The true genius of Bruce Timm is managing to take all that mess and condense into a not confusing form.
The Big Picture: Continanity
- Thread starter MovieBob
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I enjoy when Bob tells us about Superhero comics more than anything else.
It's just like a massive story rolled into 5 minutes of fun-tertainment.
It's just like a massive story rolled into 5 minutes of fun-tertainment.
I guess I'm the only one that remembers Zero Hour, where Hal Jordan became Parallax and used his God-like powers to destroy all of space and time so that Coast City wouldn't have been destroyed?
That was quite interesting because i've never got into "american" comics (can I call them like that I don't know *shrug*).
I'm looking forward to some more of this stuff, perhapes something about the marvel universe?
And I just watched the TGO: Episode 29 again which is a good addition to this one.
I'm looking forward to some more of this stuff, perhapes something about the marvel universe?
And I just watched the TGO: Episode 29 again which is a good addition to this one.
She's oldschool "liberation"-era feminist, i.e. "I should be able to dress like this and have it be no big deal, and if you look at 'em the wrong way I'll put you in traction."littlerudi08107 said:
Believe it or not, her cleavage "logo" at one point had a feminist origin: Earth-2 Supergirl decided that wearing a girl version of her cousin's outfit was sexist and wanted a new look/identity. When Superman presented her with her new "grownup" costume, she got pissed because he'd still stuck "his" symbol on the chest; so she burned it off with heat-vision and just left the empty spot to make a point. I'm not sure where that was originally published, or if its still canon, but apparently that's why she looks "like that."
So goes the legend, her breasts are so big because a certain DC artist decided to keep making them slightly bigger each month to see how long it'd take for the editors to notice. By the time they did, they'd become her "trademark."
As a casual comic book fan, I prefer the one-shot stuff a lot more. I'm not sure what version of Earth Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale's Batman: The Long Halloween took place in, but that one encapsulated story of the origin of Two Face was better than any other attempt to explain that character (or most of the Batman cast for that matter) and it was unrelated to anything else that happened.
Sure, I guess you want something to keep people coming back each month, but people like me who pick up an issue of Batman one week and read that Bruce Wayne is dead will usually immediately put it back on the shelf.
Sure, I guess you want something to keep people coming back each month, but people like me who pick up an issue of Batman one week and read that Bruce Wayne is dead will usually immediately put it back on the shelf.
Bob,
thanks for explaining that, was not a huge fan of any DC comic characters as a kid except Green Lantern. I never really understood all the fragmented stories. you made sense of that in five minutes flat. good onya.
thanks for explaining that, was not a huge fan of any DC comic characters as a kid except Green Lantern. I never really understood all the fragmented stories. you made sense of that in five minutes flat. good onya.
One could argue that it's the very fact that the continuity is so convoluted that makes DC characters so outstanding. It's not so important to keep track of all the minutia of a character as the minutia are consistent to what the character represents. It's the adaptive nature of the DC universe that brings it to the 'old school' comic readers' table - they embrace the discrepancies in continuity by allowing for the expansion and contraction of an infinite number of universes.
I've come to expect a new Crisis every so often, because it provides the freedom to explore topics that would otherwise be impossible (like having Superman raised in Soviet Russia), without just saying "it never really happened." In these cases, DC seems to be saying "no matter what happens, Batman is still the goddamn Batman" - and in doing so provides depth to the classic versions of their characters as well as the updated ones.
Marvel had two universes last I checked (stopped reading shortly after the split), and instead of expanding the depth of the characters, it seems to have cut each one in half. This isn't to say I don't like the Ultimate universe, just that Marvel seemed to sacrifice the 'soul' of some characters to appeal to a new audience.
I've come to expect a new Crisis every so often, because it provides the freedom to explore topics that would otherwise be impossible (like having Superman raised in Soviet Russia), without just saying "it never really happened." In these cases, DC seems to be saying "no matter what happens, Batman is still the goddamn Batman" - and in doing so provides depth to the classic versions of their characters as well as the updated ones.
Marvel had two universes last I checked (stopped reading shortly after the split), and instead of expanding the depth of the characters, it seems to have cut each one in half. This isn't to say I don't like the Ultimate universe, just that Marvel seemed to sacrifice the 'soul' of some characters to appeal to a new audience.
I'm glad there's at least one comic book fan who can see what we non-fans see when we look at these clusterfucks. I hate continuity with a passion. People give all sorts of weird reasons for liking mangas over American comics, but mine is much simpler: to know the entirety of the story of the Fullmetal Alchemist series, I need only read the Fullmetal Alchemist series. To learn the entire history of (say) Spiderman I'd need to read tens of different series, some spanning back to the character creation, and some being actually about some other character entirely. (And even though most of my comic reading is manga if you ask what my favourite series are I'll name Sandman and Transmetropolitan. Which are also a single series. Surprise surprise.)
Frankly I think the coherent universe thing of the two major publishers does more harm than good.
And incidentally I realized games might suffer the same fate. They don't suffer from this kind of... story incest, but suffer from the same thing in gameplay. A new Medal of Honor game expects you to use the grenade throwing you learned in Call of Duty and the cover combat you learned in Halo and the sniping you learned in, um, Sniper Ghost Warrior I guess. That's just as bad as the discovery that the big bad of this intriguing plot in this comic book is, dum dum dum, THIS CHARACTER YOU'VE NEVER SEEN BEFORE BUT THIS FOOTNOTE INDICATES HE WAS BANISHED INTO EARTH-42 OR SOMETHING IN THE ISSUE 78 (JANUARY 1986) OF THE ORIGINAL SERIES!
Frankly I think the coherent universe thing of the two major publishers does more harm than good.
And incidentally I realized games might suffer the same fate. They don't suffer from this kind of... story incest, but suffer from the same thing in gameplay. A new Medal of Honor game expects you to use the grenade throwing you learned in Call of Duty and the cover combat you learned in Halo and the sniping you learned in, um, Sniper Ghost Warrior I guess. That's just as bad as the discovery that the big bad of this intriguing plot in this comic book is, dum dum dum, THIS CHARACTER YOU'VE NEVER SEEN BEFORE BUT THIS FOOTNOTE INDICATES HE WAS BANISHED INTO EARTH-42 OR SOMETHING IN THE ISSUE 78 (JANUARY 1986) OF THE ORIGINAL SERIES!
Actually, wasn't there resistance to Crisis of Infinite Earths since it was first published as the creative teams on various books didn't want to have to deal with a company-wide reboot, so it never happened properly?
I dunno. I had been told that's what happened so these later crises are still dealing with the mess over twenty years later.
Personally, I find I like comics from a very narrow date from the late seventies to the early 80's. I'm sure most of that is nostalgia. But there was something to the art styles at the time that I prefer to the crap out today.
It's time for my medicine.
I dunno. I had been told that's what happened so these later crises are still dealing with the mess over twenty years later.
Personally, I find I like comics from a very narrow date from the late seventies to the early 80's. I'm sure most of that is nostalgia. But there was something to the art styles at the time that I prefer to the crap out today.
It's time for my medicine.
