COORDINATING INTERORDINATION

Now that I've set down some thoughts as to the emotional appeal of crossovers in THE DIFFICULTY OF WHAT'S FASCINATING, I want to veer back to justifying that appeal in terms of what it means in  a philosophical sense to associate characters who stem from different textual "universes."

I played around with the notion that what it means to associate such universes, and I meditated on the literary concept of "intertextuality," as it was coined by Julie Kristeva in 1966 and as it's been used in numerous literary essays since, including not a few on the comics medium. Here's one of many examples of how the term has been used.

However, while the crossover-phenomenon probably should be seen as a subset of the entirety of things that can be intertextual, the term itself is too general to describe the specific phenomenon.

For instance, without even looking I'm sure that one can find numerous comments about the Alan Moore-Dave Gibbons WATCHMEN being "intertextual." And such assertions would be accurate. WATCHMEN quotes instances from real-world history, from poorly understood philosophical concepts (seen in Moore's mangling of Friedrich Nietzsche), and of course, from previous comic book characters. The ensemble of heroes in WATCHMEN were famously modeled upon characters originally published by Charlton Comics, whose "universe" DC Comics had just purchased. Moore considered basing his team of heroes upon the Charlton crusaders, but instead ended up simply using the earlier characters as models for new characters.

Is this intertextual? Yes, but it has nothing to do with crossovers. Crossovers may rework established characters so drastically that their readers barely recognize them, as per my frequent example of BILLY THE KID VS. DRACULA. But there's always some assertion of identity between the old and the new-- and there's nothing of the kind in WATCHMEN.

What I needed was something in line with my definition of narrative in, well, THE BEST DEFINITION OF NARRATIVE:

All narrative is a movement consisting of the interaction of one or more Primes (superordinate presences) with one or more Subs (subordinate presences).

This meditation led me to a term that suits my needs better than intertextuality, and depends solely upon the concept of "ordination."

interordination noun

—(linguistics) A reciprocal relationship between two terms

Within my system, what this definition calls "two terms" can be expanded into "two or more presences within a narrative nexus," whether those presences are superordinate or subordinate. What I've called "stature-crossovers" concern the reciprocal relationship of two or more superordinate characters from different cosmologies. "Charisma-crossovers," in contrast, concern the reciprocal relationship of two or more subordinate characters, or between at least one superordinate character and one subordinate character from another cosmology. (Just to get away from using superhero-supervillain charisma-crossovers, I'll note that the same phenomenon appears when two supporting-characters within a cosmology forge a "reciprocal relationship," such as we see when the main stars of URUSEI YATSURA take a back seat to watching two members of their support-cast, Benten and Ryunosuke, butt heads.

I don't expect to use interordination on a regular basis, except as a means to clarify the ways in which crossovers belong more properly to this specific type of "quotation" rather than to the more generalized category of intertextuality.