2007-12-05 - FIXING A HOLE

This week's topic comes courtesy of longtime reader Ben S., who sent along the following question:

I was spending some time going through the Comics 101 archives, which by the way, hold up way better on the second and third read.

Then, I began noticing a recurring theme and that is continuity, now I know what the cause of continuity problems is, and what people have tried to do to fix such problems.

My question is how many characters/teams have horrible continuity problems? Which are the great success stories, and the failures, when DC/Marvel have tried to fix those continuity problems?

An excellent question, sir. Let's get right to it.

Probably the best success story when it comes to rebooting a character's continuity would have to be John Byrne's SUPERMAN run, beginning in 1986.

Given free reign to modernize the character and make him more approachable, more vulnerable and less omnipotent following DC's overall continuity do-over that came with the end of CRISIS ON INFINITE EARTHS, Byrne's conception of Superman worked so well not only because it was for the most part well-conceived and realized by John Byrne, Marv Wolfman and others, but also because of the company's firm and unyielding commitment to it. This was the way SUPERMAN was now, period, and there was no back-pedaling. Ma and Pa Kent were alive, Superman and Batman weren't friends, Jor-El and Lara were weird eyebrow-less germophobes, and Superboy, Supergirl and Krypto had never existed, So deal with it.

However, this did lead to one of the stickier continuity failures of the same era: Superboy and the Legion of Super-Heroes. If, as Byrne had successfully pushed for, Clark Kent had never operated publicly as Superboy, then the far-future Legion of Super-Heroes, a long-popular super-team series for DC, was left twisting in the wind.

Since the Legion were long established as having been inspired by the adventures of Superboy, even going so far as to travel back in time and induct him as one of their earliest recruits, his removal from history left a large hole in the emotional fabric of the team's backstory that numerous editors and writers were never able to satisfactorily fill. They tried notions of a "pocket universe" that did include a Superboy, as well as replacing him with a faux-Superboy type called Valor, but nothing really worked.

Speaking of John Byrne, his hand in a project didn't always mean success when it came to continuity reboots. Take for example, SPIDER-MAN: CHAPTER ONE, Marvel Comics' and John Byrne's 1997 attempt to retell the origin and early history of Spider-Man for a modern audience.

While the changes here were nowhere near as drastic as what Byrne had established in starting Superman over (with the biggest change coming in the tying in of Dr. Octopus directly to Peter Parker's origin -- not really a great or necessary idea, but certainly nothing terribly controversial or shocking), fans just didn't accept it, and especially didn't accept Marvel's heavy-handed insistence that this was the new official origin for Spidey. Funny how the commitment to the project that was a benefit for DC proved a detriment for Marvel. Maybe because most fans didn't really think there was anything in the original Lee/Ditko SPIDER-MAN stories that needed fixing. The series ran its 13 issues as scheduled, and sold reasonably well -- fans didn't hate it at all, they just didn't really believe in it, and once it was done, it was all but forgotten, with editorial never again referencing the supposed revised origin of Spidey.

A much more spectacular continuity failure took place in 1989, with the publication of Timothy Truman's HAWKWORLD, which was designed to revise the continuity of DC's Hawkman and Hawkwoman characters.

The only problem was, they didn't really need it, as the Golden Age and Silver Age versions of the characters had always been conceived as distinctly different people (one being reincarnated Egyptian royalty, the other being aliens from outer space). Even at that, if the decision had been made purely for aesthetics to radically alter the modern versions of the Hawks, it still could have been achieved without so drastically muddling much of DC comics history. However, when HAWKWORLD (which revealed the new revised origin of the alien versions of the Hawks) was released, it was revealed that it was not just an origin story; rather, it was taking place in the here and now, at the same time as the rest of DC's then-current output. This meant that the Silver Age Hawkman's entire history, including his decades-long membership in the Justice League was completely null and void. It was so ill-conceived that even new post-CRISIS comics like JUSTICE LEAGUE INTERNATIONAL, which had featured Katar and Shayera in a brief membership stint, were now by necessity declared as having "never happened, at least not like that." The Hawkman charcters then careened on a seemingly endless treadmill of reboots and revamps that didn't really get resolved until Geoff Johns resurrected the original Egyptian version of Hawkman in the pages of JSA. Even then, we've never really gotten my favorite versions of the characters back, the Silver Age Katar and Shayera I read about growing up in JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA, and that's a shame.

The JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA had its own problems with continuity in the days following CRISIS, after it was decided that Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman had all never been members of the JLA, which meant that not only was the JLA's origin now vastly in need of revision, but some twenty years' worth of JLA comics now never happened the way they had originally been told. The Black Canary was quickly plugged into the JLA's revised origin as the fifth founding member alongside Barry Allen, Hal Jordan, Aquaman and J'Onn J'Onzz.

Later, the restriction was eased to the point that it was conceded that both Superman and Batman had joined the League at some point in its history, but weren't founding members. How exactly this helped either their characters or the League was never made clear. And in recent years, this seems to have been abandoned entirely, thanks mostly to the works of writer Brad Meltzer, who clearly grew up on the same JLA comics I did, and has thrown out the notion entirely and returned Clark, Bruce and Diana to their proper role as founding JLA members, even if it no longer makes sense with the previously established timelines.

My favorite bit of continuity sleight-of-hand came from our old friend John Byrne again, in the pages of his 1990s WONDER WOMAN run. Another of the results of the whole CRISIS deal in '85 was that certain characters had to be removed from the history of the 1940s JUSTICE SOCIETY OF AMERICA: specifically, Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman, since there was no way the character could have existed in both the 1940s and the then-current 1980s. Losing Superman and Batman from the JSA was no big deal -- they'd appeared maybe twice in 67 issues. Wonder Woman, however, was more of a loss, as she'd been a steadily appearing character for much of the team's original Golden Age run. They tried to retroactively replace her with Miss America, a little-known character acquired from Quality Comics a decade earlier, but fans never really bought into it. It was Byrne who came up with the perfect solution, sending Queen Hippolyta, Wonder Woman's mother, on a trip through time to the 1940s. Hippolyta had already replaced the temporarily absent Diana in the Wonder Woman role, and when she found herself in the 1940s and met up with Jay Garrick, Alan Scott and the rest of the Justice Society, she elected to stay in the 1940s for the duration, and voila! Wonder Woman was back in the Golden Age JSA again.

And thanks to the tricky mechanics of time travel, when Hippolyta returned to the present, everyone remembered that Wonder Woman had been in the JSA, as if that had always been the case. Which, of course, it was. Brilliant. Take a bow, Mr. Byrne.

Scott Tipton just doesn't have the heart to get into the whole Wonder Girl/Donna Troy/Troia quagmire here. Perhaps another time. If you have questions about continuity or comics in general, send 'em here.

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