Canon in comics?

I know this is very hypocritcal of me to say but does canon matter in comics? should you obsess over every canon plotline or story?

edited 17th Dec '15 2:18:28 PM by GAP

Does it matter? Yes. Should you obsess over it? No. If you're doing a halfway competent job no one will be able to obsess about canon in of itself. People only care when you're being inconsistent...or if they just not invested in what you're doing and if it's the latter, they'll probably just move on to something else.

Sometimes canon matters, sometimes it does not.

Does it matter if, say, character A does something that completely contradicts who he is in canon? Yes, it does.

Does it matter if character A expresses a minor opinion that is different from one he had in an earlier issue (say, he says he enjoys polka music, but in issue #342, he says he hates it?)... No, it doesn't.

I'd say so long as the characters' core concepts aren't violated, you're okay.

For instance, it's okay to make Dick Grayson a spy for Spyral. It wouldn't be okay if they decided that he's always been a spy and was never Robin at all.

Canon ought to matter if plot requirements take precedent over consistent characterization, if only to help you make more sense out of the story.

Well, I guess I didn't word that right. See, most people say "canon", a body of work that invalidates anything that contradicts it, when they really mean "continuity", a sequence of events that consistently make sense.

People generally only care about 'canon' when 'consistency' comes into question. If you're doing the latter well you don't have to worry about the former. The reader should have an easy time telling if you're purposefully contradicting continuity for laughs, Else Worlds or something. If you manage to annoy or anger them on the subject, then you're doing it wrong.

Continuity is good when it's used for world building and strengthening the universe. Peter Parker's friendship with Johnny Storm is a good example of this.

Continuity is bad when it limits stories and restricts the use of character or is used as a bargaining chip for sales.

This seems related to the question of believability. You don't have to make your stories consistent with the real world, but they need to be internally consistent in a way that respects the story's own premises. And in comics, canon is often important to establishing those premises.

So to the extent that canon shapes the characters and their plots, it's important. Violating it in a way that renders the characters' origins, motives, or personalities less explicable calls for a sound paddling. Outside of that, though, I'm not such a stickler. Insisting on the canonicity of everything that's ever happened puts your series at the mercy of the laziest or worst hack ever to write for it.

I generally like it when continuity is kept consistent, but I don't like it when the main purpose of stories is to "fix" continuity errors.

Its like how so many Legion of Superheroes stories are built around trying to fix their continuity snarl instead of just telling good stories. It makes me want to avoid any and all stories that include them.

Continuity will always limit stories and character usage. If it doesn't, then continuity is broken, which weakens the world building. You can't have both ways. But if a story do want to have continuity, then its writers need to be skillful enough to work around their limitations and avoid creating more of it for the future.

At it's lightest, continuity is just writers demonstrating that they've read the stories that have gone before. All you want your reader to do is enjoy the story; if you write something that makes them say "Hey, this contradicts this previous story I've read" then it's a problem.

I think continuity can be important in regards to character and story. For example, having Steve Rogers willingly spew blatant homophobic hate speech would be a massive contradiction of his established character, as well as extremely insulting to his fans (especially LGBT+ fans) and his previous writers.

Whereas having Clint Barton getting food poisoning from eating some bad spahghetti when back in 1974 he briefly mentioned in a single panel that he wasn't all that fond of Italian food doesn't even merit a response.

edited 10th Feb '16 5:53:11 PM by KarkatTheDalek

If it's a mainline comic, it matters a lot how the character is portrayed based on their previous characterization. A change that goes against any logic to a character's personality or story progression is not a good thing.

If its an alternate universe or elseworld story, then canon doesn't really matter as it is an alternate take on a character. There is no need to worry about canon as most of the story is not canon to begin with.

If it's a rebooted universe, well that is complicated. On one hand its technically an AU with its own canon meaning that it doesn't really need to worry about previous storylines made in the past. On the other hand it is replacing the old canon for role of main universe, which would likely alienate dedicated readers with such drastic change to the characters they read; so it is best to retain some elements of the old characters when rebooting them (just for continuity).