thinking about the importance of origins and backstory

[about_faces]

Over at Comics Alliance, one of the main writers began his positive review for the new digital comic version of Batgirl: Year One with the following words:

"I'm skeptical of origin stories, particularly ones for characters that are decades old. I mean, honestly -- who cares? Are the specifics that important? Superman is going to be the same

Comments

[ext_545621]

First of all, there’s only so many stories that can be told in this world - I mean, we’re capable of being original and inventive, but whatever brilliant storyline you tell, whether it be an epic saga spanning seven books or a flash fiction, has probably been told a hundred times before. So, it’s the details and characters that make a story engaging, rather than plot. I’d even say character is everything to good storytelling. Just for an example, I absolutely adore The Catcher in the Rye, even though practically nothing happens in the entire book and it’s a bit of a storyless story, because the characters are so engaging and you become that involved with them. I find the same with old films from the 40’s-60’s - they relied a lot more on characters whom you could engage with and had a lot more humanity to them, rather than modern films which often feel like a series of set pieces rather than stories. So, having established that to have a good story, you need good, well-written characters...

Even then, you consider how long franchises like Superman or Batman have been going, and the characters are intricately familiar to us. The Killing Joke is considered one of THE best Batman stories out there not because of epic action sequences, dramatic locations, or the quality of the art (though that is excellent), but because it did something different with the Joker, expanded on not only his “backstory” (I hesitate to call it real backstory because you don’t really know if it’s the truth or just another possibility) but the way we read him. I’d almost say characters in comic book franchises NEED revised origins, backstory, motivations, etc., or we become too familiar with them and they get just a bit boring. Am I getting this across? Three months out of education has not been kind to me, I’m struggling to form coherent sentences in writing...

Also, this is not just any medium, this is superhero comics. They don’t really ever end. That’s one point Batman Beyond had in it’s favour, actually - things like a ruined Arkham Asylum and a vegatative Mad Hatter showed that, in the DCAU at least, things weren’t always going to stay EXACTLY THE SAME FOR EVER AND EVER. Ok, maybe not exactly the same, but the main aspects stay exactly the same. Seriously, Bruce, Gotham has been down in the dirt even with your efforts for seventy years, can you not take a hint? Ahem. Where was I? Oh yeah - these stories don’t have an end point. To an extent, the characters are permanently stuck in limbo. Any changes they go through are almost always retconned or fall through (coughFacetheFacecough), so you have to develop them more subtly. While there’s only a limited amount of change you can make to their future, there’s a world of things you can do with their past. And the past is what makes us, really. Origin stories and extended backstories and all the stories that are set before present-day continuity are instrumental to fleshening out characters, tweaking their motivations, personalities, etc. And sometimes it’s small things that make all the difference, as you pointed out re Batman and whether or not he kills Joe Chill.

I have gone on for far too long; I shall now stop.