Comics Reality Checks III: The Index Card Test

Occasionally readers respond to columns I put up, pointing out a factual mistake here, a vague statement there, a misspelling in some other place. And, while I try to write with as much accuracy as limited resources of time, energy, and money permit, I grant that I frequently place errors for posterity to enjoy on these various columns about whatever might inspire me at the time of writing. Usually I have read the material before I discuss it. Occasionally I haven't. In the latter case, my own limited understanding or misreading of someone else's description of things that happened in comics or to creators reveals itself floridly on the page. In general, no disgruntledness results when I realize my own errors, though I incline to leaving them intact partially to conserve writing time that endless revision could swallow up in indefinite quantities.

I do find my gruntles dissed (or however we should parse the verb) by concepts that I attempt to describe accurately, yet fail because their comprehension lies beyond my ability. Something, here, seems very wrong. And, even considering the responsibilities of humility, I do not favor the theory that limits of my comprehension make me unable to understand such characters as (say) Madeleine Pryor. No, I increasingly believe that excessive complexity provides a fatal conceptual flaw for some characters.

Perhaps we should consider a principle for comic book characters that limits their core definition to what a human being could write legibly (or type, if anyone has such a thing as a typewriter any more) on an index card.

Can You Understand It without a FAQ?

Perhaps comics analysts of the future - assuming the future ever happens and that comics figure in it - will divide linear art features into two principal categories, Comics You Understand Without a FAQ (CYUWOFAQ+) and Comics You Can't Understand Without a FAQ (CYUWOFAQ-).

In earlier incarnations of the Quarter Bin - in fact, during much of its existence as the Comics Literature Reviewer - I tended to bolster holes in my reading and comprehension by mining on-line comics FAQs for missing details, relationships, and understanding. At the time, I didn't think much of this, since one can find FAQs on making potato cannons, salsa, and robots on the Internet; but as time passes, I become increasingly skeptical about comics material that drives someone to a FAQ in order to understand it.

Consider, if you will, the days before an electronically connected world provided the casual peruser with access to the benefit of others' research, particularly in the context of comics. During that period between when inherited comics history had become increasingly incomprehensible, yet comics fans had no particular access to information via telephone lines and computers (the era between about 1977 and about 1994), very few channels existed for filling in the holes about stories. Some fanzines existed in mass circulation; but if you lived somewhere you couldn't find the missing comics to explain some ongoing story thread, you probably couldn't find the fan magazines either, requiring a trip out of town for some research of dubious value as an investment in time. Or, alternately, one might resort to the Local Expert, meaning anyone who had read more of the material than you had, in order to fill in conceptual and storytelling holes left by the omission of certain comics from one's own reading history.

A crossover event, back in those days, represented a much greater commitment to the reader, and a number of we consumers looked dubiously on stories that crossed into impossible-to-find titles or which completed in annuals usually not carried by magazine vendors. We saw it very much as a scam to make us buy more comics by refusing to complete a story in a single issue.

Technology, to some extent, has softened the costs of attempting to keep up with comics that do not get to the point in twenty pages or less. But the problem remains. Should a reader have to have an Internet connection to decipher something purchased (theoretically) as entertaining literature? Do other popular entertainments require an open-ended commitment to preliminary research in order to enable a reader to enjoy them?

Does it reflect well on a comic book, or on a character within a comic book, that someone must read a Frequently-Asked-Questions file in order to comprehend it, him, or her?

Occam's Razor

In science, we sometimes refer to the principle of Occam's Razor, which, in simple form, states that we should take the simplest theory that fits the facts as true. This principle originated in an age where natural philosophy abounded in theories that propagated more for their aesthetic value than their power in predicting behavior of objects or creatures.

Outside of science, we have a minimalism principle that condenses into the acronym "KISS," meaning "Keep it simple, stupid."

Does a simple core concept to a character preclude the kind of complexity that provides hooks for storytelling? Not necessarily, because non-essential details, as long as they remain outside the character's basic definition, can cluster around a character like satellite galaxies around the Milky Way, pulled by the gravity of the greater mass at their center. Furthermore, even with a fairly comprehensible character concept, differing characters can, by their variety (rather than their complexity) serve as echoing points for dense, complex, meaningful, and even difficult story ideas.

Needless complexity, however, tends to work against the process of making good comics because it burdens the reader with knowing the tangled details that surround a character, where such details remain essential to the ongoing action or themes; it similarly burdens the writer with both knowing these details and knowing how to use or ignore them, as the story may require; and, furthermore, may burden the concept by caging him into a narrowing cycle of possible stories by the need to remain true to the convolutions of the more-ornate essential idea behind him.

A Few Test Cases

In an argument of this sort, one risks cherry-picking data to support a hypothesis. However, note that I don't necessarily like or dislike characters based on their ability to yield to concise summary that meets some standard like fitting on an index card. Rather consider the task that one sets before prospective writers, given characters that fail to summarize neatly. To a limited degree, increased complexity provides more potential story hooks, However, the Law of Diminishing Marginal Returns sets in fairly early, making the hooks more like the hooks in a net that dig in deeper if the captured creature attempts too hard to break free.

A number of specimens provide good examples of concepts that either neatly comply with or that egregiously violate a principle of minimalism in design. To this end, I did, indeed, use some thought before their selection, rather than using some random method.

Nonetheless, let us consider the following characters:

• Superman.
  Passes elegantly and neatly. The last surviving offspring of a dead but technologically advanced world comes to Earth as an infant and develops incredible powers which he applies to doing good works.
• Members of the Vertigo Doom Patrol.
  In general, all of these pass the Index Card Test. For instance, one can describe Robotman as a human self trapped inside a robot body and frequently failing to cope even as he resorts to the character armor of the curmudgeon to conceal his vulnerability. Rebis and Crazy Jane similarly will fit on an index card, though in the latter's case one must understand the character, owing to comic-book schizophrenia, will take on other personalities that, themselves, might require index-card treatments.
• Nomad.
  Fails the test. The definition of the character depends upon knowing too much history about the bad old days of the Captain America book, while penned by someone who did not much care for the concept, to wit: He began his career as a replacement for the teenaged sidekick of Captain America (see Captain America when authorities believed that character and his sidekick killed; engaged in a demented roid-rage while shooting up a cheap knock-off of super-soldier serum such that authorities chose to put him in suspended animation; returned so that the "real" Captain America and the Falcon could repudiate Steve Englehart's version of the fifties by defeating the two of them; then fell prey to some white supremacist organization in the early eighties, until someone zapped the cheap replacement Captain America (no longer using that identity) into dust, whereupon Captain America offered him the opportunity to use a costumed persona created for Captain America to adopt back during Englehart's "John Workman" period...et cetera....
• Hawkman
  Passes the test well, despite some reservations about burdens of accumulated character history. We have in Hawkman a guy who wears wings and a bird mask and flies around hitting people with maces. Depending on the version, he either came from another planet or hosts the soul of a reincarnated Egyptian prince. While post-1985 he accumulated an onus of incomprehensible retcon baggage - most of which recent issues of JSA have attempted to clarify and/or remedy - those elements do not remain central to the premise, occupying a role more important to ongoing story arcs than to the character's definition.
• X-Man.
  Eeeeeeeeeeeeeek. One index card? One pack of index cards, maybe. Begin with the notion of an alternate-universe version of another character, perhaps fused to another character who died (maybe), and then attempt to explain "Cable," an alternate-future offspring of two existing superheroes already themselves quite tangled in their history but much better in their principal definitions. X-Man himself provides an excellent argument in favor of the Index Card Test, in spite of the loyalty his late and lamented series held for readers. However, until Crisis on Infinite X-Futures cleans up the last remaining baggage of Claremont-era alternate future stories after "Days of Future Past," the task of explaining this character will have to fall on the shoulders of dedicated specialists who haven't missed an appearance or mention of the character since his inception.
• Tom Strong.
  Passes, easily. A character whose history and nature reflect the notions of bringing out human potential through enlightened methods of self-improvement and technology, with the setting secondary but useful for setting his tone.

We seem to have something here. The more viable characters in this list, in terms of the ability of writers to write them and readers to understand them, do seem to pass this test, perhaps because they cannily evade the onus of excessively difficult definition.

The Burden of Needless Complexity

A sufficiently complex character both prerequires and ultimately suffers under the hard-continuity model of comics. He prerequires it generally because a creator of characters will not, typically, attempt to make a figure so difficult that no one can understand him, unless such incomprehensibility somehow represents a desired salient feature of the character; rather this convolution accumulates, piece by piece, through an inherited history the character moves through in multiple stories all connected through the vehicle of continuity. Similarly, he suffers under hard-case continuity because that standard makes it increasingly difficult to streamline the character, to ignore bad accumulated baggage, to revise by removing the nonessential.

Complexity, furthermore, can work against a character even in the absence of a shared-universe editorial model. For instance, the character Batman began to labor under a baggage of unnecessary and concept-contrary paraphernalia including, but not limited to, Bat-Mite; Ace the Bat-Hound; Bat-understudies like Batwoman and the original Batgirl; a variety of Bat-hardware more in tune with modern collector toys than a real need to have so many trademark gadgets; and thus like. A certain kind of Bat-story developed, as a result of the Bat-catalog, where some villain would attempt to emulate the signature debris attached to Batman, including stories like "The Joker's Utility Belt," none of which really did justice to the potentials of the character. Not surprisingly, when in the aftermath of the collapse of the viability of the Bat-franchise after the short-lived Batmania of the sixties, O'Neil and Adams redefined the character by ignoring most of the baggage accumulated not just since the fifties but in some ways since just before the addition of Robin as a sidekick. This had the long-term benefit of making Batman one of the few comics franchises successful enough to sustain multiple titles. Even in this case, though, the ornaments attached to Batman did not redefine the core concept. Only after writers began to ignore the kernel that defined him did the Wal-Mart of Bat-merchandise begin to take over the concept.

We all instinctively understand that traveling light makes travel easier. But how does simplicity stand up as a guarantee of success?

Failings of the Theory

Remembering the distinction between necessary and sufficient conditions discussed in the first column of this series on Comics Reality Checks, the Trashmen Tests, we might display some caution in application of this test for the soundness of a comics concept. For instance, the version of Supreme who appeared in the dreadful Bloodstrike #5 had a definition that would fit quite concisely on an index card: "See SUPERMAN, but busts people open like water balloons so that the printer can use lots of red and pink ink on the kewl explosions of guts."

While simplicity serves a character, then, it does not guarantee the solidity of a character concept. For instance, one might postulate a theoretical superhero called something like "Captain Muscles," with a definition like "real cool and kills villains and stuff" and have a concept simple because of its inherent emptiness. We can recognize such a void of ideas as vacuity and label it as the far end of simplicity, where the character doesn't work because too little defines it.

This points out the Index Card Test as, itself, too simple. Perhaps the rule we seek here involves a Golden Mean, or finding the exact point where a character has enough detail to provide adequate storytelling hooks but not so much that he requires tiresome research to comprehend, a principle that could apply to series premises as well as character definitions.

As with the Trashmen Tests and the Bouncing Boy Test, we once again have not found a suitable benchmark for measuring whether a comics character or concept works. But more notions present themselves; and a future column, perhaps, will pin down one really good test that might box in the idea.

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Column 275. Completed 16-SEP-2001.