Continuity Rant

[jducoeur]

Pardon 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...

Comments

I remember...

[ohsusana.livejournal.com]

...the whole Crisis on Infinite Earths saga, and how we all goggled that they were finally going to bring all time/earth lines to a whole.

And we bitched and moaned about that, too, at the same time that we applauded :-).

I've been out of the loop for a long, long time, but I'm sorry to hear that they've let that get screwed up again.

Sigh.

[alexx-kay.livejournal.com]

It just occurred to me that there could now (hypothetically) be DC fans out there who have never experienced a time when the Legion didn't have fucked-up continuity. Have they *ever* stayed coherent for more than 18 months since Crisis?

[jducoeur]

I wish I could say Yes with confidence, but I'm not sure they have...

[baron-steffan.livejournal.com]

Okay, I know you read a lot of comics, and I believe alexx_kay does as well. Me, not so much: I subscribe to Green Lantern and GL Corps (thanks, Beth), and I get the odd compilation at Barnes & Noble. I just recently caught up on Max Lord and the OMAC project. (Good thing, too, since apparently the JLA movie is based on it). But that's how far behind I am. DC apparently believes its fans are going to invest the time and money on keeping up with all this, but if you guys can't, imagine where I'm at. They're gonna find out that even an addicted base of religiously-devoted fanboys has its limits. Look at the Star Trek franchise. On second thought, don't.