Originally published August 22, 1997, in Comics Buyer’s Guide #1240
So… we were talking about myths.
At this point, Star Trek has reached nearly mythic status. One of the tests for that (and I may have discussed this in an earlier column; if so please forgive me, but I’ve been doing this gig for a lot of years and I’m bound to repeat sooner or later) is that discussions of key elements can be held without qualifiers.
For instance, if one were to ask, say, “Who was Napoleon Solo?” (to pick a contemporaneous program) the answer one would get (if one were rewarded with something other than a blank stare or a half-hearted guess such as “Han Solo’s brother?”) would be something along the lines of, “He was a character on a TV series called The Man From U.N.C.L.E.. There’s possible variants, sure, but that’s the most likely answer, I’d think.
But if you were to ask, “Who was James T. Kirk?” the reply you’d likely get would be, “Captain of the U.S.S. Enterprise.” There would be no qualifier, no further clarification, and no acknowledgement that one is discussing a television show. To rank as myth, a concept, characters or stories must take on a life of its own, its origins either lost in antiquity or simply irrelevant.
Star Trek fills that bill rather nicely. Comic books are likewise a sort of modern mythos being spun as we go. Superheroes are such strong archetypal characters and concepts that they continue to appeal and to attract fans even after all this time. And Star Trek and comics also constitute prime examples of that mythic pastime called “consistency” or “continuity.”
One of the knocks on the new Disney Hercules was that Disney played fast and loose with the existent myths. Putting aside that Disney did not use the proper Greek name “Heracles,” but on the other hand used all the Greek names for the other gods (Hermes instead of Mercury, Hades instead of Pluto, etc. Although that was probably a wise idea. Can you imagine a Disney film where the villain of the piece was named Pluto? For that matter, when they showed Cerberus, they should have had the three-headed dog sporting three Pluto heads. Talk about your in-jokes. Although I was the only one in the theater who laughed over Hermes’ obsession with floral arrangements. Didn’t anyone else get that? Doesn’t anyone recall the symbol for FTD florists? But I digress…)
Keep in mind that this wasn’t like Pocahantas, wherein Disney mucked with history, upgrading a pre-adolescent heroine into a shapely babe and giving her a hot romance with John Smith. This is a movie based on a character of myth. Yet some people complained that the movie wasn’t “really” how the myths went. And you find yourself scratching your head over the absurdity of the statement. Hello? They’re myths. They’re not true. None of it really happened. Or anything that did happen was embellished in the retelling to the point of creating a mythic figure.
There’s a nice turn on that in the film Braveheart, wherein an assembled army of Scotsmen refuses to believe that William Wallace (Mel Gibson) is in fact the legendary freedom fighter because Wallace in-the-flesh doesn’t match the stories of the warrior reputed to be seven feet tall, capable of slaying the British with bolts of lightning from his butt. This dovetails with genuine stories of Wallace, recounted by a poet whose tales of Wallace’s feats are so extraordinary that some historians tend to discount them, reasoning that they couldn’t possibly be true. Which is kind of unfair: It means that genuinely extraordinary people can’t ever get their due.
Comic book fans have a name for it, however. It’s called “continuity.” It is the obsession the bug-a-boo, the raison d’etre for many folks when it comes to their enjoyment of comics. If the story doesn’t match up precisely with what has gone before, there will be flurries of letters, e-mails, discussions, and demands that it be straightened out. There are still fans who are annoyed with me because I won’t do stories untangling or explaining the origin of Supergirl… a remarkably convoluted backstory exacerbated by the fact that she comes from a “pocket universe” (whatever that is) that now never existed in the first place.
Fans want to know how this can be. There’s two answers to this: (1) I don’t know and (2) I don’t care. Say that she’s left over pocket lint from the pocket universe and leave me the hell alone so I can tell the stories I want to tell. But some fans get annoyed over this because I’m not telling the stories they want to tell. My response to that is, fine, tell your own stories then. It’s a grand tradition, after all. It’s where myths come from, and myths absolutely, no two ways, don’t give a damn about continuity.
Hercules played fast and loose with existing myth. The young Hercules, for instance, is shown a mast from Jason’s ship, the Argo. Nice trick, considering that according to myth, Hercules was on the Argo, sailing side by side with Jason. His origin is different, the (rather cursory) telling of his labors is different, and by the way, Pegasus was not formed from a puffy cloud, he sprang from the blood of the slain Gorgon, Medusa, and later aided the Greek hero, Bellerophon, in slaying the Chimera.
Why did lopping off Medusa’s head result in the birth of Pegasus? Beats me. But if that story were first being told in a Marvel or DC Comic, you could bet that Pegasus’ first appearance would only be a prelude to a much more involved, detailed, secret origin of Pegasus one-shot. In the telling of myth and lore, audiences simply wanted to know what happened. Nowadays audiences have to know why it happened. People don’t want to take things on faith anymore.
Look at Star Trek, if you will. If there’s any one modern mythos that has spawned a more continuity-concerned base, it’s Trek. Why, when Scotty came out of the transporter beams in Relic, did he act as if he thought that Kirk was still alive, when in Star Trek Generations, he was present at Kirk’s believed demise. Well, uhm, he was confused. Well, uhm, deep down he always believed that Kirk was still alive somehow. The truth is that the writers weren’t going to let a line of dialogue in one episode of a TV show several years previously torpedo an entire sequence in a motion picture. The further truth is: It doesn’t matter.
Except to the fans, it does matter. This is not to take away from spirited and entertaining discussions among fans where discussing discrepancies is more of a mental exercise than anything. There’s certainly a large element of fun in that. But some folks take it waaaay too seriously. And that’s not limited to the fans; Paramount officials have been known to distinguish between the TV series and the line of novels by declaring, “The TV series is Star Trek fact, while the novels are Star Trek fiction.” This prompted at least one fan–speaking on behalf of all fans, I think–to declare, “Geez, and they tell us to get a life.” And boy, were there noses out of joint at DC when the Star Trek/X-Men team-up was announced. DC reps, back when they had the license, had proposed a Star Trek/Superman meeting, and the proposal was shot down by the then-licensing officials with the declaration, “But… Superman isn’t real.”
And yet many fans want stories in the book to “count.” To be part of “canon.” To be “real.” Because those stories become important to them, and to them they are as vital and significant as those stories which the guardians of “Star Trek fact” consider the one, true Star Trek.
And there are “protectors” of comic book canon as well. Fan protectors who will raise a ruckus the moment that there is a threat to the precious continuity, or the moment that a new creator puts a new spin on the character. They will cry foul, claim that it’s only being done for filthy commercial purposes. Maybe it is. Maybe it isn’t. The point is, if the story is interesting, who cares? Storytelling should be about surprise and the unexpected, and it is the height of absurdity to reject a concept or twist or spin out of hand on the basis that it’s never been done before.
I was on a panel at San Diego recently where continuity discussions came up, and it was pointed out (by Mark Waid, I think, although I may very well be wrong, and if so I apologize) that DC, for instance, used to revel in contradictions. There would be a story about the origin of Wonder Woman’s invisible plane, and then, six months to a year later, there would be a story about the origin of Wonder Woman’s invisible plane that would completely contradict what had gone before. It could be argued that the reasoning was that the turnover in comic book readership was such that you’d likely be writing stories for an entirely new audience who will be curious as to the background of the plane, and why just recycle the same story? More likely, the creators simply didn’t care. They figured, “I have a neat idea for a story! I’ll tell it!”
Now, when DC creators get a new and better (in theory) notion for an origin, it’s a whole big deal. It requires intercompany crossovers to justify it. Fans have created terminology to accompany it (“Reboot”, “Retcon”). Yet shouldn’t comics, which arguably have achieved in some instances mythic status, be allowed the flexibility given to all myths. Indeed, rather than obsess about continuity or become angry when stories are redressed for new audiences, shouldn’t we be celebrating part of a long-standing tradition?
William Irwin Thompson, in his book The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light, writes of the organic nature of myths, stating that it is the right and obligation of those telling stories to adapt to new audiences and concerns, stating “Forms of knowledge change as society changes.” When one looks at those who obsess about what can and can’t be done, what should and should not be done, desperately trying to keep an organic story to some sort of universal constant, they are setting themselves up as caretakers of something that should not be constricted. Thompson writes:
The structural anthropologist urges us to ignore the orthodox who labor so patiently trying to eliminate the apocryphal variants from the one true text. The priests of the Temple of Solomon works to construct the canon of Biblical literature, and in this work the dubious folktales of the peasantry were dismissed, but for us a legend or a midrash (a folktale variation on Biblical stories) may be a greater opening to the archetypal world than the overly refined redactions of the urban priestly intelligentsia. Once we are freed from the quest for the one true vision of a myth, we are also freed from the concern for determining the exact provenance of the variant. How can one tell where a myth comes from?
Thompson goes on to note,
It cannot be too strongly emphasized that all available variants should be taken into account… There is no one true version of which all the others are but copies or distortions. Every version belongs to the myth.
And added:
But there are also other reasons why all the versions of a myth must be considered, and these reasons have to do with the applicability of information theory to the study of the myth as noted by the anthropologist, Edmund Leach. Every message goes from a Sender to a Receiver through a transmitting medium, but every medium of transmission inevitably distorts the message, and so along the way the signal picks up noise. What the Receiver must get is a mixture of noise and information. If there is only one message, then the Receiver has no way of sorting out the noise from the information; but if the message is sent over and over again in ;many different ways, then the Receiver can line all the versions up in a single imaginary space, see the common structure, and sift the information from the noise. For a structuralist like Edmund Leach, the structure is the meaning. Genesis, for example, is about incest taboos; all the rest is noise and mystification. But one man’s noise is another man’s information… Every new school of thought teaches us something and adds a new tool to the scholar’s kit.
In the case of comics, in the case of Star Trek, we do know the origins. They’ve been thoroughly documented, sometimes ad nauseam. But what we’re seeing is something truly exciting: The embracing of something with specific origins and the transformation of that into mythic status. A hundred years from now, it is not impossible that characters such as Superman or Captain Kirk may still be part of the gestalt human mind, but that their origins may be hotly debated. Just as the origins of stories of Men in Black are also debated (some pegging it as far back as four hundred years ago) before Lowell Cunningham put his own spin on a myth that, once again, goes to a core notion: The world is a confusing and contradictory place, and it would be nice to know that there’s some sort of structure holding it together—be it black-clad men, a guy in a blue and red suit, a man in a starship representing a vision of a future in which we are harmonious, or a divine being overseeing the entire mess.
And as for me, all I can think of is that six-year-old Ariel looked a little disappointed as they rolled the closing credits for Hercules. I said, “What’s wrong, honey?” And she looked up, a bit confused, and said, “Why wasn’t Xena in it?”
And so the legend continues.
(Peter David, writer of stuff, can be written to at Second Age, Inc., PO Box 239, Bayport, NY 11705. At least, that’s the myth.)