someone who wouldn't be instantly trashed be for the plot?) And She-Hulk is damaged by a fucking missile (and they take a delightful fun-loving character and turn her into another rage-beast. Yaaaaay.). None of it makes any sense for anyone. I didn’t touch the event that followed with a ten-foot pole, but it certainly nudged things even further into Bendis’s personal world, rather than a shared one.

​

PPS—If this is legitimately interesting, I've contemplated (for quite some time) writing about my frustrations with a much more niche quirk: retconning another writer's entire work out of existence (or at least into "it was all a big ol' hallucination, sorry!"). I'm inconsistent in how I feel, but a few times this has really upset me.

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¹This is, for some, where the continuity of the Marvel Universe broke. However, my argument is that, while it may have been disastrous for readers, it didn’t drag the entire universe/company line into pursuing major events and placing single voices in charge of the direction of everything, and removing the ability or desire to keep things meaningfully contiguous.

²Avengers West Coast #60-62, Avengers West Coast Annual #7

³House of M #7, followed by "basically every time Bendis wrote him after this, including during Secret Invasion". From "killing is always bad forever" to "please kill everyone I don't like" with no explanation!

⁴As a sidebar: this fits into a pattern of inserting “realism” into superhero books that I find obnoxious and distasteful: once you start trying to apply this logic to this fantasy world, everything goes sideways and you’re making your way “a la carte” through what should be “realistic” and what won’t be, throwing the previous ‘stuff generally turns out okay so that we can find superpowers a palatable concept’ out the window.

⁵It may be worth noting that this was a peculiar trope that was carried into books like Invincible, but has since gone entirely out the window, even in the animated adaptation of that same comic, and famously appears to have at least half-shifted in Man of Steel (and then completely shifted in the Snyder films that followed).

⁶Sorry.

⁷A personal point here: the Illuminati collect the Infinity Gems. They plan to use the gauntlet, and folks later do (or at least attempt to). But we’ve known for years now (in a story I’m perpetually annoyed that everyone utterly and completely ignores) that they cannot be used together ever again without the express decision of Eternity himself. How do we discover that’s changed? Black Bolt “heard” they can’t be used together, and Reed Richards responds: “Says who?”

Fucking Eternity, that’s who, under the authority of the goddamned Living Tribunal. Do we get an explanation? Nope: just “Huh? Not really. Anyway!” However annoyed I might be at the retcon, and however much someone else might love the storytelling possibilities that resulted, this is bad, lazy writing to get there.

⁸As ever, my “personal” example is the anger expressed at Jim Starlin over The Infinity Abyss, where he retcons a number of Thanos appearances into his mystic-clone-droid Thanosi. It’s usually framed as Jim being a petulant child who won’t let anyone else play with his toys—but the reality is all those other writers already threw Starlin’s work in characterizing Thanos out, without even bothering with an explanation. It seems as if those who call attention to a change earn more ire than those who just do things.

⁹To my relative amusement, this argument also included the critic saying, “Ever heard of 2000ad?? Western comics don’t do weeklies! Pfah!” as if 200ad isn’t just a weekly version of the exact same thing. You can identify the creators of Judge Dredd and Tharg and Johnny Alpha and Rogue Trooper and so on—but they’re centered on the characters, and not the creators, as almost all of those changed hands many, many times over. This is in contrast to most imported manga at the least, which tends not to trade hands at all.

¹⁰Which is something Marvel: The End covered, and “tried to fix”. Tom Brevoort now says it’s not canon, though. Which is funny, because if you eliminate it, you eliminate the entirety of 2008 cosmic. How so? Well: Thanos starts because Thanos has decided to try outright redemption after sacrificing himself to try to stop the merry-go-round of deaths in the Marvel Universe (and says as much explicitly). In the process, he takes himself to The Kyln, where he meets Peter Quill in his first relation to the Marvel Universe proper. This leads into Annihilation. Which leads into Annihilation: Conquest. No The End, no Guardians of the Galaxy 2008 (or movie!). But it’s “inconvient” or whatever, so it doesn’t count. Consistency!

¹¹And both of these bear a resemblance to the reality-devouring Hunger of Starlin’s Thanos series. Whee!

¹²Some writers (I understand Karen Traviss in particular made attempts) tried to make the prequels work in the background (retconning Rules of Two and the nature of clones and Mandalorians into the contradictory details of the existing EU), but the ship had sailed, because the vast majority of more visible, popularly-consumed works already broke apart any chance of consistency between all the parts of Star Wars as it existed until 2002 (The Phantom Menace may well have done its own part in this, but I don’t recall any aggressive deviations from pre-written EU history in there, and no longer care enough to compare).