Editorial: Cassandra Complex - Canons & Carnivores

Continuity is an obsession for many comics readers, but is it important? Antony Johnston considers the purpose of continuity and the reactions against it.
03 October 2003

IF YOU DON'T KILL ME, I'M GONNA HAVE TO KILL YOU

Let's talk about continuity.

There are two kinds of continuity in fiction. Stand-alone stories need only concern themselves with one, whereas serial stories must acknowledge both.

The first, the only one stand-alone stories need worry about, is what's often called "internal continuity". It's the maintenance of an internally consistent narrative, which is necessary (most of the time) to maintain an audience's willing suspension of disbelief, a phrase common when discussing fiction.

We demand a certain amount of common sense from our stories, from the most naturalistic drama to the most far-fetched flight of fantasy. If a monstrous hell-beast suddenly appeared in a Hercule Poirot mystery novel we would expect there to be a rational, non-supernatural explanation for it, because the world we've been drawn into doesn't allow things outside the mundane, rational world of science and materialism. Conversely, we accept that such beasts are a part of Frodo Baggins' world, but if Gandalf were to pull out a mobile phone or arrive by helicopter, we would be 'thrown out of the story' - the illusion that we are witnessing events that happened, rather than reading a story, is shattered beyond repair.

Not all stories demand such consistency to be entertaining, but ignoring such conventions is generally reserved for comedies, or works of intellectualism designed to make us consciously draw comparisons between our world and the world of the story. Rudy Rucker's excellent novel WHITE LIGHT, for example, makes no "sense" whatsoever in the sense of story that we expect; because Rucker is a mathematician, and WHITE LIGHT is at its heart a giant thought-experiment in problems of mathematics and logic. Grant Morrison's THE FILTH is about as surreal as stories come without breaking down into pure allegory, but still has a valid (albeit convoluted and obfuscated) internal logic to its fantasy world. Jonathan Swift's GULLIVER'S TRAVELS falls somewhere between the two, being a surreal and obvious satire on the society in which Swift lived, while maintaining a slender grip on its own story consistency.

Plenty of stories, especially better ones, ask us to unconsciously draw comparisons between our world and the story, but by allegory and subtle hinting, not blatant incredulity.

Stand-alone stories need only maintain this type of continuity. Once the story is finished, that's it - everything is in there, and both author and audience have no further use for it.

(And yes, THE FILTH was serialised in comic form. But the story is closed, standing alone and apart from other works of Morrison's except perhaps in theme and style.)

The second type of continuity is often called 'canon', referring to the word's meaning as a law, or a doctrine that must be followed. This is actually only one of its facets, but I'll use that word here to refer to it as a whole. Canon is the maintenance of internal continuity beyond a single story into the realms of serial fiction, and it's necessary to reassure an audience that what has already occurred in previous episodes is still 'true' with regard to the episode they're about to witness.

Canon is, of course, the type of continuity most often referred to when discussing comics, and is ironically derided, lauded, ignored and cherished in equal measure according to who's discussing them.

At the risk of stating the obvious, the most common type of serial story in comics is the superhero saga. If Batman seeks revenge for the senseless death of his parents, the audience doesn't expect to be told somewhere down the line that he is in fact an orphan, and that they should just ignore what they were previously told (an extreme example, but it serves).

These sagas are also often called superhero "soap operas", which I find interesting.

Comparing a serialised comic to a television soap opera in this way is almost always done in the pejorative sense, especially by people who have a dislike of such TV soaps. One presumes that these people regard soaps as inferior fare, written by committee and churned out day after day with little thought beyond keeping the show on air in order to make money. We can assume this because almost identical accusations are made at superhero soap opera comics, especially by people making the comparison in the first place.

Here's what I find interesting about this. While it's true that television is the most common medium besides comics to adopt canon, it's hardly reserved especially for soap operas. BUFFY, THE WEST WING, THE X-FILES, THE SHIELD, THE LARRY SANDERS SHOW, STAR TREK, BOOMTOWN, DAWSON'S CREEK, ALIAS... This list is long, as they say, and is by no means restricted to "geek" television as some might think. (Even 24, originally a stand-alone story presented in serial form, has now gone beyond and ventured into canon territory simply by virtue of producing a second and third series.)

Canon has been increasingly adopted in film series, too. The average James Bond movie gives no more than a curt nod to the notion, and as sequels pile up - especially in horror movies - there's often a large amount of 'retconning' (retroactive rewriting of continuity) that goes on - not entirely unlike comics. But in, for example, ALIENS, we know that Captain Dallas from ALIEN is dead; and if he were to turn up in the hospital alongside Ripley, the audience would feel cheated, because ALIEN was not the kind of film where one expects the sort of convoluted 'back from the dead' occurrences we see in... well, most often in soap operas.

(It was last week's return of Dirty Den, a character ostensibly killed off fourteen years ago in the UK soap EASTENDERS, that got me thinking about this subject. In the now-time-honoured tradition of soap canon, Den's dead body was never seen on-screen, and since 'no body' generally equates with 'not dead' in soap operas, his return has been anticipated ever since his departure.)

Novels are no less subject to canon. From Sherlock Holmes to Inspector Morse, from Dragonlance to the The Vampire Lestat, there are enough series of novels to fill a very large library that embrace canon as another tool in the storytelling box.

Sadly, canon in comics has become inextricably associated with the inflexible fanboy mentality, where the slightest lapse in canon, even unintentional, opens the gates to a barrage of complaints; an adherence to the canon so extreme that its proponents have lost the ability to shrug and say, "It's a mistake, sure, but the story was still entertaining, and that's what matters most".

It's true that few authors can resist the temptation to muck about with what came before, some to the point of essentially destroying any validity the previous work has to their 'take' on a serial story. And some great works have come out of such blatant disregard, but most of these have been revamps along the lines of SWAMP THING, BLACK ORCHID or DOOM PATROL; books that bore so little resemblance to what came before that arguments about ignoring canon seem almost churlish.

Nevertheless, perhaps it's time that those who deride canon at all costs take a look at their own reading and viewing habits, and realise that 'those damn fanboys' are only a step away from a faithful watcher of THE WEST WING, or reader of Conan Doyle.

THIS BLEAK WORLD OF ABSENT LAWS

Typical: I wait four years for a new album from Type O Negative, then go on holiday the week it comes out and completely miss news of the release until nearly two months after it goes on sale. Bah.

LIFE IS KILLING ME is more immediate than 1999's WORLD COMING DOWN, and heralds a slight return to the very dark schoolboy humour that was almost entirely absent from WCD - like debut album SLOW DEEP AND HARD, it seeks to offend as many people as humanly possible on its seventy-five minute journey from thunderous, tongue-in-cheek start to melancholic, prog-tinged finish.

But don't be fooled by the levity; there's a wealth of depth to this album. Like all TON releases it just keeps sounding better the more I play it. And right now, I'm playing it a lot.

Typically for TON, the album also features an unexpected cover - this time in the form of ANGRY INCH (from the musical HEDWIG AND THE ANGRY INCH) which has the rather bizarre distinction of being the first thing I've come across that actually makes me want to see the show.

Antony Johnston is the author of JULIUS, SPOOKED and THE LONG HAUL. His new ongoing series WASTELAND begins in July 2006.

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