Any way to improve "coherence" of the Marvel Universe?

[JKtheMac]

There is no reason to reboot. Most readers of comics are not bothered about these issues. They are fodder for moaning fans nothing more. Take the assertion above that people dislike Chanpions. That book has remained of great quality for a very long while now. It has a solid audience and shows no sign of cancellation. Who cares if there is a vocal group of fans that don’t like the characters. As long as people like myself, that think it is great, continue to read it it will survive.

All rebooting will do is simplify things for a limited period. This is why the ultimate line failed in the long run. Once the canon builds the same problems occur. If people want a unified universe as their main selling point it is entirely counterproductive to spawn a separate line. The way to enjoy comics is to not worry about these artificial concerns about coherence. It’s entirely an illusion and we all know it is.

[JudicatorPrime]

Compare that to Marvel...the overall storytelling world doesn't pan out. Take the Jonathan Hickman Avengers run I'm reading (and enjoying incidentally) now. This is full of ultra powerful characters...guys who can destroy planets (and some more powerful still), ruthless villains very happy to kill, etc. Oh...and a level of super hero technology that allows Tony Stark to build a Dyson sphere around sun in a couple of days, and capture a significant level of the suns' total energy, and use it for his own purposes.

And yet we're supposed to believe that Captain America...a normal peak human (i.e. can maybe lift 20 stone above his head, and run 30 miles a hour) and Hawkeye (wow the guy's got a bow and arrow, and can shoot straight) are major players in the pitched battles..they go into fight after after fight...and nothing happens to them, save a bit of blood is sometimes shown on face...and sometimes (shock, horror)...their costume is ripped.

Complete nonsense. And there are sorts of other ways world doesn't make overall sense. Given level of technology, why are there any cars anymore?? What weren't practically all humans bio-engineered to godhood 10 years ago (given the level of scientific feats routinely achieved in a matter of hours)?? Etc, etc.

I rail against this sort of thing all of the time. But people mostly ignore me as a curmudgeon at least, or a rabid despoiler of their beloved suspended disbelief at most. I can safely say that there will never be the kind of coherence that you and I both would like to see. There are just too many fans that want to see Batman defeat Superman 9 times out of 10.

[Alan2099]

DC actually did Ultimate thing with the Nu52, Which if in hindsight had they done as separate line would have been better choice for them given the end result

First they tried to do their Ultimate Thing with the "All Star" line.
All Star Superman was great.
All Star batman was a train wreck
and All Star Wonder Woman and Batgirl got pushed back and ultimate never ended up happening.

[JKtheMac]

I rail against this sort of thing all of the time. But people mostly ignore me as a curmudgeon at least, or a rabid despoiler of their beloved suspended disbelief at most. I can safely say that there will never be the kind of coherence that you and I both would like to see. There are just too many fans that want to see Batman defeat Superman 9 times out of 10.

But see! You understand that you won’t get this thing, so why hold out for it? It is like King Canute trying to command the waves. It’s not going to happen so why stand there and pretend it is? You might as well say you would prefer the sky to be yellow.

When has it ever happened? When have Marvel ever tried to maintain this idea? Even when Stan and Kirby were doing all the heavy lifting they never tried to do anything other than maintain a vague illusion to serve as a backdrop for their convoluted and often contradictory stories. It would be far too expensive to do anyway. The continuity guys would end up delaying everything all the time and most writers wouldn’t put up with it.

[vitruvian]

Take your Tolkien comparison. That is collection of stories designed to maintain the same tone and genre, with self-supporting aims.

What Tolkien manages brilliantly is to mix the plot-driven story of the war, with the personal character driven story of Frodo. That’s no mean feat within a single story. Especially in framing Frodo’s increasingly dark journey to reflect his inward journey.

Tolkien can only do this because the rest of the characters are separated from Frodo and Sam. We don’t fully notice that the two parallel stories are running with different storytelling modes and with different expectations.

That is Tolkien’s craft at work. He is using Mordor as both a psychological backdrop for Frodo’s inner struggle and a plot driven antagonist setting in the ongoing war. He even has the stories intersect to maintain the illusion that they are the same wider story. They are not really the same.

Nobody standing at the gates of Mordor waiting for the army to emerge is thinking “any minute now we are about to be attacked by the external reflection of Frodo’s inner struggles”. Pointing this out only serves to highlight his craft not to show how Tolkien cheated or did something wrong.

By all means, it doesn't take anything away from the craft or the story to realize how Tolkien is using the plot and events of the story - including the separation of the Fellowship into different groups going through thematically different types of story - in order to illustrate the themes, morality, psychology, etc. that are the real point of the exercise. And yes, you could argue that at a deeper level, there is more than one story going on here. I wouldn't say that they don't together make up a wider story, though... each is in fact vital to the other, with Arago rn et al's military and political struggles a vital distraction allowing Frodo and Sam to be successful in their more essential quest, but also laying important groundwork for the times to come should Frodo be successful. They're complementary, not contradictory.

However, my point in terms of the craft required to maintain a reader's 'secondary belief' was that, even examining LOTR purely on the surface level, in terms of the visible plot and specific events recounted, everything is kept remarkably consistent and logically connected throughout, both within LOTR and within Tolkien's wider corpus of Middle-Earth works. There are really no logically contradictory events or plot elements; even things that people sometimes point to as plot holes like not using the Eagles sooner are made more rather than less justified and understandable the more of the wider, connected legendarium one reads, as you come to understand the nature of Gwaihir and that it's not a matter of Gandalf just whistling him and his cohorts up. As a grand illusionist, Tolkien built his secondary reality with practically no chinks or gaps whatsoever, at least in terms of language or story logic - geography and the physics of watersheds might be a different matter, but that's of little moment given the created rather than evolved nature of the world he gives us, since the Valar can have made river basins run parallel to mountain ranges if they wanted to.

Now of course, this is too high a standard to set for a gradually accumulated, even larger corpus of connected material contributed to by so many varied writers, artists, and yes, editors such as the MU. Tolkien had the advantage of being one author with the ability to consult all his own notes and intimately familiar with all the material he wanted to incorporate, while a shared universe by its very nature is going to involve many more interpretations which may inherently clash. For the MU, there are many more opportunities for there to be gaps between different parts of the set for the illusion, if you will... but it nevertheless remains true that the illusion works better the more seamless its execution.

[JudicatorPrime]

But see! You understand that you won’t get this thing, so why hold out for it? It is like King Canute trying to command the waves. It’s not going to happen so why stand there and pretend it is? You might as well say you would prefer the sky to be yellow.

When has it ever happened? When have Marvel ever tried to maintain this idea? Even when Stan and Kirby were doing all the heavy lifting they never tried to do anything other than maintain a vague illusion to serve as a backdrop for their convoluted and often contradictory stories. It would be far too expensive to do anyway. The continuity guys would end up delaying everything all the time and most writers wouldn’t put up with it.

What can I say, I'm human and humans often want that which is within the realm of possibility. And a few things that are not yet there, say, in the way that the first humans wanted a faster way to travel, but lacked a combustible engine or knowledge of it.

I'm reminded of an old issue of What If? where Thor has asked his friends in the Avengers to join him in his fight against Odin and Asgard. Sure, the Avengers could have walked into the battle as-is, but the writer decided that maybe, just maybe the team did require some type of augmentation before even attempting to battle godlike beings. It's not too difficult an ask that even comic books science should have some type of consistent rules. Spider Man should not be able to punch Firelord, a being whose natural coronal aura melts bullets, without having his hand instantly incinerated. When you think about it, it really is a simple ask.

[Sutekh]

Actually, I think overall setting in very, very early days of Marvel worked better than it does now, in terms of overall coherence. There were far fewer super powered characters, and top end feats by humans/ super humans were a fair bit more restrained than now. Yes...Mr Fantastic could always do incredible scientific feats...but he wasn't remotely into large scale manufacturing. So you could look at overall setting...very few super humans, less powerful than now...and sort of more easily accept that largely their world was roughly similar to ours in most respects. And easier to accept that Captain America...and the other low end supers..could be major players when far fewer top end powerhouses existed.

As a fan of the old 'Marvel Handbook' days, I really appreciated the more 'down to earth' power ratings going on back then. The biggest powerhouses like Thor could still only lift ~100 tons, where at that other company, Superman could literally *move planets.*

Some writers seem to feel that 'oh wow' moments have to be all spectacle, and the characters they write become kind of catch-phrases. Hulk is 'the strongest one there is' and called 'Worldbreaker' and suddenly he's bending adamantium and breaking worlds, *literally,* which seems kind of silly, and not as impressive as the writer was perhaps hoping. Wolverine has suffered from this as well, with both his claws and his regeneration amping up to absurdly hyperbolic levels, compared to the dude from the eighties who took hours to fully recover from a shotgun blast, or being poisoned, for instance.

And then there are some characters, like the Sentry, who is a literal hyperbole. 'The power of a million exploding suns?' And you got that from drinking something from a crack team of government scientists who *failed to recreate the serum that made Captain America not-quite-superhuman?* Whatever. The Human Torch can go all out and do a 'Nova blast' that's, despite it's name, not even close to the power of *one* exploding sun (which would destroy all life in the solar system, so, really, not a useful superhero-power to have...), and he's ten times the superhero that hyperbole-man is.

The Authority was the worst at this. Every character turned into a catchphrase. 'Night's Bringer of War.' Yeah, he's some dude who can run combat simulations in his mind. Big freaking hat, very little cat. 'The God of Cities?' He has treads on his feet, because someone watched a terrible Nike commercial, and he can talk to cities and do some urban setting manipulation stuff. A very original and potentially interesting power set compared to 'strong and tough and can fly' or 'mutant telepath,' and yet it was pretty much wasted on this character.

It's kind of boring, all these hyperbole / catchphrase characters who don't really have clearly defined powers, but just sort of arbitrarily are the 'god' of whatever it is they are doing.

Monica Rambeau, a personal favorite, has also suffered from this. She had an amazing powerset, to turn into all sorts of EM energy and fly at lightspeed. Now she just kind of does whatever the hell the writer wants her to do, as long as he says 'something, something control energy!' before she does it, like shapechanging or creating antimatter or whatever.

[davew128]

It's not too difficult an ask that even comic books science should have some type of consistent rules. Spider Man should not be able to punch Firelord, a being whose natural coronal aura melts bullets, without having his hand instantly incinerated. When you think about it, it really is a simple ask.

Except if his natural aura would melt bullets, everything he touched on Earth, including the ground he walked on when he wasn't flying, would melt, burn, etc. The problem I had with that fight was Spidey having enough punching force to knock him out, not his being able to punch him unscathed.

[JackDaw]

What can I say, I'm human and humans often want that which is within the realm of possibility. And a few things that are not yet there, say, in the way that the first humans wanted a faster way to travel, but lacked a combustible engine or knowledge of it.

I'm reminded of an old issue of What If? where Thor has asked his friends in the Avengers to join him in his fight against Odin and Asgard. Sure, the Avengers could have walked into the battle as-is, but the writer decided that maybe, just maybe the team did require some type of augmentation before even attempting to battle godlike beings. It's not too difficult an ask that even comic books science should have some type of consistent rules. Spider Man should not be able to punch Firelord, a being whose natural coronal aura melts bullets, without having his hand instantly incinerated. When you think about it, it really is a simple ask.

I've sort of accepted that Marvel 616 and main DCU is a completely lost cause for overall coherence...it doesn't bother most of the regular high volume readers

But it does nark me just a bit...and I'm sure would vex me more if I read more Marvel/ DC comics. (Basically I stick to reading long self contained runs by favourite authors...so as long as power sets are treated consistently by the author I read in the specific run I'm reading...it doesn't bother me if some other writer is writing contradictory material elsewhere.)

[vitruvian]

As a fan of the old 'Marvel Handbook' days, I really appreciated the more 'down to earth' power ratings going on back then. The biggest powerhouses like Thor could still only lift ~100 tons, where at that other company, Superman could literally *move planets.*

Much as I cede first place to no one in my love of the good old Gruenwald 1st and 2nd editions of OHOTMU... I do have to mention that much as they did a generally good job of codifying things to date, and the 'blueprints' and so on were awesome to my teenage geek mind, the official strength rankings were never really consistent with the characters' actual appearances and feats, and there were plenty of Marvel stories at the time in which even characters not given the open-ended 'Class 100' rating (that open endedness in itself a retcon with the second edition) lifted and threw objects that weighed far, far in excess of 100 tons unless they were made of styrofoam. E.g., Sasquatch's entries was obviously erroneous, given Sasquatch being listed at 70 tons but lifting and chucking football field distances a 200 ton plus DC-10 in his first ever appearance, and there were many more examples of this kind of inconsistency.

Which only made things that much more fun to nitpick! The thing a lot of people don't get about getting into the details of comic book stories is that for a lot of people who grew up on them, arguing about those details doesn't take anything away from one's enjoyment of the story; on the contrary, getting into the nitty gritty is sometimes half the fun!

[JudicatorPrime]

Except if his natural aura would melt bullets, everything he touched on Earth, including the ground he walked on when he wasn't flying, would melt, burn, etc. The problem I had with that fight was Spidey having enough punching force to knock him out, not his being able to punch him unscathed.

In truth, there are a thousand different ways that Firelord as the equivalent of a miniature sun with the ability to reproduce all of its properties, including heat, intense gravity, gamma bursts, cosmic rays and radiation, should have killed Spider-Man, especially when FL is in a berserker rage. Spider-Man isn't web-swinging away from or dodging a massive, wide-spectrum, close proximity solar flare with the force and fury of a nuclear detonation. Now, THAT would have been the time to first introduce Captain Universe Spidey. But ... comics.

[JudicatorPrime]

I've sort of accepted that Marvel 616 and main DCU is a completely lost cause for overall coherence...it doesn't bother most of the regular high volume readers

But it does nark me just a bit...and I'm sure would vex me more if I read more Marvel/ DC comics. (Basically I stick to reading long self contained runs by favourite authors...so as long as power sets are treated consistently by the author I read in the specific run I'm reading...it doesn't bother me if some other writer is writing contradictory material elsewhere.)

As long as I brace myself for the ridiculous eff-ery to ensue, I can usually tolerate a story or two where normal human heroes emerge from cosmic battles relatively unscathed. Whenever that gets to be too much, I just re-read the old Avengers 177 where Korvac empowered by only a fraction of Galactus' might wrecks a full roster of Avengers, plus just about every honorary and reserve member, and the Guardians of the Galaxy. The devastation and rigid adherence to appropriate power scales and logical outcome almost brings me to tears of the purest joy.

[davew128]

In truth, there are a thousand different ways that Firelord as the equivalent of a miniature sun with the ability to reproduce all of its properties, including heat, intense gravity, gamma bursts, cosmic rays and radiation, should have killed Spider-Man, especially when FL is in a berserker rage. Spider-Man isn't web-swinging away from or dodging a massive, wide-spectrum, close proximity solar flare with the force and fury of a nuclear detonation. Now, THAT would have been the time to first introduce Captain Universe Spidey. But ... comics.

Yes he could have done all that but didn't. Why? As much as a hothead and in a rage as he was, FL is not a murderer and he would have been killing many innocent humans in the process.

[davew128]

As long as I brace myself for the ridiculous eff-ery to ensue, I can usually tolerate a story or two where normal human heroes emerge from cosmic battles relatively unscathed. Whenever that gets to be too much, I just re-read the old Avengers 177 where Korvac empowered by only a fraction of Galactus' might wrecks a full roster of Avengers, plus just about every honorary and reserve member, and the Guardians of the Galaxy. The devastation and rigid adherence to appropriate power scales and logical outcome almost brings me to tears of the purest joy.

And even THEN you have the absurdity of a cosmic powerhouse doing that and NOT completely wrecking half of Queens in the process. Heck, but for the artwork showing the damage inside the condo you wouldn't even have know 20+ heroes just died by looking from the outside. I think that issue did a good job though of showing who lasted longest and why. Wonderman showed resiliency as did Hercules, Cap's shield giving him protection, and then the scene towards the end with Thor, Vision, Iron Man, and Starhawk blasting away as the most powerful present.

[JudicatorPrime]

Yes he could have done all that but didn't. Why? As much as a hothead and in a rage as he was, FL is not a murderer and he would have been killing many innocent humans in the process.

He could have employed other methods and not risked a single bystander. Bottom line: the story was written for Spidey to win -- yet not win convincingly.

Edit: By the way, let's not give FL too much credit with respect to his ethics. He was a Herald of Galactus, and a top level military officer, so killing innocents and collateral damage are well within his purview.