Just curious, it’s getting kind of hard to keep track of them.
Let’s break things down a bit.
DC: 4 official, at least 1 unofficial, and more subtle character reboots than I can count (soft boots?)
While the Golden to Silver age bridge was not a “reboot” when it occurred but I think we can count “A Flash of Two Worlds” as telling the reader that there had been one. Crisis on Infinite Earths is obvious. Zero Hour and Infinite Crisis are technically reboots but they kept some kind of continuity inline with the ongoing titles.
The Kingdom can be thought of as a reboot since it established that continuity only existed in regards to individual stories thus making a more quiet reboot. As for characters, feel free to pick any of the times we have been told that what happened before no longer counts (assuming they bother to tell the reader that at all).
Marvel: 0 official in continuity, 2 separate “reboot” continuities that existed side-by-side with regular continuity, and again just about every character getting quietly rebooted at least once independent of main continuity.
The closest Marvel comes to a reboot is Heroes Reborn but that was a separate continuity that played out for a year while other books continued. Similarly the Ultimates universe is definitely its own continuity starting from scratch but it is not a reboot of the main line.
Despite that Marvel has quietly rebooted individual characters more times than DC has. See how many times Spider-Man has gone “back to basics” in the past twenty years and many of those involved abandoning most of the previous continuity. In any given new Marvel series there’s a better than 50/50 chance that it will completely ignore the previous status of the main character.
House of M was certainly a reboot but it probably doesn’t count because it was only temporary. But I’d count the “no more mutants” Decimation that followed as a reboot even if its effect has since been diminished (because that usually happens with reboots).
(Hope ten days isn’t too long to add a post)
I wanted to add that between the Earth1/Earth2 of the 60s and the Infinity Crisis of the 80s, there was a reboot that technically only involved Superboy but is major enough that I think it counts: For some reason, even though Superman had always been set in “today”, and his continuity in “within the last ten years”, for some reason Superboy since his introduction had been fixed in time in pre-WW2. By the mid '70s it was no longer plausible that Superman had been a teenager during the Great Depression, so they changed the continuity so that Superboy was then always “twenty years before present”.
There have been no reboots. Everything is as it has always been.
We have always been archnemeses with the Justice League of Eastasia
Heh–or see Byrne’s “Spider-Man, Year One” for a ‘back to basics’ quasi-reboot so damned bad that it was ignored while it was coming out.
Four key examples:
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Black Widow was originally the remaining Romanov daughter (or granddaughter), working for the dirty Reds. Now…I think Hydra is involved, but she never operated at the same time the Soviets Union was in existence. Hell, if she’s 25, she wasn’t BORN when the Soviet Union existed.
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Iron Man got the shrapnel in his heart in…which war? Korea (originally)? A “Southeast Asian country” (from the first reprint onward)? Vietnam (briefly?) The Falkland Islands (as a joke, one hopes–although what “Warlord Wong-Chu” is doing in the Falklands is anyone’s guess)? Gulf War 1? Desert Storm? And what’s the big deal about a chunk of shrapnel near his heart? In 1962, sure. There wouldn’t be a heart transplant for 2 years (1964). But he stepped on that mine in about 2000, give or take a year. Heart transplants aren’t even newsworthy today. Surely Tony Stark, richer than Bill Gates could get one.
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The FF was trying to beat…who to where now? The filthy Reds to the Moon? The Soviets to the stars? Hydra to…somewhere? Without a space-race, Reed’s desire to take off in a rush becomes deranged. (Also, Ben and Reed fought in World War Two with Nick Fury and there are some key stories based on that–now? Um…?)
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Marvel has a "Everything from Fantastic Four #1 forward happened in the last 7 (or 10, depending on who you talk to) years. Let’s go with 10. That means that Reed took the rocket ship up in 1999. Let’s say the Avengers formed 2 years later (the individual members had to have origins and become well-enough known that the other members would have heard of them.) That means Captain America could have been (and next year, will have been) awakened in a post 9/11 USA. Which invalidates way too much of his previous stories.
I prefer the DC approach even if DC doesn’t really do it as well as they could (in part due to economic issues): Just reboot every 15 years or so and admit it. This constant “trickle-reboot” that Marvel has is annoying.
Defining reboot as a singular event that represents a break in continuity - changing the in-universe history from what it was before.
The transition between the Golden age and Silver Age DC represented in Flash of Two Worlds is NOT a reboot - it is a retcon that included all the stories that went before, simply placing them in a broader context.
Crisis on Infinite Earths is a reboot. The Anti-Monitor mucked with the beginning of time, changing history.
Zero Hour is a reboot, albeit a mild one. Parallax mucked with the beginning of time, changing history.
Infinite Crisis is arguable. Superboy Prime and Alex Luthor each messed with the fabric of the universe, altering certain discrete events that had come before. While history was altered, there was no real break in the “now”.
Marvel doesn’t do reboots on a line-wide basis, it does handwaves. “Eh, the readers won’t care if we randomly change this backstory event with no explanation.”
There have also been reboots confined to smaller contexts, like Spider-Man’s Brand New Day.
I was thinking of that one specifically since it resonates so tightly with recent events.
FWIW, the moon was only in the original proposal. By the time Lee wrote the dialog for FF #1 they decided on the stars…
Huh–I just read FF #1 on Marvel’s digital comic site (and man, what crappy scans!) and it does indeed say the word “stars” not “moon”. I’d have bet money that it said “moon”.
That said, I’ve got a beat-up, coverless, FF #1 at home–Marvel’s notorious about changing stuff. Unless you have the original Tales of Suspense where Iron Man first appeared (38? 39?), you won’t see the actual text–from the first reprint (Marvel Tales Annual #1) onward, they’ve changed the text of Tony’s origin. I wonder if they did the same thing in FF #1? FF #13 specifically has Reed saying “I’ve discovered a booster fuel powerful enough to allow us to catch up with the Reds in our race to the moon!” and he makes a bunch of “moon” references later.
I find it far less annoying than the utter inability on the part of writers at DC to quit spending all their time pointlessly tinkering with continuity - in my mind, an unavoidable side effect of doing a hard reboot.
Plus, DC does the same thing; their sliding timeline is just a little longer than Marvel’s. It makes the JSA and characters like Black Canary increasingly nonsensical.
Thanks to the magic of GITCorp I do have the exact text of those original issues. I’ve got a full set of their DVD’s which have scans of the full run (it makes a fun game of spot the future comic creator in the letter column 
).
Yes, there are two issues down the line where they deal with the moon race despite the fact that Lee and Kirby have them popping around the universe without much effort (the one where they save the Apollo 11 astronauts in particular is just weird). I almost mentioned them but thought it would muddy things up.
I just checked the physical copy–you’re correct, it is “stars”. But weirdly, two panels after Reed talks about “the stars”, Sue says “…the Commies to beat us to it!”.
“It” can’t refer to “the starS” but certainly could refer to the moon., so I’m guessing it was a very, VERY last-second change of plans on Lee’s part and he missed that bit of dialogue.
Very cool to do the detective work though.
How are those GITCorp collections? What kind of DPI are the scans? What format? (CBR? PDF?) Would you recommend them?
Hurray for nerdy hijacks!
First I recommend them because it’s a lot of content for your money, the fact that they contain a lot of material that simply has never been collected in any format, and (most interestingly to me) they are complete scans of each issue. I could read FF in the Essentials but there I wouldn’t get the bullpens, letter columns, house ads, and the like that made up part of that culture. How else are you going to get a complete set of Marvel stamps these days?
The downside is that they are in PDF formats and are scanned from the best material that Marvel could find which often wasn’t very good. The FF #1, for example, could only be generously described as “Fine”. You can often see a faint ghost image of the opposite page in the scan like you could with those old comics. I’m not sure what DPI they used but I do have to zoom in pretty tight before pixels start becoming evident (as opposed to just the coloring dots). Finally there is a Marvel watermark; it doesn’t show up when viewing it through Acrobat Reader but it does on print and when reading through some other pdf readers.
They make wonderful reference material since it’s easy to flip through them and were definitely worth the $10 to $40 they charged depending on which set you were looking at. I don’t know if they’re worth the mark up that is being charged for them now…
“It” could be “the achievment of being the first nation to reach the stars.”