Will Comic Book Storytelling Ever Satisfy Movie Audiences?

Let’s get the repetitive, mutually agreed upon talking point out of the way early: ever since Spider-Man: No Way Home, Marvel has been at a bit of a low point. Lucky for Marvel, their lord and savior Deadpool (with his reluctant buddy, Wolverine) brought home the biggest opening, highest grossing weekend for Marvel since No Way Home back in December 2021, not to mention the highest grossing opening weekend for an R-rated movie ever.

Per Deadline, Deadpool & Wolverine currently stands at $496.3 million worldwide as of today. Has the MCU found its salvation?

It’s no denying our long-awaited mutant team-up is already an extreme success, but something I’ve found particularly interesting is the reception and discourse surrounding Deadpool & Wolverine. Both via my own inner circles and the online discourse I’ve skimmed people are pretty divided, it seems. I’ve also noticed a general frustration with the structure, many claiming it’s “not a movie” but rather a string of gags, cameos, and action positing itself as one.

I find this interesting, and don’t necessarily disagree. That being said, I saw Deadpool & Wolverine opening night with one of my oldest friends and had an absolute blast. And, to be fair—although I can agree most recent Marvel movies are middling to a mess—I’ve found something to enjoy in just about every outing since Endgame, even if the sum of the whole has been underwhelming.

Something I’ve thought a lot about over the course of the MCU that I don’t see enough discourse around is the idea of where these stories are adapted from and how they translate from the page to the screen. I’m a long-time comic book reader to date, obsessively reading everything I can, and it’s a medium I’m very passionate about. Something about comic books that’s always been true by nature is they can seem particularly tricky to break into and fully understand on a wider scope. The learning curve is overwhelming and if you aren’t in the thick of it can lead to be pretty confusing, admittedly.

Is the introduction of the multiverse too alienating for general audiences? Is there a breaking point of adaption from panel to screen? Let’s explore.

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Breaking Down Comic Book Storytelling

As mentioned, comic books can be tricky to break into.

Multiple timelines, label spanning arcs, crossover events, elseworld stories, independent labels, one-offs, team-up books, creative teams, numbering systems—comic books are messy by nature. And while that’s often part of the fun, especially if you’re an outsider looking in, it can turn into a bit of a “what the heck is all this and how do I read it?” moment. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve tried to explain a comic book storyline to a friend and realized how crazy it all is. There can be… a lot of context.

Let’s try to breakdown the basics. Starting with some terms. We love terms.

Key Terms for Understanding Comic Book Storytelling

• Flagship Titles: Proper term for main character and team titles such as X-Men, Batman, Avengers, Spider-Man, Deadpool, Wolverine, etc.
• Numbering System for Single Issues: Issue count associated with the current run of said flagship series per issue. These can get a little wonky, but (most often then not) reset when a new creative team takes over.
• Creative Teams: The top-billed writer and artist (specifically penciller) team crafting the issue. In many cases they’ll stay consistent for arcs, but sometimes entire runs for a flagship series.
• Story Arc: The issue to issue plot within a series or run (sort of like a season of TV). These typically run for five to six issues, but like everything in comics, it’s flexible.
• Mini, Maxi, and Ongoing Series: Depending on the nature of a run, this will typically indicate how long the numbering system runs. A mini series lands around a standard arc of five to six issues, a maxiseries lands around 12, and ongoing is as stated: indefinite until the issue number resets.
• Trader Paper Back: The physical collection of a story arc or maxieseries. More often than not this will be a complete story, but for ongoing series this is largely a smaller piece to the bigger picture.
• Crossover Event: When two to several (sometimes every series in the label) cross streams for a larger overarching story alternating issues from different flagship titles.
• Event Book: This is typically a certified capitol ‘B’ Big Deal comic book event that involves all the biggest characters and will shake up the status quo a bit.
• Elseworld Stories: An issue or an arc that exists as a self-contained story outside of the central timeline. This is typically in a different universe within the multiverse, but more on that later.

Basic Story Arc Structure

Say you fell in love with a certain character or superhero team and you want to start to follow a serialized series—for the sake of Deadpool & Wolverine, we’ll say X-Men. You walk into your local comic book shop and freeze. There are several different X-Men titles, all with different numbers. Where to begin?

The way that Marvel and DC (the “Big Two”, as us nerds call them) publish their superhero fare is pretty straightforward at first. It starts they have their flagship titles for individual characters and team books, and all of these more or less exist in the same timeline. Is continuity always tidy and neat? Absolutely not, but they are typically in conversation with each other. (For instance, if there is something crazy that happens in the flagship X-Men book, it will likely effect the narrative of the flagship Wolverine book in someway. If not directly, it’ll probably get a mention).

An good example of how this translates to movies is the blip—when half the world was snapped away by Thanos, the MCU movies and shows released shortly after acknowledged the fallout. Was it messily inconsistent at times? Yup! That’s comic books, baby.

Anyway, if attempting to break into a flagship series, you might be turned off or intimidated by the numbering system. “Do I have to start at #1?” is a common, totally reasonable, question. While sometimes it’s more fulfilling to start at one, it kind of depends on the flagship series you want to read. If the series is clean, then typically the number will reset along with the creative team behind the series. The creative team is writer-driven, with a singular voice guiding the arc of the character(s) through a grander narrative. If we’re lucky the lead artist will stay consistent too, but don’t count on it.

A way to translate this to the screen would be analogous to the director. For instance, think about how Thor and Thor: The Dark World looked and felt compared to Thor: Ragnarok and Thor: Love and Thunder. Once a new “creative team” took over, the story, tone, and character shifted. One could argue the first two entries are one arc, while the second two are another (although they all live in the same continuity). In comic book language, these would all likely live in the same numbering system, but you could pick up from Ragnarok and not be confused, even though it’s not a number one issue.

To break it down deeper, comic books break down their serialized storytelling in arcs. So, essentially, every issue is an entry to a larger story arc (typically five to six issues), and that arc—so long as the creative team stays the same—will build a larger story over time for the character. Arcs are then collected into trade paperbacks, cleanly giving readers a spiffy way to read if you missed (or don’t want) any single issues.

Straightforward enough? Well, buckle up. Then comes crossover events. A crossover event is when the Big Two really go for gold and mix up arcs where two flagship books will do a crossover event. In this case titles will alternate titles for a couple issues for an insular arc between them. These can be fun but are sometimes annoying and interrupt the flow of their individual titles.

Does that make sense? Sort of?

That here is the basics of general in universe comic logic. It’s already too much, but let’s get to the nerdy, controversial addition to comic book movies that’s been tripping up audiences: the introduction of the multiverse. Both a beautiful and convoluted storytelling mechanism that’s entered the mainstream with the likes of Everything, Everywhere, All At Once, and, of course, the MCU.

The Evolution of the Multiverse

So, the nerdy-as-hell idea of the multiverse has entered the general zeitgeist. It isn’t a novel concept for film and tv (remember Mr. Nobody and, more importantly, Fringe?), but it’s never quite hit the larger discourse and integrated as profoundly as it has with the MCU.

Is it working? Seemingly not so well. Audiences seem to be frustrated with it, as it deconstructs stakes and makes things a little to confusing if you’re not keeping up with the grander narrative at large. Let’s explore the history of where it came from in the source material.

Crisis on Infinite Earths and Secret Wars

Back throughout the up-and-coming development of comic book storytelling through the Golden, Silver, and Bronze Ages, things got messy. Characters and storylines were (believe it or not) all over the place more so than they are today, and following comic books was even harder to to follow than they are to date. That’s when DC introduced the game-changing event Crisis on Infinite Earths, bringing us to the Modern Age.

Written by Marv Wolfman and pencilled by George Pérez (a creative team of all creative teams), Crisis was the first big event book from the Big Two to introduce the multiverse as a mechanism to shake up the publication line in an effort to clean things up a bit. At the time, it was an extremely revolutionary idea that blended story and meta-textual ideas in a way to consolidate the central publication line in a streamlined way for readers.

Per Wikipedia (I know give me a break):

“At the start of Crisis on Infinite Earths, the Anti-Monitor (the Monitor’s evil counterpart) is unleashed on the DC Multiverse and begins to destroy the various Earths that it comprises. The Monitor tries to recruit heroes from around the Multiverse but is murdered, while Brainiac collaborates with the villains to conquer the remaining Earths. Eventually, both the heroes and villains are united by the Spectre; the series concludes with Kal-L, Superboy-Prime and Alexander Luthor Jr. defeating the Anti-Monitor and the creation of a single Earth in place of the Multiverse. Crisis on Infinite Earths is noted for its high death count; hundreds of characters died, including DC icons Kara Zor-El (the original Supergirl) and Barry Allen (the Flash of the Silver Age). The story’s events resulted in the entire DCU being rebooted, dividing the fictional universe’s timeline into “pre-Crisis” and “post-Crisis” eras.”

Essentially, it introduced the idea of otherworldly—or, rather, other universe—comic book characters that united from different timelines (universes) and consolidated the storyline so that there was a canonical reason why the publication line could move forward as a central universe. It also introduced the potential to tell off-universe stories or “elseworlds” stories that happen outside the central timeline and make sense with in canon as their own thing, in their own universe (storyline, comic book line, what have you).

Marvel responded to this with Secret Wars, the now more commonly know multiverse event series (thanks to the movies!), introducing the idea that what if these universes are at conflict with each other. Same basic concept of Crisis, but with it’s own creative spin and meta-textual goals.

This eventually lead to a genius move by Marvel in 2000 where they developed their Ultimate Universe, creating a means to tell stories in two universes simultaneously. The main Universe (616) and the Ultimate Universe (1610) allows Marvel to publish stories within two separate universes simultaneously with their own unique flavor and character intricacies. This was once again cleaned up in Marvel’s 2016 rehash of Secret Wars (written and constructed by big-time Marvel mastermind Jonathan Hickman), where they consolidated the mainline-616 Marvel timeline with the Ultimate-1610 line.

Recently Marvel re-introduced the Ultimate universe, but that’s a story for another day.

Multiversity, the Dark Multiverse, and Beyond

Considering this is comic books, after all, the books kept coming and the stories kept finding new means of needing cleanup and canonical explanation for what the heck is going on. This brought us to Grant Morrison’s introduction of Multiversity, creating a cleaner layout of the DC Multiverse with fun explanations for it like the idea of “Hyper Time” and other fun comic book terms it would take us off topic to explain.

This later lead to the idea of the Dark Multiverse introduced in in Scott Snyder’s Dark Knights: Metal series, further expanding the scope of comic book storytelling with the introduction of an inverse multiverse where all of the darkest fears of the regular-old flagship multiverse are introduced and explored, entering the main timeline.

Long story short: it’s a lot to take in. Why does this all matter for analyzing comic book storytelling and how its adapted to the movies? Let’s talk.

The “Big Corporate Comic Book” of It All

It started as, if we remember, an initiative.

Comic book movies progressed and built a universe in a natural progression that comic books initially did back in the day to a point that needed a little cleanup and meta-fueled story explanation. The MCU did a stand-up job building out a (mostly) coherent universe developing characters and in-story through lines that lead us to the impressive magnum opus of Avengers: Endgame.

But where do we go from there? Movies—much like comic books, but arguably more-so—are a product that need to keep an audience engaged and keep the larger story at large moving forward and expanding. Now that the cat is out of the bag that super hero stories have the multiverse mechanism as a tool to explain and tie things together, the corporate idea at hand is how to incorporate this into the movies.

The well-to-do big wigs are merging their comic book properties on a business level to utilize beloved characters within their newly established grander continuity, but how do we make that makes sense on the grander scale of the narrative? What about the multiverse, huh?

As frustrating and convoluted as it may seem, the multiverse works when it works. Need an in-continuity way to consolidate a wide spread history of studio buy outs and shifting actors? The multiverse is a perfect way to do so. The difference—which, maybe the greater thesis of this article—is that when it’s words and pictures on the page verses the grander implications of producing blockbusters is that it doesn’t translate as well. How do you make an expansive, overarching fantastical science fiction plot translate when you have to consider the grander film market and big money?

It’s a tricky balance. And while I’m as annoyed as the corporate greed of it all as the next guy, there is something sort of heartwarming about the big wig money people trying to incorporate comic book nerd shit into the grander narrative of how to tie the movie universes together. Is it working? Maybe not as well as we hoped. Is it cool? In my opinion? Hell yeah.

Deadpool & Wolverine tried something innovative by both trying to wrap up the Fox universe and introduce the characters to the larger MCU. It was a messy blast stripped right from the strips its writing its playbook from.

Will True Comic Book Storytelling Ever Translate in a Satisfying Way?

Deadpool & Wolverine is a certified financial success, but the discourse surrounding it makes me think a lot of the audience still isn’t quite on board with the whole comic book nonsense of it all. For instance, re-introducing Robert Downey Jr. as Dr. Doom is a total comic book move, and makes a lot of sense within the context of getting movie-goers excited for the MCU in an interesting business move.

The comic book-ness that makes comic books so fun an innovative is totally there, but its undeniable it hasn’t been executed on the same level, and that’s tricky to navigate.

Will comic book movies crash and burn with residual returns overtime? Will they break through to nail the same in-medium logic that works?

Let us know what you think, dawgs.