The average person can tell you that Bruce Wayne lost his parents as a child and dedicated himself to fighting crime. It’s when you start talking about the details of their adventures is when things can get sticky. Here’s my take!
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Comics 411: Is Comic Book Continuity Necessary?
https://411mania.com/movies/comics-411-is-comic-book-continuity-necessary/
Is Comic Book Continuity Necessary?
Have you heard of the upcoming book Batman: Three Jokers? It’s a continuation from the Justice League story ‘Darkseid War’ from writer Geoff Johns and artist Jason Fabok and it’s being marketed as “the ultimate story of Batman and the Joker.”
Looks like we’re dealing with multiple Jokers again that was first broached when got hold of the omniscient Mobius Chair and asked, “What’s The Joker’s true name?” Looks like we don’t have one but three Jokers to contend with.
The average person can tell you that Bruce Wayne lost his parents as a child and dedicated himself to fighting crime. Like most superheroes, their origin remains true. It’s when you start talking about the details of their adventures is when things can get sticky.
It’s enough to give anyone a continuity headache.
The comic book industry has had a love/hate relationship with continuity since its inception. It’s an industry big on legacy but is also hampered by a weird sense of time. While weeks, months, years pass for us, a comic may only progress days, weeks, months. When you have popular characters who were first introduced back in the 1930s and 40s, it’s inevitable that you get tripped up on decades worth of storytelling.
The problem is compounded because when you’re dealing with a whole comic book universe, everyone’s backstory will never match up perfectly. Timelines are always shifting, events are always tweaking, and reboots are always confusing.
Comics intricate continuities were a point of pride for a while. Then slowly little questions started popping up about which stories actually happened and how to explain mixing old characters with new ones? Was this character around during WWII? It’s confusing.
Then we have the almighty reboots and relaunches that seem to come with more frequency now. In 1985 DC wanted to simplify things and gave us Crisis on Infinite Earths. Written by Marv Wolfman and illustrated by George Pérez, the series removed the multiverse concept from the fictional DC Universe, depicting the death of long-standing characters Supergirl and the Barry Allen incarnation of the Flash. Continuity in the DC Universe was divided into pre-Crisis and post-Crisis periods.
For a while it fixed things, mostly, but soon enough, continuity started to get confusing again. It seemed DC kept having to tweak things and launched Zero Hour: Crisis in Time! in 1994, Infinite Crisis in 2005, Final Crisis in 2008, and Convergence in 2015. The New 52 in 2011 was a revamp and relaunch that gave us mixed results and that was followed by…well, you get the picture. Every solution brought new problems.
Marvel has had their own tweaks to deal with as well. In 2010 they started to rebrand their line with the ‘Heroic Age’ and ‘Marvel Now!’ initiatives. 5 years later they really turned it up with their ‘All-New, All-Different’ shakeup. This was soon followed up with Marvel Now 2.0! and Legacy. It’s a lot.
I still forget how some timelines have settled so I can’t even imagine being a new reader.
If comics books didn’t have it tough enough, it faces a new enemy to its continuity with the arrival to the cinematic universes. Marvel and DC have put a lot of time and money to their big screen offerings and we are getting a trickle down effect from it. Add in television universes and it’s enough to throw your hands in the air.
