Imaginary Stories

As I write this DC Comics is once again planning an event called Convergence that will change, in some way or another, the nature of the continuity of its universe. This is only a little over three years since the launch of the New 52, which threw out (in my opinion anyway), seventy-five years of history and legacy. Over at Marvel Comics they are hyping their new Secret Wars event, and while the details of what this will eventually mean are vague it looks like Marvel will also be doing some restructuring of their continuity.

And, of course, the fans are losing their minds. Not everyone. A response I'm seeing a lot of is the eye-rolling, “here we go again” kind of exhaustion that goes along with these big events.

But that's not really what I want to talk about here. Not really. I've been through reboots and Crises and Zero Hours and Incursions enough to know that, in the world of Marvel and DC Comics, this too shall pass. What I want to talk about is the larger issue of the idea of “Continuity” in comics (and to a lesser degree in other media), and why it's so important to fans, and I want to do it in the context of my previous post about memory and recapitulation.

First, some background.

Continuity wasn't really an issue in comics for many years. Throughout the 40s and 50s readers were content to read self-contained stories that had little relationship to each other from month to month. We knew Superman's background and his supporting cast. As long as these were maintained, anything else was fair game. DC would actually label any story that broke these very basic and simple guidelines as “imaginary stories,” meaning, stories that take place outside of continuity.

It was in the Silver Age of comics (roughly the late 50s through the mid 60s), that continuity became important. Marvel certainly pioneered this concept by making all of their titles exist in the same world in a much more coherent way than DC had done prior to then. Events in one story would have lasting ramifications. If Aunt May had a heart attack in one issue she would still be in the hospital in the next. It created the illusion of the passage of time and reflected the real world more accurately.

This was easy enough to maintain when there were only a handful of books and a few years had passed. It became much more complicated as time went on. Tony Stark created the Iron Man armor while a prisoner in Viet Nam. The Fantastic Four launched a rocket into space to beat the Russians in the space race. Things like this made complete sense for a number of years. Not so much fifty years later.

These sorts of issues have usually been addressed obliquely by Marvel with a sliding time scale. It wouldn't be mentioned for awhile and next thing you know Stark is building his armor in a cave in Afghanistan.

Continuity, the sense that there is a canonical storyline, is important to many fans. I am certainly guilty of this. As much as many of us say that all that matters is that we are told a good story, part of our definition of good story is dependent on how well it fits in with our own sense of the continuity of the characters. Whether fans say they care or not, it has an effect on what books they read and what kind of emotional investment they have in the characters. We all have a head canon of what “actually” happened to these characters and what didn't.

In my personal head canon Hawkeye is morally opposed to killing no matter how many stories Brian Michael Bendis wrote indicating differently. The DC New 52 makes no sense to me if Dick Grayson didn't grow up with Wally West and Donna Troy and become adults while they were in the Teen Titans, none of which is true according to current continuity. And yes, these are some of my personal bugaboos, but we all have them. As much as I say I want change and different points of view and these characters and universes need to grow and change, the truth is I always have a certain knee-jerk reaction against anything that contradicts my version of what took place, and I'm ready to pull out the back issues to prove my point. It's all right there in black and white and four-color printing. This actually happened. It's canon!

Which makes me ask the question, “Why?”

In my last blog I talked about the unreliable nature of our personal memory, about how none of us have access to the reality of any past event, simply the story we tell about it. I can tell an anecdote from my own life that other people who were there will remember completely differently. The truth is, we're never sure of what really took place in any definitive way. There is no official canonical version of our past. We live our lives with the illusion of continuity but all we really have is our own personal head canon of what we believe happened. The stories of other people may contradict our version, or add a different dimension of information. This current moment is defined by the story we have constructed about our previous lives, but if any or all of our memories are suspect, then who the hell am I right now.

Welcome to Existential Angst 101.

No wonder a definitive continuity is important to us in our fictions. How nice it would be to pull out a back issue of our lives from twenty years ago and check to see what happened exactly the same way we experienced it then. Then we could argue with someone with a different opinion with some degree of authority.

Even if it is unconscious, we long for certainty in our lives. It's part of why we write fiction and tell stories. In our search for order amidst the chaos we create a narrative. We attempt to impose plot and structure on the random events of our day to day, to make sense of the many unrelated aspects of our existence. When something breaks our sense of continuity in comics we feel betrayed. I remember Peter Parker and Mary Jane Watson being married... what do mean that never happened? But it's easier to argue over this obviously imaginary story than it is to reconcile conflicting narratives about our own failed relationships.

In the introduction to his story Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow (Superman #423), Alan Moore, in direct reference to the aforementioned practice of labelling out of continuity stories as Imaginary Stories, famously said, “This is an imaginary story... Aren't they all?” At the time this was seen by many as a negative reaction to DC's Crisis on Infinite Earths, which consigned much of Superman's previous history to non-canonical status. None of those stories were real any more, as if any of them had any reality beyond the printed page anyway. I think it was more than that. I think it was commentary on the breadth of the imagination.

The old stories don't go away when the official continuity is changed. They're still there anytime someone picks up a back issue or a trade paperback collection. Grant Morrison addresses this overtly in the pages of Animal Man where a group of old DC characters who had been consigned to Limbo by the Crisis discover, “Every time someone reads our stories we live again!”

Unless you have been keeping a running diary of your life, written as events happened to you, you probably don't have a canonical history that you can refer to. Even if you do, maybe it's time to start questioning the back story you've been telling about yourself. Maybe not. How is the story you tell helping you live life to the fullest? How is your story limiting you? Maybe it's time for a soft reboot and a retelling before a Crisis makes it necessary.

Imagine a better story for yourself.

Recapitulations

“Every man is more than just himself; he also represents the unique, the very special and always significant and remarkable point at which the world's phenomena intersect, only once in this way, and never again. That is why every man's story is important, eternal, sacred; that is why every man, as long as he lives and fulfills the will of nature, is wondrous, and worthy of consideration.”

– Demian: The Story of Emil Sinclair’s Youth by Hermann Hesse

I have started a project that probably has no end, and no real immediate goal other than the process itself.

Because I don't have enough to do, apparently.

I recently read an advance copy of The Sculptor, the new graphic novel by Scott McCloud (of Understanding Comics fame). My main thoughts on the book will appear in a review for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, so this blog isn't meant as an examination of the book. But The Sculptor was a springboard for thinking about a whole lot of stuff, primarily the nature of memory and how we construct the story of our lives.

The main character in the book, David Smith, is a sculptor. Most of his work is an attempt to capture the small moments of his life, to immortalize his memories in stone so that fleeting impressions will not be lost. The story is also about the reality that death awaits us all sooner or later. The classic idea that when you die your entire life passes before your eyes is used to great dramatic effect in the narrative. I think the essence of this notion is that in that last moment we will find some kind of clarity as to what all the small events and memories of our lives meant. What was the structure and theme of this life I've led? What did I learn from all of this?

Which got me to thinking about my own memories and life. Parts of our lives “flash before our eyes” every time we have a memory. So, I thought to myself, why wait until I die to try and see the whole picture and see what I can learn?

In the series of books written by Carlos Castaneda, books that were very formative to me at one time, he introduces the idea of Recapitulation (The Eagle's Gift, 1982). Recapitulation consisted of “recollecting one's life down to the most insignificant detail.” The purpose of this was to engage the past in an effort let go of the things that held you back, to escape the demands of ego. Recapitulation is “genuine laughter upon coming face to face with the boring repetition of one's self-esteem, which is at the core of all human interactions.”

In short, it is used to heal. This idea isn't new or exclusive to Castaneda. It's part of most forms of psychotherapy.

I've been watching the Showtime series The Affair this week. No real spoilers here, but the conceit of the show is a “He Said, She Said” sort of dialectic. Both of the main characters are relating the memories of what took place, and the differences are significant, indicating not that they are lying (though they may be), but that each of them perceived the events through their own subjective filters (what some friends of mine have been referring to as Reality Tunnels). Events had different meanings and significance for each of them, based on their own experience and perceptions. They are both unreliable narrators.

Memory is the most unreliable narrator we know. Any given event is a moment in time that passes, only to be relived through the subjective memories of those who experienced it. No two people ever remember things exactly the same way. The difficulty in getting to the truth from eyewitnesses is evidence of this. What we end up with is a consensual reality, a version of the world we can all agree on even when it doesn't really mesh with what we remember. Over time, the story, if told well enough and often enough, replaces the actuality, often in the face of overwhelming evidence. The historical reality is always replaced by the story we tell about it.

And we all tell different stories.

I'm fascinated by this. It's one of the themes in my Arthurian novel, Bedivere: The King's Right Hand. The tale is narrated by Sir Bedivere in the later years of his life, and he is very aware of not only the failings of his own memory, but of how the stories and legends of King Arthur have already supplanted what he remembers as the truth.

I've read that our memory of an event is an ever-renewing process as well. When we have a memory of something what we are actually recalling is our previous memory of it, like rewriting over an already existing file. Each time we have a memory we are different people than the last time we remembered it. So now it is filtered through different layers of understanding, changing its meaning, therefore changing the actual memory every time.

So, that project I mentioned... Yeah, I'm trying to log all my memories. All of them. I know. It's impossible. That's okay. There's no deadline. This isn't for public consumption or any kind of project I ever intend to put out into the world (though some of the more interesting or funny stories may make it into a blog or a Facebook status update occasionally). This is navel gazing at it's finest.

I'm trying to be somewhat organized with how I do this. I do just jot down random things as they come to me. Not everything, of course.There's simply not enough time for that. It's amazing how many little memories you can have in a single day when you just start really paying attention to how you think. I've created files organized into various categories, like specific school memories, broken down by grade, or describing everything I can about the house I grew up in. I'm working on a list of every concert I've seen (I've seen a lot), and trying to track down dates and venues and who the opening bands were. I have some old ticket stubs and of course the internet helps. I have specific memories of all of these, some more vibrant that others.

The process is a rabbit hole, of course. When I focus on one topic, say first grade, it's amazing how many things come back that I haven't thought of in years, like snow forts and head wounds and the time the teacher broke the paddle on Kathy's butt.

So why do this? To get a better understanding of my own story and look for the recurring themes. To let some of it go, I suppose, though I don't have a lot of regrets. I'm one of the lucky ones who had a pretty happy childhood. To get ideas for stories. To enhance my creativity. To record my memories before they're gone (for whose benefit after I'm not sure).

One of the problems that David Smith has in The Sculptor was that he was so invested in capturing his past that he had problems living in the present or making new memories. I don't think that's a problem. My recent bout of hibernation and introversion aside, I have a pretty full life, and will hopefully continue to have one.

In the meantime, Once Upon a Time, that reminds me of a story...