when continuity in comics is fouled up

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eiderglast

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Edited By eiderglast

Reality in comics is very vague. They can discuss or reflect what's happening in real life without affecting the age of a character.One good example is Iron Man... his origin is based on the sixties when communism and the vietnam war was the current topic in media and society. quite recently it has been retconned that he was captured by middle eastern terrorists... which is quite fine since Iron Man has never been on the big screen before compared to Superman or Batman. Still if he was in the Gulf war era or the Taliban or whatnot era of the current war, does his experience of discovering Captain America with the Avengers in a sub all moot and useless now? Or do we just simply follow the Ultimate line for that explanation and just shrug off the other histories that transpired before the retcon...

But the good thing about Iron Man is he never started a legacy of sidekicks... which would create back stories of large proportions and may make the character older than usual.

With Batman's case (his origin starting from the 1940s), his sidekicks grew up... and here lies the debate... how is it that he hasn't aged in comparison to his sidekick (in particular, Dick Grayson). If Dick Grayson is in his early thirties, shouldn't the current Batman be in his 50s now? The new 52 changed a lot of stuff but hardly changed Batman's. Wally West and Kyle Rayner is not on the new 52 but the Bat Family is ok...

Should we blame this all on the Crisis on Infinte Earths? Where writers and editors realized they can just re-do all of history and just leave out the good ones and let the readers digest what they think is okay and worry about the next backlash. Superboy Prime would be a scapegoat by him punching through reality... but he's gone right?

So what came after that? Armageddon? Zero Hour? and now the new 52? Aren't we being shortchanged by most of these comic book publishers? I'm not sure if I've blogged this already... but the current state of comic book reality has just been too... flexible. So, if a bad writer messes up... all the company needs to do is do a retcon?

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Or maybe hire better writers (if it's a group of books like Batman, they should talk about how they write their plots. and how it connects with their partner books like JLA or teen titans)

Speaking of characters in different books... are we just too dense (the audience) to let it slide that these characters can go from one book to the next and just joke about it that hey.. they can teleport? sheesh.