Board Thread:The Panopticon/@comment-24894325-20160909213807/@comment-24894325-20160917233447

I want to record explicitly one thought that I meant for a long time. The definition of TheChampionOfTime is much simpler in enforcing: any new artwork is an appearance.

And I wanted to clarify one thing, just in case: I did not intend for memories to be automatically relegated to non-appearances. I'm arguing on a case-by-case basis.

However, I can't get myself onboard. My worry is the following: appearance is not something that is almost always the case. The big discussion on TV appearances is a good indication of that. The need to credit and pay an actor serves as a good balancing point on TV: creating a new appearance is objectively costlier than resorting to something that would not qualify as an appearance. I strongly suspect that credits are used as an easily verifiable criterion rather than a deeply philosophical definition of what is and is not a criterion. But it makes sense because it goes hand in hand with authorial intent.

In comics, this balancing medium is lost. And it feels to me that the new artwork criterion is not costly enough, not weighty enough to stop artists from doing it anyway, in most cases, by default. Take that scene from Weapons of Past Destruction (WPD), where the Doctor is offering his brain for sale, already mentioned before. There are flashbacks to this scene both in Hacked and Doctormania. As mentioned above the art in Hacked is derived from a frame in Weapons of Past Destruction. Wouldn't it be natural to reuse the same art the third time in Doctormania? Instead, the picture is different and does not seem to come from WPD. Hacked was one of four stories in a special free issue. Perhaps, the time was short to put an effort. But as soon as we hit a regular issue in Doctormania, a 3-issue story, wham! new art. In fact, if one looks closely at the image in Hacked, it was not taken as is either. The speech balloons are gone. The supernova had some weird yellowish ray-shaped flares in WPD that are not rendered in Hacked. It might well be that the picture in Hacked consists of some but not all layers of that from WPD, but it still has been changed.

What I'm driving at is that creating new art seems so easy in comics and some degree of modification is so often necessary that it seems unnatural to ever not do it. (I'm not a comic artist, so obviously I don't know this for sure.) And if this is indeed the case, then new artwork would be a poor measure of authorial intent in distinguishing substantial flashbacks from mere recalls.

If I understood AeD correctly, whether new artwork is used seems immaterial in that other comic-book-related wiki. Perhaps, the reason is the one I just described? It usually is used, so the question shifts from having new artwork to having new narrative information.

For me, Example 4 is really problematic in terms of counting this as appearances. Yes, it is new artwork. Yes it might be implemented on TV as moving image, even though there is no apparent reason for it (it is neither inherently moving nor inherently still). But I have hard time imagining the author thinking that he put those two other Doctors into the story. Let me speculate a bit: why are those two images there? To show that Arnora was rooting in the Doctor's head and found his memories of the Time War. The main point is that he's committed horrible crimes, she couldn't understand how he lived with himself. It could have been done in a number of ways: War Doctor fighting Daleks, Eight Doctor seeing a planet destroyed, War Doctor pressing the Moment. There could have been action there. Like in The Innocent, when the War Doctor, in his delirium, relives some of the battles. Instead, the author/artists chose to go with a very minimalist approach: just one frame combining both incarnations who lived through the Time War with the barn where the double genocide happened (according to the Ninth Doctor's memories). This is as minimalist as it gets. I can't see how to show the Doctor participating in the Time War without showing at least one of these incarnations.

Put in simple terms, if ChampionOfTime's definition is applied, I cannot imagine this scene in WPD done without appearances of the War and Eighth Doctors. On the other hand, using the current definition of appearance on TV, this can easily be done there. And this continues to bother me.