The context of my post though is for those who see the Marvel Universe or the DC Universe as a single story or monomyth.

Second, basic story structure-a story has a beginning, middle and END when discussing story as a literary form. Something without an ending is not a story. It can be a narrative, but it is not a story. Ongoing neverending stories such as soap operas and shared universe comics are not stories per se, They are narratives, they have story-like elements, but they lack one of the basic components that stories have-an ending, and thus are not stories.

Third real life is not a story. Stories have structure that informs their design. That design seems to be universal as 1) neurological science has found evidence that story is hardwired into how our brain works, processes information and learns (see books like Wired for Story by Lisa Cron for a layman's summation of some of that research) and 2) that basic design crosses cultural and language borders and seems to have developed along similar lines in areas that has no cross-cultural pollination.

Aside from biological processes which occur independent of consciousness (i.e. autonomic functions including cell growth and aging)there is no structure informing life design that is universal. Cultural mores, standards, taboos, rites of passage, gender roles, age roles, vary from culture to culture, age to age and are not universal by any means. Story is planned, life is not.

Stories can be organic and grow in the telling and can have more than one voice (say the Iliad for example) but then there is no one true version of the story there are several versions of it and each telling is its own story (especially true of the Iliad as it was an oral tradition shaped by many hands before being recorded and attributed to the pen name Homer and that has been translated several times with each translation being its own telling because changing the language changes the story-and if you have never read it in the original ancient Greek you have never actually read the Iliad as recorded and attributed to Homer you have read the translator's interpretation and telling of that story).

So yes stories can be messy and have multiple hands shaping it, but then the result of that is several stories not one. And if there is no ending, it's not a story at all but a narrative exercise. And a shared universe is not a single story. It's several narrative exercises, some stories, some not, bashed together to try to create a monolithic entity that is in itself a pure fiction. Some things, live tv series or some prose shared universes work around a series bible that trumps any individual creator's vision. That is the singular vision that guides those and the writers then act as the hands to execute that series (the Thieves World series of short stories and novels functioned that way until the original editors were ousted and one contributor elevated her vision over the shared version destroying the cohesion of that shared universe. Babylon 5 worked that way with JMS crafting a series bible as the show runner that trumped anyone else's ideas as to what the shared sandbox could be. The television show Lost started with a creator's vision, that creator left the show and newcomers came in and replaced that vision with their own and the narrative became muddled, confused, untracked and ceased being a story being told because it no longer had the basic structure of a story. Films usually have a singular vision but multiple hands executing it. That vision is usually the director's or the producer's depending on how the balance of power sits. The screenwriter, the effects people, the costume designers the actor's etc. all serve the vision of the film's director (or producer). Work that doesn't fit that vision gets removed or redone (rewrites, reshoots, recasting, what have you to bring the final product in line with the singular vision.

There was no singular vision in the Marvel Universe. Some may point to Lee, but there are heated debates to this day what was Lee, what was Kirby, what was Ditko, what was Goodman, etc. And once Kirby and Ditko were both gone, it wasn't long before Lee was no longer hands on and multiple hands were reshaping things in different directions precluding any kind of singular vision directing it.

There was no singular vision in the DCU. It didn't even start out as one company let alone one vision and editorial fiefdoms that didn't interact or overlap were the standard there for much of its history, including the crucial formative years precluding any kind of unity of vision or design.

So if you are looking for a story-you need a clear beginning, middle and end, and usually some kind of clear singular vision directing it through those aspects of its design structure. Can it be messy? Sometimes. Is life messy, sure but irrelevant as life is not story. And if story gets too messy and loses either its basic structure or singular vision, it devolves form story into narrative exercise.

If you want to sell story to a mass audience, it has to be satisfying for them or they won't come back (note I said mass audience not a hardcore fanbase of a particular property). The biggest factor in audience satisfaction is the ending. If you can't stick the ending, no matter how good the rest of the story was, the audience leaves unsatisfied. They'll buy in on the promise of a good ending, a payoff for all the build up, but if that ending fails, or worse there never is one, you will lose that audience to dissatisfaction. Neverending shared universe never stick the landing because they never even land and eventually your audience drifts away dissatisfied, the only ones who remain behind are the hardcore fan(atics), not the mass audience. This is what has happened to mainstream ongoing shared universe assembly line super-hero comics.

-M

I don't understand. Aside from a few minor continuity tweaks like the war Tony Stark was injured in being changed, what has been rewritten?

I agree. And there are many ways to see the Marvel Universe as having a clear ending.
Fans of course will differ as to when that ending is, or whether it still in the future, or if it's a lengthy fade into the sunset. I have my own very definite theories of when the MU ended, you will not be surprised to hear.

I think unplanned stories are the best kind.

Agreed. It's the blind man and the elephant -er- story.
Perhaps where we differ is in thinking there can ever be one definitive story. I think that every story is, unavoidably, a point of view. Even if an author tries to remove all ambiguity, every reader will still come away with a different understanding, depending on their personal experience.


A very good choice of words. A bible is a book that every follower interprets differently.


I was never convinced by the auteur theory. No doubt it happens that way in some cases. But there are plenty of auteur works that turn out to be heavily reliant on others. George Lucas for example channelled Joseph Campbell, and had his channelled work tidied up by his wife and others. Or Orson Wells relying so heavily on Gregg Toland and Herman Mankiewicz that Pauline Kael could argue that perhaps Mankiewicz was the true auteur.

I think that the reality is that all works are composite works, and when we say "this is the vision of X" that is just our own interpretation. It helps to share interpretations, it makes communication easier. But it is still an interpretation, and one of many. In my view.

I see it as updating rather than rewriting. The stories still happened as before and in the same sequence, just at a different time.

This kind of thread is yet another demonstration of why this is such a great community.

The discussion about the rewriting /updating of the Marvel Universe made me think yet again of how handy the multiple earths concept is. It took a near-death of superhero comics as a genre to generate the idea, but Gardner Fox was able to essentially restart the age of superheroes on another earth.

Now, it obviously was not as simple as that because DC never stopped publishing stories about Superman and several other heroes. If they had, there would have been a clear dividing line between one earth and another, and it might have established a tradition of pushing the reset button for an entire line every X-number of years.

(Now we have resets on steroids, of course.)

Had comic universes been given, say, 10-year lifespans, the narrative might well have become story, with heroes retiring, dying, being replaced, whatever.

Then the creators could reinvent or simply update the characters as needed in yet another universe or dimension. Continuity would extend only as far as the beginning of a particular age’s “birth,” the disparity between comic book time and real world time would be less problematic, and events like deaths, romances and marriages would have more realistic effects. No need for ret-cons, etc.

As we know, the problem with comics is that they outlived their expected lifespan to begin with and then their readers, instead of moving on to other interests, stuck around for life.

I’m not suggesting that the succession of numbered earths answers all or even most of the problems, but Fox’s original idea made great sense.

I’m guessing, because I haven’t felt the urge to buy a new comic for a lo-o-o-o-o-ng time, that DC has been back and forth about its commitment to multiple earths ever since the Crisis and have even gone back to 52 of them. Has Marvel done something similar via the Ultimates line? I keep seeing references to Earths 616, 1610, 92131 ad infinitum.

Remember when keeping three or four Earths separate meant that the anti-Moniotr had to come whup yer behind and smush all existence onto one Earth? Yeah, that was much simpler….

Taking just Tony Stark as an example:

1) The war he was injured in was Vietnam first, then an unnamed "Southeast Asian' conflict, then 'the Middle East' (I think at one point they may have specifically said Desert Storm, but I'm not sure about that)

2) Jim Rhodes was his Helicopter Pilot/buddy/VP/stand in.  Now he's the government liason to Stark '---'  and a Miltiary guy

3) He was Secretary of Defense, killed an ambassador when his armor was possessed, then fired.  No one has mentioned that since, even when he took over SHIELD

4) He was a sleeper agent for Kang his entire life, killed, and a teenage version of himself put in the present day.   The Teenage version went to the Heroes Reborn Universe, and came back the a late 20s/early 30s adult again, because that's how Franklin Richards saw him.

5) He's faked his death 3 times.  The last one, in addition to faking his death, he literally erased his brain and re-boot it from an electronic back up, but he was lazy and didn't back it up that often, so he only remembers like 10 years of his life from others telling him about it.

6) He came back from Civil War broke, but no one knows why, except when it's a good plot device for him to have a company, which is Stark Enterprises again, even though it hasn't been Stark Enterprises for years.   Meanwhile, the former Stark Resilient (his last company).. now just 'Resilient' and run by Pepper Potts.. theorically is still operating in the MU.

7) Oh, don't forget for a year he was 'inverted' and moved to San Francisco, made a phone app to make everyone young and healthy, gave it away for free.. for a while, than made started making billions on it when he cranked up the price.   That will probably never be mentioned again. (Superior Iron Man)

8) Instead of the son of Howard and Maria Stark, he's from an orphanage in Eastern Europe, and his father is still alive. (International Iron Man).  That same series establishes that he was a college kid in 1990.   A) Tony Stark didn't go to college, he was already the CEO of a multi-million dollar company in college.  B) That makes it massively problematic that Howard Stark was involved with SHIELD in WWII, since he would have had to have been BORN around WWII to have a child that age.  C) that would make Tony over 40 in today's MU, which I don't think they meant to do.

Those are the major ones that annoy me.  There are LOTS of others that at least made some sense