Over the past several years I have started to think American superhero comics have gone too far in this direction. So much "deconstruction" and burrowing into past storylines. One writer I know, who used to be among the best, now seems almost paralyzed if he cannot do stories that "fix" things. Often things in no need of fixing!

Probably about ten years ago, I started playing in my mind a little game of What If? about this. If I was EiC at Marvel or DC (to reiterate, a job I DO NOT want!) how would I address this? I decided I would probably hand down a Rule that stated no story could refer to any issue/story published more than a year ago (occasional flashbacks to origins being the obvious exception). And after a couple of years of that, I might even tighten the Rule and make it six months.

There is, after all, no need for the latest appearance of the Joker or Doctor Doom to refer to previous appearances beyond the simple acknowledgment that there have BEEN previous appearances. The constant listing of previous encounters plays altogether too much to the anal fanboy mentality -- it's ALL REAL and it must ALL be constantly in play. This leads to the paralyzing inability to get past the idea that Batman has fought the Joker "hundreds" of times. Which requires a lot of time to have passed. And leads to questions like "Why doesn't Batman kill the Joker?" Both very destructive concepts!

In 100+ issues of FANTASTIC FOUR, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby hardly ever referred to previous stories beyond the simplest "not the first time we've met this guy" approach. And, of course, they were always very vague about elapsed time. "Months ago" was a recurrent phrase.

How much better would the recent (and not so recent, really) history of American Superhero Comics have been if stories were not permitted to be constantly resurrected. Imagine if, in X-MEN, for instance, after one year Chris was no longer permitted to make any reference to Dark Phoenix!

How "necessary" would CRISIS have been, if Earth 2 had not become a fixture, and that parallel was not mentioned again a year after "The Flash of Two Worlds"?

I do believe anime and manga have contributed to this need for continuity in (American) super-hero comic books these days...  A good majority of anime and manga series have a finite length to them (a beginning, middle, and end) with character growth, change, and reference to past history being a big part of the attraction for this format. 

With Marvel & DC super-hero comics, trying to do the same thing brings up several problems, in that there is usually not one single creator / team who will be with a title from start to finish (a good majority of the Big-Two comics were intended to be open-ended anyway), and any major character growth / changes that have occurred can be nullified or rewritten by the next creative team assigned to the book (much to the chagrin of the fans of the previous creative team). 

If JB's Doom Patrol book ended up being set in an "alternate reality" of the DC universe, why was it even necessary for the next DP book to go out of its way to show Nudge and Grunt in the first issue (being machine-gunned and literally abandoned as a means of introduction to new readers), when they could have easily been ignored?  For that matter, the Doom Patrol's sacrifice in the original series has been carried over into nearly every follow-on DP series as a major life-changing past historical event for the team, which only ended up making the last incarnation of the team even more depressed and angst-ridden about it with each issue.

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And pursuant to that, NO FOOTNOTES!!!