Shared Universes: Yay or Nay?

So....some discussions on the Marvel thread (as well as the X-men thread) have gotten me thinking about this little detail:

Shared Universes: a good thing that expands the world, or too much trouble as a whole?

I rather like the idea myself, but there are drawbacks. Right now the biggest issue are when other writers just don't want to play ball. One writer sets something up....only for another writer to ignore it to tell their story. Or something one writer does with a character in one story is contradicted by another writer in a different story.

To say nothing of when they basically ignore that they are part of a Shared Universe in the first place.

So what do you guys think? Is a Shared Universe worth it, or is better for some stories to just be in their own bubble?

Depends on the execution. If you can make different franchises bounce off each other in a way that provides intrigue I'd say go for it.

I personally don't care for it. I'm interested in specific characters, not the company as a whole. If I'm reading a Batman comic, then I just want to read a story about Batman. Not Superman, and Wonder Woman, and Green arrow. Occasional crossovers are fine, but when it becomes a regular thing, it loses its appeal (at least for me).

Another thing is the whole "power level" deal. The need to make certain charterers more powerful so they can keep up with other characters in the universe, even if they aren't part of the same series. For example, its not enough for the Flash to be really fast. He has to be faster than Superman, and a bunch of other speedster characters. Its not enough for Batman to be smart. He has to be one of the smartest people on earth to justify his presence in the justice league.

I think it would be nice to see what writers would do with these characters without having to worry about how it will affect the "universe", and just tell their own story.

I'm into it in theory, not in practice. Some characters can do wonders in a new setting. Like, Boomerang went from a lame Hulk villain to one of my favorite Spider-Man villains of all time.

In general, a shared universe gives writers more stuff to work with, but it might not always come off that way.

It's actively good for Marvel, because Marvel was built that way. Not that it isn't a problem at times, and most of the characters could exist just fine in a little canon built to their needs, but Marvel gets actual benefit from the concept.

DC...it can be good, but honestly, I think most DC characters are better off just being in their own sealed little universes. Tends to be why I am drawn to the Legion - any time that title is good, it's because it gets to be in its own little world. I hope that DC keeps up the interesting little trend of self-contained 12-issue miniseries (like Mister Miracle, Lois Lane, and Jimmy Olsen) that tell coherent stories, because that tends to be where their characters actually shine. Superman and Batman certainly didn't need the shared universe; Superman had his own complete universe by 1962, and DC could theoretically exist profitably if they published nothing but Batman and spin-offs. (Not that they should, mind.)

Edited by TheEvilDrBolty on Aug 30th 2020 at 9:26:53 AM

I don't mind shared universes, but I've come to be exasperated with another device hat commonly goes with them: "infinite" narratives. Maybe it's just because the current crop of comic guys has a lot of edgelords, but there's so much use of Happy Ending Overrides and other ways of rendering earlier stories invalid to retread the same sorts of plots over and over; this is particularly true of the X-Men. Most stories need endings, I've decided.

This is also why I'm one of the apparent minority whose favorite New 52 Author's Saving Throw was Convergence. Give the characters from the old universe a better finale and move on. Don't look back in anger.

I tend to prefer a connected universe, but not when my favorite books have to forcibly interrupt their narratives and change horses midstream because of a big crossover event. I think we can probably all agree on that.

To be clear, I'm not saying "don't mention the Big Thing that's happening in your world right now", because that'd be crazy. I'm saying I don't like it when a character's entire story never gets a resolution or they never get a chance to crawl out of a Dork Age because they just died in the Big Thing, or the universe itself died, or what have you.

Edited by DBZfan102 on Sep 6th 2020 at 9:37:39 AM

Cutting back on the big Earth shattering events would be nice.

Because the jump from "I was just getting to know these new friends and then everything was on fire and now I have a robot arm and half my friends suddenly died and there is an alien sleeping in my couch" can be pretty bad.

Yeah.

Through Bocaj's Avengers Liveblog, I've gotten the impression that Marvel was better at the Shared Universe back in the 70-80's era. They'd found their groove in terms of both stories and continuity (with maybe the X-men being the lone exception but I can't be sure if Claremont was ignoring what anyone else was doing).

I think the way to do a shared universe is to have everyone have a little piece of every book, like some alternate on writing, trading artists, etc. That way it's easy for other guys to keep track of what going on in other books, and also so that they never feel like someone is using their characters, because the all the characters are theirs or something along that line.

Wallflower.

Another unsung benefit of the low connectivity from back then: You could pretend Metropolis and Superman existed alongside the Marvel characters and not have it contradict anything. They were just having their own little adventures off to the side.

Granted, that was also largely because stories back then were not as... ambitious, shall we say, as modern ones.

Sorry for your loss.

Edited by DBZfan102 on Sep 6th 2020 at 10:35:04 AM

Bumping this up.

Still want to hear what others think.

I've been wondering if some characters might be better off in their own separate continuities for some time. Superman and Wonder Woman might be examples of such characters. Same could be said of the X-Men, Blue Marvel and the Eternals.

It might also probably good to have characters with different stories about magic in separate universe (i.e. Shazam and Constantine).