Who's Who in the CBU 2008

Name: Regie Rigby

Regie is a strange, almost ethereal creature. Who can plumb the hidden mysteries of his dark and murky past - a past which contains a terrible secret. A secret that taught him that with great power comes great responsibility, that criminals are a cowardly superstitious lot and just who exactly knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men.

By day, he assumes the appearance of a mild mannered teacher, bringing the joy of literature and the English Language to classes of enthralled and enthusiastic students. But by night?

By night he goes home and writes lesson plans. Sorry. That's as interesting as he gets. Really.

The rumours about rooftop struggles with underworld uberfiends, the gossip about the hidden cave filled with hi-tec equipment and the suggestion that his car might be fitted with turbo lasers are all nonsense.

When he's not teaching he reads comics. Sometimes he combines the two activities. When he's not doing that he's either playing computer games or asleep.

Development Hell...

By Regie Rigby

“The trouble with comics” people have told me, “is that the characters don’t ever develop. The world changes around them, they stay pretty much the same. It’s boring.”

And sometimes, you know, I’ve been tempted to agree. As mainstream publishers continue to crank the handle on their sausage machine, churning out endless streams of the same old same old I have, on occasion, become disillusioned with the whole thing. Every generation of writers, it seems simply recycles the ideas and themes that the last generation of writers used. The package gets glitzier, the violence gets more graphic and the language gets fouler, but the basic narrative remains the same. As Stan Lee once apparently said “no change – just the illusion of change”.

Perhaps it is this apparent determination to remain in a perpetual state of stale adolescence that has kept Anglo-American comics in the “only fit for kids and semi-literates” ghetto they’ve been stuck in for so long. Does the wider reading public regard comics as juvenile because the medium itself refuses to grow up?

I suppose you could make that argument, but I’m not so sure.

For a start, you know it isn’t true. There are Western comics that feature characters who grow and develop as their stories unfold. There are graphic novels like Craig Thompson’s heartbreakingly engrossing Blankets, and there are extended ongoing stories like Terry Moore’s equally heartbreaking Strangers in Paradise, to name but two.

OK, so you could argue that neither of those titles (the first coming from Chris Staros’ Top Shelf label, and the later from Terry’s own Abstract Studio – although Francine and Katchoo did have a brief flirtation with Image) are strictly speaking mainstream. Then of course you have to consider what we mean by “mainstream”, but if you’re looking at books from the likes of DC, then I could just as easily point you at Preacher or Transmetropolitan for characters who went through just as much change as their stories went on.

And yes, I’d have to conceed that both were from DC Vertigo, rather than DC proper, but let’s be honest, it’s all Time Warner at the end of the day and the same corporate Suits are in charge in the end.

Of course the very nature of both British and American Comics mitigates against such development. One off graphic novels can develop character in the same way that one off prose novels can. In the end, series like Preacher, Transmetropolitan and Sandman are also in effect one off novels, since they always had a definate end and although long running were finite series.

But most comics stories are either short limited series (a character doesn’t really have a lot of chance to develop in four or five issues) or potentially infinite series that will run for as long as a market for them remains. I’m not saying that it’s impossible for a character to undergo a linier development when their story might end up running for six or seven decades, but given the limitations of a human life span, I can’t see a way it would work.

And of course, it’s not just comics. I’m becoming a fan of Agatha Christie, (having resisted the charms of Poirot and Marple for years, preferring the shorter Wimsey series from Dorothy L. Sayers) but I couldn’t claim that Hercule Poirot changed much between his first adventure and his last. Silver haired sleuth Jane Marple seemed to be seventy-five years old for about thirty years. Would we say that their stories suffered for it? Don’t even get me started on Sherlock Holmes, who never changed even slightly, whether he was deducing his way around late nineteenth centuary London or Second World War Washington. (Mind you, some of that might be to do with the fact that I first knew Holmes through the films of Basil Rathbone, rather than Conan Doyle’s second-rate books.)

The fact is, people hate change. When you have a formula that works, so long as you keep doing it well, people lap it up. Sometimes writers forget this, and assume that “change” is the same as “progress”.

It isn’t.

Change is only progress when it opens up new and interesting narrative possibilities. These are the changes that stick. Change for changes sake – often dressed up as “character development” tends to get retconned pretty quickly. We knew Superman wouldn’t stay dead. We knew Spidey wouldn’t stay in the black costume forever and we were absolutely damn sure that Jean Paul Valley wouldn’t keep the bat ears for very long.

The changes that last aren’t always positive from the character’s point of view. Alan Moore had The Joker put Babs Gordon in a wheelchair, which I suspect Babs herself wasn’t all that thrilled about. But the change lasted (and lasts to this day – nearly fifteen years later) because Babs as Oracle is a lot more interesting than Babs as Batgirl – however cute she looked in the cape.

But such cases are rare – and I have to admit, when I first read Moore and Bolland’s The Killing Joke I didn’t really think it would be all that long before there was some kind of magical cure - not unlike the one Bruce got when his back got broken – you can’t help wondering why he didn’t suggest Babs sought out the same healer, but then you can’t expect that kind of narrative consistency in these things, and that, essentially, is the point.

Barbara Gordon in a wheelchair is interesting. A powerful, independent woman who isn’t defined by her ability to walk. A positive role model for anybody, be they male, female, chair using or not. Bruce Wayne in a wheelchair would always be “that rich bloke who used to be Batman”. Bruce doesn’t have the personality for it – he’s too brooding, too miserable. Bruce is, frankly, too one-dimensional a character to survive such a radical overhaul. He exists to be Batman – and that’s all he’s really for.

To develop his character is to destroy it, just as Poirot or Marple would be destroyed if they were changed in any significant way. Poirot without the moustache and the duck handled cane? Unthinkable!

So let’s get over ourselves a little, my foolish friends. Lack of character development isn’t a flaw in an ongoing title – it’s the reason they survive. It’s no bad thing. These are not comics which pretend to the status of high art or great literature. Such comics are out there of course, but they don’t have Batman or Spider-Man in them.

Batman and Spider-Man, and the rest of the Spandex crowd, from Animal Man to Zodiac, are there to entertain us. They’re modern pulp fiction – disposable entertainment. It’s not their fault that nobody ever throws them away any more. All we should expect from these comics is that each of their stories is a good, entertaining read.

It’s when they fail to do even that that the long running books fall down – but it isn’t “development” that will make them better, it’s being better that will make them better.