Xenagia: Storytelling Engines #5: The Elongated Man: If It Ain't Broke, Don't Break It

Storytelling Engines #5: The Elongated Man: If It Ain't Broke, Don't Break It

"Showcase Presents: The Elongated Man" is a bit interesting, insofar as it presents a long-running backup feature rather than the stories of a character who had his own title; in fact, the Elongated Man has never had his own series, instead being a perennial second banana in other titles and member of the Justice League. And yet, he got his own collection long before such obvious candidates as Wonder Woman, the Flash, or the Atom. Why?

In no small part, it's because the character is "topical" at the moment. He's one of the leads in DC's current hit series, "52," and he's coming off of a fairly major role in the "summer event" crossover a few years back, "Identity Crisis," where his wife was murdered. These two things, combined, provided DC with a marketing impetus to publish his old adventures, giving us a chance to look at what his storytelling engine was like.

It was brilliant. Ralph Dibney is an independently wealthy jet-setter, and he and his young, pretty, spunky wife Sue travel the globe like perpetual honeymooners—and, of course, along the way, Ralph's instincts for mystery lead him to find strange, unusual cases to solve. This is a virtually endless story generator; the mysteries are up-beat, quirky little tales, the writer can use any setting, and the character dynamic is absolutely perfect. Sue and Ralph, as a couple, drive the story, with each one complementing the other perfectly and giving it a cheerful and up-beat tone.

Let's now reiterate what brought him into the public eye of late: His wife was murdered in "Identity Crisis." Um, oops.

This is the danger of shaking up the status quo to make a character more popular; it's entirely likely that you'll lose important elements of the story-telling engine. Yes, Ralph is more noticed by the average fan than he ever was, but what good is that if you can't find stories to tell about him? Note the use of the word "stories," plural. There is a story to tell about Ralph, and they're telling it in "52": He's trying to get his wife back from the dead using all the various deus ex machinas of the DC Universe. But that is one story. Right now, it's really the only story you can tell about him. And as we do keep saying, telling a single story about a character is all about inspiration. Setting up a status quo that can sustain multiple, open-ended stories about a single character requires calculation.

And this is the great crime of "Identity Crisis." (For which, it should be noted, I do not blame Brad Meltzer. He didn't force DC to publish the book; as always, editors get final say, which means that the end result is always their fault.) It's not, "Oh, they killed Sue Dibney and I always loved that character," it's "Oh, they broke a story engine that could have told a thousand stories in order to publish a single 'important' one." In any company concerned with the long game, change should always be approached with great care, and never lightly.

Even on a career second banana like the Elongated Man.

John Seavey is a freelance writer with a restless mind, having been published in such diverse places as Scrye Magazine, the Penumbra Press' line of open gaming license products, "Comics Should Be Good" and the Doctor Who anthology "Life Science." His blog, Fraggmented updates twice a week with random ideas from his fevered brain.