A consistent—and in most cases spot-on—criticism of comic books is that Nothing Ever Really Changes. Characters of any significance have too much economic value to risk alienating their audience by having them change signifcantly. More ambitious authors may make some changes, but when they move on, the narrative always seems to muddle its way back to the status quo.
Thus Wolverine, having “died” near the end of 2015 will almost certainly be back, no matter Joe Quesada’s assertions of “Dead is Dead”; in fact, by any strict interpretation he’s already back, insofar as there’s a…nah, I don’t want to get into that.
In many ways, this is the same for Lee Childs’ “Jack Reacher” novels; they jump forward and back in relationship to one another, and his circumstances may be different in some ways, but by the end of the novel, he’s generally back to the same situation he started in. He certainly hasn’t changed or grown as a character—still an amoral, violent, near super-human instrument of retribution.
One day before long I will re-read Patrick O’Brien’s “Master & Commander” series, and I wonder if I will find that they break out of this pattern of long-running series’, or not.
Aud Torvingen, on the other hand, changes.
In fact, the two sequels to The Blue Place show a character who is broken and isolated and decides to heal and engage. Not always well—sometimes with an excruciating level of obliviousness—but motivated.
As whatever-sort-of-novels-these-are, they seem to work well enough: character is injected into extraordinary events in others lives, takes action, occasionally fucks up, eventually resolves problems. The difference is that you can see how the events act on the character, not just the other way around.
It’s an interesting strategy.