Son of Drivel: Event Fatigue

The return of an occasional column that ran in Tripwire, first written by Grant Morrison back in 1995 as a nod to his Drivel column in the long-defunct but still missed Speakeasy magazine. Today it’s Mike Carey, award-winning writer of comics and prose series like Hellblazer, Lucifer, The Unwritten, The Girl With All The Gifts and Felix Castor, talking about how bored he is with the constant revamps the big two comic companies feel obligated to bring to the market…

I was just looking at some of the listings for the two comics events that are going to define the Marvel and DC universes for the next decade. Or, you know, at least for a month or so after the last issues go to press. I’m referring to Marvel’s Secret Wars and DC’s Convergence. And I’m astonished, as I’m sure the rest of you are, by the scale of the upheaval, the scope of the re-imagining, the willingness of editors and not-even-a-little-bit-co-opted creators to sweep aside embedded continuity and create something truly bold and new and great and original.

Bat-Mite and Bizarro are getting their own books. The Ultimate universe is winding up for good and ever. Midnighter is moving to the DCU. Gwen Stacey might get to live again (although that’s unconfirmed). And on, and on. It feels like we’re entering a new age of boundless possibility.

No, actually it doesn’t. It feels very much like the same pieces will be put together in a new configuration. Which I’m guessing is what the brief must have been, more or less, for the editors and the creative teams. Take all the old pieces and put them in a bag. Shake the bag. And now empty out the bag and make a new pattern.

And while you’re doing that keep saying that nothing – not anything – will ever be the same again. Even though you know, in your heart of hearts, that the golden rule is the opposite of that. The golden rule is that nothing ever changes. Or if it does, it changes right back.

Think about it for a moment. Think about that vast long list of game-changing events that didn’t change a thing because they just went and un-happened again, a year or five years or ten years after they happened. Think of all the little bubble universes and orphaned continuities – stories that you read that are just not canonical any more, no matter how cool they were and how much emotional capital you invested in them.

Think about Heroes Reborn. No, don’t. I was bluffing. Don’t think about that.

Think about all the characters who died and then got better. Superman, Captain America, Flash, Colossus, Jason Todd, Bucky Barnes… I’m going to let you round out the list for yourselves, because it’s a fun party game. Jean Grey counts for three points, because fair is fair. Writer Matt Fraction said this about superhero death:

“Killing the character is never the point. It’s, ‘How do they come back? How does that experience form them into an even greater, even stronger kind of hero?'” I love Matt’s work and hugely respect him as a creator, but that’s just bananas. It translates as “How do we milk this for all the emotion under the sun even though we have no intention whatsoever of following through with it?”

The truth is that there are only so many patterns those same pieces can be assembled into. The big pieces (Superman, Batman, the X-Men, the Fantastic Four) constrain the shape of the smaller pieces, and pull them back eventually into very familiar relationships to each other. It’s easier to swap the pieces around than to make a new piece. And it’s easier to nail jelly to the wall than it is to make a radical change that’s actually going to stick.

I’m playing devil’s advocate here. I know there are good and sound reasons why this should be so. DC aren’t going to leave Superman dead, and Marvel isn’t going to take Wolverine out behind the barn, for the same reason that the Disney Corporation isn’t going to relinquish copyright on Mickey Mouse. It would be commercial suicide. There’s a ready audience for Superman and Wolverine stories and it’s not going away. By contrast, it’s very hard to build a book around a new character and get some legs under it.

I’m also ignoring very real and significant changes in the representation of female characters, gay and trans characters and ethnic minorities over the past decade or so, which are all really positive things and worthy of celebration. I don’t mean to belittle that hard-won progress in the name of my more general weltschmerz and event fatigue.

But imagine, for a second, what it might be like if everything really did change, and nothing – really – was the same, ever again. Imagine if every existing character in the DC and Marvel universes was simultaneously mothballed, and both companies started to build again from the ground up with new characters, new titles, new premises and properties.

Imagine if you woke up tomorrow and – just in comic book terms – it was 1961 again. With everything to play for and no holds barred. A big, blank canvas to be filled with four-colour (or these days, 16.7-million-colour) dreams. That would be an event I could really work up some enthusiasm for.