302 – Space Junk

I have mixed feelings about this question. When I was young, I was very frustrated that Uncanny X-Men and the New Mutants tended to be sealed off from one another (with occasional exceptions), even though in principle the characters all lived in the same place.

I didn’t want the two to be telling the same story across two books, but I did want regular appearances from the cast of one in the other. Little scenes of Dani or Sam in mid-conversation with Nightcrawler or Colossus in the mansion’s kitchen about what is going on in the other character’s book, before the story of this character’s book interrupts it.

That goes back to one of the big appeals of Marvel comics when I was a child, that characters would appear, sometimes in quite random ways, in other characters’ book, with little captions that told you to check out Other Book Issue Number to find out what was going on.

My favorite example is from a 1970s American Captain America comic that a friend of mine picked up, which advertised on its cover that in it the lucky reader would see something like the “Pulse-Pounding Power of Iron Man.” (Possibly “Senses-Shattering,” I forget.). The Pulse-Pounding Power in question turned out to be the power of having a quiet conversation with Captain America in which Iron Man gave Cap some minor help with a problem that Cap was having (and incidentally said, “About Tony Stark — look, I should have told you a long time ago…,” whereupon Captain America interrupted and said that Iron Man and Tony Stark’s private relationship was none of his business).

That sort of thing was a central part of the feel of Marvel comics once upon a time, that sense that people who knew each other would encounter each other outside the confines of designated series. And that’s how the reference to the terrorist incident read in this to me — it was a brief look into the other book’s story, but you wouldn’t miss anything important about this story if you weren’t reading the other book.

The interesting question is, though, is whether that was something that was going out of date at this time, an approach that no longer made as much sense as it once did and was soon to make no sense at all.

Part of what historically made that sort of thing work is that one’s experience of comics was always fragmented, if you were a child and buying comics in locations that weren’t DM comics hobbyist stores — which at one point was the overwhelming majority of the market. A) You would eventually miss an issue, for one reason or another. B) You would pick up random issues from the past second-hand, which would give you brief glimpses into things about which you would have no other information.

You would gradually piece together a rough sense of the context, or rather contexts, that you did not have (from other random second-hand issues, references in current titles — this was a big part of why What If? worked as a concept in its original time — and, yes, unrelated comics that referred sideways to stuff happening in other titles). But there were always extensive gaps between the little fragments of stuff that you knew about. So this sort of sideways reference — not a problem. It fit with one’s experience of reading Marvel comics in general. One did not find that it *disrupted* the story that one was reading, because one was used to reading over the gaps.*

(This was peculiarly true of me and other people who were mainly reading comics published Marvel UK, with its haphazard decisions about what exactly to reprint and how to edit it, recut it, and divide it up, supplemented by the odd American original that found its way across the Atlantic.)

But there are two things that shoot the legs out from under that model, and this comic was being published at a critical time for both. The first is that such a way of experiencing a fictional world does not suit a readership of adult fans for whom reading these things is one of their central leisure time activities.

Being that kind of serious devotee involves completism, a drive to be an expert in what you’re reading and a lack of acceptance for the kinds of gaps in one’s knowledge that the first kind of reading took for granted.

Allied to that was the market side, in which superhero comics came to be sold primarily through specialized stores in the direct market, and the absolutely astonishing collapse in sales numbers (as a story in business history, what happened to American superhero comics in the ‘90s is remarkable and fascinating, leaving aside the degree to which one ) and a shift to being a (sort of) luxury product for a narrow market of connoisseurs.

This produced a different culture of reading with different expectations — and led to superhero comics that presupposed and exploited reader knowledge. Fragmentation gives way to coherence, and isomething that isn’t part of the story *does* disrupt you experience.

The other thing that made the older type of reading hard to sustain was, obviously, the Internet. Modern tabletop roleplaying games have the cliché “Play to find out what happens,” and I think part of why that surfaced is that we live in an era in which it’s a unique appeal of roleplaying games that they guarantee a narrative in which you only can find out what happens in by experiencing it. The details of what happened in a comic you haven’t read — those you can get online. Unfillable gaps are much smaller, rarer, and about more trivial things.

In the ‘90s, that was more patchy than it is in 2020, but it was starting to happen. And Usenet and the like is obviously a significant part of the story, because filling the gaps might happen not by sticking things into search engines, but by asking about it in a way that intensified the sense of belonging to a devoted fan community (back to factor 1).

So one can maybe see this little sideways reference as a window into how the experience of reading superhero comics was changing. Either you went full Superman and did all related titles as a single linked weekly narrative for completists who would buy all of them, or else you did a title as self-contained — the old middle road was being washed away by the fact that while a superhero comic might look fairly similar (at least in dimensions and format) to what it used to be, a superhero comic was becoming very different as a product.

Also, when Storm replies, “A large number,” when Xavier asks her how many people died — wow, that’s cold, Ms. Munroe. Say “I don’t know, but I’m afraid it was a large number.” Don’t make it sound like you know, but can’t be bothered.

*I am slightly tempted to go all Scott McCloud and start talking about reading over the gaps as the central experience of comics as a medium, and also talk about the necessity of reading over the gaps in superheroes as a genre, the way one must override the ways in which this bizarre hybrid genre juxtaposes things that don’t make sense together, so that this older fragmented culture of reading is peculiarly suited to superhero comics as medium and as genre.