Continuity Rant
Nov. 10th, 2007 12:08 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jducoeurPardon me for a minute, but I need to get this off my chest:
I am not, understand, a serious comics-continuity goon. I actively like revisionist comics like Grant Morrisson's current Superman title, which just plain don't fit with the established history of the series, but which are trying to make their own points and tell their own stories. Continuity is a tool, to be used as appropriate.
That said, I am getting *really* annoyed at DC right now. The post-Infinite-Crisis continuity is so messed up, I can't even figure out what's going on. I'm *especially* irritated about the Legion of Super-Heroes. As far as I can tell, we have *three* mutually incompatible LSH continuities running simultaneously, all nominally in the same universe. The Legion that's crossing over with Superman isn't the same Legion that's crossing over into Countdown, which *might* be the same Legion that's been working with Supergirl for the past year or two, but is at best confusingly so. Even Superman's own knowledge of the Legion is self-contradictory: in one book, he's clearly known them all his life, whereas in another he clearly had his memory of them wiped years ago.
I have to admit that it's currently *so* ridiculous that I think they're planning on Doing Something About It: they have some grand plan to explain all the incongruities. But honestly, the whole thing is so ham-handed and clumsy that it simply comes across as ameteurish. It's perhaps the best example of why I dislike Geoff Johns' writing -- he consistently reads like a mediocre fanboy to me, obsessed with intellectual masturbations about DC minutiae rather than actually *saying* anything new. (No, it's not fair to blame him for the whole mess: lots of people are involved in it. But he seems to be the worst.) And it especially annoys me because LSH is often one of my favorite books, and I was really enjoying the Mark Waid run.
*Sigh*. I am a self-professed DC fanboy, and for a few years there I was really enjoying the line. But as their stuff gets more pointlessly juvenile, reading more like a badly-designed oversized LARP than a well-managed universe, and Marvel gets deeper and deeper into their current dark but interesting storyline, I am slowly finding myself inclined to go cold turkey on the whole damned DCU...
I am not, understand, a serious comics-continuity goon. I actively like revisionist comics like Grant Morrisson's current Superman title, which just plain don't fit with the established history of the series, but which are trying to make their own points and tell their own stories. Continuity is a tool, to be used as appropriate.
That said, I am getting *really* annoyed at DC right now. The post-Infinite-Crisis continuity is so messed up, I can't even figure out what's going on. I'm *especially* irritated about the Legion of Super-Heroes. As far as I can tell, we have *three* mutually incompatible LSH continuities running simultaneously, all nominally in the same universe. The Legion that's crossing over with Superman isn't the same Legion that's crossing over into Countdown, which *might* be the same Legion that's been working with Supergirl for the past year or two, but is at best confusingly so. Even Superman's own knowledge of the Legion is self-contradictory: in one book, he's clearly known them all his life, whereas in another he clearly had his memory of them wiped years ago.
I have to admit that it's currently *so* ridiculous that I think they're planning on Doing Something About It: they have some grand plan to explain all the incongruities. But honestly, the whole thing is so ham-handed and clumsy that it simply comes across as ameteurish. It's perhaps the best example of why I dislike Geoff Johns' writing -- he consistently reads like a mediocre fanboy to me, obsessed with intellectual masturbations about DC minutiae rather than actually *saying* anything new. (No, it's not fair to blame him for the whole mess: lots of people are involved in it. But he seems to be the worst.) And it especially annoys me because LSH is often one of my favorite books, and I was really enjoying the Mark Waid run.
*Sigh*. I am a self-professed DC fanboy, and for a few years there I was really enjoying the line. But as their stuff gets more pointlessly juvenile, reading more like a badly-designed oversized LARP than a well-managed universe, and Marvel gets deeper and deeper into their current dark but interesting storyline, I am slowly finding myself inclined to go cold turkey on the whole damned DCU...