A Love Song to Continuity

So, the new 52 is coming from DC comics, now home to the DCnU. Pretty much everything has been wiped off the table, and DC fans old and new have the chance to see a bunch of heroes without the baggage of years of continuity, with the exception of whatever the writers think is worth preserving. In a lot of ways, it’s like Crisis on Infinite Earths, Zero Hour and Infinite Crisis—wipe out the outdated and camp, keep the cool and wondrous.

I can understand this. After all, when you’re dealing with characters like Superman, Batman, Green Lantern and Hawkman, you’re looking at about seventy years worth of continuity, based on characters that were essentially pulp heroes in a different medium. Longevity wasn’t exactly built into the character, and it’s a testament to many of the writers and artists who have worked on these properties that they’ve been in print for as long as they have. When a character has been around for a while, though, you do build up a lot of continuity and some of it is pretty cheesy. Try to imagine the 21^st Century Batman taking on a Joker who has his own gag utility belt, for example, or Superman spending an issue trying to make a blind girl believe he’s real.  That’s what the initial Crisis on Inifinite Earths was all about—trying to pare down the decades of continuity and “reset” DC comics for the next generation. Superman’s origin was thoroughly updated. So was Hawkman’s, Wonder Woman’s, the Justice League of America and the Justice Society of America.

Personally, I loved the new Superman. Part of me was horrified that the godlike boy scout who could do no wrong was erased, but the new Superman was…well, more human. Lex Luthor was transformed from a criminal mastermind into something worse—a wealthy businessman who Superman could defeat, but never get rid of completely, since the new Luthor was smart enough to cover his tracks. Lois Lane was less of a damsel in distress, and even Clark Kent was a more developed character than the eternal wimp. It all made sense, and I loved it all.

The problem was, there were a lot of good Superman stories that got tossed by the wayside. The one I think of the most is the Alan Moore story, “For the Man Who Has Everything,” a great story that only works with the Silver Age Superman. You need the Fortress of Solitude for that, because the story can’t really take place anywhere else. You need a Superman who more or less is without flaw, because it makes his decisions that much more painful, and it also provides a great twist at the end of the story.

This is the risk of rewriting continuity. Companies that do so throw out years of stories, and you never really know which ones are the ones that defined a character. There are comics fans out there who grew up on the Scott Lobdell/Fabian Nicieza run of X-Men, and there are comics fans whose first exposure to Spider-Man was the Clone Saga. For that matter, the 1960s Batman TV show is how a lot of people still remember the character!

Also, with respect to noted comic book writers like Peter David, rewriting continuity may not mean the retconned stories were never written, but it does invalidate them. In the instance of Spider-Man’s never-happened marriage to Mary Jane, for instance, there were a lot of good stories, a number of them in the “Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man” title that chronicled the fallout of Peter Parker unmasking himself. Those never happened. The stories where Clark Kent has those quiet moments with his family? Never happened. We as readers may like them and we might think they’re part of the character, but now with Superman’s foster parents both being dead, that’s a piece of his character that is gone, at least until the next continuity change.

It’s a lot like seeing a remake of a television show. It may be as good as the original, and it may even be better. But inevitably, some parts of the old will be left out, and the fans have to accept that loss or risk being left behind by the crowd and the characters themselves.

So fly on Superman, and prowl away Batman. I’ll be reading, and I’ll be interested in what happens next, but part of what made those characters special for me is gone. Again.