I mean… come on! It seems the Marvel and DC universes keep re-booting every 10-15 years or so at this point. Is this* really *necessary?
It’s been said that “the golden age of comic books is twelve”. Folks only have a chance to get bored by reboots if they remain fans for at least 10-15 years, and you might (depending on phase) go nearly three decades while seeing only a single reboot. And really, if you’ve stayed a fan of comic books for that long, they’ve probably got you for life.
It’s more important to them to keep the stories interesting and relevant for the new generation of fans than it is to worry about holding on to the old generation.
Yea, if your going to keep a character around for 70+ years, especially in media where stories have a lot of installments like comic books, its pretty hard not to periodically reboot.
A lot of these comics have a really long and convoluted history. The Fantastic Four, Spider-man and the Avengers are each nearly fifty years old and the grand old man, Superman, is nearly eighty. Most of the story arcs in that time are okay, a few of them are true gems and others just really stink. Sometimes you just need to purge the stupid.
Comics won’t decline because of reboots. They’ll continue to decline because they’re only available in specialty shops and because of price, content and long story arcs, they are no longer something that kids read.
Which is the real reason for DC’s reboot: going digital.\
And, anyways, why do the reboots matter to someone who actually following? If they are following, they know what is and isn’t true. The only problem is for the casual viewer who does not know that things have changed. But then it’s worse for them to have to know a lot about continuity for it to make sense.
I’ve started to switch to Archie.
: raises hands :
I’ve been reading comics about 30+ years, certainly before the bicentennial…and I’ve suffered through good times and bad and they finally managed to convince me that an artform I love isn’t worth reading any more. When “crisis”/reboots were 10/20 years apart, I was fine with them. But…
I’m sick of every-other-year continuity reboots at DC. Seriously - they just had Final Crisis about 2 years back and Infinite Crisis was about 3 years before that… And making the characters “fresher” and “better targeted at today’s reader” only means they’ll be dated quicker than last week’s People Magazine.
With Marvel, same thing: I no longer know any of the character’s basic history because of the “7-year rule” (The Fantastic Four’s rocket went up 7 years ago, regardless of when it is now–so Cap went from Roosevelt being President to Bush II). For instance what war theater was Tony in when he stepped on that land mine? Remember, the warlord’s name is Wong Chu–so it can’t be South/Central America or the Middle East. What war was Flash Tompson drafted into where he picked up his obnoxious ex-wife Sha Shan? Again, not the Middle East. Natasha Romanov couldn’t have been more than 5 years old when the Soviet Union fell. She was a spy for what country? There are dozens of examples where major hunks of the character’s story are dependent on real world stuff. Plus, stupid Joe Q reboots like the Spider-Man sells his marriage to Satan reboot.
And Marvel’s also intent on making all the characters bad-guys…and stupid bad-guys at that. Cap becomes a terrorist because he doesn’t like a law passed by congress and signed by the president? Iron Man clones/rapes Thor’s corpse and sets the Thor-Clone to kill Giant Man? Plus the level of misogyny at Marvel literally gives me the creeps.
Plus, I’m really sick of idiot writers trying to shove their own ill-thought out idiot politics down my throat. Superman quits being an American* to protest…um…something. (Yeah, I know. It was retconned about 2 months later. The fact that it made it past an editor alone is enough). No-one in the Marvel Universe has ever taken a basic civics lesson? Even the lawyers (Daredevil, She Hulk, Iron Fist’s buddy) don’t know how to get an obviously unconstituional law thrown out so they resort to terrorism? This is just shit.
Right now for Marvel and DC, I’m down Flashpoint (and not the crossovers) and Ultimate Spider-Man. And unless they wow me with the very first issue of this new multicultural posterboy, I’m out of there too**
All I want is good stories–the continuity can be fun if you can make it work for you (Alan Moore, Neal Gaiman, Geoff Jones (sometimes), Mark Waid (sometimes), Steve Englehart (back when he could write)…but the stories come first
*And his plan to calm things down in the Middle East was to just…stand there and look mean at people for 24 hours? What?
**The idiots at Marvel haven’t figured out that I’m not reading Spider-Man to read about a guy who sticks to walls and has spider-sense, I’m reading it for Peter Parker. Giving the same powers to some new kid? Who cares? He’s not the character I want to read about.
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See what every previous reboot has done to the Legion of Super-Heroes.
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Same thing to every other book to a lesser degree. Gail Simone just started Birds of Prey again–it was getting legs back under it and bang–about 1 year later, reboot. Book’s gone, characters are gone (or not). Ditto on a ton of other titles–every time there’s growth and change, there’s a reboot and it’s all reset. Which is fine every 10 or 20 years, but not every 2 years (or every issue, as per the Marvel Method)
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No reboot is ever clean. The closest they’ve come was Infinite Crisis where they said “These are the things that changed. Nothing else”). So the reader never gets an actual fresh start, they’re just left wondering “Wait–so did THIS story happen? What about that story?” Same with this DC reboot. They’re saying that Superman appeared 5 years ago and he was the first hero. But the Batman books aren’t rebooting. How, in 5 years, did Batman fight Ras al Ghul enough to earn his respect and sire a 9 year old kid?
No comic book continuity can stand up to any realistic scrutiny.
How old is Spider-Man? The character first appeared as a teenager in 1962. A realistic continuity would have him collecting social security.
You have to keep erasing a character’s past and bringing him forward to keep his present where you want it to be.
Or you let him age for 10, 15, 20 years, then reboot.
But that sucks for someone getting into comics 9, 14, or 19 years after the last reboot. You learn all about that convoluted history and then it all get s wiped out? What’s the point?
I actually prefer frequent reboots. In fact, I like the All-Star model. Grant Morrison got to start his own series and make up whatever continuity he felt like for Superman. Some things were the same and some things were different from the “main” continuity, no one worried about it, and it was widely regarded as one of the best Superman series ever.
Or you could look to the animated Batman series. First there was Batman: The Animated Series, which then got a cosmetic redesign when it combined with Superman as The New Batman/Superman Adventures. Then they did a completely different series, The Batman, set at the beginning of Batman’s career, and now they have a new series called Batman: The Brave and the Bold. Each series was it’s own complete whole.
Same for live action Superman series: no one thought Smallville had to be set in the same continuity as Lois & Clark or the old Superboy series the Salkinds produced.
But for some reason we expect comic books to maintain the same continuity for decades on end. Even Crisis on Infinite Earths wasn’t really a reboot–something in story explained why it’s no longer the case that Lois once got it on with Comet the Superhorse. If we applied that standard to other media, any TV show with a DC superhero would have to explain what happened to the Superfriends’ Wonderdog! I think every writer for a comic book should be able to reset continuity however they like. That doesn’t mean every writer starts over with a new origin story, but that like Morrison, each writer should get to create his own vision for the characters, whether that means a long history or a short one, a continuation of previous stories or a clean slate.
It would mean weakening the “shared universe” concept, but not necessarily abandoning it completely. Batman and the JLA were mentioned in All-Star Superman, but they weren’t necessarily the DCU Batman/JLA or the All-Star Batman and Robin, The Boy Wonder Batman/JLA, they were Grant Morrison’s Batman and JLA. Likewise, Superman exists in all the animated Batman series, and some of them share a continuity with each other (and JL/JLU).
Personally, I’ve always thought it was a mistake to put all superheroes in a shared universe, to begin with. The problem is that the power levels vary so greatly, that there’s no niche for all of them. Sure, the Penguin or Catwoman can keep Batman on his toes, but Superman would be able to take care of both of them in about a half a second. Why doesn’t he? Is he just trying to not hurt Bruce’s feelings, or something?
Regular Archie or Ultimate Archie where Archie leads a Junior Navy Seal Unit and Betty and Veronica are lesbians?
I’d read that.
It’s a joke but by my count Archie comics are currently publishing three separate continuities right now – the traditional exploits of the gang in high school, the stories set several years later where Archie has married Veronica, and the future-set stories where he’s married Betty.
–Cliffy
The comics have to do that.
When the Fantastic Four started out, Reed Richards and Ben Grimm had been friends since they’d served together in WWII but obviously there was no way this would work in the 70s and 80s.
Similarly, during the 60s Flash Thompson served in Vietnam, but obviously they had to forget about this by the 80s or else it would have made Peter way too old.
I only follow writers who’ve proven they can tell good stories. The character doesn’t matter, and the same goes for continuity. I’m not alone in this. It’s part of the reason behind the success of the graphic novel model. Only kids and chumps follow a character. The creative teams change so often and the shift in quality is so great, you have to have no taste to stomach collecting a run on a character’s book. Batman is cool, but he’s not inherently cool enough to save himself from a shitty story.
…unless he’s prepared.
If we were talking about anything other than (I’m betting) Silver Age Superman, I’d throw a :dubious: at you here. But we are talking about (I’m betting) Silver Age Superman, so I can pretty much take the quoted text at face value…
Comet was in human form at the time. (He was a centaur, who tried to get Circe to turn him into a human, but she screwed with him by turning him into a horse, but he could become human, occasionally. And let’s not get into how he had superpowers.)
He was in love with Supergirl, and usually macked on her when he became human, but he did hook up with Lois at one point (though I remember no details beyond that).