Well, the new versions of the characters started appearing in the '50s, but I think we can nail down the Earth-Two concept to 1961 and “Flash of Two Worlds.” This led to the original “Crisis” event two years later–which took up two whole issues!
Yep… The same Captain America who was willing to seize Hope Summers without any judicial protection in AvX. And the same stupid series where Reed Richards suddenly became such a creep, he’d send people to the Negative Zone for being unregistered.
Both series, CW and AvX suffered from incredibly bad characterization. Cap got shafted by the writers in both series. Cap believes in constitutional law…but you’d never know it from some of the stories these boobs have scripted.
Youre forgetting that SHIELD attacked Cap before the deadline passed.
…and that shit about the newspaper reporters applauding Stark at the end…WTF was that??
That said, that Avengers issue with his employee freezing his armor and nearly killing him was top notch.
Fine. You go to Jeryn Hogarth (or whatever that chubby guy who hung around with Power Man and Iron Fist) and have him subpoena the SHIELD cams showing that they attacked Cap first and hit them with a huge suit. Don’t train teens to commit terrorist acts. This really shouldn’t be hard for Cap to understand.
I’m totally cool with it because Stark’s version of the law that passed was the “You want to fight crime? Get trained and register.” version. Which I would support. I would have applauded Stark too.
Cap was fighting against his version which was the “Merely having powers gets you thrown into a Negative Zone gulag unless you agree to a lifetime of indentured servitude” one. Which I would oppose. And…so would Stark, based on his ~50 year history. Plus, Stark pushed through the law to avoid a worse version. Lifetime slavery or lifetime in prison without a trial is the good option? I doubt it.
The fact is that
A) Mark Millar wanted to make a big dumb ham-handed “George Bush SUXXX” point and warped a ton of characters to make it.
B) There was apparently no coordination between any writer at all on the law. Every book had a different version of what it did (most falling into one of the two categories above), character’s motivations changed not from book to book but from issue to issue of the same title (Reed springs right to mind.)
That’s because Mark Millar is the Michael Bay of comic books. Character and plot do not matter. Explosions do.
And no, as far as I know, Flashpoint sort of erased itself from everyone’s memory - but with how little I read DC these days, I wouldn’t be aware of any small contradictory examples. So Barry doesn’t remember that he effectively murdered his grandson Bart in a failed attempt to save his mother’s life by meddling in the timestream. Yay, heroes.
The Superboy one had already been patched long before prime started punching, he was just from a pocket universe, not Superman as a kid. And that lead to the Post Crisis Supergirl, who, at least most of the time, was a damn sight more interesting than just Superman’s cousin.
DC should really just give up the idea of continuity and instead just start doing separate micro-continuities, like when an animated show stops and is replaced by a new one, or the animated movies, or the live-action films (i.e., the three Nolan films are in continuity with each other, but not anything before or after them).
And that would guarantee I wouldn’t read the books. For some of us, that shared universe is a big part of the draw. Prior to Flashpoint, I read EVERY DC book. Even some that were mediocre, because it was another window on a universe I was invested in.
My own thoughts are that this is the reason we get mediocre and worse books. Reading a book “just because” rewards mediocrity. There’s only one title/team I had always followed, due to the fact that they were the reason I started reading any comics. Any other title, when the quality of storytelling or art declined to a point that it was a chore to read it, I dropped it. Easy enough to get the overarching continuity even if I’m missing B’wana Beast’s part in it.
Done! That’s pretty much the case in both majors. In one book half of the Earth is destroyed by demons from another dimension and it’s never mentioned anywhere else, meanwhile another character fights by themselves a world wide alien invasion, and that doesn’t affect any other book.
There’s hardly in-book continuity, even. I remember a recent Batman arc where he defeated a Mad Hatter who had mind-controlled and summarily executed practically half of Gotham, then tortured and murdered Bruce Wayne’s latest girlfriend… three books later the same writer had a short story with the Mad Hatter, not only out of custody, but no mention of his mass murdering, girlfriend killing ways was made.
The patch didn’t really work though.*. Supergirl was in the legion too, and her powerset certainly wasn’t the Pocket-Universe Supergirl. Also, Mon-El requires Superboy to have existed and there was no Daxam in the Pocket Universe (explicitly stated). There’s also a half-dozen other reasons (no Batman in the Pocket Universe=No Batcave for the Legion to hide out in when Universo took over that one time, etc) that the Pocket Universe patch was a good try but just didn’t work.
*And the reason given for the “Superboy never existed” thing was just silly: Byrne explained that he hated Superboy because if Superman exists, then you jes’ know that Superboy will never be really hurt or die. (Because…Superman’s likely to die at any point, amirite?). To be fair, Byrne has since said that it was kinda dumb on his part and that he regrets it.
Those events are literally on a different, parallel, world called Earth 2. That’s why they don’t effect the rest of the books.
92, 94, 96 ones weren’t really revamps, just storylines. 2004 one if it’s what I’m thinking of (Superman runs across a completely different, more silveragey version of Jor-El and Krypton via some phantom zone shenanigans) was just weird because it didn’t change anything from the 85 (really 86) version, it added a 2nd one on top of it, and I think that later got attributed to the 2006 superboy punches. It was mainly a way to bring Krypto the Superdog back. 2005 if that’s what I’m thinking of (All Star Superman), also not a revamp, that was the equivalent of what marvel did with the ultimate line, a different continuity running simultaneously. Just stay away from the Batman version… ick.
But absolutely read All-Star Superman. It’s fantastic.
I wouldn’t mind seeing Sgt. Rock and The Haunted Tank comics again. There was also a comic featuring a WWI Ace called Von Hammer? Only 70% certain about the last one.
“Nothin’s ever easy in Easy”.
Q
You’re thinking of Enemy Ace.
I’m not talking about Earth2. The mainstream comics in the XXI century are defined by, among other things, a need to wildly escalate any threat. Gone are the days of fending off bank robbers- nowadays you need every story arc to be about fighting nothing short of global genocide. Constantly.
In New 52 the Riddler isn’t interested on stealing valuable rare stamps or any of this small time stuff anymore- in this new reality, he literally takes over Gotham and starts killing random citizens for fun, acting like a roman emperor. You may wonder where the army was while that was happening, but to be fair every single story in every Batman Family book has Gotham being taken over or almost leveled by one villain or another. At some point I get how the rest of the world would have given up on that city.
Which makes for very intense story arcs, but it makes no sense if you want to apply any level of continuity.
To paraphrase Jules in Pulp Fiction: Shit, that’s all you had to say. Millar had Dr. Bruce Banner, PH.D. nuclear physicist become an inbreeding rapist hick cannibal for Old Man Logan, a Wolverine story set in the future. From that and what I’ve read about his stuff since, I haven’t bothered with anything else by the guy.
Zero Hour broke my interest in the Legion of Super Heroes, and I lost track of DC continuity altogether about the time that they (re)introduced a sorta-kinda Phantom Zone that lead to a parallel/duplicate/alternate-past Krypton. I suppose it’s moot now but what was that all about?
ETA: what TBG mentioned, so that would have been around 2004.
I’ve always said they should have just trapped Superboy in the future. Hell, give him his own book so that doesnt dominate the LSH books. Supes was always my fave Legionaiire.