Looking at a lot of different geek forums, I have been surprised that this seems to be one of the most popular sentiments about the DC relaunches: "I am so excited about this. I am reading marvel, but now I can read some DC without worrying about lots of old continuity."
This reaction makes me wonder if these people made sure to read all the Spider-Man, Fantastic Four, and Avengers from the 60's to the present before reading any new marvel.
Of course there are titles like Sandman or Y the Last Man. Stuff with a beginning, middle and end. But in superhero comics there is no end, and "beginnings" seem to happen every 10-15 years. Even as a kid I knew this. I never went up to the cashier and asked how could I read detective comics #487 without reading the four hundred and eighty six before it.
A lot of these characters have existed over 75 years. Sure, you can get the archives and check out the art form in it's infancy. But you need know nothing to dive into a mainstream supers tale!
Don't Be That Guy.
Well to play the devil's advocate here, Marvel has not really put great emphasis on continuity these days, in fact they tend to towards disregarding it at times. I have more than once seen conflicts within books released the same month.
ReplyDeleteDC on the other has placed a much greater emphasis on continuity, and on tweaking that continuity, leading at times to very convoluted character backgrounds and storylines. With Hawkman perhaps being the most egregious example of a convoluted origin. I mean who knows what his story is? I sure don't. They also seem to publish more books that require at the very least, a passing familiarity with continuity. Infinite Crisis for example, relied on pretty heavily on knowledge of Crisis on Infinite Earths, a book fist published two decades before. Final Crisis was even more arcane, while I’ll admit I’m more of a Marvel reader I do know my DC fairly well, and I was lost much of the time with that book.
And while I do believe it is being blown out of proportion, I do think there is enough evidence to point to that one could see where some of these people are coming from.
You have some good points with the Crisis stuff.
ReplyDeleteSo I guess we can say it's all Grant Morrison's fault. ;)
ReplyDeleteThough I say that with love, for as whacked out as he can get sometimes, he's easily my favorite writer working in the field and has been since Animal Man, which was what the late 80's?
Yeah I think so. His JLA run is my favorite JLA of all time.
ReplyDeleteFinal Crisis is really good but flawed. I am glad they put the Superman issues in the trade, without those there is no hope of enjoying the end.