11 comments on “Tape #15: Sandboxers vs Canonizers”

1. Martin Gray says:

   March 26, 2026 at 9:36 am

   Thanks for another surprise episode, I actually thought Kevin‘s book had come out – it feels like forever since I ordered it! Still, it will be an extra treat when it does get here.

   It’s weird that I hadn’t heard of these two chaps, Adam and Peter, Kevin kept talking about with such reverence, and who Dave said were an inspiration for this podcast – tell us more, what do they do?

   Doug honestly, read some Tommy Tomorrow, they’re great stories. You can find them via the usual sneaky interweb ways. Better yet, there are some awesome, beautifully reproduced stories in the DC Finest science-fiction collection, the one with the gorilla.

   Kevin’s correct, Planet of the Capes is indeed full of plot holes, but remember, plotholes are just things for Geoff Johns to mine – Jor-el becomes Mr Oz, and we get a six-issue series explaining that parallel world Clark was using Golden Age Superman’s face stretching disguise power. Stupid Crayola Corps, grumble grumble..

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   1. DC Dave says:

      March 31, 2026 at 10:27 pm

      Martin – Kevin and I were talking about “The Crisis Tapes” from the Comic Geek Speak crew. CGS is, I think, the oldest still active comic book podcast (21 years!). Adam and Peter, two of the hosts from that group, did a “deep dive” into Crisis, starting with “The Crisis Tapes” episode one back in 2009. They put out about an episode or two a year, and got 28 episodes out through mid 2024. Their show is on permanent hiatus, but well worth your time to listen to. They were pretty quickly producing 3 hour long episodes, and their indepth analysis of individual episodes usually ran 2 to 3 parts long. Yes, 6-9 hours of content about a single issue of Crisis!

      Reply
2. Martin Gray says:

   March 26, 2026 at 1:07 pm

   PS Doug, the word you were reaching for was ‘pareidolia’.

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   1. Doug Adamson says:

      March 27, 2026 at 10:43 am

      Thank you for that Martin! I knew I’d seen it recently when someone posted better resolution photos of “The Face of Mars” which show it’s not a face at all – Sorry j’onn j’onzz – there was a discussion about how humans are hard wired to see faces on glances at items even if the faces aren’t there. because it could be a real face and it could be a threat!

      Reply
3. Bucky749 says:

   March 28, 2026 at 1:08 am

   Great episode.
   Doug should no better then to try rent the satellite to aliens trying to take over the world .
   You need to tell them they have to pay only in gold and diamonds. Come on .
   Any ways here’s two secret questions
   1. Will batlash get spot light episode or blue beetle ?
   2. Here’s the question: Dave and Doug put together a five person team but here’s the catch
   You have to use people from different earths and you both can’t use the same earths
   To make it more of challenge who ever goes first has to have there
   Leader from earth S (note no members of Shazam family may be used) and the second person has to use some one from earth x military hero as there leader

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   1. DC Dave says:

      March 31, 2026 at 10:21 pm

      Bucky….have you been sneaking a peak at my “upcoming episode” notes? Hmmm….

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      1. Isamu Hideaki-Yukinori says:

         April 5, 2026 at 12:48 pm

         I’m rooting for the team led by Spy Smasher…

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4. Alexander M Osias says:

   March 28, 2026 at 10:04 pm

   Miller brings up an interesting number of topics — the utility of the Crisis to either canonize DC history (create a strict, unified timeline) or act as a sandbox (a place for creators to play fast and loose with continuity) is an interesting one.

   I was actually thinking of it as a combination of both — creating a broad DC history that is vague in stretches of time with clear milestones that are either canonized, retconned to the modern era, or erased out of existence, allowing the current set of storytellers to tell their stories to the modern audiences.

   I appreciate the economic concerns of just retconning a currently popular character or team comic, with ongoing storylines and characters. In those cases — just address any backstory via minor retcons. Anything major (like Superman never having been Superboy) then you gotta do some major jumping through hoops (and boy, there were many).

   And every so often you take the long view, see what has worked with the character and what hasn’t, and adjust and move on. I think some things that really didn’t jive with the identity of the character (like Golden Age Superman’s ability to reshape his face to look like other humans or aliens, or the New 52 Superman’s Solar Flare ability) will eventually fade and be forgotten.

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5. Isamu Hideaki-Yukinori (ee-SAH-moo hee-DAY-ah-kee YOO-kee-noh-ree) says:

   April 6, 2026 at 9:46 am

   I finished this episode on this morning’s bike ride. Wonderful discussion with Mr. Miller (XI), Uncle Dave and Uncle Doug, and I look forward to reading his companion book. I also hope we’ll be able to read the thousands of words that were excised from his final draft in some shape or form in the future.

   Having first read CRISIS 1 to 12 in one go one lazy Sunday afternoon thanks to my dad’s Absolute Edition (sorry Uncles), I do agree with Mr. Miller’s assessment of the story retconning itself as it went. My dad had commented a few times that it seemed Marv Wolfman was making up the back end as he went along, and it showed. I do wonder if readers at the time who were taking each chapter in month by month had noticed the story discrepancies…

   I read some AMAZING HEROES articles about the CRISIS project leading up to the release, which mentioned that the original plan was for the CRISIS story itself to finish in issue 10, and issues 11 and 12 would be about the new history of the DC Universe. I assume the plan for the last two issues broke off into its own prestige format project when Marv Wolfman discovered he had more story to tell.

   Despite what my dad said, I’d like to think that, similar to Mr. Miller’s experience writing the Companion, Marv Wolfman had continued to be inspired by the rich 50-year history of DC Comics publications as he was plotting and writing CRISIS, which gave him new ideas that he felt he had to work into the story, even if some of them may had perhaps been shoehorned in. I truly cannot fault Mr. Wolfman for that.

   Regarding canonizing, I had always admired how the DC comic books of the 1970s and 1980s in my Dad’s collection truly allowed me to just pick up any one of them and easily jump in even if it was in the middle of a story or ongoing subplot. There was usually a word balloon that briefly summarized any past plot point that I needed to know, as well as a helpful “editor’s note” telling me the specific issue number where I can read more of that backstory. That doesn’t seem to be as much of the case for comic books published in this century, as you all had stated in regards to “homework requirements” and the difficulty of jumping on to the current continuity ride. I tried to read the INFINITE CRISIS trade paperback and I was a bit lost because of plot threads that picked up from the earlier set-up mini-series (plural; mini-series-es?), of which the book did not provide helpful references, summaries or even pertinent points of information. So those plot threads had taken me completely out of the story long before I got to the revolting Superboy Prime temper tantrum…

   (I suppose this was akin to, though not precisely the same as, Uncle Doug’s comment of watching AVENGERS: ENDGAME as the first MCU movie… or perhaps reading CRISIS ON INFINITE EARTHS beginning with issue #4…)

   Your responses to Bucky749’s question of Kamandi versus Tommy Tomorrow made me realize for the first time that CRISIS was essentially intended to be Kamandi’s “final” send-off as he essentially no longer existed in the new post-Crisis universe… at least for awhile. One interesting item to note is that issue 60 of the original KAMANDI series, which was never published because of the so-called DC Implosion, was going to establish that Kamandi’s “Great Disaster” future was actually on a parallel Earth, and that the Legion of Super-Heroes’ future was one in which “the Great Disaster never happened.” But since this comic was never officially published, does that even count? I myself prefer to think that the “Great Disaster” scenes in CRISIS did not take place on future Earth 1, but actually on “Earth Kamandi”…

   INFINITE EARTHS, A GUIDE TO THE DC MULTIVERSE sounded like a legitimate podcast, and part of me still hopes it is, even though a lot of that territory had been covered in Peter Watson and David Steele’s brilliant EARTH 2 PODCAST (including the “Planet of the Capes” adventure Mr. Miller had mentioned)…

   And THE SOUND OF BRICKS promo was so BLEEPing funny that it made me tear up and I couldn’t see. I had to brake my bike immediately because I did NOT want to go down another steep dropoff these rural mountain roads are known for…

   Tomorrow’s ride will be my catching up on the tape backlog until the next one’s release. Until then, Uncles Gentlemen…

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6. Paul Kien says:

   April 14, 2026 at 11:55 am

   Hey guys. I know I have not commented before but I wanted to write in to tell you that I listen and especially enjoyed this episode. I have been looking forward to The Crisis Companion as well so it was a treat to hear Kevin. A few miscellaneous thoughts:

   I also thought it would have been easy to place Kamandi’s time well before the Legion’s.

   Agree with Martin that the Tommy Tomorrow stories are fun indeed. The recent DC Finest Science Fiction volume has a bunch of them as well as some other great stuff.

   As someone who bought each issue of Crisis as it came out, I remember being amazed by the scope of it all. You have to remember there had been nothing like Crisis previously. My first time reading it was literally over a year long period and if you think about it that was how it was created as well. It’s no wonder that things changed for Wolfman, Perez and company especially given the office politics of the time. Another reason I am looking forward to the Companion!!

   Thanks for a fun show!

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7. Steely Daniel says:

   September 27, 2026 at 5:48 pm

   Still getting caught up on past episodes. This was probably my favorite episode to date. I’ve been exploring in my head the idea of sandboxers vs canonizers (without using those terms) for a while now in my attempts to try to reconcile why I’m more drawn toward DC than I am to Marvel (even though, on a superficial level, the IP for both companies is very similar). And while there are a lot of reasons for my DC preference, one of the things that has always turned me off to Marvel is its long-form, never-ending, interconnected continuity where every story they publish has to connect to every other story they ever published. I get why some people like that approach, but I personally find it to be very off-putting.

   To be fair, DC has their own interconnected continuity (or continuities-plural because of all of the reboots) as well, but unlike Marvel, DC *also* publishes a lot of evergreen, standalone stories that *can* fit into established continuity OR can stand *outside* of established continuity. Which is basically the definition of a sandboxer. This was especially true in the post-Crisis era, but it still continues to this day with a lot of their Black Label books.

   In the post-Crisis era, this was mostly (but not entirely) relegated to their old Prestige Format mini-series that really required almost no prior knowledge of the characters in order to read an enjoy (two examples for me would be Howard Chaykin’s Blackhawk and Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean’s Black Orchid–I knew nothing about either of those properties prior to reading each mini-series (I still know nothing about either property), but both mini-series continue to stand on their own as self-contained stories). Not only does this approach give more freedom to creators, but I personally find this approach so much more interesting as a reader because these standalone stories allow me to pick and choose which stories I want to include in my own personal head canon. For instance, by my count there are four post-Crisis Robin origin stories (Batman: Year Three, Dark Victory, Robin: Year One, and Batman and Robin: Year One) that all work as a sequel to Batman: Year One, but the variety of approaches to what is essentially the same story gives me the freedom to choose whichever one appeals to me the most when assembling my own head canon continuity. That’s far more appealing to me than the Marvel approach which gives me only the official continuity version of each story.

   I mentioned that the sandbox approach means that readers need almost no prior knowledge of the characters in order to read and enjoy those stories. But the one thing you do need in order for the sandbox approach to work is a generally agreed upon framework of canonical foundations for each character. These would be really basic things:

   — Superman comes from the planet Krypton

   — He works at The Daily Planet

   — His love interest is Lois Lane

   — His main antagonist is Lex Luthor

   — Kryptonite is lethal to him

   From these simple building blocks, any Superman story can be built without each story having to be an origin story. These canonical building blocks are not necessarily set in stone, and they can evolve over time. For instance, at this point I think Superman’s death at the hands of Doomsday is now generally accepted to be a foundational element of the character. Similarly, Jason Todd dying at the hands of the Joker is also now considered to be a foundational element of the Batman mythos. In the case of Jason Todd, what you do with this building block is completely flexible. In The Dark Knight Returns, Jason’s death was the catalyst for Bruce retiring the Batman identity, but in mainline DC continuity Jason’s death was the catalyst for the creation of the Red Hood character. Both approaches, contradictory on the surface, nevertheless sprout from the same canonical foundation. And again, this is why I find DC’s approach to their characters so much more interesting and compelling than the Marvel approach.

   (Interestingly, the same is essentially true for each company’s movie properties as well. Marvel is insistent that every one of the Marvel movies (even pre-MCU movies like the X-Men movies, the Fox Fantastic Four movies, and the Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield Spider-Man movies) all fit together in one unified continuity stream, and if you haven’t bought into that sprawling continuity as a viewer then you’re out of luck. Whereas with the DC movies, if you didn’t like the Tim Burton Batman movies, then you can watch the Christopher Nolan or Matt Reeves Batman movies instead. Of if you didn’t like Zack Snyder DC movies, then you can watch the James Gunn DC movies. Embrace what you like, ignore the rest. Ironically, the one time that DC’s movies did try to tie their sprawling movie universe together into one continuity with the Flash movie (which I personally liked), audiences completely rejected it.)

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