Canon or Not Canon, That is the Question

[shipperx]

Ran across the question of canon in another forum and thought that I would repost my musings here. Joss Whedon's Season 8 comics... canon or not?

Frankly, I wrestle with the concept of comics as tv fandom canon. It doesn't feel like canon. It simply feels like yet another variation of fanfic.

Understand, I have great respect for fanfic. It's just that with fanfic I compartmentalize in my head a bunch of different possible outcomes. I see the Joss-penned comic as one of those possible outcomes, but it doesn't feel like the only possible outcome. I know this is somewhat difficult to understand for those who are in the camp of "It's all about Joss." But, I'm not intellectualizing this. This feeling is from my gut. If it's not on screen it's not canon to me. This is especially true for the Season 8 comics because the chances are slim to none of my actually reading these comics (unless they're a heck of a lot more interesting than their ads have seemed).

I'm reminded of how, after Farscape went off air, one of the head writers of the show penned a post finale story that was then printed in the Farscape magazine. It was written by the guy who wrote the show, so you'd think "canon"... except when they actually did film a Farscape follow-up in the mini-series, it doesn't align with the magazine story at all. So, again, was the magazine story 'canon'? Not if you compare it to what aired on screen. What aired on screen is canon. That simple.

I take the same view with the comics. Yeah, it's interesting in that it's Joss-penned fanfic. It can have merit in its own right, but it's a different media and so... not canon to me.

Actually, on an entirely different subject, I was thinking a lot about canon this week. When I was watching the BBC production of Jane Eyre that is airing on Masterpiece Theater, two things sort of struck me.

* Why is Jane Eyre's hair the same godawful hairstyle in every on screen production? It's been years (okay, decades) since I read the book. Is that godawful hairstyle described in the book and that's why they always choose it? Or is it just a plain jane Victorian hairstyle they can stick on attractive actresses to make them look plain? Since it's the same hairstyle every time... has this hairstyle passed into fanon or is it canon?

* I keep having my image of Mr. Rochester influenced by "Wide Sargasso Sea"... which, I consider to be fanfic despite the fact that it's a published and quite famous. The two novels were published with entirely different mindsets (and authors). I don't think Rhy's Rochester and Rhy's Bertha are the same as Bronte's Rochester and Bronte's Bertha... and yet, even considering Wide Sargasso Sea as professional fanfic, it seems to creep (negatively) into my impressions of Rochester.

Anyway, I don't think the lines of canon are always perfectly clear cut. In the case of Joss comics, the change in medium and the absense of actors makes the comic -- even if penned by Joss himself-- feel like it isn't canon... at least to me.

Comments

[celesteavonne.livejournal.com]

I'm right there with you on the reluctance to read the comics. When I see the published snippets and pages, my stomach tenses with almost-dread. It isn't that I don't have faith in Joss Whedon's ability to pen a readable tale. It's just that (and I know how strange this sounds, even in my own head) but the story has contined down it's own path in my brain and I'm seriously concerned that this new Season 8 will taint it somehow.

Maybe it's because I view Joss as the creator of canon and as such will define out of all of our possible infinities in fanfic what is 'real' or 'what really happened'.

I'm also a little miffed that the artists didn't choose to more accurately depict the characters as they are on TV. I mean, that Xander is far too dashing to be the 'real' Xander. With the excpetion of Willow, they don't look anything like what they should look like. Dang it, I want my Buffy to look like Buffy.

So I don't think the comics will be canon either. Just like the post-Episode VI Star Wars novels, much as I love 'em, will never be canon until I see them onscreen.

[jerrymcl89.livejournal.com]

In my mind, there are only two real paths. One is that Joss is the custodian of canon, and if he says it's canon, it is. That's the one I'll probably go with, since I'll likely buy the comics and generally like Joss's work. The other is that fandom is ultimately open-source, with all visions of the characters competing for supremacy, which is, of course, how all folklore evolves. I can't really buy the idea that the thing that determines canon is how much time and money is expended filming it.

[shipperx.livejournal.com]

Yeah, but as Celeste noted in the previous comment... they don't even really look the same. They look like different characters and it's in an entirely different medium. What's more, only a faction of the fandom will be aware of the comics. For that reason it seems odd to place it on the same level as the rest of canon.

If canon is the generally unnegotiable text, then it seems to need to be high profile enough that it's more than us geeks that know about it.

The comics as canon just don't have the same "feel" to them to me.

[jerrymcl89.livejournal.com]

Well, there is something to be said for that. Movies of comics are not canon, even if they are by the creators. But comics and TV shows are rather similar media. And I can tell the difference between a comic that advances the story and one that doesn't, which is why I avoid most of the Angel comics. I expect to consider the BtVS comics canonical, although I guess it will depend on how they strike me when I read them.

Ulitmately, canon is a matter of consensus. If most readers see them as canon, they are.

[shipperx.livejournal.com]

Which in turn makes me wonder about things like the Dresden Files... are the books canon? Or, if the series survives long enough, will the tv version be the agreed upon canon because there appear to be some differences that have (and will) develop.

(And personally, with only one ep beneath my belt, I suspect I'll prefer the book to the tv show.)

[owenthurman.livejournal.com]

What is untenable about the requirement that time and money is spent putting the work on screen?

That barrier of commercial on-screen viability and of creative control shared many ways instead of simply being Joss's story is exactly why canon has to be on screen.

Remember that Joss didn't even want to do a BtVS show. He had be offered the writing job because Gail Berman wanter to make a show. The producers made him pick Alison Hannigan for Willow over his first choice. The popularity of Spike with fans led the show runners to ask for Spike to survive What's My Line 2. The WB demanded that Spike stay on in every episode before they would renew AtS S5.

It's harder to work in an expensive environment with many competing inputs. But Joss didn't create our show alone. It is the result of competing ideas and different disciplines. Would Buffy be the same without SMG or Spike be the same without JM?

In the comics there won't be any actors giving us the internal feelings of the characters that aren't on paper.

And comics cannot really be canon.

Plus, does anyone think that if Joss had the money and the actors that he would feel constrained to follow the comics storyline instead of simply making his own new future for the characters?

[deborahc.livejournal.com]

The producers made him pick Alison Hannigan for Willow over his first choice. The popularity of Spike with fans led the show runners to ask for Spike to survive What's My Line 2. The WB demanded that Spike stay on in every episode before they would renew AtS S5.

Off the main topic here, but I did not know this. I mean, I knew about the original Willow being replaced after the pilot but I didn't know that the decision to replace her was imposed on Joss - I guess I'd just assumed that, if not his decision, he agreed that she was wrong for the role and wrong for the show. I love AH as Willow - she is Willow - and I'd always expected that the wrongness of the original actress would be readily apparent to me if I ever saw the pilot myself. But when I did finally see it myself a year or so ago, I found myself liking/i> original Willow (quite contrary to popular opinion), and suspecting that her *plus*size was behind her dismissal from the cast. They wanted Willow to be insecure, to be an outsider, but sympathetic, appealing, and likable. Overweight Willow equaled unlikable Willow to their minds, is my guess. Judging from the comments I saw around LJ after the pilot was made available for download, they weren't wrong, although people also trashed her for her acting. Her acting hadn't stuck out as bad to me, though.

Don't get me wrong - I wouldn't want to re-create canon with the Willow who might have been rather than the Willow who was and forever is, but I do deplore the mindset that I suspect led to OW's replacement. It reminds me of something I once read in a MN interview that I actually agreed with (not my favorite Buffy writer), about how the series dealt with just about every challenge that young people deal with growing up, except weight. She surely was right about that.

Re Spike not getting killed off because of his popularity with the fans - I knew that, but I'd always attributed that change of heart to Joss. If the show runners hadn't interfered, do you think Joss would still have kept Spike?

[thedeadlyhook.livejournal.com]

I'm with you on this one - I can't see the comics as canon, and never seriously considered them as such. Hell, even when JW did Fray, and he had the opportunity to make his TV and comic universes cross over, he didn't ultimately take it - the version of the closing of the Hellmouth presented in Fray doesn't match what we saw in the show (despite the crossover-tastic appearance of the red axe, which was a Fray prop), and unless he's gonna get back to that... uh, yeah. So not only is it a different medium, it's not even a consistent storyline.

So the comics will be the comics universe version of the story. And without the actors to add their own touches, their own humanity to the characters, I really don't think the tone of JW's writing will feel anything like the same. I know his X-Men work doesn't sing out to me in the same way that his TV work does - without human voices, the way everyone talks and reacts feels very... contrived to me.

[paratti.livejournal.com]

They certainly don't have the voices of the X-Men. Emma's Spike moments being particularly jarring.

[paratti.livejournal.com]

I'm firmly on the side of not canon. I'm an ex-fan of a television series not a putatitive comic. I also can't consider it canon when it's a comic that doesn't include (or has a pathetic fanbait panel in it) the only memebr of the regular cast of said show I was watching for in the end.

I could regard it as a potentially interesting piece of work in its own right set in a universe I once loved - I read/listen/watch non-television Who on that basis (though I do love that 'verse) - if I had an iota of respect or admiration left for those doing the writing and running the thing. However, I don't.

[mlgm.livejournal.com]

Perhaps BtVS fans need to take the Star War route: different levels of canon.

G-canon is absolute canon; the movies (their most recent release), the scripts, the novelizations of the movies, the radio plays, and any statements by George Lucas himself. G-canon overrides the lower levels of canon when there is a contradiction. Within G-canon, many fans follow an unofficial progression of canonicity where the movies are the highest canon, followed by the scripts, the novelizations, and then the radio plays.
C-canon is primarily composed of elements from the Expanded Universe including books, comics, and games bearing the label of Star Wars. Games and RPG sourcebooks are a special case; the stories and general background information are themselves fully C-canon, but the other elements such as character/item statistics and gameplay are, with few exceptions, N-canon.
S-canon is secondary canon; the story itself is considered non-continuity, but the non-contradicting elements are still a canon part of the Star Wars universe. This includes things like the online roleplaying game Star Wars: Galaxies and certain elements of a few N-canon stories.
N-canon is non-canon. "What-if" stories (such as stories published under the Star Wars: Infinities label), game stats, and anything else directly contradicted by higher canon ends up here. N-canon is the only level that is not considered official canon by Lucasfilm.

[molliemole.livejournal.com]

Not only do I not consider comics, even Joss-penned comics, to be canon, I reject some of what I saw on the screen as canon. If I really, really didn't like what the show gave me, then I refuse to accept it. There's plenty of fanfic that gives me much more satisfying plot twists and story lines than Joss did. And thank you, fanfic writers, for that.

[quinara]

I think I'll consider it canon in the sense that when someone starts a fanfic in that verse they shouldn't need to spell out what's happened - just say spoilers up to Issue 6 or something - but I think I personally will probably stick with writing post-NFA stories, where for all intents and purposes Buffy was in Rome. ie. It'll be the same as when people write post-Gift fic and I don't necessarily need them to have Buffy go to heaven.

[spikewriter]

I'd take the Joss comics as quasi-canon -- they hold a certain amount of weight because they're done by the original creator, but given their remove from the series itself, not explicit unless Joss were to come out and say "This is absolutely what happened." Since Joss has admitted that Angel and Spike are currently licensed by another group for those comics, that ain't gonna happen.

You can have post-series writings that are absolutely canon stories. J. Michael Strackzynski has said which of the tie-in novels for Babylon 5 are canon and which aren't and he wrote two short stories which are explicitly canon. B5 is a different animal, though, because there was a solid through line for that story that takes into acount what happens 20, 30, even a hundred years out.

Why is Jane Eyre's hair the same godawful hairstyle in every on screen production?

Because that is a very plain and simple period hairstyle that could be done by a woman who didn't have a maid who to help dress her hair. Also, given Jane's upbringing, she would have been steered toward "plain" styles; anything fancier would have been falling into the sin of vanity and a temptation to acting above the place God had given her in the world. Also, if you look at the known portraits of Charlotte Bronte, it's a style similar to what she wore.

[spikendru.livejournal.com]

To me, the comics aren't/won't be canon. Possibly, because I just don't "get" comics. I've never been a comic book fan, and just don't see what all the fuss is about them. I do understand that there are people who like them and people who are rabidly enamoured of them (for example, Xander and Andrew). When the Angel comics series came out, I bought the first two, but never bought the rest in the series. I bought the Spike comic, and was so disgusted that I'd paid $4 for a "book" in which the "artwork" was composed mainly of tracings of FFL screencaps and the story didn't make a lot of sense, that I decided - no more!

I liked the somewhat open-ended finale of BtVS and I adored the way NFA ended. Both finales were so rich in possibilities they begged for further fanfic. Even if Joss is writing the comics, without the input of actors, other writers, daily meetings, wardrobe, etc. they will just be Joss' private vision of "what happened next", and I'm sorry, but I don't really see that as more valid than the tie-in novels or the fanfic writers' visions of what happened next. Spike, the disposable villain via script, became so much more due to JM's portrayal of the character, that I can't help wonder how much fanfic would have been generated if Spike had only appeared in a comic instead of on-screen.

This is just my personal opinion, and I'm sure many people will probably consider the comics canon simply because Joss wrote them.