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A Tale of Three Imaginary Stories
(This post is part of my ongoing look at superhero comics and RPGs, Project Yellow Sun.)
I mentioned this way back when I was reading the first couple of volumes of Morrison’s JLA, but the comic book staple of imaginary stories is something I don’t think RPGs do very well. The classic idea is to have a story thats in a possible future, or an alternate world, or a dream, somewhere where we can see our favorite characters in a slightly different light. RPGs tend to actively work against this, since statting out Green Lantern Kal El of Krypton could easily take more time than the character would be in play. I was reading Mark Millar’s Fantastic Four the other day, and I noticed that sometimes comics don’t do it all that well either.
So today I’m taking a look at three imaginary stories. Two greats (Alan Moore’s classic For the Man Who Has Everything and Morrison’s Key story from JLA) and one not-so-great (Millar’s Doom’s Master from Fantastic Four #567).
The most important thing that the successful stories share is that the imaginary worlds they present have conflict in them while also showing us more about the characters inhabiting them. Seeing a Kal El that stayed on Krypton being fundamentally happy yet unfulfilled by his daily life is a great take on the character, while the conflict with Jor El’s growing extremism makes the imaginary bit entertaining even if it wasn’t about the guy we know as Superman.
The same goes for the stories that get the most focus in Morrison’s Key story. Superman and Batman have the most interesting conflicts in their dreams, so we see them the most. Green Lantern’s dream is a little bland, so we only see him when he enters the shared dream. It’s the basic role of these kind of stories that they illuminate the character’s fundamental qualities by showing them in a different situation.
Millar doesn’t do that at all. When the Marquis of Death (what a horrible name) gives Doom a vision of his dream future, just so the Marquis can tear it apart, Millar spends half an issue on a conflict-less future where we see Doom has all the things we’d expect him to want: Sue as his wife, a loving country in Latveria, a respected position as the man who saved the world. Maybe I don’t read enough Fantastic Four, but none of those things seem new to that character. With nothing revealed about Doom and no interesting plot, the pages devoted to showing us Doom’s world are just wasted space. Decompressed story telling at it’s worst.
