Over the weekend, following the revelation that J.H. Williams III and Haden Blackman were walking off Batwoman in part because their plan to marry the lead character to her fiancee had been rejected by DC Editorial, there was a lot of talk about DC’s “hatred for” or “war on” marriage.While that’s a more credible discussion to have than the marriage equality conversation that was erroneously attached to this particular story, DC has taken the brunt of the abuse–and it’s really an equal-opportunity “problem,” as far as Big Two comics are concerned. Whether it’s “rolling timelines” or periodic “Crisis stories,” both universes like to have lead characters that effectively don’t change over a number of years.The illusion of change, though, is valuable for giving a storyline or a writer’s “run” some semblance of impact and that’s why we get deaths, betrayals and, yes, marriages that don’t last. Is DC really abusing the institution of marriage any more than Marvel is? A new report over at Inside Pulse says no.
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Some characters had weirdly complex ways of getting the marriage to go away. DC’s New 52 continuity reboot did a bunch of these, including making some characters like Wally West and Donna Troy simply no longer exist. Marvel used a deal with the devil to get rid of Spider-Man’s marriage–and has a history of just ignoring that some of them–Wolverine and Viper, for instance, or Johnny Storm and Lyja–never happened to begin with. That’s, I suppose, their version of a continuity reboot since, as they like to boast, they “don’t need” reboots and so tend not to mess with time and space quite as much as DC.
So…how long before “comic book marriage” becomes a term as widely derided as “comic book death?”
