Musing: Do you need to know your comic book history?

Do you really need to know everything about a character’s history to enjoy one issue of that character’s book?

A lot of people I try to get into comic books complain about this; that they don’t know the back story of say… the X-Men. They have a crazily convoluted history with all kinds of twists and turns and retcons, that, yea, if you were trying to write a history book on Marvel Comics and came to X, you might have a hard time keeping everything straight.

For instance, Scott Summers was in love with Jean Grey who died after being possessed by the Phoenix Force. Scott married a woman named Madelyne Pryor who bore a creepy resemblance to Jean Grey. Scott and Maddy had a child named Nathan. As it turns out, Jean never died as the Phoenix Force only used a facsimile of her body and kept her preserved in a cocoon. Also, Madelyne was a clone of Jean Grey. That’s three Jeans! Then Nathan is sent to the future to cure a virus given to him in the present. In the future Nathan is also cloned. So that’s three Jeans and two Nathans.

More stuff happened, Madelyne became the Goblyn Queen when Scott went back to Jean, but that in no way affected my enjoyment of the latest issue of X-Men. In fact, I wasn’t even thinking of Nathan’s long and confusing lineage (his full name is Nathan Dayspring Askani'Son Summers), when I was reading about him. It wasn’t all that important at the time.

The X-Men books are, I think, at an all time high. Granted, I’ve become a sucker for the work of Mike Carey thanks to his amazing run on Ultimate Fantastic Four.

I don’t think a new reader would need to have any real understanding of the issues, the hundreds of issues, of X-Men written before Carey started his run. All you really need is a basic understanding of the characters powers and motivations, which become pretty clear as you read the comic book.

I think if you pick up a book in the middle of a story arc, then yea, you’re going to be a little bit confused, but that’s really your fault for starting a story in the middle. Due to the monthly nature of comic books it’s an easy mistake to make, but I don’t think it’s so hard to ask your comic book shop guy where the story actually started.

That right there is the end of that little essay, however, I’ll say something about trade paperbacks and how they fit in at some point in the future.

(Do you know notice how I’ve been teasing that? It’s exciting isn’t it? Makes you want to keep coming back to my blog even though I’ve been bad about updating it doesn’t it? You like the questions don’t you?)

For further reading on this subject please go to Bactroid.net and ComicFodder. They inspired this post.