Okay, I've been away for far too long. It's time to get this thing going again.
I have no excuse for you, dear fictitious reader. I've merely gotten out of the habit of writing in this thing. So, from now on, I'm writing a mini review of every comic book I read, just to get me off my ass (technically, onto my ass and in front of the computer, but there you go).
Before I start that, though, I'd like to tell you about the conference I went to in Louisiana. I have a few semi-humorous stories about trying to enjoy Mardi Gras, but at the conference itself I happened to present a short paper I wrote last year on Watchmen. It went over well, and the woman who presented with me, Julia Round of Bristol U., is working on many of the same texts, though with a very different focus. We exchanged ideas a little bit and I found something new that I'm all jazzed up about now.
In my long paper from last semester (I'd post it, but it's 30 pages plus images) I invented a term for characters who are deliberate pastiches, references, to other characters. The whole Watchmen cast, for example, is based on the Charlton Comics characters that Moore and Gibbons thought they were going to be allowed to use, but that they couldn't use at the last minute, hence the fact that they made a bunch of characters that feel like the Charlton heroes.
I call these kinds of characters analogues, because they are literally analogous to their originals. They call attention to themselves as copies and therefore invite comparison. The point of a good name for a literary maneouver is that the name reflects what's actually going on in the maneouver, right?
Well, Julia uses a different term for a very similar move, one that I had previously lumped in with analogues. She calls it 'superscription.' This happens when a character's personality or idiom is, almost literally, written over by a new creative team. This is how characters slowly evolve over time, having small elements of their personalities written over, superscribed, as they go; it's also how some characters go through radical changes for no reason other than a writer had a good idea. Moore did this with Supreme, and otherwise boring little Superman clone that Moore turned into something fascinating by capitalising on his Superman-ness (so to speak).
Superscription is a lot like retcon. In fact, now that I think of it, it's basically a retcon of a particular character. The interseting thing is that the superscription does or doesn't 'take' depending almost entirely on the popularity of the changes. If everyone likes Lobo without messy hair and wearing a leather jacket with a meat-hook wrapped around his arm, then that's the version that sticks around, instead of the square-haired, yellow tights that he started with. That version of the character is retroactively part of the continuity. The original has been written over.
Neat stuff.
(Some reviews to follow. Sit tight.)
Posted by orion at February 25, 2005 3:46 PM