Continuity is good?

[JulianPerez]

That's because those stories can be segmented from contemporary DC Earth continuity with a little effort.  It's been the contorted efforts to try and tie them too tightly to mainstream DC universe too strongly that have been responsible for most of their downhill trends.

I disagree - I think a lot of Legion's best stories are based on interacting with the DC present-day, and it's a shame the Weisenger insularity persisted in Legion years and years after it dissolved everywhere else. It was just plain COOL to discover that the Science Police on Polaris had permission to wear the uniform of their forebears, the Hawk Police. It was fascinating when the Legion interacted with modern times, as in the Englehart JLA/JSA/LEGION team-up and the Martin Pasko Batman/Legion team-up in DC COMICS PRESENTS.

We were just talking about Laurel Gand in the other thread. Not just because she was interesting, but because of the concept she represented.

And Legion isn't all that insulated. Heck, Geoff Johns used Mordru in his now classic initial "grab you by the balls" JSA story arc.

When I mean Legion can persist indefinitely, I'm NOT saying because it is "compartmentalized." It isn't, and it shouldn't be, either. I'm saying that the Legion isn't all dependent on individual members or a specific situation. You can have the Legionnaires move off-earth, or have characters die or retire, and the book can continue. This is true of many, many other teams: TEEN TITANS, X-MEN, AVENGERS, etc. And they can be substituted for the Legion in my point.

Good characters aren't brought down by bad storylines -- we're still talking about Superman despite the Iron Age .  But, bad characters can ruin good stories. 

I don't know about that. Geoff Johns is the only writer that has ever gotten me to LIKE a character I dislike as much as Kyle Rayner. By eliminating the nauseating comedy and having them behave in a mature fashoin, Geoff Johns "character doctored" the pain in the ass Young Justice kids in a similar fashion. Forgive me if my point is obvious here, but I don't think at this point there's such a thing as a character whose presence totally poisons a story.

(I'll be willing to eat my words about the leather-jacket wearing, jackass Starman in Robinson's "too-hip-for-words" run, which is so smarmy and self-referential it might as well be the the Godfather of ALL-STAR SUPERMAN. I wince every time I see him on panel in JSA. Thank goodness Johns had the sense to get rid of him early on.)

I take it you haven't gotten the memo about Ultron being a "she" (and I'm not talking about Jocasta).

What the - ?

Nothing can possibly be more tedious than a classic Avengers fan whining about Brian Michael Bendis, so I'll spare everyone the indignity here. But JEEZ.

There are some villains that are like James Brown: they keep up with the times so they're always hip and cool. Then there are some villains that are the equivalent of Alice Cooper, or like the cockroach: they're "classic formula."

Ultron is the Alice Cooper of the villain world.

The commercialization of unstable molecules in the 1960s alone would've meant huge changes for our way of life now. 

Waid answered this question in his first FANTASTIC FOUR arc: unstable molecules are a potential hazard outside of controlled conditions, which is why Reed protects his patents. Their instability spreads like a virus, which nearly engulfed the city.

Yes, there are some problems, but these are problems that have solutions. Like why Jor-El had the only rocket on Krypton.

The covers were uglier too, minus Swan.

Truly, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, because while Curt Swan delivers on interior art, his covers are flat and sexless, unlike the dynamic, adventurous cover art provided by Nick Cardy and Neal Adams and Bob Brown.

[TELLE]

The covers were uglier too, minus Swan.

Truly, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, because while Curt Swan delivers on interior art, his covers are flat and sexless, unlike the dynamic, adventurous cover art provided by Nick Cardy and Neal Adams and Bob Brown.

Heh, we could do this forever.     Swan's covers are examples of wonderful composition, humour, storytelling and style.  Hallmarks of his interior art as well.  I will give you Neal Adams --his work marked a stylistic departure from old-timers like Swan that had a freshness to it.  Very distinctive.  I think that both Swan and Adams, both "realistic" artists, are indebted to similar schools of advertising art and strips like Rip Kirby, etc.  Now I just find Adams flashy and repetitive.  Cardy's covers I find jumbled and ugly, his figures oddly elongated or squashed.  Not as warm as Swan.  And Swan's interior art trumped them all as well.

[Uncle Mxy]

It was Laurel Kent, not Laurel Gand.  The concept Laurel Gand represented was "fill-in for Supergirl", trying to keep future Legion mythos consistent with contemporary Super mythos.  Laurel Kent's Manhunter end, and the Laurel Gand stuff, were part of Legion stories gone wrong.  It's one thing to have ties to the past, quite another to be slavish to it.

The problem with super-tech is that there's far too much of it for it to not have a transformative effect.  The rationalizations against it wear thin in the face of SO much super-tech.  A few years, and comic contemporary Earth morphs into a world unrecognizable relative to the current one.  You have the same problem with the transformative effect of super-heroes of course, but there's less heroes than tech, and (generally ) less cloning of heroes than of tech. 

[Ruby Spears Superman]

 Personally, the whole reason why I like the pre-crisis Superman is because I don't consider it a continuity. Certainly not in the sense that Marvel is a continuity. Let's be honest, very few things published between 1958-1985 stayed the same throughout that time. They were constantly doing "revisions" of events like how he went from being Superboy to Superman in college, or how his parents died. Some stories say that he started his Superboy career in elementary school while most versions of his origin suggest he was a teenager when he first put on the cape and long underwear.

 This is not continuity in the traditional sense, and it certainly leaves open the possibility for individual interpretation. For instance, I don't particularly like the Superboy #69 story that says he didn't even know he could fly until his parents told him he used to do it as a baby (a Superboy who didn't know he could fly is not Superboy, it's just Smallville with a costume). Since this particular scene was never acknowledged again in future retellings of his origin, it is up in the air (a little pun) whether or not it counts as official cannon (Action #500 suggests that the whole reason he didn't fly as a kid is not because he didn't know he could, but just because he was very careful with his powers growing up, what impression does that give someone who never read Superboy #69?). Then there is the question of whether or not you really want everything published to count as official cannon. A lot of the Lois Lane stories were more then a little bit sexist with her always trying to trick Superman into marraige and Superman always trying to wiggle his way out of it. In 1958 when the primary audience were eight year olds that kind of thing is cute, but by 1985, it does look, at best, outdated and at worst, downright insulting to women. Would you really want that as part of his history if you didn't have to include it?

 Marvel doesn't have that choice, if Sue Storm acted like a helpless female in a 1961 issue, (and from what I understand, she did) that still counts today as part of her history because of the way the Marvel continuity is set up. If you look at issues like when Jimmy goes back in time and becomes a Beattle you realize it might be a good idea to ignore certain elements that are either dated or unflattering to the character if you have the option. I don't see the pre-crisis Superman as a continuity so much as a series of very limited rules. We know what Krypton was supposed to look like, we know that when Kal-El's rocket crashed he was propelled out by the force of the impact, we know that the Kents found him near by and took him to the orphanage and later returned to adopt him, we know that his first super feat was pulling a tree stump out of the ground and getting hit by a bull, we know that Martha Kent made a playsuit out of his blankets because he kept burning up his clothes as a toddler, we know that around the time he started school the Kents sold the farm and opened a general store in town, we know that sometime between that point and fifteen he decided to start his career as Superboy, we know that Martha turned his playsuit into his costume and we know that Jonathon Kent had to take him out in the woods to teach him to control his flight, we know that some time after that Krypto landed on Earth. That's about it for the carved in stone stuff, but what about things like Beppo? He is never mentioned in future retellings either, did he still count in the later years? What about Streaky or Comet? They hardly got mentioned either in the last decade of the pre-crisis universe.

The pre-crisis Superman works for me becaue he is "reader friendly" in the individual interpretation department, that's something you don't have with traditional continuity, and I'm not sure you could do something like that today. Some people argue that the origin revamp was necessary simply because it was so hard to figure out what still counted and what didn't in the later years.      

[carmelo]

Personally, the whole reason why I like the pre-crisis Superman is because I don't consider it a continuity. Certainly not in the sense that Marvel is a continuity. Let's be honest, very few things published between 1958-1985 stayed the same throughout that time. They were constantly doing "revisions" of events like how he went from being Superboy to Superman in college, or how his parents died.

And this worked ! If a thing was not good was not spoken more,and after some numbers was  like if it were not never happened  . Naturally the secret was not to introduce  radical changes.A character like Superman would have be timeless,like an historical European city in which in comparison at one photo of sixty years ago only the clothes of the peoples and the cars are different,but the buildings and the streets are the same.In my opinion for Superman (and Batman too) would be good thing that if continuity were much vague but the firm points (the rules) for the characters were extremely solid and not not changeable.Then for things like the dead of Superman or the wedding between Clark and Lois there are the "imaginary stories".