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.
Posted by Yellow Kid on :
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?
Posted by He Who Wanders on :
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.
Posted by cleome on :
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]
Posted by Reboot on :
...and exactly how does this "solution" serve anyone under the age of 30?
Posted by He Who Wanders on :
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?
Posted by cleome on :
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. :/
Posted by Yellow Kid on :
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.
Posted by He Who Wanders on :
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.
Posted by Reboot on :
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.
Posted by Nightcrawler on :
Since we are trying to clear out the non-Legion-centric topics in this forum...I'm moving this to Gym'll's.
Please continue your discussions...
Posted by He Who Wanders on :
quote:Originally posted by Reboot:
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?
Posted by Cobalt Kid on :
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.
Posted by CJ Taylor on :
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.
Posted by Triplicate Kid on :
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.
Posted by Cobalt Kid on :
The problem is by starting over with all new #1's and an entire new continuity (aka a "hard reboot"), a huge portion of the fans would stop collecting comics.
I know I'd see it as a jumping off point for several DC titles.
I think a softer, more subtle approach is needed. There's no need to worry about 'fixing' continuity. Internally, DC's editors should say "from this point, March 1, 2009, we will no longer worry about the huge mess of continuity; we will move forward with the DC universe as it is now, and stop screwing it up. Within a few years, we can release a few specials addressing all the problems--with an index of the exact chronology." And then make no apologies for it, give no interviews on it, and certainly make no crossover events hinge on it.
From DC's perspective, I think it would be a smart move for a long term profits without jeoperdizing short term profits, which is obviously what they are interested most nowadays. And it would benefit fans in the longterm too without alienating current fans right now.
Posted by rickshaw1 on :
Thats basically what the cosmic re-set button is.
Every book and title will, at that point, move forward. No more "mining" the past by just retelling stories already told, with one or two minor changes. Ya just go with whats there.
Each book would have a starting point. The Concave rebound was simply a device. It would not be the story itself, as the story...would be almost a non story.
The point would be to provide a demarcation line, at which point the continuity bug would be off the radar for a mandatory time, say three or five years.
The entire point would be to tell new stories. If you want people to know the origin of Batman, then give a one paragraph summary, like they used to do, and then TELL A NEW STORY.
From what i understand the last two years of batman have been about the past. Seven issues of GL were just about his origin...again...
DC is retelling the same stories over and over with only minor variations. They aren't really doing anything new lately.
Thats what the reset button is for. Pickapoint, and move forward from there.
Posted by Reboot on :
But if you reset 25 years, then you piss off everyone under the age of thirty.
DC having "been in the shower" for 25 years, as you suggested, doesn't bear thinking about.
Posted by Triplicate Kid on :
quote:Originally posted by Cobalt Kid: The problem is by starting over with all new #1's and an entire new continuity (aka a "hard reboot"), a huge portion of the fans would stop collecting comics.
I know I'd see it as a jumping off point for several DC titles.
I'd see it as a jumping on point. Anyway...
quote:I think a softer, more subtle approach is needed. There's no need to worry about 'fixing' continuity. Internally, DC's editors should say "from this point, March 1, 2009, we will no longer worry about the huge mess of continuity; we will move forward with the DC universe as it is now, and stop screwing it up.
My point isn't to do something "soft" and unnoticed. I'm talking creating a sense of hard continuity, like most popular TV shows these days have. I want to restore the ability old Legion fans reminisce about: collecting back issues and knowing exactly how they fit in. The only problem is, how do you convince non-comic readers that comics aren't so confusing anymore?
quote:Within a few years, we can release a few specials addressing all the problems--with an index of the exact chronology." And then make no apologies for it, give no interviews on it, and certainly make no crossover events hinge on it.
My whole point is to break DC's current mindset by eliminating the need to ever retroactively explain history. I want to market to fans in general, not just DC Comics fans. To people who are attracted to any large fictional universe, not just the one they know.
quote:From DC's perspective, I think it would be a smart move for a long term profits without jeoperdizing short term profits, which is obviously what they are interested most nowadays. And it would benefit fans in the longterm too without alienating current fans right now.
That's one thing I can't solve. DC currently has an unpleasable fanbase. No insult to anyone in particular; it's a collective effect. I can't see any way to market to them that will be good for the industry in the long term.
Posted by rickshaw1 on :
Thats just it. We are not unpleasable. We are frustrated, and the product we have been receiving is substandard, but that is fixable.
To the readers under thirty that don't want to lose their favorite characters, the simple solution is to introduce the characters into the book after the reset.
Its not hard. There is no perfect solution, but there is a workable solution. And considering the mess that DC editorial has made, a workable solution is the best that we can hope for.
Posted by He Who Wanders on :
quote:Originally posted by Cobalt Kid: 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.
I love this idea! The fans who are willing to fork over the money can have their cake and eat it, too, while the rest of us move on to . . . steak (and potatoes and veggies and fruit . . . ), and then come back for the cake when and if we're ready.
It does seem that DC no longer tells "stories" --e.g., narratives with beginning, middle, and end. People tend to forget that continuity was meant to enhance the reading of a particular story, not take the place of it. Continuity helped broaded and deepen the DCU and MU, but there had to be some other kind of content to build and sustain readership in the first place. Spider-Man isn't popular because he re-lives his origin ten times a year. He's popular because he walks on walls, shoots webs, and strives to be a hero in spite of enormous odds. He's someone with whom average kids of all ages can identify because he's "cool," not because he has to re-live or re-invent the worst tragedy of his life.
DC--from what little I have been able to stomach reading in the last few years--seems mired in tragedy these days. There is no joy in being a hero when you're constantly saving the uni- or muliti-verse from one disaster after another.
Re-set button? I don't know if that would make a difference. Until DC starts telling stories again, a re-set button could become yet another futile "quick fix" for problems they don't truly want to fix.
Posted by CJ Taylor on :
Continuity hasn't been around as long as comic books have. That's something used to tell extended narratives, prolong the life of a story, sort of.
The rest button is suggested to fix continuity.
If we jettison continuity, then we don't even need a reset button. Rather than hard or soft reboot, when a new creative team takes on a title, it's understood backstory is up for grabs. A new team isn't required to use any previous stories, much like comics were originally written.
You can't get more new reader friendly than that. As for long time readers, the over 35 crowd will relate to a time when there wasn't an established continuity.
I'm saying as long as writer A is on the book, readers get his/her interpretation. After that, let the new wrtier sink or swim on his/her own stories. Can you iimagine someone trying to adhere to the mess that is Hawkman? Geoff Johns simply side stepped the issue and faves raved about his work. Let's give other writers teh same leeway.
Posted by rickshaw1 on :
Thats what the reset button is for.
Batman Issue #921- Quick recap of Batmans origin in a paragraph on the splash page...then...Story. Not origin story, not another story about his first year, not a rehash of any kind. Writer X takes over and starts telling stories about batman NOW!
Reset button punched- Legion of Super heros #1 part 5: Writer gives us a paragraph recap of the origin of the legion on the splash page, then, we get a new legion story with the fatal Five, or Mordru, or who ever, but, its not another origin story, it isn't a story telling how the earthwar saga fit into blank period of blank, it is a new complete and wholly stand on its own legion story.
The Wave that i talked about is simply the device to give us a demarcation line. Thats all it has to be. Don't need a megahugeuniversechanging event. Just a...wave.
Posted by Reboot on :
One little point - One Year Later was meant to do that for DC (i.e., give a demarcation point where everyone started from the same [lack of] knowledge regarding the status quo, without crossovering).
Once the brief, initial spike was over, it completely tanked DC sales.
[ February 26, 2009, 09:09 PM: Message edited by: Reboot ]
Posted by Yellow Kid on :
Reading through this I started to wonder how much of the original Crisis was done for the benefit of DCs acquisition of other comic properties? They bought up the Charlton character rights, the Fawcett characters and it seems to me there was another company but for the life of me I can't think who it was right now.
Rather than just go forward from where they were DC rebooted them and effectively made most of them brand new characters. Why bother with the rights if that's what they were going to do?
I really loved the old Captain Atom. He was my favorite Charlton character. Steve Ditko's Blue Beetle reboot was awesome but (I seem to be one of the few) as a kid I really loved the old commie busting super powered Blue Beetle.
Ok back at DC there were some complications with a new JSA series but All Stars was doing a decent job of explaining that Superman wasn't around for WW2. (whatever happened to Arn Munroe anyway?) The Doom Patrol was dead but when does that matter in the long run for comic books?
It seems like that rather than use what they'd paid for DC rewrote those characters as National Periodicals properties and devalued their investment.
Sometimes I just don't get these corporate people.
Posted by Arm Fall Off Boy on :
quote:Originally posted by Reboot: But if you reset 25 years, then you piss off everyone under the age of thirty.
So?
Just kidding Reboot. It would be interesting to know what percentage of fans are over 30. Given the price of comic books these days, I would think it's certainly not those who are teenagers or in their early 20's who are the majority forking out the dough. To all you on this website who that DOES apply to, we all hate you, GO AWAY. Ok, not really. I applaud your success.
No matter what age group we belong to, I think the books help us to stay young. I know I use the books I read as escapism, or light entertainment. I did not like it when comic books started trying to be more realistic-with the increased profanity, violence, disasters-like one of the many times a city was destroyed, such as Gotham being taken over by the criminals. De-pressing. Not my preference. I prefer to dwell on the good things of the world, and comics are one of those things.
When did everyone suddenly decide continuiy was so important? and who decided it? I'm sure the first crisis was designed not for us, but for the writers. It was time to shake up the world of Superman, bcause his sales were slipping. Suddenly he was less powerful and more human, and God forbid he have super-powered friends from the future. "We gotta clean this up, or someone might associate Superman with the Legion and expect him to visit." And, we don't want to confuse the writers by using pre-Byrne with post-Byrne so let's clean this up a bit." Then somewhere along the way, someone realized there was too much of a heritage to let go of--why do you think the JSA is still around? They should be in their 90's and fighting incontinence, not Gog. But they are the best of heroes and we like that, so they were another retconned/revised group, and it all began to unravel. Confused? Yeah, me too, and I don't expect it o end anytime soon. I think the reset button has been pushed so many times it's stuck.
Posted by profh0011 on :
Cobalt Kid wrote: "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."
WELL SAID!
Posted by cleome on :
He Who Wanders [snip]:
quote:...I did not mean to imply that complexity and self-containment were at all exclusive. They are not...
Oh, I didn't think that's what you were saying. Not at all.
quote:...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...
Yeah, I agree with this and pretty much the rest of your comments here. Well, as much as I can given how out of touch I've been with both DC and Marvel for the past two decades.
I just wish stories, no matter what kind, were permitted to stand or fall on their own merits;Rather than being expected to serve as a hook into other titles. It just seems like a problematic way to market. Why neither company seems interested in growing its market rather than continually strip-mining the readership it already has... [sigh] I didn't get it twenty years ago and I still don't.
Posted by Triplicate Kid on :
quote:Originally posted by cleome: I just wish stories, no matter what kind, were permitted to stand or fall on their own merits;Rather than being expected to serve as a hook into other titles. It just seems like a problematic way to market. Why neither company seems interested in growing its market rather than continually strip-mining the readership it already has... [sigh] I didn't get it twenty years ago and I still don't.
That's what I meant by rebooting. It serves no use unless accompanied by renewed marketing to people under 30. That's what I'm guessing DC planned for the first Crisis: to follow up by marketing to a different (and wider) demographic. Rather than beating Marvel at their own game, to rewrite the rules.
quote:Originally posted by CJ Taylor: If we jettison continuity, then we don't even need a reset button. Rather than hard or soft reboot, when a new creative team takes on a title, it's understood backstory is up for grabs. A new team isn't required to use any previous stories, much like comics were originally written.
You can't get more new reader friendly than that. As for long time readers, the over 35 crowd will relate to a time when there wasn't an established continuity.
I doubt that. It seems to me that the older fans get, the more they care about continuity. You'd have to go back to the Golden Age (I'm talking the 1940s, not 12) to really get that lack of continuity. And, as I noted, it seems the younger generation wants continuity, something to reward their continued investment. However, in almost everything other than American superhero comics, it's easier to get in on the ground floor of that continuity.
![[LOL]](graemlins/lol.gif)
![[AHHHH!!!!]](graemlins/scream.gif)
And, we don't want to confuse the writers by using pre-Byrne with post-Byrne so let's clean this up a bit." Then somewhere along the way, someone realized there was too much of a heritage to let go of--why do you think the JSA is still around? They should be in their 90's and fighting incontinence, not Gog. But they are the best of heroes and we like that, so they were another retconned/revised group, and it all began to unravel.