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One More Brand New Day - Revisited
Definitely check out the full article (click on the underlined link) below, if you have the time, but if not, here's a highlight taken for my own purposes.
Stolen from the (vastly) longer article "The past is prelude, the plot is progress" byTom Bondurant:
"I’m not going to get too much farther into the briar patch of altered continuity. My question today is, when should an explanatory story arc be published? In other words, when do you need to explain? The answer for the Big Two seems to be that, in order to preserve the macro-narrative (and especially the sense that things are happening as we speak), these events must all proceed in regular sequence. “One More Day” is the prerequisite for “Brand New Day,” and Final Crisis requires Countdown. The story matters less than the fact that there is a story, even if that story is just a setup for the real story. "
This makes a pretty ingenious (that's genius, not genuous) point. The mere presence of a story, or even of an element or series of elements within a story, isn't a justification for all that comes after said story or elements. There's a difference between understanding the need for a generalized thing and the proper implementation thereof. Editors are usually good at understanding a serialized publication's broad requirements, whereas writers are hired to be the authorities on a series' blow-by-blow story beats. Unfortunately, editors tend to dictate more than they should, and writers tend to believe that fulfilling an editor's generalized requirement is the same as absorbing it into their actual writing. The presence of a father's decaying corpse, or even a father's preternaturally preserved corpse, is not the same as having a dear loved family member as living and part of your life. Same goes for story elements and stories, or, in Bondurant's claim, stories and stories.
Though where Bondurant expresses a desire for publishers to just jump over a hurdle to any desired story without "explanatory" sales-machines to get us there, I'd venture to point out that that's precisely where "The Clone Saga" and "Sword of Atlantis" came from. "Sword" managed some wonderful stories, but the niggling concept that Arthur and the events of the past eventually needed to be address was always present, and ruined the concept as a long-running thing. Additionally, I'd point out that the rest of "One Year Later" (Bondurant's choice example to show how skipping over the "event" allows for natural story flow) was by-and-large an abysmal affair, giving standard-fare stories without, again, addressing what eventually would need to be addressed. It creates an unspoken tension/conflict between reader and a creative property. The reader won't relax until he or she knows. The editors won't relax until the readers relax. When the big reveal eventually comes, it's forever too little too late, and its arbitrariness is palpable as no one had an answer to the continuity questions in the first place, and only later scrambled to make things work best as they can a la "Clone War" and Tad Williams' post-"Sword" Aquaman.
Why not just tell a linear story? No event, and if there's a big thing to occur, let it occur, not to get somewhere, but because it's a good, linear story that maintains the series' integrity. Any argument that such a thing can't be done is (as I argued in my last post) self-fulfilling, and not really supportable. Show me a comic with linear integrity (however it's executed) and character integrity to boot, and I'll show you the masterpieces of modern comicdom.
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