Learning From Marvel Continuum

Recently I’ve been looking at this concept of the Marvel continuum.

I’ve never been a real big fan of Marvel, I read a little of Spiderman but I’m not a big fan of its movies, on the contrary I loved Iron Man and the Avengers and Agents of Shield as well.

But it’s not about me and Marvel,

it is about the fact this concept of Marvel continuum is quite interesting for us, designers.

BTW: the idea of a continuum is not in invention of Marvel, DC comics as well has a similar concept: it is a storytelling device. Let’s dig into it.

Why do we need a continuum?

Imagine you’re a company specialized in comics. Things are going great and you grow. With you the number of stories is growing, together with characters and series you publish. Your world is that big that you start also to have characters from different stories interacting, you create a Universe. Then you have the fact that sometimes your stories are related to reality (i.e. Captain America fighting in WWII).

This implies a couple of consequences:

• First of all that you give some time reference points that automatically insert your world in a general time continuum.
• Second that you need to start taking care of consistency issue. If two characters meet each other it can’t be as if they haven’t two months later.

Relations inside fiction and between fiction and reality start to become quite complex.

One last big premise. When your story (as a comic publisher) starts to be 60 years long, you have another consistency layer: the one inside your time frame. The world changes pretty fast and you feel the urgency to keep updated (possibly without screwing all things we discussed before)

These are pretty big storytelling issues, let’s recap: consistency inside fictional world, consistency towards reality, consistency inside your (real) time frame.

(I never thought that publishing comics could have been such a stressful job)

Anyway, our mighty publisher had quite an idea to face these criticalities. They said our universe, is a multiverse. That is a universe made out of parallel dimensions. The major one is the one defined as inside the continuum. The one in which everything is consistent. The other ones are out of continuum and allow whatever to happen. The famous “What if” series are a good example of that.

Pretty smart, uh? They even invented a crossover of the two main multiverses: Marvel and DC ones. This would be a fourth level of consistency, the market one.

Let’s jump to today now. Our mighty publishers are even more prosperous today. They expanded a lot, they colonized other media than paper.

They started with the web, where plenty of communities flourished around their stories. These were the ‘90s, in which mainly bottom-up initiatives were carried on by the public. But we prefer to focus on what happens since the 00s. Then they had movies, a lot of movies, series of movies. Then they had Series (and will have more!)

Every product happens in a certain moment in time and generates a buzz around it that lasts lot longer.

Moreover, buzz and social interaction are a continuous and independent system.

This is changing a lot the way we relate to fictional content. Before, publisher had the control over continuum as they were deciding when to publish something. Plus they were publishing it in a world in which speed for news to spread wasn’t real-time. Now they release content, in a system that is based on a different temporality and is independent from them. Think how the concept of spoiler changes.

Now you have comics aside of movies that are delivering to a general public (billions) things that are quite old for the comics. Then you have The Avengers movie happening between Iron Man 2 and 3. Marvel Agents of Shield starts after The Avengers and 2/3 of first season Captain America: the winter soldier happens, Avengers 2 is forthcoming while Guardians of the Galaxy fight same villains of Avengers and so on. All of that — in social media era.

The question is — what happens to continuum issues in a transmedial environment?

I think that a key to understand this is to change perspective. We’ve been taking the publisher’s one so far. Now I’d move to the audience one. What before was a one-to-many relation turns into a many-to-many experience. As I don’t like the term “experience” I’d say that is about rituals. We move from an absolute continuum to a personal one. Let’s try to understand how it works.

In general we have the publisher releasing a content in reality. Then there’s a whole bunch of people dealing with this content. It is a matter of fact that is impossible that everybody get everything at the same time. We thus enter here in a system based on personal rituals interacting differently between each other.

Two big points emerge:

• First is: is it still about knowledge? 25 years ago it really mattered a lot who killed Laura Palmer. Today I have the feeling that for quite a lot of people it is more about experiencing rather than knowing.
• Second is: in such a complex, transmedial and real-time system, which is the expiry date of an information? Is there a no-spoiler bubble in which we can live a certain time in order to get updated without being spoiled? Does it really matter or is it more like being part of a collectively aware continuum?

And the main problem — how do we design for this new storytelling environment? (stay tuned for that!;)