View Single Post
Old 01-22-2016, 06:44 PM   #15
Leo656
The Franchise
 
Leo656's Avatar
 
Join Date: Mar 2003
Location: nWo Country
Posts: 27,694
People don't get it, it didn't used to be like this. DC was great about consistency for years, they had ONE major reboot in 75 years, back in '86. Sometimes individual characters would have backstories "tidied up" or old stuff would be swept under the rug but all this recent retcon/reboot sh*t is 100% Dan DiDio and his cronies, who make every editorial decision based on Sales Panic. That guy is like the single worst thing to EVER happen to DC as an entity.

Anyone trying to get into reading DC comics would have no problem doing so if they ignored most everything before "Crisis on Infinite Earths", used that as a starting point, and just followed the company's line from 1986 through 2010. Everything between that is really not at all complicated, although a lot of stuff in the late-90s simply wasn't very good but it was still consistent and recognizable. None of the stuff they did in between like Zero Hour or Infinite Crisis really had a huge effect on any continuity, mostly just minor tweaks to things readers already knew but nothing world-breaking. And most people don't need to bother with anything pre-1986, anyway, the Silver/Bronze Age was pretty unrelentingly silly and all the best stuff is easily found in TPBs, and the rest is junk best left ignored anyway.

Point is, DC really DID have a great universe, and a great mythology, that really anyone should get into and enjoy, BUT that Universe starts at Crisis and dissolves at the end of Flashpoint. But you really can't go wrong with the 25-year run in between. They've done nothing at ALL since 2010 that I've enjoyed, but I still highly encourage anyone to check out the "real" DCU from 1986-2010. For one thing, all the cartoons everyone jerks off to borrowed 99% of their stories from the books of that era, so if nothing else it's worth it to see where those stories first came from.

The constant shift towards "It's not selling? REBOOT!" since about 2005 is all DiDio. The editors and not the writers have been steering DC the wrong way for a decade, because ALL they care about is beating Marvel in sales which means "Events, Reboots, and Mega-Deaths of Major Characters" because that's supposedly what pushes sales. DC's sales have NEVER actually supported that theory, but it's the one DiDio subscribes to and what every new direction is based on.

Comics would be more fun if they weren't now a business aimed at only at selling action figures. That's really all they are anymore. It's 100% profit-driven and not story-driven. Both companies are guilty of it, but Marvel was actually run (into the ground) by a toy company for a years and years, to the point people got used to it, and plus the writing hadn't been that company's focus in decades, anyway, they've always been more a "Superstar Artists on Big Event Books" comic company than a story-driven one. DC's line was always more story-driven, and once it became all about the Big Events that was the end. It took them so far away from what they were actually about as a company and the way they did super-hero books. Now they're literally no different from Marvel, and not in any good way.

So yeah, f*ck modern DC. If they're doing anything other than, "Just kidding about Flashpoint and the New 52, we're just pretending everything since 2009 never happened!", it's not worth the effort.
__________________

"I left some words quite far from here to be a short reminder...
I laid them out in stone, in case they need to last forever..."

"But hey... I'm not telling you anything that you don't already know."
nWo Tech: The Official Thread Poison of the Technodrome Forums
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCxr...awnHgDz1ceDcfA
https://theroxxshow.blogspot.com/
Leo656 is offline   Reply With Quote