dadaluholla

What comic characters would you say have had the most screwy continuity? With all the reboots and multiverses, I would have to say its probably a DC character, but obviously Spider-Man could now probably give some of them a good challenge in the inconsistency department.

I'd imagine it is pretty difficult to keep a character fresh and interesting without occasionally mixing things up. Has any character maintained a solid continuity? Archie? Uncle Scrooge?

Patman

Power Girl

fujishig

Hey, they cleaned Power Girl up a bit, though the whole Atlantis/Arion connection because of that (stupid) edict to not have any other Kryptonians besides Superman was dumb.

I'd have to go with Wonder Girl/Troia/whatever the heck she's calling herself. First she was just a little analog of Wonder Woman, so that there was a girl in the Teen Titans. Crisis goes and changes WW's origin, so that's out the door... she becomes some child of the elder gods or something. Her son became an absolute despot in the world of the Team Titans. Her husband and son both die (to nobody's dismay) in a car crash. Byrne tried to clean this up with his run on WW, but I still have no idea what the official story is.

If taken as a group, the Legion of Superheroes, as I mentioned in other posts, is totally screwed up. Crisis happens, removing Superboy as a possible motivation for them to get together... bam, replace him with Valor/Mon-el, who seeds the UP home worlds. Brande is really a Durlan from Vril Dox's present-day L.E.G.I.O.N. who went on to find the youths to create the future Legion. Supergirl's gone, let's get a female Daxamite. Let's add a superpowered guy with glasses named Kent. Blame it all on the Time Trapper or Glorith. Reveal that the Legion we've been following all this time might be clones, and introduce a kid-Legion: spin off into a new book called Legionnaires.

Zero Hour messes this up, so create a whole new Legion of Superheroes, going through many of the same stories as before but with little twists (look, Ferro Lad didn't get killed by the Sun Eater, and Jeckie's a big snake). During Infinite Crisis, reboot the Legion yet again with a kids vs. adults theme. Meanwhile, have the original classic Legion show up in various places during Countdown (but wait, Sensor Girl and Karate Kid together? Impossible!). Can anyone explain to me what's going on here?

Also give a honorable mention to Hawkman. Post crisis, they introduced him as a Thanagarian police officer, then some kind of avatar for the Hawk God. Zero Hour, I think, just merged them all together.

But yeah, you're right, DC seems to get most of the continuity issues, mainly because they seem to want to always fix them, but end up making them worse.

DGibFen

I think Geoff Johns is going to fix a lot of this in a mini-series this summer. They had Superman and Batman in a conversation about some aspects of this subject in Action this month.

To a point. He was reincarnated (again!) in JSA 2-3 years after Zero Hour, where all the origins were meshed together and formed some weird death/resurrection story.

I think if anyone should be criticizing screwed-up continuity, it should be Spider-Man. In one stupid storyline, 20 years of continuity gets tossed out the window, characters are brought back from the dead, and no one seems to notice. And all the explanation we've gotten is "it's magic!" Marvel will have to do a Crisis-type reboot on him eventually.

I'm curious what Grant Morrison's run on Batman will do. The issue coming out this week had a few twists and turns that I would have never imagined - and the whole "RIP" idea may not be

davidh777

Nancy?

Superboy

HAWKMAN.

Period.

slop101

Considering that Spider-man had been around for over 40 years, his continuity was pretty solid - more solid than most comic book characters with half his history, that is, until Joey Q fucked it all up with his "One Last Day" bullshit.

Josh-da-man

Wolverine.

For a while, they hinted at things from his past that were kind of intriguing (like Wolverine #10), but in the early 90s, they blew it big time.

Implanted memories. Part of a lame commando consisting of members with names like vole and kestrel. Those stupid Shiva robots. Sabretooth is his brother. No, he's his father. No, he's neither. Then his youth was this weird gothic romance set in the nineteenth century. Then the "Weapon X" program is actually "Weapon Ten" and he's part of a line of super soldiers that started with the Black Captain America (Weapon Zero) and Steve Rogers (Weapon One).

stingermck

The Time Trappers recent appearance in Action Comics fixed Legions problems in one page. Now we just need to see what Johns does with it.

Donna gets my vote though. It wouldve been Hawkman, but thats been cleared up.

Superboy

That's only because Marvel is completely ignoring John Byrne's Spider-man: Chapter One reboot.

fujishig

Just to show that you don't have to have decades of history to mess up continuity: how about the modern-day Supergirl? Crisis wiped the slate clean, and even Peter David's Matrix version of Supergirl was brushed aside in order to start anew.

She was introduced in the Loeb/Michael Turner arc of Superman/Batman, as the older cousin of Kal El who had been trapped in suspended animation before landing on Earth, thus making her younger than Superman. She lands on Earth, meets nothing but mistrust from Batman, gets sent to Paradise Island to train by Wonder Woman, then gets kidnapped and brainwashed by Darkseid before being rescued... all in the span of a few issues.

Loeb also starts up the Supergirl regular series. Every issue, she gets into a misunderstanding with a bunch of superheroes and ends up fighting them. She apparently has an evil side to her (the one Darkseid brainwashed), which is manifested physically when Luthor exposes her to some Kryptonite.

Then Infinite Crisis happens, and she gets jaunted off to the join the current version of the Legion of Superheroes, where there is no mention of her dark side. She returns during WWIII. However, in the first post OYL story, she and Power Girl are in Kandor as the "legendary" heroes Nightwing and Flamebird... I don't think this was ever fully explained. They jump from this story to one where she decides to become a normal teenager with a secret identity, and starts dating/flirting with a bunch of different guys including the sadistic Power Boy and a member of the Outsiders (this is later retconned when someone finally remembers that she's supposed to be 16). A new origin story follows that involves her father having a master plan to kill Kal-El, involving Kryptonian crystals that come out of her body and her ability to see Kryptonian ghosts from the Phantom Zone. She was also apparently a murderer as a child. This, too, is ignored a couple of months after the conclusion of the story, which included some reference to 52 and some influence by Dark Angel, who, it should be noted, was also heavily involved in Byrne's convoluted Donna Troy origin story.

Now she's on a quest to cure cancer.

dx23

In Marvel:

Spider-Man (specially the mess with his parents' storyline)
Wolverine

In DC:

Hawkman
Donna Troy
The entire DC universe

I was talking to a friend of mine the other day that I think all this continuity issues and constant reboot and restarts of both Marvel and DC is the main reason of the decline in comic book popularity and the decrease in readers. I think that this problem has driven away more potential customers than what gimmicks did in the 90's.

boo-ga

You are so DAMNED right! Which is why the Ultimate titles do so well (DID so well?); they take characters you know like the back of your hand (hmmmm.....never noticed that before, LOL), and re-tell the stories with a very contemporary twist, plus a few alterations here and there, so you don't get too bored. Heck, 9 out of 10 times, I like the Ultimate version of a character better than the "classic" version. The old Marvel U could cease to exist, as far as I'm concerned, as much as I've [not] followed it in the last 15 years or so. And I've been reading comics for 40 years now.

Til Fred Hembeck fucks up the Ultimate U., make mine Marvel!

resinrats

DC definitly seems more screwed up. They keep rebooting the universe since they tend to screw it up so bad. Marvel seems to at least keep things going even if they do try to explain things as this, making some things confusing. Spiderman's devil deals seems to be the biggest continuity screw up that I can remember.

Marvel does start other universes (Ultimate universe) as a way to fix things other than change it in the normal books that DC does.

resinrats

The biggest issues I have with long running series and long continuities is the fact that there is no way that all these stories could possibly happen. Spiderman has been running for 40 years or so but for Peter Parker, it has only been 10-12 years since he became Spiderman. No way could all those comic stories have happened in that short of a time. Then there are some stories that say the amount of time that has passed during it or since an event, cutting the amount of time possible for the other stories. Same with the other heroes, Batman, FF, X-Men, etc.

dx23

I think Green Lantern writers were the only ones doing the smart thing and aging the main character slightly throughout the years. It was great to see Hal Jordan getting white hair.

One of the biggest problems that the comic writers face is the aging of the character, but I think it is the only one that fans don't seem to mind that much. i do agree that is weird seeing storylines in Spider-man that had mentions of Nixon, Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton and Bush being the US President while the character only age 4-6 years during that timespan.

fujishig

Of course, they retconned the white hair too, saying that it was a result of that whole Parallax thing. DC actually had a perfect excuse with their Earth 1/2 thing, at least for a while, until the edict came down to pare it all down to one Earth. After that, they just took Supes, Batman, and WW out of the JSA and deaged or killed off the rest.

Not that Marvel doesn't have their share of crap. The most recent Spidey stuff was the clincher, but the Spidey clone stuff, the Gwen Stacy retcons, and the efforts to make his parents more interesting were all head scratchers. Wolvie's a mess, always has been and always will be... he's at his best when they just ignore his history. Cable's whole storyline is a mess, as is Captain Britain, Rachel Summers, Jean Grey, Colossus, the Fantastic Four, and on and on. Particularly heinous is Iron Man: prior to the whole Heroes Reborn debacle he was made evil, and replaced by a good younger version of himself pulled out of the timestream. And post Civil War, he's been the mastermind behind the Illuminati, the head of Shield, and pretty much this close to being a villain. Contrast that to the film version of him, which in many ways is truer to how the classic character had been portrayed.

But they have to change continuity in order to make the stories have more impact, and they have to deage the characters somehow so that their icons don't go away. Nothing really changes because these characters are just a change of writers away from going back to the status quo. And really, despite all of the cries about continuity being messed up, I think we've seen time and time again that the fans want the status quo.

MovieExchange

Wolverine would get my vote. When the "Weapon X" storyline came out in the old Marvel Comics Presents, people were saying "we're finally getting Wolverine's origin!" I said "No, we're getting the beginning of one long ass-fucking from Marvel Comics. Whenever the new writer decides the current origin isn't to his liking, all he has to do is make it another memory implant. Whenever a new editor comes in with a "new direction" for the book, the old stuff is just a memory implant."

And that's pretty much what happened. They made liberal use of the whole "false memories" thing for a long time. Hell, they might still be doing it today for all I know.

slop101

I don't have too big a problem with that, as it's not really "40 years" worth of stories, but one or two issues a month, which usually only cover a day or two span of time, so one year's worth of stories is only like a 12-24 day span of time. Of course, that's not taking into account the accelerated cultural changes.

rexinnih

I am so out of touch with everything. Memory implants?!?!? I'll keep my childhood memories of comic collecting. Unless these are actually implants and I'm still collecting. Damn, better hide them from my wife if that's true.

MovieExchange

It started with issue #72 of Marvel Comics Presents vol. 1 back in the early 90's. They revealed that Logan was a military experiment, and that they had implanted false memories of his past in order to control him.

Thus, the door was opened for any writer to throw away a previous storyline by saying "guess what, it was another false memory!"

fujishig

It used to be such a big deal, but does anyone even care about Logan's past at this point?

MovieExchange

Not really. Of course what is the reason no one cares? Sorry to repeat myself, but it's because we know that when the next writer / editor comes on board, the past will change again. So why bother to care about it anymore?

Rogue588

Continuity, schmontinuity.

Besides, you're only supposed to be reading comics for no longer than 3 years anyways.