Is the idea of "canon" outdated?

[616MarvelYear is LeapYear]

I wasn't reading a character I have come to know as Reed Richardss over the years when we see him working on 42 and tossing former comrades in arms in there just because it was the law. Exactly!
At some point a character's traits should be canon and I think there were a lot of fans that thought Millar, Bendis and others were shoe-horning heroes into a role that didn't follow the character's history.A character's trait matters and I do not appreciate Millar and BMB tossing their salad all over a character's history Thankfully BMB writes a lot of marvel comics so I'm saving 4 dollars per issue
It Reed's case, the earlier Simonson story should have been the indicator that he would be against Tony's plan. EXACTLY!, I have those issues and when I learned through reviews how the marvel character Reed Richards was portrayed I concluded that marvel comics does not respect what past creators established regarding character traits of certain marvel characters like Reed Richards Tony Stark, Carol Danvers, Jennifer Walters, Greer Nelson, Simon Williams and Janet van Dyne are to me hero assassinated as well

[Zero Hunter]

Exactly! Let's all just enjoy the stories for what they are, instead of pretending Marvel canon is still a thing.

But that is the thing. It is a characters history that makes a lot of fans like the character to begin with. A good writer can use history without it bogging down anything at all and it adds layers to the story. A writer who just ignores it all is just lazy. Anyone can write a story if they ignore everything they don't want to use, but only the really talented writers can tell their story without just throwing away anything that doesn't fit.

[RobinFan4880]

I wasn't reading a character I have come to know as Reed Richardss over the years when we see him working on 42 and tossing former comrades in arms in there just because it was the law. Exactly!
At some point a character's traits should be canon and I think there were a lot of fans that thought Millar, Bendis and others were shoe-horning heroes into a role that didn't follow the character's history.A character's trait matters and I do not appreciate Millar and BMB tossing their salad all over a character's history Thankfully BMB writes a lot of marvel comics so I'm saving 4 dollars per issue
It Reed's case, the earlier Simonson story should have been the indicator that he would be against Tony's plan. EXACTLY!, I have those issues and when I learned through reviews how the marvel character Reed Richards was portrayed I concluded that marvel comics does not respect what past creators established regarding character traits of certain marvel characters like Reed Richards Tony Stark, Carol Danvers, Jennifer Walters, Greer Nelson, Simon Williams and Janet van Dyne are to me hero assassinated as well

Your opinion about certain things can change as new circumstances pop up. People are not set in stone.

[LifeIsILL]

X-Fans will be ECSTATIC if it turns out that mutants will be on an earth where there are ONLY mutants no superhumans, inhumans, eternals, asgardians, olympians, androids or cyborgs

They won't be ecstatic, just go to the X-Forum and ask this same question and see what responses you will get.

X-Men being in the same universe was never a problem before the movies came out.

[Michael P]

Your opinion about certain things can change as new circumstances pop up. People are not set in stone.

Yeah, it's a little ridiculous to dictate that a person will always behave the same way, regardless of circumstances, as if people don't ever change their opinion on something or step outside the box in extreme circumstances. If you go that way, you get ridiculous stuff like X-Fans complaining about X-23 awkwardly trying to dance in a comic from 2014 because she said she doesn't dance in a comic from 2008.

It also confuses what "character traits" actually are. They're the surface of a character, the sprinkles on the sundae. "Sarcastic" is a character trait. The Thing talking like a mook from the Lower East Side is a character trait. The choices characters make, and the way they react to the events of the story, is character. The deep stuff. It's the chocolate ice cream in that sundae metaphor. And characters, like people, are allowed to change, allowed to show new behaviors in new circumstances, allowed to be three-dimensional. And they're allowed to make mistakes, and make up for those mistakes later. There's no such thing as "ruining a character forever"; there's just one bad story. There will be others.

(For the record, I didn't like much of anything in Civil War, but that's ultimately because Mark Millar was absolutely the wrong person to write that project, and because no one ever stopped to think about how the Superhero Registration Act would actually work as a law, or about how over the top a prison like 42 actually was.)

[Gordonstar]

Golden age comics had loose continuity, may stories never referenced and the concept of a shared universe wasn't all there all the time.

[Anarchist]

No, it's just that the writers and editors aren't even trying to make sense anymore.

[Michael P]

Fun fact: Bucky was originally shot and killed in a comic from 1948. Stan Lee ignored not only this, but every Cap comic released after the end of World War II, when he wrote Avengers #4. Compared to that, Bendis is a piker.

[Supernature]

At this point I've stopped caring about continuity / canon as well.

I like to think of each writer's run as an individual, self contained story (one of the reasons why I skip event tie-ins). If things get referenced or a writer wants to build upon something that was done before, that's good. I can appreciate that. But it's just absurd to expect every writer to respect all the little details of the continuity, especially when the editors who are supposed to correct eventual mistakes don't really seem to care.

[Gordonstar]

Yeah, also Captain Americas post war stories was retconed into being a different cap aka the grand director

Marvel retconed away the golden age comics as in universe stories in side the marvel universe that are fictional.

[AJpyro]

At this point I've stopped caring about continuity / canon as well.

I like to think of each writer's run as an individual, self contained story (one of the reasons why I skip event tie-ins). If things get referenced or a writer wants to build upon something that was done before, that's good. I can appreciate that. But it's just absurd to expect every writer to respect all the little details of the continuity, especially when the editors who are supposed to correct eventual mistakes don't really seem to care.

I respect and like that idea. But I do still wanna get all of a certain writer's run. Even if they are tie-ins.

[gurkle]

Exactly! Let's all just enjoy the stories for what they are, instead of pretending Marvel canon is still a thing.

Isn't this conflating canon with characterization? Canon is what happened; characterization is the way a the writer writes a character. Sometimes the separate characterizations, particularly in an event like Civil War, come from an order being handed down for something to happen, and different writers coming up with different ways to shape characterization around it. Everyone was told that Reed Richards had to support the Superhuman Registration Act. Everyone came up with different reasons for why that was, because they were all twisting it, pretzel-like, to fit the way they were writing Reed.

It's always going to be the case that writers write characters differently, and I disagree - as I've said many times - with the people who act like everything a character has ever done is equally important to his or her characterization. That's treating them as if they're real people, when in fact the Captain America we see in one book is not the Captain America we see in another book. It's fine to say "I hate Captain America in this story," but when you jump to "I hate Captain America because he did X," this is mistaking canon for characterization.

However, the things characters did are still canon and shouldn't cease to exist. This is part of the fun game we play with post-Silver Age superheroes, the thing that sets them apart from continuity-free comics (which I love) or creator-owned comics (which can have actual beginnings and endings). The problem with a lot of modern superhero writing is not that it doesn't reference every little thing, it's that the writers don't do a lot of research and either make the characters a blank slate, or refer only to a few of their most famous stories. What makes these characters more than one-dimensional is just how much they've been through and how much history they have. When writers don't use that, they often wind up impoverishing the characters, and that's the problem with ignoring canon - it's fine to ignore or forget things characters have done in the past, but if you cut them off from their history, they are just silly comic characters.

[Iron Maiden]

Yeah, also Captain Americas post war stories was retconed into being a different cap aka the grand director

Marvel retconed away the golden age comics as in universe stories in side the marvel universe that are fictional.

I am not aware that they made a complete retcon. In Brubaker's Captain America, Bucky and Namor were reminiscing about WWII.

[Gordonstar]

Yeah, but it happened some what different than the actual golden age books. Some stuff don't exist the way it did.

Invaders itself is a retcon.

[gurkle]

I think "broad strokes" is a good term to use here. We know a lot of things happen in comics that contradict each other, and we just accept it. There was nothing wrong, for example, with Stan Lee and Jack Kirby ignoring the '50s Captain America stories and saying that he was frozen in the '40s.

On the other hand, when nerdy young writers decided they had to find an explanation for why there was a Captain America in the '50s, that was a good story too. So what matters, as always, is telling a good story and being true to the character.