I've been sitting in front of the computer for about 30 minutes now, trying my best to come up with something. I have to tell you, I'm having a hard time. The only thing that keeps running through my head is One More Day. One More Day... the story so infuriating, it nearly brings tears to The Supernaut's eyes. The story that kind of makes me feel like it's time to stop reading the mainstream superhero titles altogether. Maybe just pick up trades or something from here on out.
But
Savage Henry Lee already wrote about One More Day, and if I've got anything to add, I'll just do it in his comments section. And if you haven't read his thoughts on the subject, you probably should go ahead and do that right now...
Somebody once said "With great power comes great responsibility." I'm sure you've heard it. Not sure what part of that involves making deals with the devil.
But I digress. When I started writing this blog a little over a year ago, I thought I'd try to be the positive guy on the internet. The guy who says "Hey, if you don't like it, don't read it. There's plenty of good books on the shelves!" rather than the guy who says "Blech! I'm done with comics forever!" The guy who recommends good books, or looks for the silver lining, rather than being the guy who slams everything. Of course, that's tough to do when you have to read stories like One More Day... but I digress. With great power does come great responsibility, so I'll try to talk a bit about that. About the responsibility that writers have to characters.
Immediately after reading OMD in my local comic shop (yeah, I know it's not a library, but no way was I paying for that!), I phoned fellow blogger The Superfist to discuss. He brought up a very good point, and since I know he's not going to write about it, I'm going to go ahead and do it.
The Anatomy Lesson. That's how you do it. In Swamp Thing #21, Alan Moore took a failing title and completely reinvented it, revived it and it basically led to the creation of the whole freakin' Vertigo line.
Haven't read it? Here's the nutshell version: Up to that point in the series, Swamp Thing was a scientist who had been transformed into a shambling, muck-encrusted monster made of vegitation. Pretty much the whole point of his existance was attempting to return to his human form. Alan Moore took over and revealed that Swamp Thing was not, in fact, a former human. He had never been human - he was simply a shambling, muck-encrusted monster made of vegitation that thought it had been human. Big difference.
Now, here's where I get to the point. This big change, this story that turned the character of Swamp Thing on his ear by revealing that everything you ever knew about him was false... it didn't contradict anything that had been previously written. Sure, there had been a story or two where Swampy had briefly returned to human form through a magical spell or something like that, but that's easily explained - it was magic! My point is this: Moore recreated a character from the ground up, and he didn't have to rewrite history to do it. He didn't have to have Superboy punch a wall, he didn't have to make a deal with the devil and he didn't leave behind a million continuity errors. All those old Swamp Thing stories? They happened. All the villains and heroes he encountered? They remembered him.
There were no longtime fans left scratching their heads and feeling cheated or like they'd been lied to (well, maybe there were. I was a bit too young to be reading Swamp Thing at that point, though I remember the older kids on my bus absolutely loved it). No one felt like the character they'd loved had never existed, because he had existed. Only now he was different. Moore completely altered the character, but didn't have to change a thing to do it.
Now, I guess it's pretty clear that I'm not particularly fond of Joe Quesada's feeling that Spider-Man has to be single, and I'm even less fond of the way he went about it, but to some extent, I can understand his motivations (although, if people want to read about an unmarried Spidey, they could just read Ultimate Spider-Man... isn't that supposed to be the point of that book?). If Joey Q wants an unmarried Spidey, he gets an unmarried Spidey, and nothing I say will change it. And who knows? Maybe Spider-Man will be reinvigorated and Quesada will be proven right?
But are you seriously going to tell me they couldn't come up with a better way to do it than simply saying "It never happened" after the hero makes a deal with the devil? Couldn't they have come up with a story that doesn't contradict 20 years worth of continuity, not to mention throws a massive monkeywrench into their current storylines? Civil War is barely over, and now they're telling us that the most pivotol event in the story didn't even happen?!?!
But I digress... now I'm getting back into that territory I didn't want to venture into. The angry rant. The point of this post was to be positive. To remind people that it can be done. A good story can be told, and a character can be reinvented without trampling on the past.
And my point certainly wasn't to steal Savage Henry's thunder by writing about the same topic he just wrote about... so if you've got a comment regarding One More Day, please go over to his blog (right here on C2F), read it and leave yer messages there.
And if you haven't read Alan Moore's run on Swamp Thing, do yourself a favor and pick up the first trade. Or just go ahead and buy them all - after the first, I'm sure you'll be back for more. You can find 'em on Amazon, and you can usually find 'em for 1/2 off at comic cons. Trust me on this one.
And now that I'm done writing, I'm off to bed, to go to sleep next to my wife, whom I would not trade for anything, not even my mother or favorite aunt... which is another f***ed up can of oedipal worms that One More Day has unleashed. But I digress...
