Q&A 4: Complicated continuity

Jen Decay writes:

"On your own terms and without concerns for the audience talking in your face, how significant to you personally is the continuity of your sprawling canon, and how do you keep track of it all?"

I work very hard on my stories, and when my answers to questions about continuity are flippant or dismissive it's because writing (or saying) "I'm doing my best; when I'm tired, I make mistakes" isn't very funny. If I know the answer, I always give it. 

The basic continuity is simple, I just keep it in my head, or look back at the old comics. There's no realistic way to keep track of an offhand joke from one comic that contradicts an offhand joke in another comic. The longer I go on, the more likely I am to repeat myself or make a mistake. 

I have readers who have read my work through, multiple times, and seem to know it backwards. I've read most of it, in consecutive order, once --  when I originally made it. 

Obviously I've had to review bits of it multiple times, when laying out books, or checking things for stories, but there are thousands of pages and I'm not always 100% sure when certain small events occurred in relation to one another. My solution to this is not to draw too heavily on this continuity but to try to break new ground instead. 

One of my least favourite tropes in any serial entertainment is the sudden and unexpected return of a departed character from the past presented as a cliffhanger or moment of serious note. This is most of what comic readers think "continuity" is. I often see comments under my comics guessing that [PLOT EVENT] is something to do with [CHARACTER UNSEEN FOR YEARS]. For all their close attention to the material, they have ignored the fact that I don't like this construction. 

The reason characters are always bloody coming back in Marvel comics is because the writers don't want to invent new IP for zero ownership. It's prudent to bring back a long-in-the-tooth villain or B-character rather than giving away your ideas, which might be better rewarded in creator-owned work.

And that's why I don't really want to write for Marvel or DC.

By branching off series over the years, I have learned the value of encapsulating those new projects. That's why they all had different names, while being, in a sense, continuations. The new name drew a hard line under them, obviating (to my mind anyway!) the requirement to go back and read previous iterations. You could, and there would be easter eggs if you did, but you shouldn't ever have to. 

Giant Days relies in many places on world building I've done elsewhere, but when Shelley turns up years in, she's Esther's daffy older mate and that's literally all you need to know. It's explained in one panel.

Asking "what order should I read these series in" is slightly pointless because several of them take place simultaneously. 

There are, obviously, awkward questions. For example: "when does Destroy History take place?" I've barely made 60 pages of it. It starts after the last page of Scary Go Round in 2009. Shelley has already left the Ministry of History in Murder She Writes, from 2012. She makes the decision to leave her job in an issue of Giant Days from 2019. 

But I still occasionally make new Destroy History comics. I have loads of ideas for them that I haven't had time to make. Obviously, this is not a series of decisions I can discuss without sounding like I'm deranged. But it's not complicated to me. Any new Destroy History comic is simply a flashback story from Shelley Winters' crazy time at the Ministry.

I'm not conflicted about my continuity, I'm proud of how I've maintain it and I'm pathetically wounded when people find gaping holes in it. The realities of book publishing and the odd excursion into what is arguably "fan-service" have bent it out of shape at times, but I still know exactly where each piece of the taxonomy fits in. 

The continuity is like the foundation of the house. It keeps it up, but it's not particularly hospitable as a place to hang out. You're better off in the kitchen. 

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