Retcons and universe reboots are common in comics today.
Soon Marvel will have its Secret Wars
event, expected to reshape the universe by joining the main 616 universe with
the Ultimates universe. As the company moves offices to the West Coast, DC is
having Convergence, an event that
will at least temporarily reintroduce some concepts that the universe
jettisoned in its last reboot. However, the way each company has historically
approached reboots is very different.
I don’t believe the Marvel Universe has ever had a hard
reboot, as in a cataclysm that sweeps the entire universe and results in wholesale
changes. (An example of a hard reboot in the movies was the end of X-Men: Days of Future Past, when messing
around with the timestream resulted in resetting the franchise to the original
2000 continuity.) When Marvel wants to retcon stories or throw out ideas that
are outdated or unpopular, it tends to go for smaller in-story changes.
For example, when they retconned that Jean Grey was never
Phoenix (originally), there wasn’t some big universal reset that affected all
of Marvel. They just explained that Phoenix took Jean’s place and her original
body was intact. For the most part, Marvel Universe history is one unbroken
line and that has a real appeal. You don’t have to wonder if a story from the
past is still valid.
DC has a tradition of huge event changes and that seems more
suited to the company’s more complicated history. Most of its World War II
heroes stayed active for decades and the company had to invent the concept of
an Earth-2 to explain why the older heroes existed alongside their modern
versions. (Golden Age Superman lived on Earth-2 while Silver/Bronze Age
Superman lived on Earth-1.) As DC acquired more characters from other comic
companies, it added more Earths for them to live on and it got more
confusing.
Almost all the Earths got whited out in the 1985 series Crisis on Infinite Earths. This series
featured every major DC character ever (except Green Lantern Hal Jordan, oddly)
fighting the Anti-Monitor, who was using anti-matter to destroy one universe
after another. Several A-list heroes died. I thought it was a great story, the
ultimate in heroes teaming up to defeat a huge menace, but some people didn’t
like how it retconned away the rich multiversal tradition. During Crisis, the heroes went back to the
beginning of time and prevented the creation of the multiverse. There was one
Earth, one Superman, and many of the Golden Age stories effectively never
happened.
Despite some small retcons, this was the status quo at DC
for years. In 2005, Infinite Crisis
brought back the concept of the multiverse. The survivors of the original Crisis on Infinite Earths — Golden Age
Superman and Lois Lane, Alexander Luthor and Superboy Prime (who hailed from
the Earth the readers live on) — had been spirited away to safety. They saw how
dark the new DC Universe was getting and decided to bring back the purer values
of Earth-2 and the Golden Age. Superboy punched time (this actually happened)
and messed up continuity, bringing back multiple Earths and resurrecting
characters who were dead. There were 52 Earths, one for each publishing week of
the year.
The last significant reboot came a few years ago. During Flashpoint, the Flash screwed around
with time to prevent his parents’ murders. As a result, Bruce Wayne was
murdered instead of his parents, Ma and Pa Kent did not discover Superman,
Wonder Woman and Aquaman waged bloody war against one another’s kingdoms, etc.
From the wreckage of this short-lived alternate universe
came the current status quo, dubbed the Nu52. This new universe redesigned many
characters. All the heroes got younger and all their previous exploits
throughout DC history are supposed to have taken place in the last five years.
Some characters have seemingly never existed and that has led to some confusion
about what old stories are still in continuity.
After 30 years of reading comics, all this rebooting and
retconning proves one thing to me: It really was simpler when we were kids.
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