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I just got off the phone with Wally Flores, fellow columnist, comic collector, and all around great guy, but a man with a firm opinion. When talking about what comics he is ordering, he commented how few Marvel titles he is buying, and how much DC he is buying. He's commented on this in several columns lately and being a huge Green Lantern fan and with Blackest Night in full swing this makes a lot of sense, DC is publishing what he wants. And I have to be honest they are doing the same for me, too. I love a lot of what DC is publishing. Booster Gold is one of the best books being put out now period, Batman, with Dick Grayson, has been enjoyable, and Robinson on JLA looks to be a new highlight . . . but . . . there is something that has really bugged me about DC for a while now . . . which I couldn't quite pin down till recently.
I became a DC fan with the Death Of Superman, leaped over to Knightfall, hopped on Green Lantern with Emerald Twilight, and loved the Flash in Flash Year One but . . . the house that Crisis (all of them) has built has left DC with a very large problem in this reader's eyes.
Obviously, since I write in a comic book fan resource, and have bought a large amount of comics over the years, I am what most would refer to as fan. Fan's have bad reputations. They want things one way, they don't like change, and they tend to be generally . . . grumpy. They want what they want and you better give it NOW! Well . . . I'm not that kind of fan. I'll say it and be very clear that I'm not and I hope to back it up with very clear logic and facts, and I'll let the audience be the judge. So in speaking of this issue, what is my beef with DC?
Well the "multiverse" DC has built is not on a solid foundation. It has no clear beginning anymore, and all the patches they have put on the construction have only made the house resemble some Frankenstein housing project that MC Escher could claim as art. The DC Universe does have a beginning that we all recognize: it begins with Batman and Superman and expands from there, but this is a beginning that is convoluted and changes from creative team to creative team. In the beginning all of the characters that form what we now refer to as the DC universe were owned by separate companies and publishers that eventually did team up their characters. Also much of what we know of these early beginnings is no longer the case. Batman does not kill people anymore. Superman can not only leap over tall buildings, he can fly between heavenly bodies. So that means the foundation already changed around the 50's, so within 20 years someone had to go into the foundations and put in new concrete and move some pillars around.
But if it was your house, wouldn't you want someone to do that? To keep it maintained have them come in and fix the foundation? Good idea, but DC didn't do that. They just took the foundation, and then changed around some of the rooms and the kitchen floor. One thing to remember about DC history is that the switch from Golden Age to Silver Age is really hard to pin down and when it exactly begins for heroes like Batman and Superman who have existed since the beginning is hard to figure out. People have guesses, but DC never came out and said, "Oh! Everything from here on happens on Earth 1, everything before happened on Earth 2." Yes, we know that for Flash (Barry Allen), Green Lantern (Hal Jordan), Atom (Ray Palmer), and many others, when their books launched is when their history started, but for the already established . . . who knows?
This is one of the issues that Crisis on Infinite Earths was supposed to fix. Everything after the Crisis would happen on one Earth with one history. The original intent was to start the whole timeline over . . . but it never happened. DC couldn't bring itself to abandon everything, so the characters started again with a three or four year gap, between their origins and their current adventures. Well most of them did . . .
Crisis on Infinite Earths did a pretty decent job. It removed all of this universe, that universe, this Adventure counted, this one didn't because it happened on this Earth, but by not restarting it you got creators who decided to fit some of the old stuff back in, in different ways. Some flashed back and said that certain issues happened; others retold the older tales with a modern twist. Batman and Superman came through relatively unscathed by more or less having an origin, and then picking back up with new tales being told later that filled in the missing gaps. Wonder Woman skipped over this by having her origin start at the same time Batman and Superman's adventures picked back up. Everyone else got new origins and then picked back up at the current date. However, the teams had some major problems. JLA now was still founded in the same way as the Silver Age, but with Wonder Woman no longer around Black Canary was substituted in. And that worked . . . but there was one big headache, the Titans.
The Teen Titans had origins all tying back to the JLA and their mentors, which was all well and good, but with Wonder Woman now not around, Wonder Girl became . . . odd. Also, to be honest, the Wolfman/Perez era of "The New Teen Titans" is considered, to this day, to be so good that that is one of the reasons the pair did Crisis on Infinite Earths. No one wanted to touch those stories and say they weren't canon, so some later "retconning" was done to basically say those "classic" stories happened but with some minor "changes". Unlike Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, and the JLA, no one went back and explained the changes for the Titans or which stories did and didn't count. These became real noticeable when events like Donna Troy's (Wonder Girl) wedding, where Wonder Woman was present, or the fact the Doom Patrol in certain incarnations was up and about, while for Beast Boy they were dead, which version of Hawkman guest starred? When the Titans guest starred in Silver Age Wonder Woman and Superman stories do they still count at all?
Nevertheless DC muddled on and with the Titans they "patched" issues with retcons, John Byrne's on Wonder Woman for Donna Troy being the most creative. The rule became for "Post-Crisis" unless you were told in a comic it was canon, anything before a set issue, like Superman Volume 2 #1, or Batman #404, Wonder Woman Volume 2 #1, was no longer canon. Until Infinite Crisis . . . sort of.
Before Infinite Crisis the changes became more commonplace and creators who were huge Silver Age fans started working Silver Age elements back into Post Crisis. Krypton went from over sterile and scientific to untamed and Rao fearing under Jeph Loeb, Mark Waid brought back evil twins in the Flash, and several creators wanted to get rid of the Clark Kent (Superman) / Lois Lane marriage through "creative changes". All of this lead to Infinite Crisis and the main problem with DC continuity as it now stands.
Infinite Crisis brought back the mulitverse and reestablished that Wonder Woman was a founding JLAer, Superman was once again Superboy, and many other changes back to "Silver Age" ideas undoing the revisions that had been done by Crisis on Infinite Earth's . . . sort of. Earlier Superman: Birthright had sought to bring back much of the Silver Age flair to Superman's origin, Lex Luthor lived in Smallville for example, but that didn't stick and Infinite Crisis gave Geoff Johns a chance to revisit Superman's origin in the current Superman: Secret Origin. Now both Superman: Birthright and Superman: Secret Origin have their merits and are good stories . . . but as basis for universes built off the aftermath of Crisis on Infinite Earths and The Man of Steel, the later of which is no longer canon, this becomes so problematic. (By the way, it is easy to notice that Superman is the main offender in this whole idea, with so many creators wanting him to be his Silver Age incarnation again.) Again, like with Crisis on Infinite Earths, Infinite Crisis didn't do the smart thing and reboot, it kept going and basically said "most of what you knew is now wrong, but we aren't going to tell you what any time soon." This basically seems to stem out of the status of Geoff Johns. Great writer, love his stuff, but DC has given him the keys to the kingdom and let him pick and choose what he likes and ignore the rest. Superman: Secret Origin would be great and work well for me if it wasn't saying that now every Byrne issue, a large amount of Roger Stern's and Dan Jurgens', along with so many other Superman creators' issues, no longer happened, but they "kind of happened" because in the current books Lois and Clark are married, something that came out of those runs. One of the biggest complaints comic book fans have right now is that Spider-Man's "One More Day" arc changed Spider-Man's whole history and now we don't know what happened and we aren't being told. Well DC has been doing this for YEARS now, and no one really raises a peep. It seems as if whatever hot creators want to do at DC, including rewrite all of DC's continuity any time they want is fine, as long as it sells books.
Now this whole piece can come off sounding like basically someone who is obsessed with continuity pouting that the books he loved as kid no longer a part of continuity, which does upset me, but it is more the way it is handled and the fact that it alienates and confuses people needlessly. With continuity that changes willy-nilly, a reader can't go back and pick up back issues, or most trades, without basically having a large text piece at the beginning which explains what is canon in the trade and what is not. Any fan who loves Green Lantern: The Sinestro Corps War cannot go pick up Green Lantern: Secret Origin and Green Lantern: Emerald Dawn without being really confused. You can't go read George Perez's Wonder Woman and Brad Meltzer's JLA together without wondering why one says Wonder Woman was never in the JLA, while the other says she was a founding member. And the sad part is that all of these have books that are based on them that are considered canon, with no clear place to see which is canon and which isn't. Also all these stories are collected in trades and available to order with no problem, and they do not contain any explanation for their "inconsistencies" with each other.
I find this whole situation disheartening. Classic DC stories like John Byrne's and Jerry Ordway's "Supergirl" where Superman killed the Kryptonian Criminals is no longer canon because one creator really wanted Superman back in the Legion of Super-Heroes, yet years worth of stories, such as Superman becoming Gangbuster, or Walt Simonson's classic Sand Superman special, are based off this storyline and still canon . . . probably. I have no idea, and keeping it straight is annoying. A common response would be just to relax, ignore it, and enjoy the stories, but knowing that a whim can make them unimportant takes some of the enjoyment away. None of this of course will stop me from buying DC books I like, which perhaps enmass would be the only way to convince DC to stop doing things like this, but I'd like to see DC care enough to acknowledge and stick with a history, both good and bad, that doesn't just rest on a few creator's whims about what they like and don't like.
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