I know DC did “Crisis on Infinite Earths” and “Zero Hour” to reset their universe. I’ve heard some references to Marvel doing the same thing.
What was Marvel’s reboot called? What major changes were introduced?
You might be thinking of “Heroes Reborn” which kinda reboot Avengers, Captain America, Iron Man, Thor, and Hulk. But not really. You could have not read any of the Heroes Reborn issues and still not be lost. The origins from the early 60’s still hold true.
It wasn’t. Marvel refuses to actually have a Crisis, instead they just let bits drop off so you’re never sure what’s going on.
For instance: It’s crucial to early Marvel history that Ben and Reed fought with Nick Fury in World War Two. Nowdays, of course, they never did, the rocket having launched “ten years earlier” (from whenever…in 50 years, it’ll have launched “ten years ago”, or forty years from now). So Reed and Ben weren’t in WWII. How’d the several stories happen that depend on their involvement in WWII? Who knows.
Tony Stark stepped on that land mine “ten years ago”…apparently during the first Gulf War (actually, two years ago it was Gulf War I. Today? I dunno. Wasn’t Clinton messing around in Haiti in '93?). What an Asian warlord was doing in the Gulf States (or Haiti), I dunno. Ten years from now, Tony will have stepped on that land mine in the current Gulf War. Again, I don’t know how he ends up a prisoner of an Asian warlord after that.
Obviously the Thing and the Human Torch never met the Beatles. Perhaps they met Pearl Jam! :rolleyes:
The X-Men didn’t hang out with beatniks in Greenwich Village coffee houses, I’m guessing they were in Mosh-pits with grunge-rock fans.
Flash Thompson wasn’t drafted for Viet Nam. He was…um…drafted(how? It’s important that he was drafted: he did NOT volunteer) for…um…some conflict…about 6 years ago. I don’t recall any draftworthy conflict 6 years ago. And met his Vietnamese wife-to-be in a prison camp in this unnamed conflict.
Frankly, the Marvel Method leads to gibberish. Crisis wasn’t perfect, but except for a few screw-ups (Hawkman, Jason Todd, Wonder Woman, etc) you knew where you stood. With Marvel, who knows if any book happened, how it happened, under what circumstances it happened, etc.
There’ve been at least 4 attempted “explainations” for what the Fantastic Four where trying to do when they launched their rocket. I can buy that, at the height of the Cold War, they rushed an incomplete rocket into production to try to ‘beat the Reds’ to the moon. There WAS a space-race. There was a fear that if the Ruskies got there first, they’d claim it for themselves. Um…but why would they rush to test out a new hyperdrive? Or a new type of rocket?
Part of Marvel’s charm, that the current morons in charge are trying to erase is that the stories are grounded in time. The early Marvel books capture a slice of the flavor of early '60s. NO other comic company was doing that; a DC book from '52-'67 or so is set in some generic time. I could tell you within a year when any given Marvel book was pubished based on the current events mentioned, the fashions, etc.
Anyway, the short answer (too late!) is that DC had one (or two if you count Zero-Hour) Crisis where things were rebooted. Marvel has one long ongoing, neverending reboot.
While I’d rather have neither (and simply ignore the problem, which worked for 40 years) or let the characters age, grow, marry, have kids and have the kids take over (which won’t happen because of licensing), of the two, I prefer the DC method.
Fenris
Thanks. I could have sworn I heard that Marvel “ripped off” Crisis or Zero Hour, but I don’t even remember where.
There is the deal they’re doing now with the Ultimate titles. They’re basically restarting the stories of several comic book lines in modern times, and compressing a lot of story lines together.
A few years ago Marvel did Age of Apocolypse, which temporarily (about 4 months) rebooted things. It involved going back 30 years or so, killing Xavier, and then having Apocolypse take over in present day.
The only effect that Age of Apocalypse had on mainstream continuity was that a few characters “leaked over” from that plotline into the mainstream. This was not a very good idea, and so all the examples of this got killed off. Theoretically, the version of Bishop from that timeline was the exact same character that appeared in mainstream continuity before and after the storyline in question, but he never brought it up afterwards.
As far as Marvel coninuity getting a reboot, I actually agree with Fenris that it needs one, not because there are any huge problems with continuity, but just to synchronize things as far as character history goes. However, both Bill Jemas and Joe Quesada are on record as saying that they don’t want anything of the sort. If the Ultimate line keeps going the way it has, though, it’ll eventually come to the point of necessit, just as it did with DC.
AoA wasn’t a reboot, it was just a sort of What-If style alternate-timeline story that was grounded in the canonical Marvel timeline. Kind of like Days of Future Past.
The ‘leaking’ thing was weird. Nate was cool as a character, although I thought the further complexities added to the Summers saga was unnecessary. The ‘Evil Beast’ I thought had potential, but ended up being pretty lame. And the Sugarman thing I just never got. And the Morlocks connection was stupid.
But all in all, I loved AoA. And it had the intended effect on me – I bought every single ish they put out, and I hadn’t been buying every X-Book at the time, so what with that and all the Greek letter issues they put out (AoA Omega, AoA Alpha, etc.) my purchasing during that period probably doubled. But it was more than worth it – the storytelling and art during the period were superb.
The only thing I liked in AoA was the idea that the Bad Beast and the other mutant-builder (Sugarman?) had appeared…what? 20 years in the past and had “built” the Morlocks and the Genoshans.
That was kinda cool, really.
AoA was one of the best things they’ve done in a long time.
It was self-contained and limited. It let the writers experiment with new variations on characters by re-thinking their history and placing them in a whole new world. And because it was a limited story, major characters could actually die (albiet most of them at the end). I still sort of wish they’d do some more of the backstory, like the original tussle with Apocalypse that put him out of the action for a few years. But the more limited the better, really. They drained DoFP of its vitality by returning to it too often.
Anyway, Marvel’s continuity isn’t even now anywhere near as bad as D.C. was with Crisis. There are a few different versions of some character’s backstories, and a few sloppy retcons, but most things can either be figured out with a little research or simply have never been addressed. Most of their problems have to do with dates and major events simply not matching up temporally, which really isn’t as big a deal to current stories.
The main X-books DID recently have a “six-month gap” period where we missed out on some action, and things started up a little differently than we’d left them.
I have to disagree with you on both counts.
Ignoring the problem of the years and cultural settings of the stories going by and the characters not aging in kind didn’t work and fans noticed. Fans complained and that was at least part of what caused Crisis and Marvel’s various shots at ret-conning. And having the heroes age in real time doesn’t work either because most fans don’t want to read about the Hero’s child who has a different personality from the original; they want to read about the hero they grew up and spent years with.
Also the big problem with DC’s reboots is they caused everyone to wonder which of the old stories happened, something even the writers got confused about, which is what ultimately caused Zero Hour. Marvel’s practice of keeping the same basic stories but updating the settings in retellings means you don’t have to wonder which stories happened and which stories didn’t: they all did (well, except for a negligable few), and only a few minor details are usually changed. This means that I know that if I go and pick up a book I haven’t read in ten plus years, say the Fantastic Four, then I know that all the FF stories I read actually did occur and I have a guaranteed continuity where the She-Hulk and Medusa were once part of the FF. However if I go and pick up Batman after not having read it for ten years, that pesky Zero Hour reboot gets in the way and I’m left wondering if Batman actually fought off that group of criminals holding an underworld Olympics in Gotham.
Ultimately though, comparing DC and Marvel’s continuity histories is like comparing apples and oranges. DC’s continuity got screwed up in large part because they just ignored continuity for so many years until it got to a point that something drastic had to be done. Marvel started off with the goal of being continuity tight so they haven’t had to deal the issues DC has on such a large scope, and only needed to do infrequent updates to keep a relatively tight continuity for their universe.
Keeping in mind that this is all a matter of taste, so I’m not saying you’re wrong, just that I disagree.
Except, those that…well…didn’t. And there’s bunches. I listed a bunch from the '60s, but there’s a similar amount from the '70s and beyond.
**
**…as opposed to not understanding how the hero’s origins happened: or explain how Tony Stark, in 1993 was in a conflict in Southeast Asia. You can’t just say “It was the Gulf War”, because it was over by then and what would whatshisname: the fat Asian warlord guy who captured him, be doing in the Persian Gulf anyway? If the Punisher WAS in Viet Nam, assuming he went when he was 20, he’s now 60-some. Pretty spry for a senior citizen. If he WASN’T in Viet-Nam, where was he? I can’t think of a conflict in the late '80s and the Falkland Islands lack a certain dramatic impetus. Hell, no matter HOW it’s retconned, the FF’s origin makes no sense without a space-race.
You can’t get around the fact that Marvel’s stuff (back in it’s best days) was set in time. That was the charm of Marvel. The heros interacted with real-world events.
A couple of quibbles and a major disagreement. DC’s continuity was fine by the '80s (or give me some examples of screwed up continuity). The multiple Earths solved most of the problems back in the '60s, and the small details (which Superman was running around in 1949-1953? Where did the Batman stories in the late '50s where he was running around in outer space take place?) were fodder for discussion among the few geeks (cough 
) who cared: no one else even thought about it. It was certainly never mentioned in a story)
I don’t think anyone believes the DC story about the multiple universes being too confusing: there were only 6 of them that showed up more than once (1, 2, 3, S, X, Prime), and several of them hadn’t shown up in years or decades (X, 3, Prime) and only two could be possibly confused with each other (1 and 2)*. Besides the multiple earths were rarely mentioned more than once a year in the annual JLA/JSA crossover (and in All-Star Squadron, but since it was set in WWII, you’d really have to work to be confused). One two-part story once a year in one title CAN’T be all that confusing to most people.
The Crisis happened for two reasons: DC wanted publicity and they wanted to provide a “jumping on” point for all those X-Men readers who’d crossed over to read Teen Titans but didn’t want to try the other books.
And, to their credit, it worked. They got a TON of new readers. If they had done it right and simply started everything over from scratch, it woulda worked fine, but there was a six-year gap (Man of Steel covered Superman’s portion of the six-year gap) from the end of Crisis to the first issue of everyone’s post-Crisis book. And DC did THAT because the hottest DC book was The Titans and if you start all the books at ground zero, Batman won’t even get around to meeting Robin for a year and it’d be a couple of real-time years before even a proto-Titans could be formed. You don’t put your hottest book on a 4 or 5 year hiatus to keep continuity nice and tidy.
And Marvel didn’t have tight continuity from the start: it just kinda happened. Stan certainly didn’t go into it with a master plan, he just thought (correctly, IMO) that it would be cool if all the heroes existed together and could casually bump into each other, rather than following DC’s formula where ANY crossover was a big deal.
What’s fun is that I’m willing to bet money that within the next few years, if the Ultimates line survives, Marvel will find itself exactly where DC was in 196x. We will see a cover where a fallen construction worker is about to get crushed by bricks and on either side of a brick wall, there’s a Spider-Man swinging to save him: Spider-Man of Two Worlds. It will happen (and I’m looking forward to it).
Fenris
- It really wasn’t all that hard: S is where Captain Mavel lived, X is where the Freedom Fighters lived, 3 is the Mirror-Mirror universe where all the heros are bad-guys, Prime is here. Where we are**, 1 is where Barry (Flash) Allen lived, 2 is where Jay (Flash) Garrick lived.
**Please, let’s not start the Earth-Prime/Earth-Real silliness again.
The obvious answer for Marvel would have been the painful one: let your freaking characters GROW OLD. Let them have kids, let the kids take over.
But lacking that…
Well, you COULD push the Punisher into the late 80s-early 90s and have him as a Special Forces type who saw action in Panama, the Gulf War and Somalia.
The FF’s rocket COULD have been rushed into service to avoid the government shutting it down in the wake of, say, the 86 Challenger disaster.
And Iron Man COULD have been in the PHILLIPINES or INDONESIA working with our SF troops there fighting Islamic terrorists.
I guess I’m the only one who doesn’t have a problem with Reed and Ben fighting in WWII and still being around 40 today. I know Spider-Man met John Belushi and the rest of the Not Ready For Prime Time Players a while back and is still not 30 years old. Tony Stark was in Viet Nam (or Korea?) when he was wounded. Kennedy-Bush Jr. have all been president. All these stories happened and are still going on today. And it doesn’t phase me in the least.
Since I haven’t seen anyone else mention it, you might be thinking of Marvel’s “Secret Wars” which went on at about the same time as “Crisis”. It wasn’t so much a reset as an excuse to put all of the Marvel characters together for one big mega-adventure.
There were a few changes that came out of it (I think that’s where Spiderman got the weird black-and-white suit he wore for a while) but mostly it didn’t really have any effect. Because of the timing I think it was a response to DC’s “Crisis” but it wasn’t intended to be the same thing.
What about Onslaught? Didn’t some characters die/get reset during that?
Yeah, it led to Heroes Reborn, where the major nonmutants were all done by Image. Very little to nothing stuck around after that.
That was “Heroes Reborn” and as I said, no long lasting changes came of it. Personally I liked Jim Lee’s take on the Fantastic Four origin where the quartet flew up to investigate a cosmic anomaly which turned out to be Silver Surfer. But the official origin is still the…original one.
Another common Marvel continuity habit I forgot to mention: Wolverine. It sometimes seems like he’s in every single freakin X-book at the same time: even when he’s undergoing major events in other books that can’t really be ignored if they’re happening at the same time. We have him brainwashed in deep undercover, or deep in outerspace in his own title, and then popping up all over the place in the main books. That’s what they get for building such a popular character. Are sales flagging on your limited series about Kitty Pride knitting sweaters in Uzbekistan? Time for special guest star Wolverine! Even if he’s a smoking skeleton recovering on one of the moons of Jupiter at the time!
Now I remember why I gave up fretting about continuity.
Mark Waid’s “hypertime” idea works for me.