| Posted: 31 January 2013 at 7:25pm | IP Logged | 12
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Do y'all think DC will return to their prior continuity at some point, or is the New 52here to stay? There is no "prior continuity" at DC to which they could return. Ever since the first COIE series way back when, there has never been a single time period at DC during which their titles made sense in relationship to one another, or were ready to move forward rather than looking back over their shoulders for stray debris from previous continuites that they could "rework" and "reinvent" into new, more relevant backstories. Even when attempts were made to return things to their previous state, the result was always yet another new iteration that did not, could not possibly jibe with what had occured previously. Mark Waid, who famously asked, "Can we have the real Superman back now?" created nothing of the kind when given his bite at the apple. His version is at least as far off-model and consumed with "one author's vision" as the one he set out to displace. It was itself displaced in what may be record time by Geoff Johns' "Hey, they got their's! Where's mine?" iteration. That one lasted to some degree up until Grant Morrison's NuSuperman jumped into traffic with his Lil' Abner shoes and no trunks. Bam, bam, bam. Nothing lasted long enough to gain any traction before the next Celebrity Creator With a Dream trampled it into the dirt to make way for the next One, True, This-Time-We-Mean-It! Superman. Morrison, of course, had already had his turn with All-Star Superman, so his New NuSuperman is more of a pastiche version, cobbled together on the fly out of leftover ideas not good enough for All-Star and whatever occured to him in the shower this morning. Straczynski had a go at it with Superman Earth-1 (a.k.a. Assassin's Creed in the City*) and that one didn't match anything in any of the others either. "Oh, no, no. You misunderstand. Those weren't in continuity, you see. They don't count." Except to those who paid real money for them and found that, like those versions that supposedly were in continuity, what they'd just learned meant absolutely nothing in relation to this month's book. They get to relearn everything about Krypton, Clark's idea of himself, his relationship to his parents, his co-workers... Not one thing ties in with anything else. Superman Earth-1 sold a lot of copies, many I would bet to people who wanted to catch up on the old character and see what he was up to these days. Instead, they got a left-field take that does them no good if they liked it well enough to pick a copy up on the newstand. As if they could. Ha ha. Another Geoff Johns "fix" was the Great Lightning Saga wherein the Legion was rebooted back to the height of the Giffen/Levitz era, except some number of years later, thereby invalidating all of the stories featuring those characters between their fight with Darkseid and the first of their many, many, many ill-considered reboots. (Hey, one was done entirely by Mark Waid, who was merely the editor on most of the others! And it fit with nothing else. Well, why should it? The name of this game is Doin' It MY Way! Weisinger? Seigel? Binder? Those guys? What the **** do any of them know about storytelling or selling a comic book? Pshaw!! No, no, get this... Colossal Boy is (Hahaha! I'm dyin' here! I'm killin' myself! Yer gonna love this!) from a whole planet of giants, right? And his gimmick is that he can shrink down (Hilarious, am I right? Colossal Boy? Shrinking? Genius, right?!) to (Bwahahaha!!) OUR size! And so... And so... hang on let me catch my breath... And so he wants to be called, "Micro Boy!!" HAHAHAHAHAHA!!! I got a million of these for the new Legion! A new Legion that of course bore no resemblance to Waid's last attempt to reboot the team. Or the one before that. Seriously, "previous continuity" at DC? What continuity? They contradicted every fix and refix they put it place, usually within weeks of installing it. What I could see happening at some point when Didio, Lee, and Johns fall off their podium is a return to form for the characters. Superman learns that his Kryptonian Armor was in fact a symbol of dishonor to his family and removes it, enshrining it at his Fortress (which, of course, looks like no version of the Fortress we've ever seen before... Gotta do it MY way. Every one else got to do it THEIR way. Their way was wrong. MY way is right...! You'll see. It's cool. It's like a big aquarium... With fish made of razor blades and algebra!) Superman then dons a more conventional outfit. More like a circus costume. Maybe even with trunks. Wonder Woman will never have a consistent backstory ever. The next guy will diss the Papa Zues revelation and show us she was sculpted from clay, a mixture of Pandora's and Galatea's, making her both potentially evil and everyone's perfect fantasy. To which the guy will roll his eyes and ask, "Puh-lease, rilly?" No, no... It was meteorite clay. Wonder Woman's a space alien. Which the next guy will think is an okay idea, since it allows him to do his story about her clay race's natural enemy being walrus-tusked Space-Rapists, who come to Earth and rape Paradise Island into ruins! (Paradise Island was previously destroyed in the last three runs first by an explosion of demons from Hippolyta's womb (She's secretly been sleeping with Hades, earning her Diana's eternal hatred and emnity, just like all those other times Diana feels her mother's done something unforgiveable and hates her. Until she forgives her again. 'Cause that never gets old...), then eight months later in a war with the Eskimo Gods (Thomas Kalamaku finally claims his birthright as a mad diety!) and then again four months after that by an insane Hercules driven mad by Pallas Etherea, the latest in a long line of Uber-Villainess Arch-Foes for Wonder Woman that no one except their original author gives a rat's hindquarters about...) Continuity for Wonder Woman? Lost cause. It will never happen. But I could see them putting her back into a more merchandise-friendly costume at some point. Not that it matters. It's not like anyone reads the comics anymore! Along the way to that point, Didio's DC may get the idea for an "out-of-continuity" anthology book called "DC Comics Presents" or "DC Special" featuring tales of the characters that could have been written during previous eras... but weren't. And after you've read them, you know why. This one looks a little like Swan drew it. (With his elbows.) This one looks like Kirby! (Or rather Mark Pacella who, no really, looks JUST like Kirby!) Sort of a "Legends of the DC Universe" book that seems edgier and more daring now because it doesn't feature the Jim Lee Superman and Jim is standing right over there while we're drawing it!! Wild, right?? Really, though, I think the Nu52 is more or less here for the duration of the current administration, and the following ones would be morons to clamber down the "Crossovers on Infinite Earths" rabbit hole again... * See also "Arrow..."
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