What about John Byrne's "Generation"?
I only picked up one issue, the one where Superman and Batman's descendants team up with the Legion to fight Darkseid.
I learned several things from this:
1) The Fourth World seriously needs to be given a rest. It was innovative to throw Kirby's concepts into DC-proper when Levitz did it in the early eighties, but like Celtic Myth, "airport novel" theories about Jesus's bloodline, Angels, and Vampires...Kirby's Fourth World has become way, way too trendy. Familiarity has strip-mined it all of coolness at this point.
2) 30th Century Batman's night-black spaceship (with the 1950s style "Batman face in front" look) is the coolest vehicle since the Millennium Falcon.
3) Man, Byrne's art has been getting steadily worse for 20 years, and now he's hit the bottom of the spiral. His action-centered, three-dimensional panels in everything from IRON FIST to his heyday on UNCANNY X-MEN was easily the most mindblowing art of that wave of creators, but nowadays everything looks like its drawn by a lazy amateur bored in art class?
Yes,but for chacters like those what is "real"? which is the gradation of realism?
I'm not entirely sure what you're asking, but just because something is a superhero or fantasy story does not mean that the obligations of writers to create emotionally believable people changes (and a big part of that is people who can remember their past).
GARGOYLES was very "realistic" despite the fairies and gods and robots because of the way it told its story: stories building off other stories, characters remembering their pasts, and so forth.
Is Lobo more real of Batmite?
ANYONE is more real than Bat-Mite.
At last i think that the best manner to use "multiverse" is give different version of same characters at different type of readers.I imagine two or three regular series,one with a "contemporary" version of Superman,another with the classic Silver age style Superman,another more "cartoon style" for childrens and Kids.
I don't know if that would work.
For one thing, Silver Age-style pastiches are seldom any good. Even Waid himself regrets THE SILVER AGE, and SUPREME is (at best) hardly Moore's best work. At worst, it's a blight on his resume.
I made an observation a while back: if someone wanted to tell a good Silver Age-style story
today, if it was sincere, if it was any good, it wouldn't immediately be
recognizable as a Silver Age-style story. Paul Levitz's LEGION OF SUPER-HEROES run duplicated the "epic battle" Silver Age Legion story formula, and even directly built on sixties stories.
But because it chose to be sincere instead of half-mocking, maudlin nostalgia...because he chose not to laugh at the characters, his stories didn't dwell on making sure the Legion future looks laughably "Buck Rogers." And so people don't immediately see that Levitz's Legion was so very, very "Silver Age."
And another thing: I don't think separate superhero comics need to be created for kids.
Remember that TREK episode where Kirk was beamed into a good and evil version, but it was the evil version that had Kirk's command abilities and the "good" version was a wuss? That's what happens when you break superheroes up into adult and kid stories: you get a toothless lamb on one hand, and then on the other hand you have a vicious, mean rattlesnake...yet
he's one that has the grit and grandeur.
I cited that as -an- option, along with rolling continuity, or "something". Alan Moore's Supremacy concept works. Just letting the old continuity run its natural course, possibly ending in something epic that isn't necessarily related to the start of some new continuity. Planning a logical end to a long series of stories at the beginning. Look at how the last Thor run ended, where he takes the world over in a possible future, or the awesome PAD story where the Hulk is the last mammal on Earth. I dunno. The hard part is that so much is tied to so much else.
As interesting as some of the "planned ending" series have been, isn't it possible there are some things that are just not designed to end? Legion of Super-Heroes, for one, can reasonably continue forever even under the worst circumstances.
Alternatively, there's more than just the individual stories of the character or group to think about. Certain things benefit the shared universe beyond just what it means to a single character, and it may be shortsighted to eliminate it when it can offer a lot to other comics. For instance, even if Man-Thing as a series was winding down, the MU would be all the poorer if they eliminated the Nexus of All Realities.
I said a while back the idea of characters aging and dying isn't problematic, but perhaps what I should have said was that there ought to be a way of taking time into account. That is, you can have change by characters yielding their identity to their successors (e.g. Flash) and you can have characters that don't age because there's an explanation: e.g. Nick Fury and his Infinity Formula.
Tarzan for instance, as PJF points out, ought to be immortal and ageless.
The characters trump the stories. and the stories trump the universe.
I don't agree. Stories don't and shouldn't happen in a vacuum. Superhero comics aren't an anthology series like THE TWILIGHT ZONE.
If a writer has a story that is centered around Ultron being a cold and emotionless robot, whether that is a "good" story or not is totally irrelevant, because that's not how Ultron is characterized as being. It is by definition, a "bad" story because they gpt it wrong: Ultron is calculating and ruthless, but he can be very passionate and violent.
I guess I'm not a slave to some world-without-end illogical congruous canon.
Here's an observation of mine: opponents of continuity (which really, is as nonsensical as opposing gravity) seldom give any examples of what they see as being wrong with the shared universe. There's a tendency to talk in generalities. As in "I think this."
All the doubletalk in the world doesn't get you out of the predicament that it's been really hard for superheroes and their ilk to really to change the world around them on any permanent basis. Stuff gets too far out there, and the world becomes really hard to relate to. There's SO much fantastical science portrayed back in the comic 1950s and 60s that would reasonably percolate into the world that it wouldn't look anything like it does today.
I don't know if I agree with that. There have been some moments where writers really got sloppy with the science fiction elements, certainly (introducing something that should have been a much bigger deal), but you have to hand it to the MU in one respect: the introduction of most new fantasy elements is carefully considered. It's not like Reed Richards created a machine that cures paralysis or cancer in one issue, and then "forgot" about it.
Of course, this is seldom as true over in Silver Age DC-land, where Lex Luthor can create a sattellite that turns all lead on earth into glass.
The only sense of continuity that you'll find in Superman books right now is All-Star Superman,
to the power of Infinity.
Actually, your statement might be true if your definition if continuity is "whatever Grant Morrison says is true at any given moment."
Even if you ignore the baldfaced lie that the aptly-named ASS is in some way a continuation of Earth-1 Superman (a belief that somehow persists despite its obvious falsehood - Jimmy Olsen being seventeen, no Morgan Edge or WGBS, a "jerk" Steve Lombard: a characterization he moved past during in the Byzantine Era), ALL-STAR SUPERMAN is a glorified Elseworld. It has no more continuity weight than that issue of WHAT IF? where Wolverine became Lord of the Vampires.
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