continuity

[ratcreature]

I remember those debates in TS fandom about how the canon was never really clear about Jim's birthday and age, and the issues with differences between prop canon and what is shown in the flashbacks in some episodes, and how sometimes the months between the episodes don't really line up with the shown season of the year in a coherent chronology etc. And I remember how everyone used to bitch that the canon was so inconsistent.

Hah. Trying to just get a basic idea what pieces of canon are still valid and what has been retconned for just a little part of the current DC universe continuity makes me laugh at those complaints in retrospect. Current "definite" canon is more slippery than a wet fish for the DCU.

I mean, so far I've only read post-Crisis DC but not even that makes it really easier. Right now I'm reading through DCU FAQs to understand the impact "Zero Hour" had on post-Crisis continuity. Zero Hour apparently was the second retcon intended to fix the snafus and inconsistencies in the wake of their first retcon...

I get the need for retcons in comic canon to adjust it from time to time, but the way DC did it is certainly, uh, challenging. I guess I'll add the relevant "Zero Hour" issues to the ever growing list of "comics to get eventually" and hope I'll be able to figure it out at some point.

(Or at least get used to it, sort of like with quantum mechanics, you don't really understand it, but get used to it when you just use the formulas often enough...)

Comments

[mamadeb.livejournal.com]

Oh, please.

When I stopped reading comics in 1976, the DCU was only slightly confusing. The kid type heroes were starting to age a bit - Dick Grayson was in college, for example, and Barbara Gordon was in the US House of Representatives (which meant she was at least 25, since that's the minimum age for a congress member), but Superman and Batman were pretty much stuck on ageless/thirties. There were some memories of the "Golden Age" heroes, but they mostly existed in reprint issues.

Barry Allen did manage to get married, though, so that was a change.

The audience was still mainly kids, and kids just didn't care about continuity that much. Most stories (and they were often only ten pages or so long, with at least one backup, if not more) were one offs, begun and ended in that issue. Nothing really *built* on anything else. This was starting to change - notably in the Legion stories where the characters had romances.

When I came back 25 years later, all this had changed. There had been two major crises, and the end result has been total confusion.


At this point, Wonder Woman has only been around for "five" comic book years or so, so that Donna Troy, Wonder Girl, predates her. Her WWII stuff was all done by her *mother*, Queen Hippolyta, with some sort of time travel thingie. Donna's continuity is a complete mess.

She's been replaced in the Justice League's orgin by Black Canary, too, so that's changed. I mean, Dinah Lance is a great character, but there's a tremendous difference between the two women.

And Hawkman. Oh, goodness, Hawkman. That's not even describable.

Superboy was written out of canon completely, with Clark coming into his powers after high school, which makes a tremondous problem for the Legion of Superheroes, who used the teenaged Kal-El as a model for their "club." They went to elaborate lengths, including a "time bubble", to maintain them, which created several continuities, and eventually led to a complete reboot of the Legion and their origin such that Superboy is not necessary. They used Zero Hour to do this. There *is* a Superboy now, but he came out of the events surrounding Superman's death, and he's a separate person from Clark Kent, and contemporay with the rest of the universe.

I've spent the past two years playing very expensive catch up. And I've decided to just go with what they tell me, and not try to make sense of anything.

[ratcreature]

Yeah, I'm starting to realize that getting to understand stuff and catch up with it will turn out to be an expensive endeavor. And that despite my modest goals. My main interest is Dick Grayson/Nightwing and those parts of the Batman continuity that are really important or relate to him, and I've already decided that I'll turn my attention to his Teen Titans (or whatever the incarnation of that group was called when he was in it) years only much later. And it's still really complicated. Obviously Batman's history gets retconned in fits and starts, and some stays some is changed. I've read that while post Zero Hour Year One is still continuity, Year Two got retconned, and I'm still not sure whether the flashbacks in Year Three are part of the current continuity, since I haven't read the newer Robin origin issues, and I still don't know exactly where the current versions of the crucial Two-Face and Joker incidents with Robin I are told...

But then I've only started this February, and before I only was a casual Batman reader, which causes much less headaches.

Gah. Yeah.

[sanj.livejournal.com]

With Dick, particularly, you have an incredible mess. Because not only has he had nearly as long-running a history as Batman himself, but Dick's been reliving the same five or so years now since the 1970s, in at least three different series at one time, with no particularly major retcons. Yet not everything that seems to have happened could have happened -- because not even the Twentysomething Wonder can pack that much action into his life.

I think there has to come a point when you decide which parts of his story you're going to accept or define as important. That can even become freeing, really -- or so I keep telling myself.

And now I'm betaking myself to GothamGazette, because this post got *really* long. :)