(Pictured above: The cover of
Hawkworld #1—the post-CRISIS series that re-booted the
Hawkman franchise. It’s also the series that launched a thousand retroactive continuity problems.)
Not content to blather here on our own blog,
FanBoyWonder has been taking part in an online discussion with
Ryan and Jason at Film Fodder Comics www.filmfodder.com/comics on DC’s newest weekly series Countdown but more broadly about the current state of continuity at DC Comics.
You can read the full exchange at Film Fodder Comics but for our part, DC has created a crisis of its own making due to a two decade lack of editorial discipline that has allowed writers to continuously “tweak” story continuity until it’s become an incompressible mess to reader and creator alike.
The original
CRISIS on Infinite Earths in 1985 was designed to streamline its then 50 year history and get its pantheon of characters into something resembling a manageable state.
Unfortunately, CRISIS worked all too well and DC missed its chance to reboot its universe and start over directly at the end of CRISIS #12.
First there was
John Byrne’s Man of Steel re-boot the following year after CRISIS, followed the next year with
Batman Year One with
George Perez’s Wonder Woman starting over somewhere in between. Drip, drip, drip as subtle changes were made and remade impacting the DCU.
Attempts to fix the continuity “leak” with
Zero Hour, to explain it with the concept of
Hypertime and then to attempt to “fix” it again with
Infinite Crisis and 52 have only made the problem worse.
Yet we can pinpoint the exact moment when it all came apart and the DC Universe (and it’s readers) have been feeling the effects ever since—the first issue
Hawkworld, the mini-series and later continuing series featuring
a Modern Age, militarized view of Hawkman and Thanagar.
It’s not that Hawkworld was bad…quite the contrary…it was very good. Hawkworld’s lasting sin was a sin of omission. A sin that could have been prevented by just three little words in the first panel of Hawkworld #1—“
Ten years ago.”
But the Hawkworld editor wanted the new adventures of Hawkman to take place in present day and in doing so he launched a thousand little retroactive continuity problems.
But don’t take our word for it, allow us to interject the words of
DC's original “Continuity Cop” Robert Greenberger into the mix. The following comes from his recent column in
http://www.comicmix.com/.
“
We can all be forgiving of not being consistent with obscure stories from 20, 30 or even 50 years ago. But stuff that contradicts itself from the major continuity-resetting event of the last year, is unforgivable. Editors and writers should be following a singular road map and they should all be capable of doing efficient research so when they use a supporting character or villain, it’s consistent with the last known appearance. When that does not occur, the reader is annoyed and the talent comes across as sloppy or uncaring.
