Superman Through the Ages! Forum

Another total reboot for DC universe? Opinions? P.S. The characters in the trailer are very Silver Age style,isn't?   a Reboot towards the classic?                                                                                                  (http://img511.imageshack.us/img511/5120/finalcrisisic1.jpg) (http://imageshack.us)
Shot at 2007-07-20

Kind of an odd picture. Batman looks like the Adam West version. As for yet another reboot, there's a rumor that the multiverse will once again shrink into a single earth. I hope that doesn't happen, but anything is possible at this point.

That's Earth-1, perhaps?

I don't see the point of establishing 52 earths then shrinking it down to one again, but this is DC so who knows?

This is causing reboot inflation. You should really only do this every twenty years or so.

When is Archie going to have Crisis in Infinite Riverdales?

If they know what's good for them, never I'd hope! :-)

This month's Archie (either the main title or one of the digests) *is* having a sort of "Archie of Two Worlds" story though (the modern Arch meets his original 1940s version, in an anniversary story).

Thanks Johnny Nevada !  I'll have to look for that.

I'd like to bring to mind three examples of where the action takes place in the "present", The Simpsons, King of the Hill, and the no longer running Dondi.

At some point, all of the above made specific reference as to what era it was set in, I recall that Homer (and Hank Hill) graduated High School approximately the same year I did, the mid seventies.  and Dondi was a five year old WW2 Italian orphan.

However, doing so fixes a specific age of the characters, and in a format where the characters don't physically age, this causes problems.

Dondi solved the problem by ceasing mention of his background, and I think  that The Simpsons and King of the Hill will probably do the same, just not reference it anymore.     

Ignoring the "Simpsons have no continuity d00d!" crowd (which isn't true... least far as the 90s episodes seem concerned, before I stopped watching), the Simpsons' solution is mainly either ignoring it or following the "sliding scale" bit that comics do---Homer graduated from high school "20 years ago" and Lisa was born "8 years ago", simply of depicting the world as being whatever things were like "x" # years ago, despite any earlier examples to the contrary.  Thus the "oddity" of an earlier episode (The Itchy and Scratchy Movie one) showing Homer as a teenager during the moon landing of 1969, but a circa-2000 episode (Homer becomes a hippie) shows him attending Woodstock in 1969 with his parents, only as a very young child. :-)

Homer was like 10 years older than me when the show started, now I'm 10 years older than him

That's nothing---I was five years older than Bart when the show debuted, and now I'm 4-6 years younger than Homer!

The Simpsons has always made it obvious that they ingore continuity totally.  It's part of the "in joke" that they occasionally reference.

As for Final Crisis, I suspect is will not eliminate the 52 earths as some want to believe or expand them to infinite earths.  Instead, my opinion is that it will be the final crisis for one of these earths, probably Earth 1, which I think will be revealed as the Silver Age DC Earth.

Assume you meant "ignore"---don't think they're goring the concept. ;-)

As I stated before, not (completely) true that it's ignored *totally*---a complete lack of continuity would make it "The Far Side" or "Looney Tunes". Last I checked, Maude's still dead and Apu still has those 87 (or whatever) kids... ;-) 

Do think it fits the "sitcom continuity attitude" mold, though---i.e., self-contained stories that generally don't refer back to previous episodes...except that the "Simpsons" does do that on occasion (the various Sideshow Bob episodes for one, or the episodes with Homer's half-brother Herb). (Though like I said, my sentiments are based on the first 8 or 9 seasons' episodes, before I stopped watching...not wasting brain cells pondering any of the 2000s-era episodes I've heard about... :-p ).

I think even some of the Sideshow Bob episodes don't follow one another.

I remember seeing one recently in which Bob is sentenced to death.  I don't recall if they ever explain why he wasn't executed. 

Simpsons makes fun of the fact that continuity is forgotten.  An episode where the children are trapped by snow in the school demonstrates this.  Ned mentions Homer's "Mr. Plow" business from a previous Christmas show.  Homer acts like he never heard of him owning a snow plow.  Ned points out that Homer even has his "Mr. Plow" jacket on, with the writing on the back. 

I think the Simpsons remembers what they want to and forgets that they don't.

Continuity is a disease,we not need continuity,but good stories.

Thanks, Carmelo! This is what I always feel. Obsessive attention to continuity often gets in the way of a good story, and it's unnecessary when you're writing about emblematic characters. You got a karma point for that.

Both of the episodes above (Bob in electric chair/kids snowed in) apparently were 2000s produced episodes, thus my previous remarks on the latter episodes' tone (and me ignoring any of the ones made after I stopped watching around 2000...not unlike some of the pre-Crisis Superman fans here's attitudes toward post-Crisis ;-p )).

We need both . Non obsessive continuity creates very special stories and invests us in the characters. At the very least characters need to remember they met before and what happened and relationships be consistent and characterizations need to be pretty stable. We do not need today's self indulgent kind I certainly agree.

The Simpsons has an ironic meta or post-modern attitude to continuity.  Superhero/adventure comics used to have a pre-ironic attitude to it and then evolved, with the readership, into what exists today: continuity overkill and obsession that nevertheless is ritually erased every decade or so. 

I find myself vacillating between a yearning for late-Silver Age/early Bronze Age levels of continuity and the sort that was prevalent during the early Silver Age, which, to paraphrase MacKenzie King, was "continuity if necessary, but not necessarily continuity."  That is, ignore continuity if it gets in the way of a good story.

I also think it would be neat if the age/time problems didn't necessitate constant reboots: it would be fun to read the serial adventures of someone who was immortal: Superman, Tarzan, Doc Savage, Hercules, The Shadow, etc.  I also like the melodramatic "aging" comics like Gasoline Alley, Love and Rockets, and ..what else?  I'm not a huge fan of Lynn Johnston.  Did Tom Strong age?

Was the Doc Savage pastiche character from Planetary immortal, or just the victim of some sort of time-stasis field? I can't remember. (See, I do read the occasional modern superhero comic!  ;))

Yikes!  "For Better Or For Worse" is one of my faves!  Lynn is stopping the aging process I think by year's end.... but I have enjoyed seeing the Pattersons age.  I was out of touch with the strip for years, but started reading it again through www.fbofw.com and was surprised to see Mike as a dad, Liz teaching and April in High School.

It's hard to knock one of the most popular cartoonists in the world, and a Canadian icon, but once I stopped being the same age as the children in the strip, I totally lost interest and before that I though it generally inferior to Family Circus.  I never read the daily strip enough to follow the continuities, especially the more maudlin dead dog stories.  My exposure was mostly limited to the colour weekend episodes, which were generally less continuity oriented. 

Her decision to end the strip is probably good for her (mental) health but the idea of continuing it as a "greatest hits" is selfish and misguided.

I have been following the online furor fans have raised over Liz's romance with Anthony.

She's not stopping the strip, just the aging aspect (characters will be frozen in their current ages), from what I understand...

What's the on-line furor about the Liz and Anthony romance?  I'm ecstatic that they are finally back together!

FBOFW has always been just mildly interesting to me.  The comparison to "Family Circus" is interesting; I wouldn't have thought of it, but actually both strips rate at best a small smile from me on a really good day for the cartoonist, or a really weak day for my standards.  Aside from the fact that "Circus" preserves the family in stasis in some undetermined era (looks like the early 70s, but in a divorced-from-reality, Brady Bunch sort of way), while FBOFW lets them age, both strips are, in their own way, way too preachy and precious to be much fun.  Plus, Johnston's art style is pretty crude. (It still edges out "Circus" in the end, because that one's also creepy.)

One really weird stip is "Funky Winkerbean," which started out funny and kept its characters in High School for years, then overnight aged them all into adults and became "serious."  I have to confess I'm on pins and needles with the current Lisa storyline, but I can't remember the last time this strip was funny, or even determine if it wants to be.  batiuk's work, like Johnston's, is pretty weird because it's essentially a soap opera with cartoony art, like Rex Morgan if it were drawn by Johnny Hart.  I guess that's why they put me off; they're neither fish nor fowl.

It's interesting looking back at some early strips that let characters age for a while, then stopped, like Dick Tracy and Blondie.  In retrospect, they were more vital and worthwhile before they got "frozen," but once they became "franchises" that outlived their creators, something had to be done.  That's why I'm surprised to hear Johnston's freezing her strip, which always seemed so autobiographical or at least very personal.  I don't see it surviving her death, so why not let it keep aging with her til the end?  Plus once you take away the assorted dramas of growing up and older, what's left but gags, which as I said are not her strong suit?

Don't know what the furor is over Liz and Anthony, but isn't he the guy who dumped her when she wanted to get married and now has a kid by someone else?  Probably Johnston did too good a job making him a rat first time around and now the readers aren't willing to give him another chance.  Plus I preferred that Native American guy she was dating...reminded me a little of Wyatt Wingfoot. :-)

"Blondie" is sort of a classic idea of aging in spurts ("Winnie Winkle" was like that as well).

Dagwood is a playboy who loses his inheritance after Blondie finally agrees to marry him.

Evolution into a working stiff with a young wife.

Kids.

Everyone stays young except the kids that grow up to start dating, etc.

And then there's not much else that can happen unless you decide to phase out the main characters the strip is named after.

Maybe Rao will move this part of the thread...

I didn't read FBOFW for some years... so I wasn't aware Anthony was a jerk... looks like he grew up a bit.  I picked back up at the time Liz was working at the nursery and Anthony averted her rape...

Funny how these characters of paper and ink are "alive"

Many fans hate Anthony, apparently.

Johnston is basically retiring in order to travel and enjoy her millions/have a life after 30 years of sitting at a drafting table thinking up lame gags and drawing continuities.  The strip seems set to morph into a "greatest hits" with new sequences used to introduce "classic" sequences (ie, 2 characters will look thru a photo album and say, "Remember when you came out of the closet?" and then the syndicate will rerun that arc).

Maybe the creators of Final Crisis should do the same?

My personal theory regarding Final Crisis is that it will be the final gasp of "Clutter Earth".

As the Multiverse stands now, certain heroes are on different Earths. For example, the Marvel Family is on Earth 5, the JSA is on Earth 2, etc.

Ok, granted there are probably 40 different Supermen (or more) in this Multiverse, but do we really need two Marvel Families and Two JSA'a? I think when the smoke clears, Clutter Earth will be gone. Earth 1 will be the home of the Justice League, Earth 2 of the JSA, etc.

I've been thinking along the same lines... I think it's time to kill off the Unified Earth JSA completely (well, the members that have been around since WWII era)... hopefully the Earth 2 JSA will have a nebulous date in the past when they started (30 years ago)... the Earth-5 Marvels could start now and scrap all previous continuity for new DC Earth... start fresh (meaning don't try to tie in all previous continuity as if it all happened on this Earth)

Found this: http://www.fborfw.com/news/002642.php

I don't have the power to split this thread.

Maybe Rao does?

I wonder what Earth For Better or For Worse takes place on?  Talk about convoluted continuity and 30 years of backstory!  I would love a team-up between Ace the Bathound and Farley...

I just find it difficult to believe that DC is going to alter the history of their "main" earth yet again.

Why don't they reboot already? I like the idea of a reboot every couple of years or so.  I'd say 10 but what do they care after final crisis they'll probably say there's more than one multiverse or something like that.  But anyway now Superman has a family (something i'm not particularly fond of) and batman has a son too.  Wally's kids are teenagers and bart is dead.  Why don't we have a few send of tales and start over, huh?

>>I wonder what Earth For Better or For Worse takes place on?  Talk about convoluted continuity and 30 years of backstory!  I would love a team-up between Ace the Bathound and Farley...<<

Guess it takes places on "Earth-FBOFW" (or "Earth-F" for short?)... :-)

Make that a teamup between Ace and Edgar, Farley's current-day replacement (Farley died in an early 90s storyline while rescuing a drowning 4-year-old April...).

I'm sure there is an Earth where Farley didn't die --let's call it Earth-Farley-- and where instead of drowning Farley was sent back to Earth by God as a superpowered agent or perhaps he was magically imbued with the power to breath underwater and became a sort of aquatic avenger.  Either way, he would make a great team-up with Ace or maybe Krypto.

It would be funny if For Better or For Worse had too many alternate timelines and universes and Johnston had to devote he retirement to a series of miniseries to clean it all up, killing off all of her mistakes.

Given Dc's bent for hiring famous artists and writers from outside of superhero comics, isn't it unfortunate that they haven't talked to Lynn Johnston?  She could whip together a great melodram for them and wouldn't have to draw it, freeing up tons of time.

 

It occurs to me that I've generally been harder on crossovers than perhaps they deserve.

Sure, there have been some real dogs (GENESIS and EVOLUTIONARY WAR come to mind), however, I suspect they are viewed with an amount of cynicism that they just don't deserve, as "artificial" and "soulless." Which they certainly can be...but the point is they ought to be judged like any other kind of story.

In that light, I've reread several crossovers, like MAXIMUM SECURITY and COSMIC ODYSSEY, and I've found them surprisingly enjoyable once I read them like they're just another kind of story instead of a "soulless event."

I like something like FINAL NIGHT, where you have the sun-eater attempt to chew on earth's sun. The miniseries itself was the usual nineties stuff, but the tie-ins made logical sense, as this crisis was worldwide. You had, for instance, Aquaman deal with the fact the oceans were freezing. There wasn't the usual compartmentalized nonsense that often made me dislike JLA in the 1990s, where there was a worldwide crisis and the only people available to fight it are, conveniently, the main characters of the book.

A crossover done well is a thing of beauty. The reason I like a book like LEGION OF SUPER-HEROES or AVENGERS is because they do these huge "event" stories that shake things up and where people die, like "Kree-Skrull Wars," or "The Thanos War," or "Earthwar." The crossover is essentially the Legion or Avengers event story, only more all-encompassing. If I want to be intellectually consistent, I have to admit there's no functional difference in approach and storytelling style between a comic I love, say, Englehart's AVENGERS/DEFENDERS WAR, and the idea of the big crossover.

And my position on continuity - or rather, consistent characterization and worldbuilding - is fairly well known. For those that came in late: "Continuity" is another word for "the world." And that the single most defining characteristic of adventure comics, from TERRY AND THE PIRATES to ASTRO CITY, is the ability of characters to remember their past.

If you don't like continuity, read PEANUTS. Or watch a sitcom. Charlie Brown falls for the football every time. The Scooby-Doo gang doesn't remember that their last adventure was pretty much identical to their current one. It's like they wake up every morning with a wiped memory.

I suspect everyone else believes this as well, and that it's all a matter of degrees.

The current "fashoinable" position among writers and a certain kind of DC fan is to "reject continuity," but I have found they reject continuity in theory, but they actually demand it in practice.

For instance...let me select an example unrelated to comics:

Remember that episode of STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION where Data builds a daughter? She eventually breaks down when Starfleet threatens to steal custody of her from him.

I will never forget the moment when Data calmly walked onto the bridge, and without any emotion in his voice, took his duty station, and told the crew that Lal, his daughter, was dead.

Then, though, they just about never saw fit to mention that something this important had happened. True, Data is not capable of emotion and the crew may avoid talking about his daughter's death out of sensitivity, but Lal was quietly forgotten for the rest of all of Trek's seasons as if she had never lived. Data never repeated his attempt to create her. He kept Tasha Yar's hologram, but he basically forgot Lal.

I was speaking about this with a fellow TNG fan, and she agreed with me: yeah, that was pretty friggin lame.

But right there...that's continuity, isn't it? Remembering your past and having it influence your current characterization. And contrary to popular belief, this isn't at all hard to do, or anal retentive: just have the writers remember that Data had a daughter.

Actually it was mentioned again late in the series. When Data met his "mother," Dr. Soong's ex-wife. She told him about the many failed attempts she and Soong had made at making a working positronic brain. She was shocked to learn about Laal (after seeing Data's painting of her), and tried to convince him never to attempt to create an android again. Incidentally, she turns out to be a very sophisticated android herself. However, this is the only mention I can think of in subsequent episodes, so you do make a good point. DS9 and Enterprise used more complex and faithful continuity.

My only real problem with crossovers is more a financial issue; I have a hard time justifying adding all these tie-in books to my monthly buys. Especially if the tie-in is only very tangential to the main story. My other problem with Big Crossovers is that they interfere with the long-term story and character development in the characters involved. For example, I kind of liked Young Avengers. I felt like it had far more of the spirit of an  Avengers team than say the New Avengers. I feel like their stories got put on hold in order to get them involved in Civil War, and that this ruined the book.

I am going to sound like a whiney fanboy but....Unless Final Crisis deboots the entire DCU back to the original pre-crisis continuity I might just drop reading comics. Its just getting annoying as a hobby.

-I am getting tired of reading a writers "version" of a character instead of reading a writers "take' on a character.

That cover looks sweet, can't wait for that! Is that the Wally West Flash?

In fact, any details anyone has on Final Crisis would be welcome, as I for one enjoyed Infinite Crisis, and that picture excites me particularly.