6 ms·

Marvel Comics and the “most intricate fictional narrative in history” (2013)

88 points by drjohnson 12y ago

Discordian93 12y ago
More like a narrative multiple train wreck. There have been so many retcons, resurrections, inter-series crossovers and changes of characterization that it's pretty much impossible to understand what's going on with marvel comics if you haven't read the comics since the 80's. Even they line they started to avoid that problem, ultimate marvel, recently got crossed over with the main universe, after it had prevously dropped sharply in quality with the ultimatum event. I never could get into the main continuity, and stopped reading ultimate comics after ultimatum, honestly the only marvel narrative I care about now is the cinematic universe, they've completely ruined comics as a medium to tell marvel superhero stories, which is pretty sad.
- brazzy 12y ago
  I'm pretty sure that any narrative that is shared by a substantial number of authors inevitable goes down that road, though Marven may well be the one that went furthest. Just look at what happened to the Star Wars extended universe - and that with a much tighter creative control.
  - webmaven 12y ago
    What's 'substantial'? The Wild Cards novels have had a couple of dozen authors, I think (though one editor) for several decades, and maintained continuity rather well: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wild_Cards http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wild_Cards
- GuiA 12y ago
  Agreed. I've found that as a casual comics aficionado, the sanest route is to just stick to omnibus/one shots. I'd recommend that for anyone curious to get deeper in the story lines but who doesn't want to enter the giant rabbit hole that is the Marvel universe.
  - mongrol 12y ago
    Agreed, and as a comic enthusiast I avoid all mainstream DC and Marvel. It's just one big marketing scam. Stick to Image, Dark Horse, IDW, some Vertigo stuff and you'll be much more rewarded.
  - astrange 12y ago
    Personally, I recommend escaping the world of American comics and finding some of them other countries to read books from. Historical accident might have made it so all comics produced here are over-drawn cosmic nonsense about superpowers and people wearing underwear outside their clothes, but obviously you can imagine writing a story about something else, right? I recommend comics about competitive wine tasting. http://www.vertical-inc.com/dropsofgod/ http://www.vertical-inc.com/dropsofgod/
    - Touche 12y ago
      That's a ridiculous generalization, there are many varieties of comics created in the U.S., not just superhero comics.
      - mercurial 12y ago
        Absolutely. Try something like "Air" or "Scalped", for instance. That said, you will also find some fantastic European comics outside of Lucky Luke/Spirou/Tintin, like the French classics "Les sept vies de l'Épervier" (3) (historical fiction with real character development) or "Les passagers du vent" (4) (more historical fiction, well-researched and beautifully drawn). 1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_(comics) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_(comics) 2: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scalped_(comics) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scalped_(comics) 3: http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Les_Sept_Vies_de_l%27%C3%89pervier http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Les_Sept_Vies_de_l%27%C3%89perv... 4: http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Les_Passagers_du_vent http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Les_Passagers_du_vent
- rat87 12y ago
  For me the spiderman(specifically 90's spiderman and spectacular spiderman) cartoons are a pretty good abbreviation/retelling of the comics without as many crossovers and with a more coherent stories. Probably some of the other cartoons work similarly for other heroes/lines.
- vidarh 12y ago
  I don't see why it matters. Read the individual stories, or story arches, and see them as different facets of myth or fairy tales. From my childhood, in advance of one of the Superman reboots in the 80's, I remember a particular issue where they'd rounded up several artists to each do their take on the "end" of the previous continuity, or the a version of the origin story. It didn't matter that they did not fit into a single coherent canon. If anything causes it to be a trainwreck, it is that they try to maintain the idea that there's any kind of coherence. I like that there's different takes on the characters.
- gyardley 12y ago
  Oh, there's still great stories being produced, and the best writers manage to work within the Marvel continuity while not assuming their readers have prior knowledge of it. Unfortunately, you can't see any of that from the cover of the comics, and the best writers share shelf space with a whole lot of dreck, as well as a bunch of not-dreck that assumes you've already been reading the series for ten years. My advice is to buy collected story arcs rather than individual issues, avoid crossovers, favor single-character rather than ensemble books, favor series relaunches or miniseries, and once you've found a writer you like, buy for the writer and not the character.
manachar 12y ago
The Stan Lee / Jack Kirby duo reminds me some of other "business savvy" and "creative genius" duos. Seems like a common combination that works best when the business and creative learn they need each other and respect each other immensely.
soneca 12y ago
I was expecting (and missed) the role of Watchmen in this narrative, as well as the evolution of really mature comics (not only based on sex and violence). I understand it is a story about Marvel, but their story was influenced by these players also, not just DC. Anyway, great reading.
- sampo 12y ago
  What was the role of Watchmen? (This is a genuine question.)
  - soneca 12y ago
    I am sure i am not the right person to answer that question. I am convinced it is an important role, but i could be wrong. But i will try. Watchmen was not so much a satire, but a humanized version of what a superhero could be. But that is eclipsed through the end by its deep sociological question and its dubious answer. For me, the genesis of the comic genre that deal with mature subjects for mature audiences. For me these were the guidelines used by Hollywood to make the comics to cinema transiction right. Teenagers by themselves can sustain the comic business, but not the movie business. So i understand the role of the Graphic Novel as the ingredient needed to make comics an art media for ali audiences. Something that Pixar made for animations through clever humour, for example.
  - jcr 12y ago
    I'm unsure if "role" is a useful way to think about the Watchmen. Since the 60's there have been plenty of "adult" comics with sex and violence, and with the Watchmen being released in 1986 (I think), the adult themes weren't anything new. The "new" things I remember about The Watchmen, at the time, were (1) increased popularity of a mature themed story, and (2) the sales success of an adult themed story by a major publisher. Similar could be said for the "Superhero without superpowers" plot device, and "Heroes with fairly regular human problems" plot device. The plot devices were old and well tested by the time they were used in The Watchmen. On the other hand, the idea of using a limited series outside of the normal (cannon) universe to both introduce new heroes and kill them off in the same book/series was a deviation from the usual comics industry methods (for maximizing profits). Of course, DC eventually did a follow-on prequel "Before Watchmen" in 2012 after the release of the movie adaptation of the original in 2009. The price of success in comics is typically repeated dilution. Permanently killing heroes became normalized in 1988 with "A Death In The Family" when they killed the second Robin in Batman (and started the "Replaceable Robin" and/or "Replaceable Sidekick" trope). I've never seen the Watchmen as an analogy to the comics industry. After all, it was from one of the big two publishers. To me, the Watchmen was mostly just a product of its time; at the height of the seemingly endless threat of the cold war when everyone wanted the cold war to end. The trope of "endless threat resolved with substantial losses and significant change" was fairly prevalent in stories from the mid 80's. To some degree, the trope is still reused in current works, but to a far lesser degree. The toughest thing to grasp is what the mid-80's were like, and unless you're in your mid-40's or older, it will be tough for most to imagine. If I didn't know what the time was like, I doubt I'd consider the Watchmen to be such a fantastic story.
virtualwhys 12y ago
Wow, X-men #142, have that and the piercingly beautiful and tragic Dark Phoenix series sitting in mylar in a box (with other keepers) at my parents place. Was absolutely hooked until John Byrne left (soon thereafter). He and Tony Perez on the DC comics side were for me comic creating legends. Edit: George (not Tony) Perez. Could of sworn it was Tony, but it has been nearly 3 decades ;-)
vidarh 12y ago
> For a short while, comics became insanely collectible, and Marvel figured out how to cash in. This struck me. As a European, from one of the countries where comics stands strongest (Norway), I remember as a child, be shocked at hearing that in the US it was common, for the purposes of determining advertising reach, to count multiple issues per reader at one point. Because in Norway, it was normal to calculate 3-4 readers per comic for of the most popular titles. Like (in the 80's; while still going, they've been displaced by homegrown titles "at the top" as far as I understand) Donald Duck & Co. and the Phantom, which both sold in the region of 150,000 to 200,000 per issue through much of the 80's (every week for Donald, and every two weeks for the Phantom) in a country of then ca. 4 million people. So for Donald it would not have been unreasonable for an issue to have been read by one in five people, including a lot of adults. Comics, as a culture here, was always about fun and sharing, not really collecting (there are certainly collectors too, but it's never been as big as in the US). Many Marvel and DC titles also sold more in translations in Scandinavia (sometimes each country in Scandinavia might outsell the US for certain titles) than they did in the US, though their popularity has diminished since the 80's. Though it was not hard to see why "our" versions sold better when I saw my first US comic: Thin slivers full of advertising. We expected 60+ page issues, often expanded issues with up to 100 pages, and usually only 3 pages of advertising or so (inner cover and back page); maybe an advertising inlay. My first exposure to Marvel (as had "always" been the case in Norway - we never had the proliferation of titles following different aspects of a character) was also far easier to digest (though it used to be more chaotic): From 1983 onwards, a new publisher took over. Where the previous one had published a mish-mash of stories from the different Marvel titles, out of order, the new one followed a very simple format, coordinated throughout the Scandinavian market: Spiderman, Hulk, Project X each got one title that weaved together a single coherent-ish narrative for their title character from the different Marvel titles + extra stories about the other Marvel characers. In addition each title carried a single number scheme that placed them chronologically relative to each other. Focus was on ensuring that you could either follow one of the main titles or all of them in numbered order, and get a narrative that was understandable, if necessary "filled in" by a "fact page" or similar explaining the background of a "new" (to us) character that had to be thrown into the mix for the narrative to make sense. Especially relevant with the new X-Men movie: Project X lasted 13 issues on its first run, and ended with Days of Future Past. It got another 13 issue run again a couple of years later. Since then I stopped following superhero comics for many years so I don't know if they tried again, but superhero comics have never done particularly well in Scandinavia, which to me makes the US comics market even stranger. Because our market, is dominated by, well, comedic comics, many of which through the years have been series that only got newspaper strip treatment in the US. The format is generally a main title, which gets the most pages aggregated from new and classic strips, coupled with a number of rotating sideshows. Examples includes Beetle Bailey (which has run continuously since the 70's), Hagar the Horrible (currently not being published), Calvin and Hobbes (which kept running for a few years after the new strips dried up), Opus (/Outland/Bloom Country), Ernie, The Far Side. Many of these will start as a side series in one of the titles, and then "graduate" to a full series, and occasionally go back to being a side series in another title once their popularity diminishes (or when new material dries up - e.g. Calvin and Hobbes still show up). In return, we've long had the bizarre situation where US comic artists that are virtually unknown in the US, tour Scandinavia and get large articles in national newspapers about their book signings, and we get special stories weaving the Scandinavia into stories. Some of them (Ernie for example) have even snuck in their Scandinavian editors as characters in their series at times. These type of titles of course evades all of the narrative issues: Their universes are if not static, then at least rarely bound by their story lines. But the most popular comics today are homegrown comedic series. At least three currently have regular (monthly) titles: The Collective (Kollektivet) - a story about a group of badly mismatched friends that started out as a housing collective, Pondus - a story that started out as a story about two soccer crazy bus drivers -, and Nemi, which is the most internationally known of them, thanks to being the least peculiarly Norwegian one of them... All of these interestingly have in common that their universes evolve. Particularly Pondus and Kollektivet. Pondus has for example evolved from a simple series about two football-loving, beer drinking bus drivers getting into bizarre situations involving ugly women (the artist claims a US syndication deal stranded on his refusal to re-draw strips to make the women that one of the main character constantly hits on less ugly), horrible passengers etc. to a one of them buying a pub, and the perpetual bachelor (with the ugly women) finding himself a nice woman, getting married, having a child, and running a record-store with his dad. They escape the narrative "nightmare" that Marvel and DC deals with by not sharing their universe with anyone (the occasional friendly jabs between the different comic artists, where they've made fun of each others characters in various ways, excluded). Pondus and Nemi sell more than most Marvel and DC series do in the US on a monthly basis in Norway alone, with their artists in full control and making enough to tell the publishers where to stuff it if they get too much interference. These magazines, and slots as side-series in other comedic comics supports a relatively large number of other comic artists, though most of them can not live full time of their series (one of the more popular series, for example, is drawn by a high-school teacher). Compared to the US, we have a market that does amazingly well in sales, despite far fewer titles, but does not sustain as many artists. On the other hand, the stories are far more diverse, and one of the reason we sustain fewer artists is that the series are not "cookie-cutter" series managed project-managed by the publishers. To us, in many ways, when it comes to comics we are much closer to the Franco-Belgian comic culture than to the US. French and Belgian series like Tintin, Lucky Luke, Asterix, Spirou have always done exceptionally well in Scandinavia, regularly getting reprinted in huge numbers.
zipwitch 12y ago
While I certainly enjoy my comics, "most intricate fictional narrative in history"? I think not.
- mathattack 12y ago
  What's more intricate? Perhaps Lord of the Rings? This narrative spans 50+ years of writing across many (hundreds of?) titles. It combines comic books, regular books, TV and movies.
  - thaumasiotes 12y ago
    But 50 years is nothing at all. Consider Egyptian mythology, which evolved to reflect changing political realities across hundreds and hundreds of years. Consider the relatively minor knight of King Arthur, Sir Kay. Why did Arthur have a knight by that name? Because originally Cai was a great Welsh hero. That kind of thing is absolutely the norm for any mythology -- Marvel is a fairly piddling effort by comparison. Or if you want to go by number of official published works... consider any modern fanfiction website.
    - tlarkworthy 12y ago
      Or the more accessible Greek mythology.
      - thaumasiotes 12y ago
        Very true; I picked Egyptian mythology for its very long record and well-understood "character developments" over the period. But that's an artifact of features of Egypt that make its history comparatively easy to read; any traditional mythology or modern focus of fanfiction will dwarf the output of Marvel, for the simple reason that a publishing company is not able to devote the same level of effort to storymaking as the group "anyone interested" is.
nicwolff 12y ago
> But who rescues someone from Heaven? Willow Rosenberg?

88 points by drjohnson 12y ago

More like a narrative multiple train wreck. There have been so many retcons, resurrections, inter-series crossovers and changes of characterization that it's pretty much impossible to understand what's going on with marvel comics if you haven't read the comics since the 80's. Even they line they started to avoid that problem, ultimate marvel, recently got crossed over with the main universe, after it had prevously dropped sharply in quality with the ultimatum event. I never could get into the main continuity, and stopped reading ultimate comics after ultimatum, honestly the only marvel narrative I care about now is the cinematic universe, they've completely ruined comics as a medium to tell marvel superhero stories, which is pretty sad.

brazzy 12y ago
I'm pretty sure that any narrative that is shared by a substantial number of authors inevitable goes down that road, though Marven may well be the one that went furthest. Just look at what happened to the Star Wars extended universe - and that with a much tighter creative control.
- webmaven 12y ago
  What's 'substantial'? The Wild Cards novels have had a couple of dozen authors, I think (though one editor) for several decades, and maintained continuity rather well: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wild_Cards http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wild_Cards
GuiA 12y ago
Agreed. I've found that as a casual comics aficionado, the sanest route is to just stick to omnibus/one shots. I'd recommend that for anyone curious to get deeper in the story lines but who doesn't want to enter the giant rabbit hole that is the Marvel universe.
- mongrol 12y ago
  Agreed, and as a comic enthusiast I avoid all mainstream DC and Marvel. It's just one big marketing scam. Stick to Image, Dark Horse, IDW, some Vertigo stuff and you'll be much more rewarded.
- astrange 12y ago
  Personally, I recommend escaping the world of American comics and finding some of them other countries to read books from. Historical accident might have made it so all comics produced here are over-drawn cosmic nonsense about superpowers and people wearing underwear outside their clothes, but obviously you can imagine writing a story about something else, right? I recommend comics about competitive wine tasting. http://www.vertical-inc.com/dropsofgod/ http://www.vertical-inc.com/dropsofgod/
  - Touche 12y ago
    That's a ridiculous generalization, there are many varieties of comics created in the U.S., not just superhero comics.
    - mercurial 12y ago
      Absolutely. Try something like "Air" or "Scalped", for instance. That said, you will also find some fantastic European comics outside of Lucky Luke/Spirou/Tintin, like the French classics "Les sept vies de l'Épervier" (3) (historical fiction with real character development) or "Les passagers du vent" (4) (more historical fiction, well-researched and beautifully drawn). 1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_(comics) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_(comics) 2: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scalped_(comics) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scalped_(comics) 3: http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Les_Sept_Vies_de_l%27%C3%89pervier http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Les_Sept_Vies_de_l%27%C3%89perv... 4: http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Les_Passagers_du_vent http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Les_Passagers_du_vent
rat87 12y ago
For me the spiderman(specifically 90's spiderman and spectacular spiderman) cartoons are a pretty good abbreviation/retelling of the comics without as many crossovers and with a more coherent stories. Probably some of the other cartoons work similarly for other heroes/lines.
vidarh 12y ago
I don't see why it matters. Read the individual stories, or story arches, and see them as different facets of myth or fairy tales. From my childhood, in advance of one of the Superman reboots in the 80's, I remember a particular issue where they'd rounded up several artists to each do their take on the "end" of the previous continuity, or the a version of the origin story. It didn't matter that they did not fit into a single coherent canon. If anything causes it to be a trainwreck, it is that they try to maintain the idea that there's any kind of coherence. I like that there's different takes on the characters.
gyardley 12y ago
Oh, there's still great stories being produced, and the best writers manage to work within the Marvel continuity while not assuming their readers have prior knowledge of it. Unfortunately, you can't see any of that from the cover of the comics, and the best writers share shelf space with a whole lot of dreck, as well as a bunch of not-dreck that assumes you've already been reading the series for ten years. My advice is to buy collected story arcs rather than individual issues, avoid crossovers, favor single-character rather than ensemble books, favor series relaunches or miniseries, and once you've found a writer you like, buy for the writer and not the character.

manachar 12y ago

The Stan Lee / Jack Kirby duo reminds me some of other "business savvy" and "creative genius" duos. Seems like a common combination that works best when the business and creative learn they need each other and respect each other immensely.

soneca 12y ago

I was expecting (and missed) the role of Watchmen in this narrative, as well as the evolution of really mature comics (not only based on sex and violence). I understand it is a story about Marvel, but their story was influenced by these players also, not just DC. Anyway, great reading.

sampo 12y ago
What was the role of Watchmen? (This is a genuine question.)
- soneca 12y ago
  I am sure i am not the right person to answer that question. I am convinced it is an important role, but i could be wrong. But i will try. Watchmen was not so much a satire, but a humanized version of what a superhero could be. But that is eclipsed through the end by its deep sociological question and its dubious answer. For me, the genesis of the comic genre that deal with mature subjects for mature audiences. For me these were the guidelines used by Hollywood to make the comics to cinema transiction right. Teenagers by themselves can sustain the comic business, but not the movie business. So i understand the role of the Graphic Novel as the ingredient needed to make comics an art media for ali audiences. Something that Pixar made for animations through clever humour, for example.
- jcr 12y ago
  I'm unsure if "role" is a useful way to think about the Watchmen. Since the 60's there have been plenty of "adult" comics with sex and violence, and with the Watchmen being released in 1986 (I think), the adult themes weren't anything new. The "new" things I remember about The Watchmen, at the time, were (1) increased popularity of a mature themed story, and (2) the sales success of an adult themed story by a major publisher. Similar could be said for the "Superhero without superpowers" plot device, and "Heroes with fairly regular human problems" plot device. The plot devices were old and well tested by the time they were used in The Watchmen. On the other hand, the idea of using a limited series outside of the normal (cannon) universe to both introduce new heroes and kill them off in the same book/series was a deviation from the usual comics industry methods (for maximizing profits). Of course, DC eventually did a follow-on prequel "Before Watchmen" in 2012 after the release of the movie adaptation of the original in 2009. The price of success in comics is typically repeated dilution. Permanently killing heroes became normalized in 1988 with "A Death In The Family" when they killed the second Robin in Batman (and started the "Replaceable Robin" and/or "Replaceable Sidekick" trope). I've never seen the Watchmen as an analogy to the comics industry. After all, it was from one of the big two publishers. To me, the Watchmen was mostly just a product of its time; at the height of the seemingly endless threat of the cold war when everyone wanted the cold war to end. The trope of "endless threat resolved with substantial losses and significant change" was fairly prevalent in stories from the mid 80's. To some degree, the trope is still reused in current works, but to a far lesser degree. The toughest thing to grasp is what the mid-80's were like, and unless you're in your mid-40's or older, it will be tough for most to imagine. If I didn't know what the time was like, I doubt I'd consider the Watchmen to be such a fantastic story.

virtualwhys 12y ago

Wow, X-men #142, have that and the piercingly beautiful and tragic Dark Phoenix series sitting in mylar in a box (with other keepers) at my parents place. Was absolutely hooked until John Byrne left (soon thereafter). He and Tony Perez on the DC comics side were for me comic creating legends. Edit: George (not Tony) Perez. Could of sworn it was Tony, but it has been nearly 3 decades ;-)

vidarh 12y ago

> For a short while, comics became insanely collectible, and Marvel figured out how to cash in. This struck me. As a European, from one of the countries where comics stands strongest (Norway), I remember as a child, be shocked at hearing that in the US it was common, for the purposes of determining advertising reach, to count multiple issues per reader at one point. Because in Norway, it was normal to calculate 3-4 readers per comic for of the most popular titles. Like (in the 80's; while still going, they've been displaced by homegrown titles "at the top" as far as I understand) Donald Duck & Co. and the Phantom, which both sold in the region of 150,000 to 200,000 per issue through much of the 80's (every week for Donald, and every two weeks for the Phantom) in a country of then ca. 4 million people. So for Donald it would not have been unreasonable for an issue to have been read by one in five people, including a lot of adults. Comics, as a culture here, was always about fun and sharing, not really collecting (there are certainly collectors too, but it's never been as big as in the US). Many Marvel and DC titles also sold more in translations in Scandinavia (sometimes each country in Scandinavia might outsell the US for certain titles) than they did in the US, though their popularity has diminished since the 80's. Though it was not hard to see why "our" versions sold better when I saw my first US comic: Thin slivers full of advertising. We expected 60+ page issues, often expanded issues with up to 100 pages, and usually only 3 pages of advertising or so (inner cover and back page); maybe an advertising inlay. My first exposure to Marvel (as had "always" been the case in Norway - we never had the proliferation of titles following different aspects of a character) was also far easier to digest (though it used to be more chaotic): From 1983 onwards, a new publisher took over. Where the previous one had published a mish-mash of stories from the different Marvel titles, out of order, the new one followed a very simple format, coordinated throughout the Scandinavian market: Spiderman, Hulk, Project X each got one title that weaved together a single coherent-ish narrative for their title character from the different Marvel titles + extra stories about the other Marvel characers. In addition each title carried a single number scheme that placed them chronologically relative to each other. Focus was on ensuring that you could either follow one of the main titles or all of them in numbered order, and get a narrative that was understandable, if necessary "filled in" by a "fact page" or similar explaining the background of a "new" (to us) character that had to be thrown into the mix for the narrative to make sense. Especially relevant with the new X-Men movie: Project X lasted 13 issues on its first run, and ended with Days of Future Past. It got another 13 issue run again a couple of years later. Since then I stopped following superhero comics for many years so I don't know if they tried again, but superhero comics have never done particularly well in Scandinavia, which to me makes the US comics market even stranger. Because our market, is dominated by, well, comedic comics, many of which through the years have been series that only got newspaper strip treatment in the US. The format is generally a main title, which gets the most pages aggregated from new and classic strips, coupled with a number of rotating sideshows. Examples includes Beetle Bailey (which has run continuously since the 70's), Hagar the Horrible (currently not being published), Calvin and Hobbes (which kept running for a few years after the new strips dried up), Opus (/Outland/Bloom Country), Ernie, The Far Side. Many of these will start as a side series in one of the titles, and then "graduate" to a full series, and occasionally go back to being a side series in another title once their popularity diminishes (or when new material dries up - e.g. Calvin and Hobbes still show up). In return, we've long had the bizarre situation where US comic artists that are virtually unknown in the US, tour Scandinavia and get large articles in national newspapers about their book signings, and we get special stories weaving the Scandinavia into stories. Some of them (Ernie for example) have even snuck in their Scandinavian editors as characters in their series at times. These type of titles of course evades all of the narrative issues: Their universes are if not static, then at least rarely bound by their story lines. But the most popular comics today are homegrown comedic series. At least three currently have regular (monthly) titles: The Collective (Kollektivet) - a story about a group of badly mismatched friends that started out as a housing collective, Pondus - a story that started out as a story about two soccer crazy bus drivers -, and Nemi, which is the most internationally known of them, thanks to being the least peculiarly Norwegian one of them... All of these interestingly have in common that their universes evolve. Particularly Pondus and Kollektivet. Pondus has for example evolved from a simple series about two football-loving, beer drinking bus drivers getting into bizarre situations involving ugly women (the artist claims a US syndication deal stranded on his refusal to re-draw strips to make the women that one of the main character constantly hits on less ugly), horrible passengers etc. to a one of them buying a pub, and the perpetual bachelor (with the ugly women) finding himself a nice woman, getting married, having a child, and running a record-store with his dad. They escape the narrative "nightmare" that Marvel and DC deals with by not sharing their universe with anyone (the occasional friendly jabs between the different comic artists, where they've made fun of each others characters in various ways, excluded). Pondus and Nemi sell more than most Marvel and DC series do in the US on a monthly basis in Norway alone, with their artists in full control and making enough to tell the publishers where to stuff it if they get too much interference. These magazines, and slots as side-series in other comedic comics supports a relatively large number of other comic artists, though most of them can not live full time of their series (one of the more popular series, for example, is drawn by a high-school teacher). Compared to the US, we have a market that does amazingly well in sales, despite far fewer titles, but does not sustain as many artists. On the other hand, the stories are far more diverse, and one of the reason we sustain fewer artists is that the series are not "cookie-cutter" series managed project-managed by the publishers. To us, in many ways, when it comes to comics we are much closer to the Franco-Belgian comic culture than to the US. French and Belgian series like Tintin, Lucky Luke, Asterix, Spirou have always done exceptionally well in Scandinavia, regularly getting reprinted in huge numbers.

zipwitch 12y ago

While I certainly enjoy my comics, "most intricate fictional narrative in history"? I think not.

mathattack 12y ago
What's more intricate? Perhaps Lord of the Rings? This narrative spans 50+ years of writing across many (hundreds of?) titles. It combines comic books, regular books, TV and movies.
- thaumasiotes 12y ago
  But 50 years is nothing at all. Consider Egyptian mythology, which evolved to reflect changing political realities across hundreds and hundreds of years. Consider the relatively minor knight of King Arthur, Sir Kay. Why did Arthur have a knight by that name? Because originally Cai was a great Welsh hero. That kind of thing is absolutely the norm for any mythology -- Marvel is a fairly piddling effort by comparison. Or if you want to go by number of official published works... consider any modern fanfiction website.
  - tlarkworthy 12y ago
    Or the more accessible Greek mythology.
    - thaumasiotes 12y ago
      Very true; I picked Egyptian mythology for its very long record and well-understood "character developments" over the period. But that's an artifact of features of Egypt that make its history comparatively easy to read; any traditional mythology or modern focus of fanfiction will dwarf the output of Marvel, for the simple reason that a publishing company is not able to devote the same level of effort to storymaking as the group "anyone interested" is.

nicwolff 12y ago

> But who rescues someone from Heaven? Willow Rosenberg?