Day Ninety Five: Let's abandon continuity!

(Geeky post up ahead. Seriously. Go outside and play football or something.)

One of the major problems with comics seems to be this massive amount of history hanging over all of the characters. If you look at something like DC, which has near 70+ years of back story to it, and has actually rebooted their own history more than a couple of times, then there's just a little bit to the characters there.

This is horrifying and intimidating for a newcomer to comics. It's like watching a soap with no idea who any of the characters are. Worse, it's tuning in half way through, and all the characters carry on as normal, and the audience has no fucking clue what's going on. This is terrible. And, yeah, with the rebooting of continuity thing. As I understand it, Crisis on Infinite Earths was an attempt to slim down the massive back story of DC in order to draw in new readers, as well as getting all the old guard excited with a big crossover event that would affect everyone in the DC multiverse. But, duh, it didn't work. Because it was such a massive event, it informed everything that happened after it. Continuity wasn't wiped clean, it just changed, and all manner of new shit began informing narratives. They've tried to clean it up again, with other Crisis events, but it doesn't work, because all it does is make the backstory for these characters even more convoluted and weird.

This is why there's such a fucking nightmare about adapting a Superman movie, by the way. There's so much legacy to draw on that any film simply gets overwhelmed with it.

So, let's abandon continuity. Throw it out completely. Obviously keep it for standard runs of comic books, the twelve or fourteen issue runs that happen, but get rid of this massive, archaic crap. Because it is scary, and not friendly.

Also, I'll be honest, because I just finished reading the out-of-continuity All-Star Superman and it absolutely rocked my socks, because it takes what everyone already knows about Big Blue and just distils it into the most awesome qualities of Superman punching people in the face.

And know I find out that it was written by the same dude who wrote Final Crisis. Huh.

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