Hey, look! Somebody said something in a reply thread that rubbed me the wrong way a little bit! So now I get to reply right here in public–an absolute godsend when you’re trying to fill up a blog.
No kidding. What do you think I’m doing here?
Okay, here’s the post in question, in response to the Continuity thread:
>… But I gave you MONEY!
My approach to continuity is simple: if I’ve paid good money for an issue, I don’t want to be told 10 years later that the events I read in the comic I *paid* for should be ignored.That would be a big waste of my money, would it not?
Posted by Adrian J. Watts on 2006-06-22 01:29:15>
Adrian, I think you have the wrong idea as to what you’re buying from us.
The transaction is pretty simple: you put down your $2.99, and in return we try to entertain you for 22 pages. But that’s really all you’re entitled to. There’s absolutely no guarantee of permanence, any more than there is when you watch a television show (“Bobby Ewing’s still alive in the shower?”) or go to a movie (“You mean Superman III and Superman IV don’t count now?”)
You’re not buying permanence. You’re not buying a guarantee that nothing will ever change. And you’re buying the physical object–which WON’T ever change.
It’s entirely your personal choice whether you feel the reading experience is a waste of your money. That’s the choice that every read has to grapple with every day–and why we work so hard to make sure that it is. Same as with every other entertainment possibility available to you (“You mean TOMB RAIDER III isn’t cutting edge anymore?”) And if you read the comic and liked the comic, then you got what was promised you. And even if you read the comic and didn’t like the comic, if you got the experience of reading the comic, you got what was promised to you–it just means that you’re much less likely to buy another one thereafter.
I’ve been disagreeing with Tom for longer than anybody else working in comics today.
When you are using continuity as a selling point and then disregard it, it’s fraud. It’s not that Adrian gave you money, it’s that you offered it for sale as “the latest installment in the story”. And then you’re going back and saying, “Nope.”
I’ve blogged on this in the past, if you want, go back there. Here’s the money quote:
If the stuff is good enough to take a fan’s money, it should be good enough to count as legitimate. When you sell products that say “the continuing adventures of X”, “a prologue to Y”, or “what happened between Episodes 9 and 10”, I don’t think it’s that unreasonable that they actually BE those things. As it is, this is a marketing strategy that takes your most loyal fan base and uses them like a drug dealer uses his clients– and then cuts the smack with baking soda or rat poison, figuring they’ll never notice the difference and if they do, it’s not like they can go somewhere else, is it?
Not only is this rude, not only is this deceptive, it’s horrible marketing. Ticking off your most loyal fan base, the evangelists who keep your brand alive when others were willing to write it off as a failure and turn it into a billion-dollar powerhouse, shows a contempt and stupidity that I can’t even fathom. Most brand managers KILL for that kind of user loyalty.
And it’s not like it can’t be done. All the Matrix tie-in stuff is kept in continuity, from video games to comic books. J.K. Rowling controls the Harry Potter brand….
But it requires devotion to the brand, not one section of it. And when done properly, it enhances the brand, and all the licensees involved.
Let me use a metaphor here.
Let’s say that Major League Baseball decides to start up an additional premium digital channel with ESPN for showing Major League Baseball games. At the end of the season, it’s announced that none of the games that aired on ESPN-MLB count for league standings– and furthermore, because those games don’t count, the Yankees are now league champions instead of the Blue Jays.
Is it okay to do so because customers were willing to spend money on it, but only 2% of the viewing populace of a whole? Or should baseball fans be upset because these games were sanctioned by MLB, but now aren’t because we didn’t like the way they were going and New York is a bigger market than Toronto?
No. And in fact, MLB this year started doing the exact opposite: they took the All-Star Game, a game outside league standings– outside continuity, if you will– and said that the league that won the game would get home field advantage in the World Series. Result? Ratings for the All-Star Game went up 30%. People cared again, because it had been brought into the larger fold.
The difference is that they cared about the brand as a whole, rather than one particular part of the family. And as we all know, when you favor one family member over another too much, a lot of bad blood builds up.
Amazingly, I think Tom and I reach the same conclusion: if you toss continuity out the window willy nilly, you make it much less likely that they’re going to stick around for more. Continuity is a quality issue.