A post from the old Marvel blog about history and continuity and the different approaches to it that have been taken over the years.
October 6, 2008 | 1:00 AM | By Tom_Brevoort | In General
Back in the 1980s, there was a general
guideline at Marvel that said it wasn’t wise to refer to continuity more than
around five years old. There were exceptions, of course—typically relating to
the origins of the characters. But when it came to typical storylines, if it
was more than five years old, forget it—the readership had.
The theory was that even among the hardcore audience there was enough turn-over
so that, by and large, any stories that were more than sixty months old had
been forgotten. And while you wouldn’t go out of your way to contradict that
stuff, you also couldn’t count on anybody remembering it.
This led to their being a vague line of demarcation within the Marvel Universe,
one I’ve become aware of when talking to people who started reading the books
during this period. They really don’t remember much of anything before 1980 or
so, and their vision of the characters is based fundamentally on this decade.
Nowadays, however, it seems like the awareness of the audience has grown a bit,
at least in general. There are more people who remember the ins-and-outs of
stories published a decade ago, and any number of readers who had been
following Marvel in the 1990s, dropped away for a number of years, and have
since returned.
But all of these groups tend to operate under what I like to call “selective
continuity.” Put simply, if they didn’t read it, to them it was never
published. If a character returns from the past, and they have no idea how that
character changed from back-in-the-day to what he is now, they become
irritated, and expect the new story to cover that ground again (or, from their
perspective, to cover it for the first time.)
MARVELS was really the first project in a long time to buck this trend, to
actively put elements from the past back on the radar as story points. And the
success of MARVELS made brought the use of vintage continuity back into vogue,
at least for awhile. But this led to a different problem: while it was fun to
connect the dots over forty years, very few readers remained who’d been there
for all of the gyrations, and this use of the extended continuity often made it
difficult to figure out who the characters were supposed to be. Continuity
started to become an ankle-weight, rather than a springboard to new stories.
These days, we tend to walk the line a little bit, but we definitely hew a
little bit more closely to the five-year-rule. But at least once a month
something gets brought back from much earlier, and re-established on the
canvas. So it’s a little bit from column A and a little bit from column B.
Of course, nowadays, many readers are equally confused by the different lines
with their different continuities, and by the fact that some projects don’t
quite fit into any of them. But that’s part of the price of dragging 45 years
of history behind you.
More later.
Tom B
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