Out of the blue, I remembered a conversation I had with a friend of mine a while back about a regional comic book/scifi/fantasy/gaming convention she had attended. (No, it wasn’t the Bi-Mon-Sci-Fi-Con.) I asked her how the show went upon her return, and she replied that it was mediocre; there weren’t many dealers or booths, and the crowd was mainly “lower-caste geeks.” I wasn’t quite sure what that term meant, so I asked for more details. She told me this group was composed of stereotypically overweight anime fangirls and World of Warcraft obsessives.

Now, this post is not meant to claim that my friend is somehow an elitist for placing one group of geeks below another; her “lower-caste” term was clearly meant as a joke, as she was just fishing for a funny term to describe the crowd. (She’s a comic book cosplay nerd herself, so she didn’t really “fit in” with most of the other patrons.) Instead, I want to examine an interesting trend that’s been growing exponentially in geek circles over the past decade: subdivision of the overall geek crowd into smaller groups (a caste system, if you will), the game of one-upmanship that accompanies this behavior, and the absolute irony of the entire process.

Heated debates between geeks is nothing new; you could trace ‘em all the way back to Star Trek versus Star Wars arguments in the late 1970s, and I’m sure there were Flash Gordon diehards who disliked John Carter of Mars even further back. However, what bound everyone together was their love of the source material, and in the end, that was all that was important. In recent years, that common bond has been eroding, and the geeks have no one to blame but themselves.

With growing frequency, geeks are cramming one another into a caste system of their own making. My friend’s joke nonwithstanding, this is a very real and serious situation: geeks in one group are demonizing the other, but not out of the good-natured rivalry seen in the past. Geek subcultures literally hate each other now, and often consider certain groups “beneath” them as far as the nerdy social strata are concerned.

This is the colossal irony I spoke of. Geeks and nerds have always complained that they’re a misunderstood and maligned social group, shunned by the rest of the world. Well, look at what they’re doing with this caste system: the exact same thing! So, not only are they maligned as a whole, they’re actively pushing some of their own peers even lower down the social scale, making the entire problem even worse. How fucked up is that?

The Internet has certainly contributed to the caste system in a big way; just as it has brought nerds together, it also drives mountainous wedges between them. Case and point: video game console flame wars, which have gotten far uglier than even the famous Sega and Nintendo rivalry in the early 1990s. Now, we’ve got entire sites and forums devoted to elevating one nerdy hobby while bashing another. All this truly accomplishes is making geeks look even worse in the eyes of everyone else!

I’ve always been of the mind that you shouldn’t hate an entire group; just specific people inside said group that personally piss you off. For example, I can’t stand all of that Twilight shit, and I think the fan fervor over it is incredibly annoying…but I have friends who are into it, and I’d never consider myself “better” than them as a result.

Having said that, if a Twilight diehard nearly knocks me down at the bookstore in their frenzy to score yet another generic young adult novel, they’re going to get an earful of rage.

You all know how much I hate spoilers. Many of my peers share this belief, but it seems that a majority of people do not. Spoilers are all the rage, and not a day goes by where some hotly-anticipated television plot or upcoming film script isn’t spoiled on the internet by greedy fans.

Nowhere is this behavior more prevalent than in comic book fandom. Legions of message boards and websites are devoted to spoiling upcoming issues and plots, weeks (and sometimes months) before their release. In fact, I’d wager that the amount of comic book nerds hunting for spoilers far surpasses those who do not. Which of course begs the logical question: if you’re going to rabidly seek out spoilers, then why bother even reading comics in the first place? You’re obviously not that interested in experiencing the story from month to month, as was intended.

It’s been pointed out to me that some spoilers are “impossible” to avoid, such as those printed in the monthly PREVIEWS catalog put out by Diamond Comic Distributors. Is this catalog full of spoilers? Absolutely. But there’s a legitimate reason for this: the PREVIEWS catalog is an advance order book designed for comic book shop owners so that they know how many of a particular book or other piece of merchandise to order. However, you don’t have to dig through it for spoilers! In fact, I skip past the entirety of the comics listings in the catalog for that exact reason. So don’t tell me that those spoilers are a given; you can avoid them just as easily as I can. The closest we come to “impossible” spoilers are when something’s printed on PREVIEWS‘ cover. For example, the villain behind DC Comics’ Blackest Night crossover was spoiled a few months in advance of his in-series appearance due to a PREVIEWS cover promo, but the few readers that complained about it were drowned out by the rabid cheers of fanboys.

I’m sure the ending of stories like Blackest Night are already well known amongst the basement-dwellers, even though the final issue isn’t due out until the end of March. I’m perfectly comfortable waiting until then; I don’t know why so many of these losers just can’t learn simple patience.

(Note: This entry is crossposted to The Indigo Tribe.)

It always bugs me when I see people shamelessly supporting and defending a favorite creator, actor, or other celebrated personality no matter what they do. For example, if an author writes an excellent book, does that mean that all of his or her other books or works are automatically good, as well? Of course not, yet far too many people subscribe to this dangerous belief. (This blind devotion completely explains the popularity of Joss Whedon.)

This is not to be confused with being excited for future projects by a favorite creator; the difference is recognizing loss of quality when it applies. No creator has a perfect track record; everybody’s human, after all.

I’m a fan of writer J. Michael Straczynski, especially his work on Babylon 5 and Rising Stars, so I was eager to check out his take on Spider-Man in the early 2000s. Well, it started out good…but then it went straight into the shitter. Some JMS fans still praised it as the best thing to the happen to the book; I wonder what was going through their heads, because diehard Spidey fans certainly didn’t agree.

Furthering the comic book example, let’s look at novelist Charlie Huston. He’s written quite a few popular novels; I read one of them (Already Dead), and while I didn’t find it to be awful, I didn’t find it to be great, either. It was just an average urban vampire novel. (And we know how that whole genre has been beaten to death.) Like many other comic book readers, however, I first discovered his work through the relaunch of Moon Knight a few years back. Well, Huston’s novels may be decent…but his comic book work was atrocious. The Moon Knight relaunch read like a crappy Grand Theft Auto clone, focusing on excessive violence and shock value rather than character development or adherence to the source material. Yet, fans of his Moon Knight work automatically praised his novels, and vice versa!

This kind of fanboy loyalism just doesn’t make any sense to me. You’re not bound by law to automatically defend your favorite properties, nor are you required to like the entire breadth of a creator’s work. If they go sour, so what? You gotta take the good with the bad. It happens to everyone and everything. Just ask any Star Wars fan.

Jeez, I even see people defending things they haven’t even seen yet!

So, the Flash is getting a series relaunch again this spring, with Geoff Johns at the helm. While he’s certainly being whored around to many a book these days (he’s like the Brian Michael Bendis of DC Comics), the fact that he’s working on the new Flash series is particularly noteworthy. Johns wrote the book in the early 2000s, and his run (no pun intended) on the series represents some of the best Flash stories ever published, and personally, I feel its his finest work to date. So, this new series must be good news all around, right?

Wrong. The new series is going to star the recently-returned-from-the-dead Barry Allen, who was the Flash from the late 1950s through the mid-1980s. (When Johns wrote the book years ago, it featured Allen’s successor, Wally West.) Allen is Johns’ favorite superhero, so it’s only natural that Johns would use his considerable clout in order to secure the writing gig. The problem is that Barry Allen as a character is fucking boring.

Barry Allen embodies the stereotypical “goody-goody” superhero. Originally, that was to his credit, as that’s what made a popular hero in the Silver Age. However, the comic book audience has grown up (well, somewhat) since then, and those types of characters just don’t fit well with modern storytelling. Every human being has his flaws…except for Barry Allen. He’s still a super-devoted forensic scientist and superhero who is portrayed as being the perfect moral compass, and that’s extremely limiting when it comes to modern stories. More seriously, it’s incredibly boring.

Johns has said that the first storyarc of the relaunched series is going to be a CSI-like tale. Well, as well all know, CSI has completely oversaturated the television market with the main show plus a number of spinoffs also airing. So, not only are we stuck with a Flash with a sterilized, one-dimensional personality, we’re also stuck with a setting that’s already been beaten to death. Plus, if we want to read a detective story…we have Batman!

It’s very possible that Johns’ writing may break Allen out his goody-goody rut, but I’m not betting on it. He’s publicly stated that Allen is the greatest superhero ever, so the book is practically a fanfic before it’s even begun! (I’m sure the powers-that-be don’t care, as the legions of Johns apologists will buy anything he writes and defend it to the death, no matter how contrived it is. They’re a very silly bunch.)

My gripes with the new series may be considerable, but I am willing to give it the benefit of the doubt. After all, Johns’ previous Flash work was excellent indeed, but more importantly…I can’t render final judgment on the new series until I’ve actually read it. After the hilariously bad The Flash: Rebirth, in which nearly seventy years of history were retconned to show that Barry Allen is the source of all Flash powers past, present, and future, I suppose it can’t get much worse…can it?

Admit it or not, we all know comic book continuity is a mess. Characters from the big two publishing houses, Marvel and DC, have been around for so many decades that trying to make sense of the mess is next to impossible. Both companies have published many universe-spanning events to rectify the bigger problems, while introducing smaller retcons into books to solve the smaller ones. For example, a few years back, Tony Stark’s origin was changed so that he received his original injuries and became Iron Man during Operation Desert Storm, not the Vietnam War. That at least makes sense; otherwise, Iron Man would be a senior citizen!

Continuity decisions are completely at the whim of the editors, and writers have to pass any changes by them. It’s a tough job, but someone’s got to do it! Fans don’t always agree, but unfortunately for us, it’s not our decision to make.

Sometimes, though, continuity decisions aren’t as cut and dry as you’d think. Today’s focus is on one of the many changes implemented by 2007’s Infinite Crisis event from DC Comics:

• Dream of the Endless never told Kyle Rayner that he was superior to Hal Jordan.

This was revealed in one of editor-in-chief Dan DiDio’s “DC Nation” columns, back in October of 2007. The event he’s referencing, though, happened back in 1998, in JLA #22-23. Grant Morrison was writing the comic at the time, and he got permission from Dream’s creator, Neil Gaiman, to use the character in the story. The original exchange was as follows:

Dream: “Why do you hesitate each time? This man Jordan, the one who wore the magic ring before you…why does he overshadow all of your thoughts and actions?”

Kyle: “What? What does this have to do with anything? I was just thinking about…what is this about Hal?”

Dream: “You will surpass him. You already know what he could never learn.”

Kyle: “Sh’yeah! Hal Jordan was the best. Everybody knows that. Everybody keeps telling me that, no matter what I do. I met him; the guy was a star. What could I possibly know that he didn’t know?”

Dream:

It’s completely within DiDio’s power to decide what proper continuity is, but I have a problem with this particular instance for three reasons.

One, as I’ve mentioned before on this blog, we know that both DiDio and Green Lantern writer Geoff Johns harbor a strong distaste for Kyle; ever since Green Lantern: Rebirth, just about everything that happened to Kyle in the past has either been severely lessened, or retconned out of continuity entirely. The retcon dealing with Dream was specifically designed to be a dig against Kyle in favor of Hal, and that kind of fanboy bullshit bugs the hell out of me. It’s considerably worse that such fanboyism is coming from professionals at the top of the ladder, so to speak. They should know better. (To be fair, other characters are getting shafted, too; DC Comics has been seemingly hellbent on retconning or “deleting” most of their mid- to late-1990s tales as of late. It’s a shame, as that era had many of the publisher’s best stories.)

Two, to the best of my knowledge, Dream is technically the property of Neil Gaiman, not DC Comics. Creator-owned characters are a rare occurrence in the DC and Marvel comics houses, but regardless, Dream and other characters Gaiman created for The Sandman are his. Furthermore, the realm of the Endless exists outside of the regular DC Universe and Multiverse. So, no matter how hard Superboy-Prime punched the walls of reality in Infinite Crisis in a fit of teen angst (I’m not making that part up, by the way)…Dream and the Endless would not have been affected. Most importantly, though, it technically wouldn’t be within DiDio’s power to make continuity decisions when it comes to the Endless. Gaiman would have to do that, and there’s no evidence whatsoever that he was consulted.

What does all of this mean? DiDio’s column nonwithstanding, does Dream’s original conversation with Kyle still stand? Based on the evidence, it sure seems that way. If that’s not good enough for you, then consider this: if you ignore the legalese, then instead go by the Golden Rule of Canon used by film and television. Since DiDio’s comment was in an editorial column, and not in the story itself, it doesn’t apply. (This is how properties like Star Trek and Star Wars handle canon.) Of course, the fact that I’m just finding out about this whole thing now, over two years later, proves that DiDio’s comment couldn’t have been that important to canon anyway.

There’s a really simple way out of this particular retcon, if you want to be purely literal about it. In this case, DiDio’s comment is accurate, because Dream never claimed Kyle was “superior” in the first place! He said Kyle would surpass Hal at some point, and he never said exactly when this would happen. Going by this literal route, the retcon technically does not exist, as they’re trying to alter an event that never took place to begin with.

I realize this post may make me come off as a disgruntled Kyle Rayner fan, desperate to undo the post-Rebirth changes to the character. I can assure you, however, that this is not the case. I roll my eyes at any retarded and fanboyish attempt at retconning, regardless of the character. This was just an example I’m much more familiar with.