Richard_Swift
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Post: 47757793_46 created on Thu Mar 05, 2009 12:49 pmPosted: Thu Mar 05, 2009 12:49 pm
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Technologist Tony Stark I was worried I'd have nothing to contribute here, but it looks like a very fun space to start to feel out just what Marvel is, especially getting a feel for the MU. There's a certain je ne sait quoi about the DCU that I grasped very early on- I think the first non-Vertigo/Wildstorm DC book I ever picked up was Azzarello's Superman while I think my Marvel reading was largely uninterrupted from when I was fourteen until now, so about a decade and yet I couldn't ever really say that I've had a handle on what the MU is in that same sense. I think its hard to get a grasp on what sort of a space the MU is, because it isn't one. Or at least it isn't one in the way that the DCU is. It's more like an artefact. The DCU's a conceptual space that was created when people started squashing different stories together and deciding that they 'shared a universe', and over the years that process of combining, dividing and understanding the conceptual space has become the focus of much activity in the fiction. A Crisis is a painting about its canvas. That brings its own problems, but by foregrounding its spatiality, the DCU makes explicit that it isn't a story, that it isn't a history. It's a place where stories and histories happen. This allows for an incredible variety of tone, ideology and technique. Sandman could never ever have grown out of any other shared comics universe. The DCU's the only kind of soil in which trees like that will fruit. It is possible to see the Marvel Universe as one story, one history though. Its main virtue is the integrity, cohesion and wholeness that the DCU finds its main virtue in lacking. I'm not talking here about anything as boring as "Marvel's continuity is more linear than DC's" - that's just a side effect of what's going on here. It's a universe that grew up as a universe, rather than through the cellular fusion of vigorously frotaging narratives. There's a mechanical quality to the MU...it's like a horologist fitting together lots of little cogs and calling it a "watch", whereas the DCU is more like an artist taking a handful of little cogs, throwing them across a beach and yelling out, "I call it....THE SHORES OF FOREVER!" Obviously what I'm trying to say is something you've heard me say a good few times before...I think the DCU is a postmodern space and that the MU is a modernist object. Ihab Hassan once wrote a list of oppositions helpful in getting the whole modernism/postmodernism thing. I expect Oni's seen it around, but it's still fun having a look down it and seeing the extent to which it could be talking about the Marvel and DC universes. Modernism / Postmodernism Romanticism/Symbolism / Pataphysics/Dadaism Form (conjunctive, closed) / Antiform (disjunctive, open) Purpose / Play Design / Chance Hierarchy / Anarchy Mastery/Logos / Exhaustion/Silence Art Object/Finished Work / Process/Performance/Happening Distance / Participation Creation/Totalization / Decreation/Deconstruction Synthesis / Antithesis Presence / Absence Centering / Dispersal Genre/Boundary / Text/Intertext Semantics / Rhetoric Paradigm / Syntagm Hypotaxis / Parataxis Metaphor / Metonymy Selection / Combination Root/Depth / Rhizome/Surface Interpretation/Reading / Against Interpretation/Misreading Signified / Signifier Lisible (Readerly) / Scriptible (Writerly) Narrative/Grande Histoire / Anti-narrative/Petite Histoire Master Code / Idiolect Symptom / Desire Type / Mutant Genital/Phallic / Polymorphous/Androgynous Paranoia / Schizophrenia Origin/Cause / Difference-Differance/Trace God the Father / The Holy Ghost Metaphysics / Irony Determinacy/ Indeterminancy Transcendence / Immanence I might go through them later and see which ones fit and which don't. Or that might be your homework. |
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Oh, I think we can manage a little blacker than that.
