Comics readers – have you been a tad puzzled over how to keep the continuity straight in DC’s latest, ongoing universe-wide crisis – with, for example, Batman fighting crime as usual in one comic, M.I.A. in another comic, and M.I.A. for an entirely different reason in yet another comic?
You’ll get no reassurance from these comments by Grant Morrison about the continuity problems between Final Crisis and the series leading into it:
Why didn’t Superman recount his experiences from DOTNG [= Death of the New Gods]? Because those experiences hadn’t been thought up or written when I completed Final Crisis #1. If there was only me involved, Orion would have been the first dead New God we saw in a DC comic, starting off the chain of events that we see in Final Crisis.
As it is, the best I can do is suggest that the somewhat contradictory depictions of Orion and Darkseid’s last-last-last battle that we witnessed in Countdown and DOTNG recently were apocryphal attempts to describe an indescribable cosmic event.
To reiterate, hopefully for the last time, when we started work on Final Crisis, J.G. and I had no idea what was going to happen in Countdown or Death Of The New Gods because neither of those books existed at that point. The Countdown writers were later asked to ‘seed’ material from Final Crisis and in some cases, probably due to the pressure of filling the pages of a weekly book, that seeding amounted to entire plotlines veering off in directions I had never envisaged, anticipated or planned for in Final Crisis.
So, I wonder what DC pays its editorial staff? It’s clearly either way too little or way too much.
In related news, there’s some frustrating intel on Anarky; it counts as a spoiler so I’ll bury it in the comments section.
WARNING: SPOILER BELOW:
It looks like the irritating moronic villain Ulysses Armstrong will be taking the role of Anarky over from Lonnie Machin for the indefinite future. DC writer Fabian Nicieza explains his reasoning behind the decision; I summarise the reasoning as follows:
Thesis: Anarky is too interesting a character not to write about.
Antithesis: Anarky is too interesting a character for me to write successfully about.
Dialectical synthesis: Therefore I will make Anarky less interesting so I can write about him.
I confess I’m not entirely satisfied with this resolution to the antinomy.
I guess that is why Fabian Nicieza did his best to make Deadpool a less interesting
I actually have a Fabian Nicieza autographed copy of X Force 1. Granted it was a pretty bad comic, but hey, it’s kinda relevant here.
“The day evil won”….sounds like every damn day in this world!
Roderick,
I have been reading Marvel since I was about 10–say, 33 years. With a brief gap during college and law school. For the last couple of years I’ve found it hard to read the ones I subscribed to–Spider-Man, X-Men, Thor, etc. When I learned of the Spider-Man/Obama issue (http://mypetjawa.mu.nu/archives/195815.php), it made it easy for me to do what I’ve been leaning to for a long time–canceled all of them. Now that Spider-Man is a *real* criminal.
I have to say, after reading the most recent Robin, I’m kind-of mad.
I was expecting some semblence of an Anarky story — but it wasn’t.
Perhaps we should all write to DC Comics and complain?
Hey, fans saved Spider-Girl numerous times from canclation. DC actually has to listen to it’s customers.
Tracy
Yeah, they never explained how (the real) Anarky ended up in paralysed; you’d think Robin would go looking for him.
You would think.
Tracy