In Spider-Man: No Way Home, Peter Parker encounters Doctor Octopus and the Green Goblin...

In Spider-Man: No Way Home the Peter Parker of the Marvel Cinematic Universe encounters Doctor Octopus and the Green Goblin. And Sandman and Electro. And the Lizard. And possibly someone else so lacklustre that I have already forgotten them. And then he encounters two other heroes named Spider-Man. They are presented as characters from elsewhere in the multiverse. But everyone knows what they really are: characters from elsewhere in the franchise. Characters from other movies.

If the Peter Parker of the Marvel Cinematic Universe can meet the Peter Parkers from the previous films, does it follow that the Peter Parkers from the previous films have acquired a new kind of fictional reality? Or does it follow that the M.C.U.P.P is just a character in a movie? 

In the beginning, there was no Marvel Cinematic Universe. There was the X-Men (2000), a very good film about a team of super-powerful beings. There was the Fantastic Four (2005), a not very good film about a team of super-powerful beings. (There was another attempt to make the Fantastic Four in 2015, which was also not very good.) There was Hulk (2003), a weird, art-house interpretation of a big green superpowerful being, directed by Ang Lee. (You wouldn't like me when I'm Ang Lee.)

There was no suggestion of a shared universe. Indeed, one of the things which made sense about the X-Men was that Mutants were presented as the only super-powerful beings on earth: not merely a sub-class of superdude. It hadn't crossed anyone's mind that the unique selling point of Marvel Comics might also be the unique selling point of Marvel Movies.

The first Spider-Man movie, imaginatively called Spider-Man, came out in 2002 and said pretty much everything that there was to say about the character. The second -- given the equally imaginative title Spider-Man 2 -- said it all again, only in a rather more depressing tone of voice. Spider-Man 3, the one with the black costume, went down so well that they had to rebooted the franchise, meaning that mainstream audiences had to go through the whole not-saving-Uncle-Ben's-life thing for the second time in ten years. Andrew Garfield was less nerdy than Toby Maguire, but got more of a chance to do Spider-Man's sarcastic repartee. His second film was even more depressing than Toby Maguire's. It tried to end on an upbeat note -- Parker comes to terms with the death-of-Gwen and resumed the hero trade -- but the second spider-cycle lurched to a halt after only two movies.

Superheroes last forever, but not so young actors. Ten years is a long time for an actor to stay in one role; but three movies is not very much screen time in which to represent decades and decades of Spider-Man comics.

Sometime around 2008, the penny dropped. It may have helped that Iron Man was a character who people outside the insular world of comics had not heard of, and that the first Iron Man movie was very good indeed. It also helped that the big paradigm shift happened in a post cred and could be ignored if you wanted to. Samuel L Jackson turned up at the end of Iron Man 1 to tell Tony Stark about the Avengers Initiative; and Tony Stark and Nick Fury both turn up at the end of The Incredible Hulk; and Iron Man 2 ends with the discovery of Thor's hammer. Comic book fans jumped up and down with anticipation; and mainstream audiences were tentatively introduced to the idea that the heroes of Hulk, Iron Man, Captain America and Thor could all come crashing together in a huge Avengers shaped mash up. It worked so well that "trying to create another franchise like the Marvel Cinematic Universe" has become the holy grail of commercial cinema. Snyder wants to do it to the Justice League; Russell Davies wants to do it to Doctor Who; She Who Must Not Be Named want to do it to Harry Potter. Only Star Wars has come anywhere near it; and Star Wars was a universe before it was a series of films.

Tom Holland swung into the Marvel Cinematic Universe in Avengers: Civil War (2016); the third reboot in fourteen years. There had obviously been some serious soul-searching about how to put Spider-Man into the vast Marvel Universe Phase Three meta-movie. If you are trying to sum up who Spider-Man is "He's a super-hero...but he's still in High School" is not a bad way of doing it. That was, after all, the essence of the Ultimate Spider-Man reboot.

Indeed, quite a lot of the Miles Morales characterisation bled over into this new Peter Parker. In the comic book, Ned Leeds is, in order, a Bugle reporter, Peter's rival for the affections of Betty, a supervillain and dead. His namesake in the M.C.U is a close friend and contemporary of Peter Parker who bears more than a passing resemblance to Miles Morales' close friend and contemporary, Gank Lee. Peter's red haired lover is Michelle, not Mary Jane, but she is sometimes called EmJay to confuse us.

Maguire and Garfield began their stories as high-school students but rapidly grew-up; Holland is coded as "young" throughout his tenure, and the M.C.U Spider-Movies are presented as High School rom-coms. The first one, Homecoming, is focussed on old reliable, the High School Prom.

It would have been unkind to make audiences sit through Spider-Man's entire twist-ending morality play of an origin story for a third time, and the arrival of Peter Parker as a red, blue and webby fait accompli was a great cinematic moment. But the apparent excision of Uncle Ben from the mythos raised a few eyebrows. (And by raised eyebrows I mean "Waa-waa-waa #notmyspider you raped my childhood.") To a great extent, Tony Stark took over the mentor role, gifting Parker with a bells-and-whistles Iron Man inspired Spider-Costume. The first movie was more focussed on Parker learning to drive his Iron-Spider-Man costume than on his actual Spider-Powers. I couldn't blame it for this: Kid Iron Man is by no means a bad premise for a story. The idea of a character with a powerful set of super-heroic hardware that he hasn't learned how to drive put me in mind of the criminally underrated 1991 Rocketeer movie. But some people understandably thought that it wasn't quite the Spider-Man they had known and loved.

The previous five movies had promiscuously burned their way through Spider-Man's back catalogue of villains: the Goblin, Doctor Octopus, Sandman, the Lizard, Electro, Venom and even the Rhino, leaving Tom Holland to face off against barely recognisable versions of the Vulture and Mysterio. One way or the other, the Goblin and the Octopus, at least, were going to have to be brought into the continuity. Spidey without Doc Ock is like Sherlock Holmes without the Daleks.

The obvious casting choice to play Doctor Octopus was Alfred Molina, who had memorably appeared in Spider-Man 2 in the role of....Doctor Octopus. And since the audience had already accepted Willem Dafoe as the Green Goblin -- and since no one does barking mad insane like William Dafoe -- why not get William Dafoe to reprise his role as the Green Goblin as well. (He, that is to say the Green Goblin, was dead the last time we saw him, but that can be got round. No-one dies forever except Bucky.) In fact, why not go for a full on supervillain reunion? But if you haven't bothered to tell the audience how Peter Parker came to be swinging around new York on a thread; why waste their time on a series of Just So stories for what are definitely not going to be called the Sinister Six. ("How Doctor Octopus got his arms." "How the the Goblin got his gob.") Why not take them for granted too? Why not, in fact, take "bring Doctor Octopus into the Marvel Cinematic Universe" literally?

I don't know whether it was the success of Into the Spider-Verse that made the franchise masters decide that the time was right for there to be multiple live action Spider-People. With the Thanos Saga out of the way, the Marvel Universe had to go somewhere, and replacing the big purple guy with Kang the Conquerer or Galactus would feel like more of the same. (They are also big and purple, come to think of it.) So a sideways move into What Iffery may have been a conscious change of direction for Marvel Universe Phase Seven, Eight and Nine.

But then comes the fatal step. There had been a half-warmed plan to have Tobey Maguire voice Peter B. Parker in Into The Spiderverse. If there are other world's with Alfred Molina's Doc Ock and Willem Dafoe's Goblin living on them; then the idea of the Three Spiders becomes overwhelming.

From 2000 to about 2008, the Marvel Movies were Just Stories: each series locked off in its own separate world. From 2008 to 2022, every movie was connected with every other movie. No Way Home appears to offer us the opportunity to have our cake and eat it. Toby Maguire's Spider-Man is not part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but he is not not part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, either. It is one thing to imagine how Admiral Thrawn, or Mara Jade, or Jaxxon the Giant Green Bounty Hunter Rabbit might be written into the primary Star Wars universe as characters. It is a very different thing to say "Itchy and Lumpy have crossed over into the Mandalorian from a parallel universe where the special effects aren't as good and people burst out singing for no readily apparent reason.

There is a nice scene in a No Direction Home involving a blind lawyer. The blind lawyer did come from a different part of the franchise; but he did not come from a different universe. The Netfux TV shows regarded themselves as taking place in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Characters are aware that New York has been invaded by aliens; there is a reference to a big green monster; and Luke Cage is described as being like a black Captain America. (This was before Captain America was black.) The brief cameo by Matt Murdoch confirms that the movies regard the TV shows as "canon".

Daredevil appearing, however tangentially, in Spider-Man is fun, because it opens the possibility, however remote, that Spider-Man and Daredevil could meet up and go on an adventure together. But from the fan point of view, it's importance is that it give us permission to suppose that Daredevil and Jessica Jones and Iron Fist and Luke Cage and the Punisher all happened in the same world as Far From Home and Endgame. It expands the great story; it pastes new material into the meta-text.

A story involving Spider-Man and Daredevil could be a lot of fun because they both live in the same city; fight the same kinds of villains; but have a different approach. Peter Parker vs the Hand would be interesting because at one level he would be out of his depth -- he's a kid, they're born again Ninja -- and from another point of view they are small fry to someone who helped defeat Thanos. But even if that never happens, Daredevil, and all those TV shows, have been afforded Secondary Reality.

Also it's cool and made me smile. 

But the appearance of Charlie Cox is a different kind of thing to the appearances of Andrew Garfield or Toby Maguire.

When the voice of David Hyde Pierce appeared opposite the voice of Kelsey Gramer in a 1997 episode of the Simpsons, the story was entitled "The Brother From Another Series" -- an in-joke on at least three levels. When Evan Peters turns up as Quicksilver in WandaVision, we are presumed to know that he played the character in the X-Men series, even though the same character is played by Aaron Johnson in the Avengers. (The story works fine if you don't know that.) The arrival of Doctor Octopus and the Green Goblin is a metajoke on the same level. From Peter's point of view, these are just villains from some weird other universe. From our point of view they are Villains From a Different Franchise.

NOTE: Tom Holland is the young man who plays Spider-Man in the Marvel Universe. Tom Hollander is the older man who plays the vicar in the remarkable Rev. I think there is probably a multi-universe crossover to be written in which Tom Holland and Tom Hollander come face to face with Tom Hollandest.

If you have enjoyed this essay, please consider supporting me on Patreon.

If you don't want to commit to monthly payments, please consider making a one-off payment on Ko-FI. 

I would have been perfectly happy for Ultimate Spider-Man to have remained a story...

I would have been perfectly happy for Ultimate Spider-Man to have remained a story. I would have been perfectly happy for it to have remained in its own, hermitically sealed conceptual space with no wormholes or passages connecting it to any other Spider-Man, living or dead. Ultimate Spider-Man was obviously and utterly dependent on the Ditko/Romita/Lee comic books; retelling them, riffing on them, creating a new thing out of them; a story about a story. A meeting between the Brian Bendis Spider-Man and the Stan Lee Spider-Man would have felt like a category mistake: like Pooh winking at the audience and the little boy from the Princess Bride being taught fencing by Inigo Montaya. 

It's not so much "comparing apples with oranges" as "thinking you can take a cubist pastel rendering of a bowl of oranges and make marmalade with it".

A Picasso is as good a thing as a jar of Golden Shred. Maybe even better. And you could imagine Picasso taking his still-life fruit bowl and using it as the first frame of a comic strip about nude marmalade making. But what you'd have at the end is still a picture of a jar of marmalade. In a square jar, very probably. You can't spread it on your toast. Although you can draw a picture of yourself spreading it on a piece of toast. You can even draw a picture of yourself drawing the picture.

This is not a pipe. And this is not a pipe. And even this is not a pipe is not a pipe....

Help. I am stuck in an infinite

Ultimate Spider-Man took the old Spider-Man stories -- in truth, took fan memory of the old Spider-Man stories -- and asked "How would we tell those stories if we were telling them for the first time today?" -- where today meant "On or about the turn of the Millennium." So, Peter Parker -- married twenty-something going on thirty something  -- reverts to being 15. Aunt May, permanently at death's door now looks old enough to be his Mother's sister, i.e, not very. While Peter Parker works as a freelance crime photographer the Ultimate version works part time for J.J.J as a web-designer. Ho-ho. The magic pixie dust which infected the Spider which empowered the high school student was genetic modification rather than radioactivity; and it was part of a deliberate experiment by Norman Osborn. The powers that be, in the shape of Nick Fury, take an interest in the young, amateur superhero from the beginning. He ends up dating Kitty Pryde. Several of these ideas were borrowed for the 2002 Spider-Man movie.

But, obviously, the story was not being told for the first time; and vanishingly few readers were reading it for the first time. It generated meaning and significance through intertextuality. It relied on our memories of those older, primary, and some of us still thought, real comic books. When someone called Gwen turns up, we readers have an inkling that she may come to a bad end. When Peter and MJ make out for the first time, she exclaims "Face it tiger, you just hit the jackpot" and everyone in reader-land smiles wryly.

Probably. It doesn't matter if they don't: the story makes sense anyway. 

If we were still talking about fan fiction, which thank Galactus we are not, we would ask whether "fan- fiction" ever meant anything more than "a story about another story". We could then wonder out loud if all stories are about other stories; and if it therefore follows that everything is fan-fiction, even if when isn't.

Ultimate X-Men and Ultimate Fantastic Four were never quite so good. The X-book was only superficially distinguishable from the mainstream X-books, and the F.F book was a perfectly good science fiction story which didn't have a great deal to do with the source-text. But the Ultimates, a team consisting of (stop me if you've heard this before) Captain America, Thor, Iron Man and Ant Man was enjoyably extreme, and exerted considerable influence over the cinematic Avengers. Before Ultimates, Nick Fury was a cigar smoking white guy from New York; after Ultimates, he was irrevocably Samuel L Jackson. But Ultimate Captain America was a gung-ho nutcase, and all the more fun because of it. ("Surrender? Do you think this A on my helmet stands for FRANCE?")

Around the time of the one hundred and fiftieth issue of Ultimate Spider-Man, writer Bendis had the bright idea of killing Peter Parker and replacing him with a new spider-enhanced teenager. It was a clever, back-to-basics move. Ultimate Spider-Man started out trying to be more like Spider-Man than Spider-Man: dropping decades of clones, dead relatives and resurrected super-villains, and taking us back to a contemporary character who we nevertheless still recognise as Stan and Steve's 1960s ubernerd. But a decade of Ultimate stories (none of which were dreams or imaginary tales) left us with a Peter Parker who was equally recognisable as the original Spidey.

That's how stories work. Either stuff happens, or else nothing happens. Either the hero changes, or he stays the same. Umberto Eco, yes that Umberto Eco, thought this was where the whole idea of Imaginary Stories came from: a way of allowing Superman to both change and not change at the same time. 

The Death of Spider-Man gave Peter Parker closure; and wound us back to the core idea of Spider-Man. A very young lad; still in high school, lumbered with powers he never chose, doing his best to be a superhero but screwing up all the time. The new incumbent, Milers Morales, came from an Hispanic background, which made racists very cross indeed.

For me, this stuff worked because Ultimate Spider-Man was, well, an Imaginary Tale. If the Marvel Universe Spider-Man, as created by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko were to have been killed off -- well, it might make a good story, but you would know -- absolutely know -- that next month or next year or possibly the year after, the original character would be restored to life and everything would carry on as before. No-one dies forever except Bucky. Ultimate Peter Parker could drop dead because, ultimately, he's not real and it doesn't matter. This brought a playful naughtiness into the proceedings, as if the writers were saying "Let's see if we can get away with doing things to these characters that we could never do to them in real life." When New York gets flooded due to the evil actions of Magneto, Spider-Man stays behind to help survivors. When J.Jonah Jameson witnesses this, he realises he's been wrong all these years, and becomes as obsessed with boosting Spidey as a hero as he had been in denigrating him as a menace.

But Ultimate Spider-Man could not remain a story.

In 2012, a perfectly nice story called "Spider-Men" happened, with the Miles Morales version of the character dimension-hopping and meeting up with the original Peter Parker. At that moment, we had to stop thinking of Ultimate Spider-Man as "a story about a story" and start thinking of it as "a different part of the multiverse". 

Fans sometimes refer to the Marvel Universe by Alan Moore's 616 designation; although this terminology is reportedly not much liked inside the camp. According to this nomenclature, the Ultimate Universe is apparently Earth-1610. Some of the other worlds have been given phone numbers: the world in which Spider-Man joined the Fantastic Four is apparently Earth-772.

And in 2015, Marvel succumbed to the inevitable. It did what DC had done thirty years earlier. It rebooted the universe. Earth-616 and Earth-1610 crashed together, destroying both, and creating a new setting, an amalgamation of their respective good parts. Miles Morales ended up in the same universe as Peter Parker. This was probably a bad idea. But it led, indirectly, to the Best Spider-Man movie and very probably the best superhero movie.

Into the Spider-Verse had one huge advantage over the three live-action essays. The common herd had never heard of Miles Morales: there was no baggage. The movie had to sell Miles Morales to a general audience as a character. It couldn't rely on our familiarity with the tale. On the other hand, there was no danger of anyone saying "Oh, god, not that Uncle Ben thing, again, again." Sam Raimi's Peter Parker had to some extent been the very famous and archetypal Peter Parker with his own theme tune and tee-shirt. Miles Morales was just some kid. 

Which was the original point of Spider-Man: the Hero Who Could Be You.

The movie had to sell non-comic book audiences on the idea that there could be more than one Spider-Man; and many critics must have been perplexed by the hoodie-wearing-hero on some of the posters. In the comic books, Miles' extra-dimensional origins were a matter of narrative necessity: he was a character from a discontinued line of comic books. In the animated movie, his status as "the Spider-Man from another universe"  became his unique selling point. The movie persuades us that there could be two different Spider-Men by offering us eight. But it also spends an inordinate amount of time just showing us Miles being Miles; his parents, his uncle, his graffiti, his awkward first day at the gifted school. He starts out as a viewpoint character in a universe where Spider-Man is real. We are offered a quite shameless piece of wish fulfilment -- fan-boy meets hero -- and follows it up with a cruel tragedy -- fan boys sees hero die. "Fan-boy tries to take hero's place" and "Fan-boy is not very good it at" follow quite naturally. We are still processing all this when we work out that the dead Spider-Man, the red-haired Spider-Man is not our Spider-Man. He is, if anything, Ultimate Spider-Man, with a young, understanding Auntie and a Spider-Cave full of Spider-Suits. At which point the idea of the Spider-verse is made explicit: the other Peter Parker, our Peter Parker, appears in Miles-world. 

Except it isn't the Peter Parker we know. It's an overweight, drop-out Peter B Parker who has quit Spidering.

At which point, all bets are off, and we are given lady Spider-Gwens, manga Spider-Droids and a very silly black and white film noir Spider-Rorschach. And yet the focus of the film remains resolutely on the character of Miles Morales: how he gains the confidence to be a hero in his own right. By the time all the other Spiders go back to their correct times and places we have accepted that different universes have their own web-spinner, and Miles has got as much right to take up the mantel as anyone else.

The different versions of Spider-Man are not presented as What Ifs... There is no single moment of choice which could have resulted in Miles Morales turning into an anthropomorphic pig. They aren't Imaginary Stories either -- they have autonomous reality and make sense on their own terms. There isn't much sense that the same Being appears in different forms in different times and place. No-one has read the Spider With A Thousand Faces. Miles Morales is not an avatar of the Eternal Spider.  There just happen to be different Spider-Men who are similar in some ways and different in others. 

I think that even the most the casual film goer can see that Spider-Ham and Spider-Man Noir (at least) are literary takes on the character: different ways of telling the story.  Not "Peter Parker as he could have turned out if things had been different" but "Spider-Man as he might have been imagined in a 1930s pulp novella" and "Spider-Man as he might have been imagined in a 1950s Warner Brothers Toon". 

Peter Porker is not a cartoon character. Or, at any rate, he is a cartoon character; but he comes from a different universe which functions according to cartoon logic. Spider-Man-Noire is not a character from a black and white movie. He comes from universe where colour literally does not exist. Characters who are logically "just stories" are autonomous beings who can interact with the flesh and blood Miles. But then Miles himself started out being "just a story" and might have remained so. "All stories are true" is now a logic according to which the universe functions. 

Peter Porker looks like a cartoon. But despite a lot of metafictional pyrotechnics in the actual animation, Morales himself never feels like a comic book character. He feels like a young lad in the real world who is finding out what great power comes with. 

If you have enjoyed this essay, please consider supporting me on Patreon.

If you don't want to commit to monthly payments, please consider making a one-off payment on Ko-FI. 

If stories are only valuable if they are Pretend-Real; and if one particular Author(ity) has the power to say which stories are Pretend-Real and which are not -- then it is quite reasonable for fans to feel sad or aggrieved when the Author(ity) suddenly changes his mind.

If stories are only valuable if they are Pretend-Real; and if one particular Author(ity) has the power to say which stories are Pretend-Real and which are not -- then it is quite reasonable for fans to feel sad or aggrieved when that Author(ity) suddenly changes his mind. (His mind. I think canon-keepers are probably male. I think the canon is probably a patriarchal construct.) The reader has spent a decade reading stories in one particular way: she is suddenly presented with a Disney Encyclical telling her that she has to start reading those same stories in a different way -- a way, which for her, deprives the stories of their purpose and point.

"You are no longer allowed to treat these texts as news and information from a secondary world. From next Tuesday, you have to treat them as being stories. And what is worse, on the following Wednesday we are going to start issuing new and completely different texts, and you are to rebuild the secondary world in their image."

So, it is not very surprising that some Star Wars fans were quite genuinely sad when Disney announced that all the novels and comics and computer games set after Return of the Jedi would be, for the purposes of Star Wars VII, VIII and IX, non-canonical. The much reviled prequel trilogy was still canon; but the widely enjoyed Heir to the Empire novels were not. You could still read them if you wanted to, but you could not read them to learn about the Star Wars universe. They had been re-designated as “legends”. I think a legend is probably the same thing as an imaginary story. If you want to call them fan-fiction, I certainly cannot stop you.

No high-budget mass-market reboot of the Star Wars franchise was ever going to be an adaptation of a twenty-five year-old spin-off novel. But some fans honestly couldn't conceive of it being anything else. They weren't saying "Heir to the Empire is a really good novel. We would have liked to have seen it realised on the Big Screen with Big Screen Special Effects. We are disappointed that Admiral Thrawn has been replaced by General Hux." That would have been a perfectly reasonable thing to say. I myself think that Galactus is a really good supervillain. I would have liked to have seen him realised on the big screen with big screen special effects. I was disappointed that the second Fantastic Four movie decided to replace him with a big cloud of purple smog.

But I think that the Star Wars Expanded Universe fans were saying something different. I think that they were committed to Star Wars as a saga with a fixed an immutable history. I think that they thought of the Star Wars universe as a collection of facts, not a collection of stories. A film in which Luke Skywalker doesn't marry a bounty hunter and become a dark side disciple of the Emperor's clone (*) is no longer a Star Wars film; in the same way that a book about Neville Chamberlain leading an Anglo-Japanese alliance against the communist Americans is no longer a book about the Second World War. Ye canna change the facts of history any more than ye can change the laws of physics.

Plus it had girls and black people in it. That made some Star Wars fans very cross as well. (**)

“All the time I spent reading those books was wasted, because some exec in America has announced that they didn’t really happen.” I literally heard a man say that in Forbidden Planet.

I was tempted to mutter "...but then, aren't they all..." . Or perhaps point him to Douglas Adams riff about Lalaffa the poet. The books are exactly the same as they always were, so what’s the difference?

I wonder if he was the same man who told me, all those years ago, that the Phantom Menace had raped his childhood all those years ago?

*

There is a solution. It’s a very good solution, and it seems fun for a few minutes, but if you are not very careful, it ends up ruining everything.

We have agreed that, in Doctor Who and Star Trek and Marvel and DC Comics there are allowed to be parallel worlds in which the Brigadier has an eyepatch; Captain Kirk is a fascist and Uncle Ben never died. These parallel worlds are part of the secondary reality: the Watcher can observe them; and the Flash can open a wormhole between them. The Justice League and the Justice Society can have get-togethers on a regular basis; and Marvel/DC crossovers are not out of the question. So why can we not say that the Star Wars "legends" are part of a branching timeline; one more strand of the infinite multiverse?

Wouldn't that be fun?

Instead of complaining about the despoiling of the canon, why not look forward to the moment when Ben Solo (son of Leia and Han) slips through a wormhole and meets up with Ben Skywalker (son of Luke and Mara).

Several Hon Members: "Mara? Who the hell is Mara?"

*

Great Stories can be told and retold in lots of different ways. I came up with five different fictional Mary Shellys without trying. I ran out of fingers before I ran out of Robins Hood (***). No sooner had the idea of Superman been thought of than there was a Superman comic book (1938) a Superman newspaper strip (1939) a Superman radio show (1940) and a Superman cartoon (1941). They didn't form one big story. Hell, the comic book wasn't even that consistent with itself. No-one felt the need to explain why Superman leaped tall buildings in the Action Comic, but flew above them in the Cartoon; or why Superman’s existence is a secret on the Radio but public knowledge in the Comic. They were different stories; or the same story told in different ways.

When I was very small indeed I could already see that the TV Wombles were different from the Book Wombles and different again from the Wombles that appeared each week in Playland comic (which was way too babyish for me in any case.)

So: why not take the final, fatal step.

Box Three stories are the only true stories.

Box Four stories are essentially without value.

But if a Box Three reality can contain multiple versions of itself then it doth follow as the night the day that no box Four Story need ever exist. Put everything in Box Three and call it a parallel world.

Nothing is only a story.

Everything really happened.

The Superman who appears on the Radio is part of the same reality as the Superman who appeared in the comic, but exists in a different strand of the multiverse.

Evaluative criticism can be dispensed with; all that is left is endless Watsonian scholarship.

“My comic book is about the really really real Batman; the dark, tragic vigilante who fights terrifying, psychotic enemies. Your dumb TV show is just some pretend parody of ther Batman with zaps and kapows and lame villains that some jerk made up out of his head."

“No, on the contrary, my TV Batman is as epistemologically real as yours, he merely happens to exist in a different one of the myriad realities that make up the DC universe....”

“So how come you can literally see the sound effects, huh?”

“Interesting. We must investigate how sound and vision function on the plane known as Earth TV.”

It seems to me that even if it is happening on a parallel world, the TV Batman is still pretty dumb; but if you found it fun and clever then you can carry on finding it fun and clever even if it's just a story some fella made up.

But, you know.

Okay.

Fair enough.

If it helps, it helps.

Whatever gets you through the dark knight.

Superman on the Radio comes from an actually existing parallel world called Earth-R.

Superman on the TV comes from an actually existing parallel world called Earth-TV.

Superman on the packet of cornflakes comes from an actually existing parallel world called Earth-Kellogg.

And there is no reason on Earth-Prime why one day they shouldn't all meet up and have a reunion. Radio Superman punching people on the chin and attending church; Silver Age Superman retreating to his clubhouse with his super friends and super pets; post-Crisis-John-Byrne-Yuppie-Superman locking phantom zoners in death chambers with black Kryptonite...

Alan Moore said that all stories were true. I think he really meant that no story was true. Tash is no more than Aslan. More than once he imagined dream-time cities populated by every possible version of Superman and every possible version of Captain Britain. It was Alan Moore who first decided that the primary Marvel Universe, the one which isn't a parallel or a What If... should be called Earth-616.

And this is essentially what Spider-Man: No Way Home has done. It has taken a weird copyright muddle and turned it into a cosmological principle.

(*) He gets better

(**) And some of them just didn't think it was very good.

(***) Walter Scott

T.H White

Erol Flynn

Richard Green

the chap in tights I saw in Babes in the Wood at the Intimate when I was ten,

the Clannad One

the Kevin Costner one,

that Other One Which Came Out At The Same Time as the Kevin Costner One

the Sean Connery One Where He’s Old

the Serious 1970s BBC One That I’d Like To See Again If It’s Ever On Britbox

the Russel Crowe One I Didn’t See

the More Recent BBC One Which Wasn’t Very Good

the One in the Spires and Boden Song

the one Huw Lupton does as performance piece

the Silent Douglas Fairbanks One

the Spoof With One With the Guy From Princess Bride

the Disney One Where He is a Fox

that Time They Did It On The Muppets

the New BBC One I keep seeing trailers for

the very old lost TV one with Patrick Troughton

the Tony Robinson Maid Marion One

If you have enjoyed this essay, please consider supporting me on Patreon.

If you don't want to commit to monthly payments, please consider making a one-off payment on Ko-FI. 

More than one person has told me that they like Star Wars but that they don't like "the fan fiction"....

More than one person has told me that they like Star Wars but that they don't like "the fan fiction".

They mean that they like the Trilogy but not the Prequels; or that they like Episodes I - VI but not Episodes VII, VIII and IX; or that they like the movies but not the cartoons, or that they think the Mandalorian contains too many inside references for its own damn good.

One old friend in the Twittersphere says that there is only one Star Wars film ("it is called Star Wars") and that everything else is fan fiction.

Well, from a critical point of view, this is not a million miles away from my own position. The 1977 movie "Star Wars" -- the one now known as Episode IV, A New Hope -- had a unique flavour, and nothing since has come anywhere near recapturing that flavour. As Star Wars critic and theorist Andrew Rilstone once said, the Empire Strikes Back doesn't extend the Star Wars Universe; but it is just about possible to retrofit Star Wars into the universe created in Empire Strikes Back.

But "everything else is fan fiction" is a really, really odd way of expressing that thought.

"The Book of Boba Fett is fan-fic" is a snarky way of saying "The Book of Boba Fett is not canon". Which, in the first place, isn't true. And in the second place, is unnecessarily demeaning to the folk who actually read and enjoy fan fiction.  And in the third place -- well, why does it matter if it is canon or not?

Sometimes, when I watch Star Wars -- a New Hope -- I choose to watch it as if it was a stand alone fairy tale set in space. As if Obi-Wan told the truth, and Darth Vader really murdered Luke's father. As if there was nothing incestuous about Luke and Leia's kiss.

 

You might say that I am pretending that no such movie as The Empire Strikes Back was ever made. You might say that it does exist as an artefact, but that it didn't really happen. That it doesn't have secondary reality. That it is only a story. That is belongs in Box Four. 

Or, if you absolutely insist, that it is fan fiction.

Sometimes when I watch Star Wars Episode IV I choose to watch it as if it were one component of a vast space saga stretching from The High Republic to the Rise of Skywalker and beyond. I like that kind of thing: Dune and the New Gods and the Thanos saga. Star Wars is bigger and more fun than any of them. In which case you might say that I am treating The Empire Strikes Back (and the Force Awakens, and all hundred and something episodes of the Clone Wars, and all fifty something issues of Doctor Aphra) as if it were canonical. As if it "really happened"; as secondary reality; and belongs in Box Three.

I suppose most of the time we hold both readings in our head. Obi-Wan is both lying and telling the truth; Leia is both Luke's lover and Luke's sister. See Threepio is both a droid and a man in an uncomfortable metal suit. The desert is both on Tatooine and in Tunisia. Wherever you go in the universe, there is a loud orchestra playing, but Luke and Han and Leia don't seem to be able to hear it.

I don't see how any of this is clarified by saying "fan fiction".

You could take the line that the only Star Wars Universe is the one George Lucas created. J.J Abrams ideas about how Han and Leia's marriage turned out and what they named their son has the same status as a piece of Han/Leia erotica on a Star Wars word-press blog. (Tash is no more than Aslan.) 

That would be an intelligible approach. I believe that fans of the Other Franchise used to say that only episodes Gene Roddenbury had a direct hand in were canonical. 

I myself am sometimes inclined to think that the first decade of Marvel Comics -- say from 1962 to 1973 -- are the only "real" Marvel comics. The primary text is the text that Stan Lee directly created; everything else is other writers riffing on his material. Some of them were very good writers; some of them produced very good riffs. But none of them was Stan Lee. But on this definition it would be deeply odd to say that The Phantom Menace, Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith -- three films over which Lucas had complete artistic control -- are "only fan-fic". Fan-fic is pretty much the opposite of what they are. The Clone Wars TV series is probably as close as we can get to George Lucas's original, unadulterated vision of how he wanted Star Wars to be. The true identity of Luke's father wasn't in George's original notebook: but the Midichlorians decidedly were. 

Is Attack of the Clones a good movie? No, it is not. 

Is Attack of the Clones a good Star Wars movie? No, it is not. 

Do I think that Anakin's massacre of the Sand People is going to be a major plot point in the forthcoming Tatooine-set Obi-Wan TV show? Yes, I do.

Okay then. You could simply say that you really liked the prologue to Return of the Jedi, in which Boba Fett met an ignominious end in the Pit of Sarlacc, and really dislike the way the Mandalorian changed the story and said that he survived. 

There is nothing wrong with that. Where there are two versions of one story, it is quite natural to prefer one to the other. In Pygmalion, Eliza leaves Higgins and opens a florist shop with Freddie. In My Fair Lady, she goes back to the Professor. The original ending is better, in my opinion: the musical comedy version feels like a cop-out. Both exist; both were approved by the Author, who recognised that movies and stage-plays had different rules.

"Did you really just reference Jabba the Hutt and Eliza Doolittle in the same paragraph, Andrew?" 

Yes. I am rather afraid that I did.

But in preferring "Boba died" to "Boba survived" we are not comparing two versions of one story. We are not talking about Return of the Jedi. Return of the Jedi is a film. It's the same film in 2022 that it was in 1986  (give or take a Haden Christensen and a couple of gub-gubs.) We are not talking about The Book of Boba Fett. The Book of Boba Fett is a TV series about space gangsters, which some of us liked and some of us didn't like. We are talking about some third thing, which doesn't exist in any particular text, but which is out there, in idea-space, in our collective imagination, in fan discourse. We have tacitly agreed that what we talk about when we talk about Star Wars is The Star Wars Universe. We approve or disapprove of Boba Fett and the Last Jedi and the Bad Batch because of what they do, or what they do not do, to that conceptual non-thing.

If everything was an imaginary story then you wouldn't be complaining about the pit of Sarlacc. You care about the change because you think that all the different bits of Star Wars fit together into one enormous story. It's that one enormous story you think the Book of Boba Fett has spoiled. You are only saying that it is fan fiction because you don't believe that it is fan fiction. 

I agree that Star Wars has taken some missteps. I think that Star Wars is irreducibly a comic-strip world of people in black hats and people in white hats. I think that once you start giving the scary savage natives their own culture and their own way of life, then the very thing which was fun about Star Wars goes away. But that's an artistic judgement. A political judgement, too, if you think that "cowboys and Indians" is a racist trope. Some of the novels and comics have gone so far as to say that The Jedi and The Sith are not forces of good and forces of evil locked in perpetual manichean opposition; but two different but perfectly valid ways of looking at the world. The Dark Side is Dark, not because it is evil, but because it is hidden. I think that this is a really bad idea. I think that Star Wars is about goodies and baddies or else it is about nothing. But I wouldn't frame this in terms of canon and fan fic. 

I will never love anything in the way that I first loved Star Wars. But I like the composite fix-up universe of which Star Wars: A New Hope is one component very much; enough to be rewatching all 150 episodes of The Clone Wars and trying to keep up with Marvel's infinitely extended War of the Bounty Hunters "event". I like baroque, complicated, fictional worlds. I particularly like the way in which sleazy space saloons; mystical space-monk retreats; honourable space-knights in space-armour; and thrilling space opera all fit together into one story. I think this is one of the things that The Clone Wars cartoon does very well. It's slightly bloated, ensemble format showcases the scope of the Star Wars Universe. 

There are some really interesting out-takes on Disney Plus. There's a clip of Harrison Ford meeting a fat human called Jabba the Hutt; and a clip of Mark Hamill talking to a man with moustache about the nationalisation of the shipping lanes. They offer a really strange lens to look at Star Wars through. A universe almost, but not completely unlike the one we are familiar with. 

Fan fic? Canon? Stories? Things which George Lucas wrote on the back of an envelope and crossed out. 

Shall I tell you a secret? I even slightly don't hate the Holiday Special, because it takes me back to my pre-Hoth world where Star Wars was just a movie.

 

The TV franchise -- from The Clone Wars to Obi-Wan and beyond -- treats Star Wars as a place and a history. It assumes that we want to know who took over on Tatooine after Jabba died and are interested in who the first students in Luke's Jedi school were. How much we care it depends on our degree of engagement with the franchise. If you have even the vaguest idea of what a Star War is, then you understand questions like "What was Obi-Wan doing on Tattooine in the years of his exile?" and "Had Luke met Old Ben before that day in the Dune Sea?" If you regard Star Wars: Rebels as being in the same category as Droids and Ewoks then "Where is Ezra Bridger?" is pretty much devoid of meaning.

I think David Filoni is doing a pretty good job of bringing balance to the franchise. Mr Canon Freak gets to say "That was a Lothcat, wasn't it? I'm pretty sure it was a Lothcat", while Mr I've Never Seen Star Wars can still get the gist of what is basically a  spaghetti western with ray guns. If you haven't seen Rebels, you can still grok that Ashoka is a former Jedi and a person of some importance; but if you have seen it, you smile knowingly when she mentions she’s an old friend of Luke’s family.

Some people like this stuff on general principles. Some people object to it on equally general principles. I am lawful neutral. I like fantasy worlds. I like the illusion of the Star Wars universe being "out there" and that it would carry on being "out there" even if no-one was telling any stories about it. I am not intrinsically thrilled when a baddie from one of the cartoons appears in one of the live action series; but I don’t run away whimpering “fan service, fan service, get a life, get a life, fan fiction, fan fiction” either.

Mr Ultra Hard Core Canon Freak likes internal continuity and hates it at the same time. He spends three months saying “Squee! Squee! That gangster who kid Boba used to hang out with a series two of ther Clone Wars is going to be in the live action series, squee! squee!”. But once they see the episode in question, they are like “You did it wrong! He didn’t look right! You changed it! You have raped my childhood!"

Star Wars can't be an imaginary world and at the same time not be an imaginary world. You can't add to the setting and leave the setting unchanged. You can't pretend Tatooine is a real place and avoid mentioning dewbacks and krayt dragons in case someone thinks you are a sad case who needs to get out more. If I point out that a female of Yoda’s race (named ‘Yaddle’) was a member of the Jedi Council in Phantom Menace, and wonder out loud if perhaps she is Grogu’s mother, then Filoni might very well say “Nice thought, but no, they aren’t related...” But he would be unlikely to say “Phantom Menace is only a film; Female Yoda was both on the council and not on the council because the council was made up out of George’s head and anyway Episode I was shit, get a life, this is an imaginary story, aren't they all”. On the other hand, if I were to ask what happened to Jaxxon the giant bunny he would naturally say “That was stuff that Roy Thomas made up for a 1970s comic book, before Empire Strikes Back even came out."

Unless, of course, David Filoni decided that a giant green leporine bounty hunter was exactly what the Galaxy needed. In which case he might very well write a new story which happened to have Jaxxon in it. Star Wars "legends" material continue to exert a gravitational pull on the new, post-Disney canon. Comics, books and novels and cartoons and computer games are being treated as a vast melting pot of tropes from which characters and storylines can be scooped. Ashoka mentions that she is hunting down an ex-imperial officer named Thrawn. Thrawn was the main villain in Timothy Zahn’s Star Wars novels: he was the eponymous Heir to the Empire who tried to keep things going after Vader and the Emperor were killed. That’s all been retrospectively de-canonised: but Thrawn -- a blue skinned alien, like an evil Sherlock Holmes crossed with an evil Mr Spock -- turned up as a villain in Rebels. Because he’s fun. Perhaps someone will decide that Jaxxon the Rabbit is fun as well.  

Disney has not retrospectively re-canonized an entirely different post-Endor history. But neither had it flipped Baby Yoda into a different part of the Multiverse where Ben Solo was never born, the First Order never arose, and the Starkiller project never occurred. The Star Wars universe remains resolutely singular. 

If you have enjoyed this essay, please consider supporting me on Patreon.

If you don't want to commit to monthly payments, please consider making a one-off payment on Ko-FI.