snap judgments

So, holidays are over and the hours at work have increased which means I’m reading more books and that means… MORE POSTS!

Like the fact that, against my better (snap) judgment, I read Joe Fridays this week. I know I shouldn’t, the man just gets me blood pressure up, but I like the Christmas tune from last year and wanted to find out if there was a new one this year.

Ha ha, it was late, despite being recorded last year.

Anyhow, reading on, there are a million and one things again that just yank my crank about the defensiveness and the wait-n-see approach to answering questions about upcoming content, but that’s par for the course on Joe Fridays.  What really gets me in new and interesting ways is the attitude about Editor’s Notes.

No joke, right next to each other are the following Reader Questions and Staff Answers: First, a sensible question from ‘ireact’ about the continuity trouble in Civil War and associated crossovers, Sue leaving and then REALLY leaving from Civil War #4 to Fantastic Four #540, Amazing Spider-Man’s squeaky clean Area 42 vs. Civil War: Frontline’s dirty hellhole Area 42, Punisher opening fire on two recruited villains in a meeting in Punisher: War Journal #2 and two villains as surprise help in Civil War #6 who then get shot by Frank. I mean, these are good questions and Joe Q. side-steps over to Tom Brevoort (WIZARD MAGAZINE’S EDITOR OF THE FREAKIN’ YEAR).

Tom Brevoort: In most of these cases, these aren’t continuity mistakes, but a necessary duplication of certain story points in different books so that each one can be read individually. And it’s no different than working out how Captain America can be facing certain death in his own book, but hanging around with the Avengers in New Avengers seemingly at the same time - one story, one scene, one event happens before the other.

On the first part, fine. Duplication of scenes from different angels certainly do tie a story together… if they are reasonably recognizable as connected. If not, then it should be an editor’s job to create a time line of events in such a large scope for the writers to use as a guideline. Right? Or at least make sure that the writer to first put it to print is used as a guideline for writers to come.

We’ve covered the Sue sequence of events a few times already, but just to reiterate it: in Civil War #4, Sue is present for the battle in which Goliath gets killed. Then, in FF, she and Reed have a blow-out argument after she helps Wildstreak to escape and she storms off - and Ben says, “she’s laving, huh?” Then, towards the end of Civil War #4, we read her final note to Reed and see her and Johnny leave the Baxter Building while Ben watches.

We have? Where have we covered the Sue sequence? I’m an honest comic purchasing fan and I have apparently missed the explanation. Funny, because I read the books, you think all the information would be contained therein. Does this mean there is no such thing as a casual comic reader? Should all issues have a link to the Internet so the content is properly explained? Oh, wait. Writers are supposed to do that.

I could make fun of the ‘laving’ thing, but that’s just too low a blow for WIZARD MAGAZINE’S EDITOR OF THE YEAR. I will give him props for a reasonable explanation (but not of the Thing’s departure which took a few issues to actually happen), but it still makes me wonder how an editor could keep an explanation like this when writing gets choppy within the book itself instead of on the internet.

The Punisher War Journal scene aligns pretty precisely with the scene in Civil War #6, with the additional sequences taking place in-between panels in Civil War #6. We’ve got a limited amount of space in the core book, but if you look at that scene, while the Punisher is walking with Spider-Man on the previous page, he’s not in the scene when Diamondback brings the villains in.

Uhm. No. Now, I will fix my scanner, but with the issues right here, trust me on this one. In Civil War #6, the ‘reformed’ villains are walking into the room as sort of a surprise introduction. In Punisher: War Journal, they are sitting at a table with Cap when the Punisher walks in. In Civil War #6, there’s the whole rebellion there. In Punisher: War Journal, it looks like a private meeting. Again, this looks like something an editor would see (perhaps an over arcing editor of a gigantic company wide crossover reading all these books and checking the art) and make a note of before it saw print. Maybe it was forgone to make sure the book got out on time? Maybe because it was so late they skipped the check over and trusted the artists on credit? Maybe I’m just making up excuses?

The dirt floors in Front Line had more to do with the fact that Steve hadn’t drawn the prison yet in the main book, and so to some extent Ramon Bachs had to determine his own interpretation. As it turned out, the place was actually designed by Ron Garney in Amazing, because he needed it before Steve was going to be able to get to that issue, and so we then provided Steve with the appropriate reference.

So, Civil War artist hadn’t drawn the prison yet…. BUT IT WAS ALREADY DRAWN BEFORE THAT? There was a reference available already from an issue of Amazing Spider-Man? So McNiven and Ramon Bachs could have worked from the same art? How is this an explanation? How did Ramon Bachs miss getting this important reference art?

The only item on your list that’s a genuine mistake

Oh really.

is the turn-around on Iron Man’s take on the prison being temporary or permanent between Amazing and Civil War, and that was simply a miscommunication between JMS and Mark.

Okay, so the two misspoke to one another. But… isn’t there a third party? Perhaps… oh, work with me, an EDITOR who would read both issues before they went to print and noticed ‘gosh, these two ideas don’t match up!’? Maybe at one of these infamous summits shouldn’t there be an answer to something like this? Or is the prison such a weak idea that not too much thought was put into it as a story device? Why do I have so many questions when these are supposed to be the answers?  I feel like such a jerk but I can’t be the only one wondering things like this, can I?

And even within that, from a story point of view I can rationalize Iron Man telling Spidey that the prison is a permanent measure in order to try to scare him back away from doing what he’s thinking of doing.

Not only a futurist, Iron Man is a mind-reader. But I’ll give Tom Brevoort the No-Prize on this one.

So, what we see here are a bunch of … I don’t want to say nit-picky as they involve major point of plot charging through the Marvel Universe, but notes on story and continuity that need to be addressed. And to be accessible to new readers, the basic information of how these books interweave if it’s not addressed within the story needs to be accessible somewhere in the book itself, not on the internet. You have to admit, it sounds really elitist to have all the answers to fairly common questions like this on specialty sites. In fact, when moments of opposition meet, there could be a little note, like a footnote to let you know how an enormously late book fits into a book that’s semi on-time or a little off in the grand scheme of things. Such as a note to tell you that the current X-Books are WAY ahead of Astonishing X-Men, that Iron Man just caught up to Civil War, anything that can’t be covered in the ‘Previously’ in the front of the book. Heck, Annihilation’s got this nifty timeline thing rocking it’s front pages…

Lo and behold, one of the questions after ireact’s is exactly that! What about those Editor’s Notes, Joe? What do you say? Take pity on your poor readers who’ve stuck by you on all these delays and help us put together your grand puzzle design!

JQ: The footnote boxes were very important to our business when our business was primarily on the newsstand and stories were much more of a continuous soap opera and not constructed in story arcs.

So, what he’s saying is that there are no ongoing stories in Marvel, but ‘constructed’ story arcs with clear beginning, middle and ends so that footnotes wouldn’t be needed. The reader would be following the storyline and all the information they would need to understand it would be in that constructed arc an would be designed to be insular.

Because Civil War is very insular and self-contained.

But, while they may have been informative back in the day, I find them annoying during the course of a story today. They became a sort of tradition in Marvel comics, but to me they take you out of the story.

Please note! Joe Quesada says that he finds them annoying. Not redundant, not useless, not unnecessary. Annoying.

Imagine if you will, you’re watching your favorite weekly TV show and as your enthralled in the middle of a scene suddenly they pause the action and a voice over announcer’s comes on saying, “for more info on the background behind this scene, make sure to pick up the Season 3 DVD set, disc 4, chapter 11.”

I would be first, infuriated, and secondly infuriated again because it takes me out of the scene. Now, imagine that happening in the middle of your favorite movie.

A small yellow box in the corner of a comic book panel versus a pause in live action and a voice over. Now, I’ll give him that sometimes the references got kind of crazy and could take up more than a few picas of space in that panel, but I’m not really sure how this comparison matches up.  Not to mention how infuriated I get when I see a continuity error in a story that’s supposed to orchestrate all the issues to come after it.  Double infuriated, even.

So, while we haven’t banned them altogether, we encourage our editors and writers that, when possible, if you need a footnote, add the asterisk and then place the footnote in the letter’s page.

Really? Again, that’s something nice to note at the front of the book so when people start to read, they know to look back to the letters page to get filled in. Oh wait, that’s kind of stopping the action, isn’t it? I’m going to see if I can’t find an example of this in any of my books.

Also, all of our books come with a handy dandy recap page that should give you all the info you need.And the final thing to consider is that the footnotes would be redundant and kind of annoying in the trade paperback of the story.

Oh, well, yeah. How could I possibly not have considered the almighty trade? And while I am a HUGE fan of the recaps, sometimes they just don’t cover what book was supposed to come out before what other book in a mega crossover event like this.

Makes me wonder if Editor’s Notes killed Joe’s family as a child.