Crossing the Line

Recently the internet has been alive with discussion about the next Superman film. Not simply because of casting or the other personnel decisions which seem so important to film obsessives, but because the next Superman film will also involve Batman - it will be what comic book types call a crossover.

Crossovers are a device which arose in comic books as a way to boost sales: Superman has long struggled to retain an audience and one way the writers attempted to address this was to find a story where he was pitted against Batman, the logic being that people's curiosity would boost sales, possibly extending beyond the audience either character commanded alone. Allegedly it worked, for a while, but like most such strategies it was little more than a short-term fix.

But on the big screen, the superhero movie is definitely in the ascendant. Under Disney's watchful eye, Marvel's stable of characters has been carefully nurtured, culminating in what must be the biggest superhero event movie of recent years - the Avengers. Seeing the success of the Avengers, Warner has clearly decided to use the same strategy to boost their own movie, bringing together Superman and Batman on the big screen for the first time.

And will it succeed? Not having followed the mythology of the comic books, I don't know. It's difficult to see how a film containing two such unevenly matched characters could work, but what's interesting is that it's considered possible at all. Because being able to make two series come together in one story is about vastly more than just having the right script.

What if, for example, it had happened in an earlier age? What if there had been an attempt to bring a Christopher Reeves style Superman into a Tim Burton directed Batman movie? With the comic book feel of 90's Batman and the somewhat more grounded feel of Superman, unevenly matched heroes would have been the least of the problems. The reason that it has become possible now is that when Christopher Nolan rebooted Batman, he took it away from the camp and colourful world it had come to inhabit and made it feel darker and more believable. It wasn't quite something that could happen in the real world, but it was less of a suspension of disbelief than other incarnations in recent memory. With the trilogy receiving critical acclaim, Superman was rebooted with the same sensibility - and with Nolan executive producing - making the two worlds close enough to mesh.

And it's not just about direction and design either - no matter how real-world Nolan's Batman was, you wouldn't expect him to turn up on Casualty. Films and television programmes operate in meta-worlds, defined by the liberties they take with reality and it is the credibility of bringing those meta-worlds together determines whether crossover is possible. You can see what happens when it goes wrong: not long before Doctor Who was originally cancelled, somebody decided to put a definitive nail in its coffin with a Children In Need Special. Shot using a primitive form of 3D which only worked with the camera in continual motion, using cheap computer graphics to replicate the faces of the early doctors, the show brought various incarnations of the Doctor into a crossover with the cast of Eastenders. It was appalling. Sometimes things just shouldn't be brought together - and I don't just mean the Doctor and John Nathan Turner.

Beyond television, despite the lack of look and feel issues, it's easy to see that books also have limitations in crossing over. Despite the current craze for mash-ups involving zombies and regency drama, one wouldn't expect Sherlock Holmes to turn up in Oz, or Arthur Dent to materialize on the deck of the HMS Bounty without jettisoning the values of at least one of the donor series, potentially both.

But sometimes it's more subtle than that. Ask why Alice, of Wonderland fame couldn't logically end up in Narnia and you can see that there's something not quite right with the mix, but it's not quite as obviously wrong as Doctor Who and Eastenders.

Which brings us round to my own writing. In the New Year I will be publishing a new historical comedy - of which more later. This time it's not a time-travel story, but is entirely fixed in its period - in this case the English Civil War. Whilst Erasmus and Bandwagon are clearly worlds apart, on the surface the new book could share the same universe. It would be easy to believe that there could be at least a cameo for our time-travelling schoolteacher.

But that's on the surface. On the surface, both books are rooted in real historical settings, although the first Erasmus uses legend rather than real history; both feature a supporting cast of comic historical types. Only one book involves time-travel, of course, but that's hardly a problem unless the new book makes it clear that time-travel is impossible. No, what makes the difference between the two is something almost subliminal - it's a sort of emotional framing. And oddly, what this means is that the book that involves time-travel is more real than the one that doesn't.

To explain: the new book - of which more another day - is broadly comic. The easiest way to describe it is a Wodehouse comedy set in the Seventeenth Century. The characters are drawn with a broad brush and would probably not have seemed out of place in a Restoration comedy. In Erasmus, meanwhile, whilst there are comic characters, the central characters are picked out less theatrically. Erasmus has a complex span of emotions intended to make the reader care about his predicament, rather than simply to laugh at it. That's not to say the new cast lack definition or complexity, but it's a different kind of complexity, rather like the difference between a sitcom character and a character in a drama. And what all that means is that the worlds are too different: Lord Galton - to whom we will return at a later point - would not benefit from meeting Erasmus. No matter how good those individual worlds are, they wouldn't mesh - and only the most forgiving of fans would appreciate an attempt to make them.

So does this mean I've made a mistake? Wouldn't it make more sense to imbue the new book with a similar sensibility to Erasmus to keep alive a commercial possibility for the future?

Some authors certainly would. Some authors would feel that everything should be pegged together to create one cohesive world, either because one part of that world is already a successful brand or because they feel that should they stress the relationship from the start it would make each book as likely to lift the others.

But in so doing, they would be sacrificing something. For me the point is that those meta-worlds, whether realised in the design, the nature of the humour or the characterisation, are not there simply to separate one canon from another or to create separate brands. They are there to give the canons somewhere to operate, something to support them and to make them satisfying in themselves.

It's true that some worlds are flexible - Oz in particular seemingly happy as dark and sinister or light and filled with song - but others work best in their own idiom. To return to the original inspiration, the reason that Batman and Robin was seen as a failure is that it went too far from what viewers thought the 90s films were about. It's not intrinsically a bad film, but the look didn't mesh with the humour and it jarred. Likewise, the later Superman films jettisoned much of the reality and sincerity that had made the original a success. Perhaps people were harsh, expecting more of the same when that was scarcely possible, but perhaps they were simply instinctively responding to a feeling that something wasn't quite right. Perhaps suspension of belief is like suspension of a bridge - it requires any number of strands to keep the thing up. Severing a few in the name of commercial consideration isn't going to please those crossing the river.

When it comes to my own work, meanwhile, I will continue to plough as many furrows as seems appropriate for the different seeds I wish to sow. When the new book - of which more anon - is published, I hope that readers will be attracted to the other books not because they want more of the same but because they want more of the same quality.