Continuity in comics

I just wrote a massive comment about how I feel about continuity in comics and TV, inspired by reading The Mighty Godking's post about characters and aging in comics. And I wanted to preserve it over here. You'll probably want to read the article there before you read my comment, for context. But it's not mandatory.

I'll join the "because stories/universes that hit the big red reset button" don't tend to interest me over the medium term. I can happily watch an episode or two (or read an issue or six), but after a while I want character progression and change.

This is a grown-up thing. Kids don't need this so much, because kids are interested in the "here's a cool story about when the x-men met a mutant shark" without caring about the soap-opera elements so much. Adults care more about the changes that happen over time, and character growth. Again, not exclusively, but it matters more than it used to.

Babylon 5 broke TNG for me. Because suddenly I had a series that didn't just tell me a cool story of the week, but told me a story where people changed, and grew, and dealt with ongoing situations, and people referred to last week's episode, rather than ignoring the fact that this week's problem could be easily solved by the tech that they used to solve the week before last's.

Comics in stasis very much feel that way to me. It's great for writers that want to tell a story about version X of that character. And I think it's awesome that (for instance) Grant Morrison can write All-Star Superman. But if I was to be reading something regularly nowadays it would have continuity that mattered. And, indeed, the main thing I pick up issues of works like that - which is Powers. The last comic I bought in issue format, before I switched to trades was Lucifer, which was basically a single 75-issue story.

I prefer the way that DC handles this to the way that Marvel does. DC has a meta-storyline, which includes reboots, so that they can say "Yes, there was a version of Superman who did these things, but that was before Zero Hour/Crisis On Infinite Earths/Infinite Crisis. Now there is a new Superman with a different backstory, that allows us to tell different stories." Marvel just puts its fingers in its ears and pretends the issue isn't happening - that the current crop of superheroes always came into existence about 10-15 years before whatever year the characters are in.

Waking up slowly

Prodigy vs Enya, with a video from Tiamat (Brighter Than The Sun). It shouldn't work, but it really does.

Strange dreams this morning. I woke up at 8am, staggered to the bathroom, then back to bed, and managed to put myself back to sleep until 11-ish. Weird dreams of an Earth broken by humans, and cylons turning up to save us before it all fell apart. Today is a day of tidying and sorting. I need clean clothes for Monday, to clean up some of the stuff I've been too busy too for the last few days, and do all the other fun weekend stuff. And then off to Enthiran with octopoid_horror. While you're enjoying your Sunday afternoon off, I shall be watching this:

I think I win :->

Delicious LiveJournal Links for 10-10-2010

• Setting weird, abstract, animations to the Dr Who music really works.
  (tags: DrWho music animation)
• BBC updates linking guidelines, encourages linking to scientific journals. Nice one!
  (tags: bbc journalism science)
• Now this is a fascinating story of a journalist doing their job (and Wikipedia, by the looks of things, covering things up)
  (tags: incest wikipedia usa journalism)
• Republican congressional nominee is a Nazi re-enactor. Anyone surprised? Really?
  (tags: nazi republicans usa)
• NY Times Op Ed piece argues in favour of detention without trial.
  (tags: law usa wtf)
• Universal pulls 'gay' quote from Vaughn trailer. I wonder if it will be in the movie.
  (tags: movie trailer lgbt)
• KIF: an infocom text adventure interpreter for the kindle
  (tags: kindle amazon adventure games)

30 days after I set up bit.ly to keep stats...

In some ways, I'm somewhat boggled. That just users on Twitter, after all. And nearly 2500 clicks is a pretty big number.

On the other hand, that's less than a hundred clicks per day. From 167 "followers". So someone's not pulling their weight :->

Oh, and that includes people clicking on retweets, which is where I think the highest number of clicks come from.

"Direct" in the left-hand pie chart means "from an app that doesn't send info about what it is." The orange slice just above Twitter.com is Tweetdeck.

Benefits and Taxes

budgie_uk points out that the recent child benefit fuss isn't actually anything new.

Because taxes are applied to individuals, not households, but many benefits are means-tested the other way around - on households, not individuals.

This means that any couple where there is an earning disparity gets the worst end of the deal for both taxes and benefits.

Am I missing something, or is he? And would it make more sense for benefits and taxes to both be conducted on an individual or household basis? Or is it actually better to work them separately?

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