By Zack Quaintance — One week is an accident, two weeks is a reason for a conern, and three weeks is officially a trend. Thankfully, this is just the second week I’ve been a bit late posting my comics things I liked and didn’t like from the past week. So, go ahead and be concerned but don’t call this a trend just yet.

Anyway, let’s get to the things!

1. Continuity!

Something is going on at Marvel, but it’s been many many years since I’ve seen the publisher make such a concentrated effort to fit new stories into past continuity...or at least to reference things that have happened to and/or between characters in a way that implies things that happened to it’s immortal IP don’t just bounce off. 

This new embrace of continuity and everything matters has happened throughout Marvel’s superhero line, but this is comics and recency bias (always) wins the day, so let’s look at an example from this week’s X-Men + Fantastic #1.

Crazy. An interaction between Kate Pryde (ahem) and Franklin Richards from 1987 comes back today. Not only is it reference, but it actually matters and is being used to generate plot, rewarding us compulsive folks who for whatever reason (most of them unhealthy) pay attention.

And look! I get it. I think the time is right for continuity to matter again. I first noticed it maybe not mattering so much a few years back, when Marvel Studios was reaching the peak of everything. This makes sense. One can only presume that a not-insubstantial number of new readers were finding Marvel Comics, and nobody wanted to send them right back out of shops by predicating major happenings on continuity from the ‘80s. Superhero series — especially those at Marvel — became aggressively accessible, with new starting points, new creative teams, new entires launching sometimes twice in the same year. 

But that has probably had some diminishing returns at this point, and, let’s face it, whatever new readers were being inspired to check out the comics by the movies are probably here already and not still coming in in any meaningful numbers. In fact, those new readers have maybe even schooled themselves in past continuity as much as we have, joining the ranks of the weird and compulsive. Huzzah! I like all of that.

2. A New Animal Man Trade Timed to My Recent Read

So, I don’t know if you all follow me on Twitter, but I recently read for the first time Animal Man #1 - #26 by Grant Morrison, Chas Truong, Doug Hazelwood, Tatjana Wood, and John Costanza. And then this week I found out that a new printing of the compiled first half of the run is hitting shops next week (Feb. 12!). Given the meta nature of the story, this blew my freaking mind. I liked it. 

3. Tom King’s Strange Adventures Preview...and REACTING in General

This week we got our first glimpse of Strange Adventures, the collaboration between writer Tom King and artists Mitch Gerads and Evan “Doc” Shaner that’s due to hit shops in March. I had wondered if King’s interest as a writer might move further a field relative to traditional superhero comics work, given that he seemed to be moving away from that in both Batman and Mister Miracle. This book definitely seems to be that. What struck me the most about this brief tease DC released, however, was that it seemed to be all about reactions, as in King was translating his experiences with fans reacting his work into his actual work.

Here’s the preview.

At the same time, we had quite a few hard reactions last week in the comics world, which means it was a week of the year. It’s always like that. Comics is an intimate medium, one in which it feels like participating in it makes you part of it...and so we react. At the same time, it’s also a medium funded by an increasingly small pool of participants. So, we have publishers pushing us as far to our financial breaking points as they can without alienating us...and the result is a recent (or maybe it was always there?) feeling in college that we need to be especially selective, that we need to REACT and react hard to things we don’t like, taking them entirely off our purchase radar all together in the interest of comics self-preservation.

The two things that drew the biggest REACTIONS this week were DC’s forthcoming Generation Zero FCDB story — which stars Wally West in possession of the Mobius chair and the powers of Watchmen’s Doctor Manhattan — and Bad Idea, a new comics publisher that’s using exclusivity as something between a marketing gimmick and financial necessity in today’s market. Comics people reacted to both these things with grousing of the highest order. 

I don’t personally have a strong opinion of either. I tend to keep an open mind (often to a fault, see this very embarrassing piece about Heroes in Crisis...which I think I ultimately atoned for with another piece about Heroes in Crisis). I do, however, think there’s a bit of missing the forest through the trees with these reactions, in the sense that we should wait a few months to complain because there’s a risk here of sliding into a position where we’re intellectually justifying immediate rage whenever someone does anything different. And in a medium that’s inherently agile and small, different is what’s for sale. I don’t like or like this, it’s just a thing I wish people would be more thoughtful about.

Read this week’s comic book reviews here!

Zack Quaintance is a tech reporter by day and freelance writer by night/weekend. He Tweets compulsively about storytelling and comics as Comics Bookcase.