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01/01/2004: looking back on my (fannish) 2003: a newbie's journey into Batverse comic fandom
I was feeling grumpy and depressed, because I'm home alone with my cold (yeah, still *grumble*), and wasn't feeling up to going out, but then I decided that lying in bed, zapping through 24 hours news channels who intercut terror alert news (*) with New Year's celebration pictures wasn't the way to go for New Year's Eve, and I should really start New Year on a more positive note.
So I thought about what I could do to improve my mood, and I decided to take a look back on one of the most fun things for me in 2003, which was getting into Batverse fandom. It's my newest main fandom, and I'm still feeling the squee a lot.
I'm still feeling very much as a newbie too, but I've learned a lot about the universe, the characters, and DCU continuity, though I was (and still am) puzzled and confused a lot. So I present you A Newbie's Journey into Batverse Comic Fandom, and hope it conveys a bit of the fun I had this year with discovering this cool fandom.
At First: Still in Denial
While I have been a longterm comic fan, that was mostly European comics, and I started out 2003 not yet a Batman fan. I had read a couple of Batman comics in years past, mostly one-shots by artists I really like, but for reading those no knowledge of continuity or characters is necessary. Of course I had been slowly loosing my snobbish attitude towards superhero comics for some time now, had started to read Amazing Spider-Man (because of the movie and JMS writing the series), had watched the short-lived BoP tv series in 2002, had read stuff in
Undoubtedly my general love for the AU concept (whether in canon AUs or in fanfic) helped me to ease into Batman comics, without having to jump right into a confusing continuity. Thus my second Batman blog entry, still in January, was a review of a Batman Elseworld as well, this time Batman: Golden Streets of Gotham, and unlike Gotham Noir, I liked it quite a lot.
It Was the Fanfic's Fault: No Clue about the Character -- Still Producing Fanart
I also had read Cereta's story Secrets, which she had posted in December 2002, which would turn out to play a fateful role. At that point I had never read a Nightwing comic, and had only a vague idea about the whole stuff with the existence of several Robins and all that background. Weird as it seems to me now *g* it's actually quite possible to go through life, and even read the odd Batman comic without being aware that there is more than one Robin. Anyway, it's not that common for me to have ideas for pictures, but reading Secrets was quite evocative for me, despite being essentially clueless.
I've never good with photorealism or exact portrait likeness, so Sentinel fandom gave me little opportunity to share creative output, but here was a chance: I had a reasonable illustration idea, and I could do fanart for someone's story! The little problem of having no clue how Nightwing looked at that point in the continuity was easily overcome, by rambling at length in my blog about my problems, which led Sanj to supply me with a link to a Nightwing resource site. Even better, I got encouragement for my creative project from her and Cereta. (My reaction: I have an audience for a picture!! *squee*)
Thus I posted my first comic fan art in January, before I had even read a single Nightwing comic. But drawing him got me to browse the resource sites, and so I became more and more intrigued.
A Warm Welcome: Being Greeted with the Dance of Successful Pimpage by Longtime Fans
By the end of January I caved and asked for Nightwing comic recs in the Gotham Gazette community. Of course I got plenty. Notable fun moment: Watching Cereta do the Dance of Successful Pimpage, you see, newbies get a really great welcome.
Orwell, Plato, and the State of Confusion: Trying to Make Sense of Continuity
Now I had a list of comics to get, and as looking for and buying comics is just about the only major shopping high I get, that was fun. What was recced to me was Year Three, i.e. Batman #436-39, the Prodigal TPB, and the Nightwing TPBs. With that I entered the first major phase of getting to know the Batman universe: The State of Confusion. I went from reading Batman comics without being really aware of even the existence of all the subtleties and continuity, to realizing just how much it was that I didn't know. At that point I also began to truly realize that the continuity wouldn't be "neat and tidy" and just have one version of central events in the characters' lives.
Later I started to conceptualize this to myself in two main models of continuity: One is a kind of "Platonic model of comic story telling" or maybe a "multiple witness model", by that I mean that for the event in question there is really one "ideal" version of it, that is the same, and is intended to not have changed, yet, like with the objects/shadows in Platon's cave allegory, we actually have multiple accounts that don't match in minor and sometimes major details. For example that is the case for the current version of how Bruce's parents were killed, for which I have read multiple versions which are the same in the key elements, but differ in details of the story. The other is the "Orwellian 1984 model of continuity without a competent MiniTru", by that I mean of course the retcon (short for retroactive continuity), which when done smoothly should be working like when the MiniTru declared that the past has always been different. However, DC continuity demands a more active participation, because after a retcon events in the past are not always totally wiped out or explicitly rewritten (like a MiniTru would do for everything), but events are assumed to have changed so that they fit, and you are left to work out your own patchwork of how the past you have seen might fit with the explicitly retconned part.
I don't want to put too much emphasis on this, and it is actually fun for me to figure out a complex universe, continuity, and character history (the process is still ongoing), but I quickly learned that it is often helpful to have a couple of key web resources at hand. Now I mostly use The Unofficial Guide to the DC Universe to look up characters I haven't met before, but at the beginning I relied a lot on The Dark Knight site to orient myself in the larger Batverse. Even though it hasn't been updated recently, the site still has a helpful FAQ, a chronology, and an overview of important storylines. The Batman Continuity Pages also helped me to figure out which comics I might want to get.
More Robins Than You Can Shake a Stick at: First Steps to Get to Know the Main Characters
The first thing I decided to familiarize myself with was the thing with the multiple Robins, as that was central for Nightwing as well as Batman. So I learned that Dick Grayson, who was the first Robin, left after Batman terminated their partnership. (I actually haven't compared all recounts and flashbacks regarding this break up, but I think they don't exactly match, not to mention that this breakup of course has been retconned from the pre-Crisis version.) I first read the breakup version in Batman #408, which also begins the (modern continuity) story of how Batman meets the juvenile delinquent Jason Todd, who then becomes the second Robin not too long afterwards, and is also adopted by Bruce. I still need to get all of the Jason Todd issues inbetween, but I have to say that from the point of character motivations the whole sequence of events has its problems, i.e. why Batman would take Jason as Robin, when he terminated his partnership with Dick because of an injury Dick sustained, though I enjoyed the exploration of their conflict in Batman #416. Anyway, after that I read Death in the Family, which may be important in so much that Jason dies, but as a comic, especially in its writing and internal logic, it sucks. Badly. And not just because the Joker is an UN ambassador for Iran appointed by Chomeini (and somehow I just can't let that go). I like the story of how Tim Drake became the third Robin, A Lonely Place Of Dying, much better.
Together with Year One, which I had read previously, and the first Nightwing TPBs, I now had at least a working knowledge of the origins of Batman, Nightwing, and Robin, and I had already read A Killing Joke, where among other things, the Joker shoots Barbara Gordon, i.e. the first Batgirl, who's crippled and later becomes Oracle.
The Bat-Shaped Dent in My Finances: Starting to Catch Up With Continuity
I was thinking about continuity a lot, and outright confused the first time I tried to figure out what exactly the Crisis and its impact was. Then again, the only really important thing for me was that for now I was just interested in what happened after. Understanding Zero Hour that happens inside current continuity was a different matter. I settled for simply postponing any attempt to grok the time anomaly stuff.
I figured out, that actually the modern Batman continuity, and probably most of DCU continuity, has an equivalent to mytharc episodes in tv shows. Which may seem trivial, but I hadn't known it before. I think I had expected it to be like soaps, just ongoing storylines, but actually there are "events" that structure the ongoing stories, and impact most, if not all titles. Of course just like the DCU wide crossover stories they are in part a "ploy" to get fans of one series to try others, and the strategies as to their scope, i.e. the number of titles involved, and their length, i.e. the number of issues, varies.
I also realized that not all titles published are part of the continuity, that not just the Elseworld stories stand apart. For example the ongoing title Legends of the Dark Knight was part of the continuity for a while, then dropped out (I think after the No Man's Land storyline), and in the newest pre-order catalog DC has announced that it will rejoin the continuity titles one again, beginning next spring.
Once I had figured that out, I decided on my primary strategy to catch up, which was to keep up with current issues on a monthly basis, and skip back one major "mytharc" storyline at a time. I researched whether TPBs and single issues are equivalent in story content, found that they're not, and decided to get single issues, which for me are more fun to collect too.
After the Nightwing comics that weren't in the first TPBs I got the issues of Bruce Wayne Murderer? and Fugitive, the two most recent "event storylines" in the Batfamily titles. By now I have all of Cataclysm (an Earthquake devastates Gotham) and most of the over 80 No Man's Land issues (Gotham City is abandoned by the government as a "No Man's Land" in the quake's aftermath). Next up, i.e. my collection plans for 2004, Contagion and Legacy (a plague attacks Gotham, that city really has all the bad luck *g*), then the massive Knightfall (Bane breaks Batman's back)/KnightQuest (Azrael becomes Batman)/KnightsEnd (Batman recovers and fights Azrael) event.
And Much, Much More: The Squee Continues
I posted even more fanart, quite a lot of comic reviews, got into lured into becoming interested in even more DC characters and series, like the Teen Titans, Green Lantern and Green Arrow, Wonder Woman, and many more. Not to mention that I now watch the Justice League cartoon too.
All in all I had lots of fun reading, collecting, and trying to make sense of (mostly) Batman comics last. Also I need to get new shelves this year...
Now that I'm in a much better mood, I wish a cheerful: Happy New Year! to all of you.
(*) There was some kind of "intelligence" on a supposed car bomb threat against a military hospital here, which led them to close off the whole parts of the hospital's neighborhood, complete with armed security forces, armored vehicles, car searches and other fun stuff (still ongoing), and now local and federal authorities are squabbling whether that is an overreaction or not, i.e. the federal authorities argue that the reaction now lowered the chance to catch the two people they suspect of planning that attack, whereas the locals argue that they had to react as precaution,...and it doesn't help that they're from different parties either.
