Meaningless Awards of the Week- 5/31/07

Frustration of the Week- the new DC continuity

It’s really annoying when you don’t know what the hell is going on. I have no idea what’s happening in a lot of DC Comics nowadays. Everything I thought I knew about the history of the DC Universe has been called into suspect lately due to events in 52, Countdown, Justice League of America, Justice Society of America and others.

A lot of the continuity issues seem to stem from the Legion of Superheroes. In the Justice League/Justice Society crossover “The Lightning Saga,” we see a Legion composed of several characters that don’t exist anymore. Crisis on Infinite Earths wiped them out of existence twenty years ago. We also learned from that story Superman was a member of the Legion as Superboy, even though prevailing continuity would suggest that the Superman we know never donned the red and blue until he was an adult, and thus couldn’t have joined the Legion as a child. To confuse matters even further, this week in Action Comics #850 we learned that Superboy has never been a member of the current Legion of Superheroes. So does that mean the LoSH that Supergirl joined is not the future of the normal DC Universe?

The first time DC reset the history of its universe, right away they set down ground rules for the new continuity. Batman, Superman and Wonder Woman were all given new definitive origins. From there, the status quo of the rest of the universe was formed. Anything questionable that took place before Crisis on Infinite Earths could be entered into canon or ignored as the writers saw fit. But the major aspects of each character were set in stone, and readers knew the “new” history of the DC Universe.

This time around, DC didn’t deliver. When the “New Earth” was created at the end of Infinite Crisis, readers were lead to believe that it was essentially the same universe as the one that was around before IC. I even remember hearing something about a “history of the DC Universe” guidebook being released to let fans know exactly what changes in continuity had been made. But since the end of Infinite Crisis, DC has made no mention of any of the changes and no mention of a new definitive history of the DC Universe.

So writers have just been pulling whatever out of their asses they want to. Superman was Superboy and joined the Legion of Superheroes? Sure, it ignores the last twenty years of continuity and embraces one that stop existing two decades ago, but what the hell! Jimmy Olsen has superpowers? Why the hell not!

I know Geoff Johns and Brad Metzler have a hard-on for Silver Age DC stories, but the Silver Age ended ten years before I was born and isn’t readily available in TPB. So how the hell am I supposed to know what happened in the Silver Age?

The Silver Age stopped being “official” continuity more than twenty years ago. Crisis on Infinite Earths got rid of it. As far as I could tell, Infinite Crisis acknowledged that COIE reshaped DC’s history when it occurred, wiping out the previous history. It did not, however, negate the effect of COIE and return DC’s history to what it was pre-Crisis. But now all these things are happening that seem suggest that Infinite Crisis did just that.

I’m sure that a year from now, when “Final Crisis” begins, everything will make sense. But dammit, I don’t want to have to wait 48 more weeks before I understand what’s going on right now. The build-up to Infinite Crisis made sense as it was happening and even more sense when the big picture was revealed. Countdown is just a clusterf&#k at this point, and I’m getting fed up with it.