By Zach Rabiroff — Continuity is a dirty word. Sean Howe’s Marvel Comics: The Untold Story contains a quote from the turn of the millennium in which Hollywood executives scoffed at the “Talmudic continuity scholars in Marvel editorial” whose loyalty to “the holy litany of Stan and Jack” made comics impenetrable to anyone outside the Android’s Dungeon. It’s an ethos that has taken firm hold over the past two decades, as a greater commitment to the individual whims of creators and a desire to clean the slate for a new (and potentially imaginary) crop of young readers have combined to make the story of the Marvel Universe something more like credit reading than a sacred text.

There's a certain irony in that this kind of loyalty to a shared universe has fallen out of fashion just at the moment when long-form, arc-based television (to say nothing of a continuity heavy Cinematic Universe plucked directly from that maligned source material) has conquered mass culture. But from the viewpoint of creators, it's easy to see why this rejection feels not only natural but necessary. After 50 years of Iron Man stories, who can be expected to know precisely when he first met Daredevil, or Stilt Man, or Howard the Duck? In a comic line where upwards of four dozen titles are coming out in some months, who can know exactly where the Punisher was last seen or what he was shooting into whom? And when it comes right down to it, who really cares?

Well, I do. And not just because I’m the sort of semi-socialized human being who finds a certain Zen comfort in putting 700 X-Men issues in chronological order. I care because continuity is the scaffold that holds together the entire wobbly construct of Marvel Comics. It allows us to look at decades worth of messy, contradictory, tonally inconsistent stories and find in them a pattern and a logic. Glance around a comics shop at Hickman’s X-Men, and Coates’ Black Panther, and Spencer’s Spider-Man, and it seems a hodgepodge of self-contained stories unconcerned with the past, future, or other creators in general. But find a way to make those stories interact with and reference one another; tie them together with a sense of shared history and memory, and suddenly what was once absurd and random becomes perfectly rational. Continuity is the way that comics make method out of chaos.

Case in point: this week’s Immortal Hulk #34, written by Al Ewing with art by Butch Guice and Tom Palmer (filling in this month for the absent Joe Bennett). The story is an issue-long overview of the lives, deaths, and rebirths of the Hulk’s arch nemesis Sam Sterns (A.K.A. The Leader), taking in stories as widely disparate as Lee and Ditko’s 1960s showdown with the Watcher, Peter David’s revival and execution of the character during the 1980s, and a string of casual resurrections during the 2010s. It’s a comic that could very easily become the storytelling equivalent of a Marvel Encyclopedia, were it not for a metanarrative that Ewing weaves throughout every flashback: a revelation that Sterns’ many revivals have all been leading toward a final, terrible descent into dark godhood.

In Ewing’s telling, the Leader’s story isn’t just a string of embarrassing defeats; it’s a journey toward revelation, an unshakeable belief in the immortality and power of his own eternal mind. As Guice shows us images of a naked Sterns wandering through Hell, a first-person narration tells us, “And in that moment — rejected by the one man who might have been my friend — I knew there was nowhere left to run. Instead, I turned around. I looked Hell in the face. And at last I knew faith. Faith in myself. In Samuel Sterns...the Leader. And in my all-consuming hate.” The gospel of the Leader is, quite literally, the mind-body dualism from Hell. Walk in the path of his wickedness, and gain eternal, miserable life.

It’s a bravura performance from Ewing, accessible to those encountering this character for the first time, but uniquely pleasing to anyone who’s filed away the Leader’s many battles in separate compartments of their memory until this moment. It’s a narrative technique that is natively unique to comics, where dozens upon dozens of creators over a span of decades have left dangling plot threads for an enterprising writer to knit together into something elegant and strange. Ewing’s model, conscious or not, might be the storied run of Alan Moore and Alan Davis on Captain Britain during the 1980s. There, the creators ran their fingers over a cobbled-together mess of half-hearted and abandoned notions from previous writers (Chris Claremont’s wizard-god Merlyn; Larry Lieber’s Mastermind computer; Brian Braddock’s clairvoyant sister-turned-mutant Betsy) and reconceptualized them as part of a grand design present from the very start. 

It’s precisely this sort of retcon that Ewing has brought to his entire run on Immortal Hulk, never overwriting past stories in service of new pet ideas, but rather embracing and building from what has come before. The reader can’t help but look at it and think, “ah, yes, of course. I should have seen it all along.” It’s all a magic trick, of course: a sleight of hand to distract us from the well-meaning mayhem from which comics are born. But who doesn’t enjoy a good magic trick now and again, especially when it’s so lovely to believe the illusion is true?

But there’s a different way to use continuity, too. Not to impose a guiding logic on a shared comic universe, but to prod and question it. To make us look askance at the comfortable assumptions of comic book heroics, and by seeing them with fresh eyes, ask ourselves whether we’ve been right to take them for granted all along.

This was the ethos behind Kurt Busiek and Alex Ross’s landmark Marvels miniseries in 1994, which used an everyman narrator to cast a sideways glance at the great events of Marvel history. And it’s the approach taken by Mark Russell, alongside artist Ramon Perez, in Marvels Snapshots: Captain America, a sequel anthology that dances between the raindrops classic comics to much the same purpose.

Russell’s launching pad here is Jack Kirby’s Madbomb story from his 1970s return to Captain America, a run that, depending on the mood of the reader, could be described as either brimming with enthusiasm or overflowing with the collective madness of post-Nixon America (these are not mutually exclusive notions). Here, however, the title character is largely off-panel throughout the story, and that’s entirely by design. Russell wants us to look away from the epic adventures of marquee heroes, and toward the human detritus that gets left to fend for itself in their wake -- here in the form of Felix Waterhouse, a young resident of Harlem living through the mess that Captain America’s battles leave behind.

Felix’s story is a 30-page fable about the struggles that heroes don’t see, or choose to look away from: the baby brothers who lose their lives from Madbomb explosions, and neighborhoods ravaged and unrepaired after supervillain rampages, the shuttered stores and lost livelihoods that never come across the Avengers Hotline. In narration that feels eerily prescient and relevant at its publication time, Felix tells the reader about the days after the Madbomb riots: “The city had deserted us. People joined gangs...either to find protection or to exploit its absence. Sometimes the police would come. But in most neighborhoods the police came to keep the peace. Here, they came to keep the war.”

No surprise, then, that Felix struggles to find a rationale to keep the faith in any purpose behind costumed antics, ultimately falling prey to the financially remunerative (and psychologically manipulative) pitches of evil AIM scientists, who use the shaky moral high ground Cap and his cohorts as a way to cast doubt on morality in general: “Sure, you could argue that every research dollar in history was given out by some criminal empire...but empires crumble and fade away. In the end, all that’s left...is the science.”

If Russell’s story falls somewhat flat, it’s due to the mechanics of its plot much more than the resonance of its themes. For all its tweaking of superhero conventions, this is, in the end, a superhero story in all the important beats, with Felix ultimately learning the error of his decision, heroically turning on his erstwhile employers, and sharing a quiet moment of learning with Captain America, who turns out to be not just a bad slice of apple pie after all. The latter scene feels especially out of place for anyone well-versed in Captain America comics. Russell treats Cap’s newfound connection with the common man as a novel bit of characterization, but it’s been reiterated in so many Captain America stories over so many decades that it’s become a self-referential cliche. If Steve Rogers is anything, he is a man who keenly enjoys desultory rides on a motorcycle while monologuing about whether the world really needs a Captain America. Consequently, lines like, “But you’re right. We’re supposed to be heroes. Sometimes we forget what that means,” read as perfunctory more than revelatory. For a book rooted deep in Marvel continuity, Russell might have benefitted from reading a few more of the deep cuts.

Still, for all its imperfections, it’s an affecting story that captures at least something of the larger-than-life magic that superhero comics are supposed to inspire. And by reaffirming the purpose of heroism even when our cities and our society feel too broken to repair, it finds a kind meaning even without a grand design. Maybe the problems of this world will always elude our grasp, and maybe we won't ever be okay with that. But there’s always a reason to reach out with a helping hand.

Read past editions of the No-Prize Like the Present Marvel column!

Zach Rabiroff is a writer and editor who has written for Open Letters Monthly, Open Letters Review, and Xavierfiles.com in addition to this column. He has read every Marvel comic ever published, and regrets the life choice only mildly.