The internal continuity of comic-book 'universes' will come into my work in a couple of ways. First, through the concept of the analogue, because without established universes of characters, the analogues mean nothing. They're not just about replicating characters but also replicating their relationships with each other (the most common ones are the JLA and the Superman/Lois Lane/Clark Kent love triangle).
Second, possibly more interesting, is to compare the creation of comic-book universes to 'naturally' occurring fairy-tale and myth cycles. Thousands of artists over hundreds of years gradually build up strata of interpretation and nuance to, for example, the Arthurian legends, and the same thing happens with Superman or Spider-man over just a few decades. Hundreds of writers and artists offer their versions of the characters.
What that creates is, in lay terms, a richness and depth, a sense that everything has a meaning. In comic-book terms, that usually means that the present plot (whatever it might be) is inherently related, bound up logistically and causally, to something that happened last year, and something that happened two years ago, and something that happened ten years ago. This is one of the reasons why new readers have a hard time with mainstream comics. You have to know a decade of continuity in order to even start. But on the flip side is the depth you get as a result. (or possibly breadth, wideness, lots of events, as opposed to loads and loads of meaning attached to them?).
The really interesting up-shot of all those different versions of the characters (and I've talked about this before, so I won't belabour the point) is that readers then create an amalgam of all those presentations within their own heads. They have a custom-made version of the characters and situations that only exists internally. Ironically, that custom-made version is usually not made up of the 'primary texts' of the characters, the comics, but from cartoons, movies, video games, from the derivative presentations that are, nevertheless, literally more popular in that they've been read and watched by more people. The primary texts then become 'unreal' for the casual reader. That version of Spider-man is not the one that most people know, despite being the default 'real' version, the approved version. That confusion between versions is what DC/Marvel try to control when they tell their comics artists to make the comics versions match the TV shows or movies (I.e., Supergirl's costume changed after she appeared in the Superman animated series, Spider-man gained biological web-shooters around the time of the first Raimi
movies, etc.).
The 'lots of artists over a long time' practise also contributes to the timelessness, the 'neverwhen' by which mainstream comics continuously and incrementally change their core elements in order to appear as if they never change, which is itself a major part of their mythic quality. They seem eternal and unchanging. They seem to stand for values that are immutable. Inversely, in the Barthean sense, they don't seem particularly 'political' *because* they stand for ostensibly eternal values that transcend politics; they depoliticise themselves, just as Barthes says about most media.
So, yes, the layering has some fairly powerful implications
Posted by orion at July 10, 2006 3:09 PM