Hmm. Can any long-arc extended universe type stuff be traced to the 1920s? Especially in genre fiction?

Considering a hypothesis that it was a slump decade for EUs.

There’s a weird period between 1890s-1910s when pulp fiction was enabled by cheap offset printing on cheap paper. You’ve got some EUs like Tarzan in the 1910s, but the big ones begin in the late 20s. Buck Rogers is 1928. Flash Gordon is 1934.

Poirot is one of the rare EUs I can think of that booted up in the 20s. And it’s a weaker EU than Sherlock Holmes a couple of decades earlier.

The Lost Generation artistic boom is mainly stand-alone literary fiction. EUs are a genre thing. So if I’m right WW1+Spanish Flu plus end of baroque-Victorian age made EUs hard.

The world itself was a fragmented mess. No reference implementation universe to work with.

The modernists (Woolf, Fitzgerald, Hemingway...) broke with the very complete and fully realized baroque condition of Victorian civilization. It had become artistically sterile. But the new world, while generative, was still in pieces. Too incoherent EUs.

EUs, whether MCU in 2015 or Holmes’ Victorian/Edwardian England in 1915, require a real world that’s almost complete but not yet dead.

EUs are fraught with cosmic gestalt tensions. Moriarty symbolizes shadowy specter of coming European unraveling after a century of relative order post-Napoleonic wars. Tarzan a rejection of its essential irredeemable fatal corruption.

Likewise MCU, LOTR, and Nolan Batman trilogy all evoke a rhyming modern condition. A universe that’s simultaneously on the brink of fully-realized perfection and unraveling from a fatal flaw.

Poirot too doesn’t really pick up momentum till the 1930s. There are 6 Poirot novels in the 20s and 15 in the 30s. Partly of course Christie getting warmed up but also partly I think pacing the world being born. Poirot is born with the world. A modernist and psychologist.

Astonishing doesn’t launch golden age sci-fi till the 30s. I think we’d find similar patterns in other world-building genres. SF from the 20s is barely known outside of genre historians. Jules Verne, H. G. Wells are known. Asimov and Heinlein are known. In between few are.

Transitional characters are interesting. The Phantom was between Tarzan and Superman and is noticeably no longer popular in the US (huge elsewhere in the world for complex reasons). Hybrid Victorian and Modern universes.

Point being, the next decade is going to be the worst time to launch EU franchises. It will be easier to do literary fiction than genre for a while. Weird inversion.

BUT!!!!

If you can launch in this winter culture, you could be as big as Agatha Christie.

There will be a rush of talent trying to do the Woolf/Hemingway/Fitzgerald type thing. EUs will be in a countercyclic slump.