Image and continuity porn

-For some reason, Friday's entry was set to "do not allow comments." Don't know how that happened, but it did. Sorry about that. My apologies to anyone who wanted to comment, especially since the post in question was rather critical of Tim Leong's plans for Comic Foundry. But the comments on said post are open now, and I'll be double checking all future posts to make sure they stay that way.

-Rich Johnston reports that DC's current Countdown series is counting down to something tentatively titled Final Crisis. Bleaugh. Final Crisis? And then there's the recent news that Marvel seems to be meandering down basically the same path of relentless eventeering.

Is this all the Big Two have left? Things were looking better at DC about a year and a half ago, when it efforts like the All-Star line and Alex Ross' Justice seemed like the evidence of a dual publishing strategy, combining short, out-of-continuity prestige projects (like Jeff Smith's Shazam) with more fanboy-friendly, continuity-heavy offerings (most everything else).* But here in 2007, the All-Star line is losing credibility and I never hear anyone talking about Justice (possibly because bloggers--including myself--tend to dislike Ross' tediously realistic art). Smith's Shazam is certainly an online favorite, but we all seem to view it as something of a hothouse flower, especially in light of the rest of the DC line. Marvel, meanwhile, is certainly winning the post-big event sweepstakes (at least in terms of sales), but it's too early to tell how much of this is easily-satisfied curiosity. It's telling that Marvel editorial is already starting a new Things Will Never Be the Same!!! hype cycle while the corpse of the last Things Will Never Be the Same!!! event is still warm (and, for that matter, while the Hulk mini-event is just getting started).

Sometimes I wonder if the direct market, ruinous speculation aside, was in better shape in the much-maligned early 90s. We look back at the attention given to the Image founders as laughable, but I would gladly trade Hot Artists for Event Fever. I mean, DC and Marvel might be reluctant to do so--after all, people can leave, while intellectual properties and years of accumulated continuity can't. But for the rest of us, I think an industry driven by popular creators is much more healthy than one driven by...whatever it is that motivates people to buy Geoff Johns comics. It's hard to imagine an equivalent of Image starting today, largely because there are no figures of comparable stature to Liefeld, Lee, and McFarlane c. 1992. Johns, Loeb, and Bendis all sell books, but only books featuring established, beloved characters. And there really aren't any unfathomably hot artists who weren't already hot in the mid-90s; the closest would probably be John Cassaday or Bryan Hitch, and they're nowhere near as popular as Todd McFarlane was in his heyday. The absence of new, mega-selling artists is part of this larger phenomenon of fans' seemingly contradictory fascination with continuity and change, which has all but supplanted the creator-as-selling-point model of the 90s (with the exceptions of Lee and Ross, two talents who managed to establish themselves before the current epoch).

On the other hand, I don't know that people appreciate the extent to which Image presaged the current, continuity-heavy era. We typically blame the downfall of Image on the founders' eagerness to play media mogul, particularly their horribly ironic embrace of work-for-hire practices. There's certainly truth to that, but I think it's worth considering how quick some of the Image founders were to put themselves in a position which necessitated hiring outside creators. These guys weren't satisfied to make their own bestselling, fully-owned comics--they all wanted to be world-builders as well. Youngblood and WildCATS weren't enough to fully shape out the convoluted mythologies Liefeld and Lee--easily the worst offenders--felt compelled to produce. It's one thing to develop a rich backstory in the process of making a comic, but too many of the Image founders apparently thought this was a prerequisite for making superhero comics. Having grown up reading Chris Claremont's X-Men, they just couldn't fathom producing comics without deep layers of intrigue, red herrings, mysterious strangers from the past, secret betrayals, unspoken alliances, and ornate taxonomies of aliens, mutants, mercenaries, and cyborgs. But while Claremont weaved this dense skein over time, the Image boys tried to do so right out of the gate. And so their comics were dense and colorful, yet utterly incomprehensible and totally unsatisfying.

So then, do we blame Claremont for the current predicament? Gardner Fox for integrating multiple continuities into the same "multiverse"? Roy Thomas for taking this seven or eight steps beyond what Fox had intended? Mark Greunwald and Len Wein (I think) for The Official Handbook to the Marvel Universe and Who's Who, respectively? Carmine Infantino and Stan Lee for hiring fan-creators? Or do we just buy Josh Simmons' really awesome-looking House**, thank the appropriate deity that we like a rather broad range of comics, and hope this all blows over without doing too much damage in the process?

*Tom Spurgeon was the first person I saw advancing this idea, but it was so long ago that I'm not even going to try to find the original article. I do recall him alluding to Night of the Hunter in his framework, which might be why it sticks with me so long after the fact.

**Just to be clear, I'm going to do this regardless of what DC chooses to call its next mega-event.

-This was the saddest thing I read this weekend, assuming it's not a joke. I do so hope it's a joke--I mean, I'm not unrealistic about this kind of stuff, but it's the internet, for god's sake. Even if you don't want to lie, you can at least avoid these kinds of subjects.