posted
Okay, its all come to be too much. Every few months DC puts out a series that is supposed to solve all the continuity problems, re-establish or reinvent characters, etc.
And its been far, far, far too overdone.
DC keeps looking for a magic bullet to solve all their character problems and the only one they need is staring them right in the face and they do nothing with it.
Its a Cosmic Re-set button. Possibly the largest single Deux Ex Machina ever, but its there.
Out of the original Crisis the histories and character changes started, and grew. We got mess' like Huntress and Power Girl and Hawkman and our beloved legion.
Crisis was the great bump in the road.
So, when crisis occured, one of the main driving forces was the battle between Spectre and Krona, the guardian that caused the multiverse.
The simple, easy peasy awnser is....their battle occured all through time, but time has a way of healing itself, and eventually, what should have come to pass will in some form or another.
This battle, while all through time, was localised at three points, the big bang, the 20th century, and the end of time.
Time did a great job of repairing itself, but it became increasing difficult as time moved forward. All the ripples in time started at the crisis, localised in the 2oth century, and they moved down the time stream to the end of time...
WHERE THEY REBOUNDED AND STARTED THE LONG VOYAGE BACK TO THE CRISIS, THEIR STARTING POINT.
Along the way, the legion, which was effected at the end of the magic wars, is restored. Its not perfect, but it only takes one line of story to make it so. (I am a great believer in minimalism, used to drive my english professors nuts, but thats neither here nor there). And since the barrier at the end of time is a concave barrier rather than a convex barrier, the ripples eventually focus at the end of the original crisis.
DC continuity is re-set to the end of crisis. But, it allows for their to be only one earth, or as many as DC wants to reshape the multiverse. We can still have the JSA and the JLA on the same earth, or they can be seperated again. We can have Carter and Katar seperated again,on one earth, or seperated again on two different earths. Because even though it is a simple reset, there is wiggle room.
This could so easily come out of zero hour, or infinite crisis, or the morrison crisis.
It just takes one line of exposition. You can build a story around the time wave headed back through time if you want, or you can to a blink scene, and there it is.
But, the important thing, the thing that really matters is...before you do it, you time it so that it all happens at once, that the writers and editors are in the loop and the changes happen in the same month.
It's so simple, it will never, ever, ever be done correctly.
-------------------- Damn you, you kids! Get off my lawn or I'm callin' tha cops!
posted
How many books will it sell? Who do you think we can get to write the core series and does George Perez have time to draw it?
Sure it should be simple and with a little dialogue or text it's over and things move onward toward whatever but these days it's about the most giantastic mega-maxi-ultra-splendorific, blowout-spunoff-revampbooted relaunch EVER! ..this time we mean it.
I want to know, when great stories and high volume sales became two different things?
From: Smallville Sector : Greater Metropolis | Registered: Jun 2004
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posted
I would be surprised if DC were genuinely interesting in "solving" anything. As long as fans continue to buy mega-crossover comics, then nothing, so far as the company is concerned, is actually amiss.
-------------------- The Semi-Great Gildersleeve - writing, super-heroes, and this 'n' that
From: The Stasis Zone | Registered: Jul 2003
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cleome46
or you can do the confusion 'til your head falls off
posted
They'd do better to try marketing less complicated, more self-contained stories via outlets and mediums not traditionally associated with comic book fans.
[shrug] You can only mine the same vein over and over so many times. At some point, it's time to stretch out and look for some new ones.
That's my story and I'm sticking to it. [raspberry]
-------------------- Hey, Kids! My "Cranky and Kitschy" collage art is now viewable on flickr. Drop by and tell me that I sent you.
From: Vanity, OR | Registered: Dec 2008
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posted
Agreed, cleome. Unfortunately, that would also mean breaking away from the fanboy mentality and trying to reach an audience that doesn't relate to the characters in quite the same way that the diehard faithful do.
Self-contained stories would be wonderful, but I would also like to see stories with some substance greater than "Here are the good guys. Here are the bad guys. Watch the former trounce the latter (or vice versa)." Unfortunately, this might mean taking chances with the characters that could displease the diehard faithful. It could mean altering long-time characters in such a way that would make them unfranchise-able. (Hence, the reason Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons invented Watchmen instead of using Charleton heroes.)
It's far more expedient to "re-imagine" characters every few years. Fans may complain, but so long as they are buying the stuff, who cares?
-------------------- The Semi-Great Gildersleeve - writing, super-heroes, and this 'n' that
From: The Stasis Zone | Registered: Jul 2003
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cleome46
or you can do the confusion 'til your head falls off
posted
Oh, I don't think complexity and self-containment are mutually exclusive concepts. I don't fault companies so much for wanting consumers that will come back more than once. I DO fault them for trying to make consumers feel they must come back every damn time for everything, or else the experience of enjoying a particular work will be impossible.
In "real" fiction, there are plenty of examples of authors who return again and again to certain places and characters. However, if the author knows what s/he is doing, it won't be necessary to read the first appearance of the players in question to enjoy their fifth appearance in an entirely different tale. The knowledge/consumption of Appearance 1 might enhance the enjoyment of Appearance 5, but the former won't make or break the latter.
If that makes sense. :/
-------------------- Hey, Kids! My "Cranky and Kitschy" collage art is now viewable on flickr. Drop by and tell me that I sent you.
From: Vanity, OR | Registered: Dec 2008
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posted
Yep. I can read a Sherlock Holmes story without knowing what happened in the previous story and still enjoy it for it's own sake.
Even if I do need to know something I'm sure Dr Watson could just ramble off a bit of dialogue and we're up to speed. "Oops, sorry Holmes. I suppose I'm telling you something you already know." "Indeed."
Done in one.
From: Smallville Sector : Greater Metropolis | Registered: Jun 2004
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posted
Again, I agree with you, cleome. I did not mean to imply that complexity and self-containment were at all exclusive. They are not.
But there's a difference between complexity and convolution. Characters can be emotionally complex, for example. Fictional histories can be complex (think Star Trek or Babylon 5). But neither of those types of complexity deter broader audiences from following a story or franchise.
However, it's disingenuous for a company to create complexity in its back stories and settings (e.g., Earth 1, 2, etc.), and then complain that things have to be "simplified" for fans to follow them. Fans tend to be (or at least used to be) more intelligent than companies gave them credit for. The pre-Crisis-era Marvel universe, for example, was just as complex as DC's, as it include Asgard, Olympus, and numerous other locations, as well as a much better defined (but nonetheless complex) web of back stories for its characters. This suggests to me that Marvel was outselling DC (the motive for the Crisis) for reasons other than complexity.
Where things became convoluted was when DC tried (and continues to "try," apparently) to fix something that wasn't truly broken. But, as I said, it doesn't really matter since DC will continue to publish comics that people are buying. From a corporate standpoint, it would be foolish for them to do otherwise.
-------------------- The Semi-Great Gildersleeve - writing, super-heroes, and this 'n' that
From: The Stasis Zone | Registered: Jul 2003
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quote:Originally posted by Yellow Kid: Yep. I can read a Sherlock Holmes story without knowing what happened in the previous story and still enjoy it for it's own sake.
Even if I do need to know something I'm sure Dr Watson could just ramble off a bit of dialogue and we're up to speed. "Oops, sorry Holmes. I suppose I'm telling you something you already know." "Indeed."
Done in one.
Conan Doyle had absolutely no sense of continuity whatsoever - a particularly infamous example is withinin The Sign of Four, where a day starts as the 8th or 9th of July, and becomes a September evening before the day is through. He forgot Watson's first name (introduced as John H., he's later referred to as James); he forgot when Watson married and was widowed, to the point that a Holmes book I have in my hand speculates Watson may have been married three times.
Essentially, the only way you CAN read a Holmes story is as a standalone. ACD had neither the desire nor the attention span to carry stuff from story to story, and sometimes not even within a story.
quote:Originally posted by He Who Wanders: Where things became convoluted was when DC tried (and continues to "try," apparently) to fix something that wasn't truly broken.
But trying to undo the fixes is like trying to unfry an egg - time-consuming and with absolutely no hope of actual success.
From: The Mainframe | Registered: Jul 2003
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quote:Originally posted by He Who Wanders: Where things became convoluted was when DC tried (and continues to "try," apparently) to fix something that wasn't truly broken.
But trying to undo the fixes is like trying to unfry an egg - time-consuming and with absolutely no hope of actual success.[/QB]
Agreed--which is all the more reason why I doubt DC's sincerity: why fix a mess when fans continue to buy it?
-------------------- The Semi-Great Gildersleeve - writing, super-heroes, and this 'n' that
From: The Stasis Zone | Registered: Jul 2003
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posted
I think Reboot and HWW are right. Why bother trying to fix anything at this point. Its only ever made it worse (on numerous occassions by now) and DC likely thinks there is nothing to be fixed.
The best route would be to start fresh and just ignore this continuity glitches and go from here with great stories. Have each series stand on its own with a relatively easy to understand shared universe.
And when comic book fans and the internet clamor for complicated continuity explanations, then have the writer and artist of the moment do a story, make it one giant sized annual and price it to the extreme, like $10.00 an issue, so those fans are forced to subsidize the rest of DC's line trying to move past those long-standing problems.
But honestly, the less stories 'about continuity' the better. Continuity growing naturally from a series of stories is a welcome literary tradition. But when continuity is the main focus of an entire story, it has almost always created problems.
From: If you don't want my peaches, honey... | Registered: Sep 2003
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posted
I’m completely fine with continuity being reset every time a new writer comes on a book. There’s no reason anyone following Paul Dini has to adhere to his previous stories. Mind ya, if Mark Millar wants to use some of Dini’s work to tell his own story, that’s fine by me. And if Christos Gage tells a great story that contradicts some of Dini’s work, that’s fine too.
From: Denver, CO | Registered: May 2004
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posted
For many years, I've held that the only solution for DC is to do what they planned for Crisis on Infinite Earths. Hard reboot, start every title over from #1 simultaneously, and never reference any previous story again. Most of the insanity in DC continuity of the past 20+ years comes from the fact that the original Crisis wasn't that, so we got piecemeal reboots and updates, and then attempts to explain how it all fit together.
DC was missing the point when they set the rule "No parallel universes". They're an SF staple, and a valid one for writers to use. The rule should've been (and should be) "No metafictional parallel universes". That is, never depict any previous version of the story, even as an alternate universe.
And then we can have stories in continuity instead of about continuity.
This is basically what DC wanted to do. They had the right idea - why did they abandon it?
With the experiences of the Modern Age behind us, I can add something more to it. We can now see that no comic universe can last forever with a stable continuity. Therefore, there is no further need for a sliding timeline. Comics could finally achieve a harder continuity by being bound to fixed dates.
In practical terms, this would necessitate firing most of DC's current top writers. Morrison's too metafictional, and Johns and Meltzer are too into retro.
-------------------- Tom Strong, on nostalgia: "I suppose it's a ready substitute for genuine feeling." - Tom Strong #6, Alan Moore
From: Calgary, Alberta | Registered: May 2008
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