![]() The text is the foundation of our engagement, and if we are engaging together, it must be on equal footing. But as soon as you move to discuss the universe more broadly (including characterization) with others, canon becomes an essential component of that discussion. There’s still some wiggle room here-if you constrict your analysis to a single run, title, or issue or only converse with people who have the same boundaries as you, you may be able to get away with ignoring everything outside the boundaries you’ve set. ![]() This brings us back to the issue at hand: the ability to engage in good faith discussion with other readers about the superhero universe as a single text requires equality among readers. Implying no one reader is superior to another. I don’t think he means that readers should never bring their personal history to a text, but that there is no one ideal reader he is imagining. Barthes finishes that quote from above by saying, “but this destination can no longer be personal: the reader is a man without history, without biography, without psychology he is only that someone who holds gathered into a single field all the paths of which the text is constituted” (6). Even if we adhere strictly to Barthes, this is a change in destination, from the reader to the discussion. Where canon becomes necessary is when fans, and critics, engage in dialogue about the superhero universe. ![]() As long as your reading is just yours, you have the power to manage canon as you choose or even ignore it altogether. If you think no one’s written a decent Fantastic Four story since Stan Lee’s original run, you don’t have to give any consideration to anything that came after. If you love Gotham by Gaslight and hate everything about Scott Snyder’s Batman run, you can choose to see Gotham by Gaslight as more relevant to your reading of Bruce Wayne. The act of reading forms the text, and anyone can read in the way that most makes sense to them. In Roland Barthes famous essay, “The Death of the Author”, he argues “the reader is the very space in which are inscribed, without any being lost, all the citations a writing consists of the unity of a text is not in its origin, it is in its destination” (6). From the standpoint of personal enjoyment and emotional connection, a reader can do whatever they want. On a reader by reader basis, canon isn’t actually essential. And I’ll also try to grapple with how these issues can matter at all in a story where accessing all of canon would be a mammoth feat. Then I will address the complications of timeline inconsistencies and direct contradictions. I recognize that what published comics should be considered canon can be a tricky question, and I will make the best case I can for my own method. I intend to argue that all canon, regardless of how contradictory, must be seen as equally legitimate. Having a cohesive theory of how to consider canon is imperative to treating superhero universes as coherent texts worthy of criticism. If I’m going to dedicate the majority of this blog to talking about superhero comics, it’s crucial to lay out my approach to canon. They were created by hundreds of people across thousands of titles. The big two, Marvel and DC, are sprawling stories spanning decades of real-time. Superhero comic universes have a well-earned reputation for being confusing. Warning: reproduction and discussion of racist language
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