I can see WHY they're doing it, as DC continuity is a right old mess (how many decades can someone legitimately be a "Boy Wonder?), but this risks throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
Continuity's a mess since the Big Two decided to try and maintain a market of the SAME dwindling pool of fanboys instead of turning over a larger pool of younger readers, and pandered to their anal insistence that the comics should operate in something approximating real-time.
Fuck that. In superhero time now=now; tomorrow=tomorrow; yesterday=yesterday; ten years ago=yesterday; forty years ago=the day before yesterday. If you have a problem with this, remember that you're reading a book about an alien who looks just like us but can fly and wears his pants outside his trousers.
The Simpsons have a Christmas special every year, and yet no-one's head seems to explode over the continuity implications of Bart STILL being ten years old.
That's not directed at you, by the way, DDD. It just drives me insane that all traces of fun in the comic industry seem to have been sacrificed on the altar of fanboy pandering.
Gaah!
Jim
No, it' a very good point. Most of the DC TPBs I tend to buy are short series (eg Superman & Batman) or standalones, which are often flashbacks (Batman Year One) or themed stories (Long Halloween), elseworld type stories (Red Son, KIngdom Come). These pay no heed to the dead weight of fanboy continuity wank. I think only my Green Lantern collection has any sort of ongoing narrative that I enjoy.
So why can't DC's titles be like this? Run a 6 month Batman story. Then run several months of one-offs with different artists and writers. Than a massive 12 part epic. Ignore the passage of time, just tell the best stories you can, changing styles and moods constantly, but always juggling those same basic elements. Batman and Superman have so much symbolic weight they lend themselves to any amount of retelling and reinterpretation. I've got no problem with that at all, sounds like heaven, and not far from what you seem to be getting at.
What we've got however, is the worst of all possible worlds. They TRY to make it all hang together when obviously it makes no sense when looked at carefully. The time-scales don't match up, but there
IS a a passage of time - And Lo, Dick begat Jason who begat Timothy....The Final Crisis followed the infinite one which followed the one on multiple Earths, Superman's death & resurrection came before Batman's death and resurrection ... etc.
Either do it right (Judge Dredd) or don't do it at all (DC at it's best)
This new relaunch just seems to be an excuse to recycle decades of old stories in shiny contemporary packaging, like Hollywood, bereft of new ideas.
But I said that about the Ultimate Marvel stuff and ended up loving that...
Which is a long rambling way of saying I don't really know.
Be interesting to see how it pans out in the next few years.
