#but they handwave plenty of things they don’t care to explain in those games

[hylian-twink]

this is my only controversial sidlink shipper take:

WHY DO ZORA LIVE THAT LONG (narratively) IF NOT TO BE WAITING FOR LINK WHEN HE WAKES UP!

[hellzyeahthewebwieldingavenger]

No Comicstorian, Marvel DOESN’T need a reboot Part 1: DC history

Youtube channel ‘Comicstorian’ recently put out a video detailing why he feels the PS4 Spider-Man game proves why Marvel needs to reboot their history.

I was so gobsmacked by how misinformed his views were I felt compelled to debunk his statements in two parts, the first being a coverage of DC comics history of reboots.

“This game proves that Marvel should do what DC does and soft reboot their continuity every 4-7 years”

 This is the first and probably biggest point of bullshit spoken about and I suspect my points will apply to the rest of the video’s arguments.

 The idea of this one game adaptation ‘proving’ Spider-Man, let alone ALL OF MARVEL COMICS, needs to reboot their continuity is laughable at best. Did Batman the Animated Series prove Marvel needed to reboot their history? Did X-Men the Animated Series? Did the X-Men movies? Did X-Men Evolution? Wolverine and the X-Men? The 1994 Spider-Man cartoon? The Spectacular Spider-Man cartoon? The Raimi Movies? The MCU?

 All of those are wonderful adaptations of the comic book characters (mostly) but none of them led to anyone rebooting anything, reorientating maybe but not rebooting. Moreover if all those more public and serialized stories were awesome and modernized the characters why does this ONE GAME prove that NOW we need to do this for Marvel?

 It doesn’t prove anything, it’s just his ‘feelings’.

 But there is a bigger issue with this point of view.

 Comicstorian is mind blowingly out of touch with the nature of DC’s reboots.

 Broadly speaking it is understood that a hard reboot in comic books is something like Crisis on Infinite Earths wherein the majority of old stories for a character are thrown out and the fundamental building blocks of them are changed or remixed in major ways.

Even for a character like Batman his origin as recounted in the Golden Age was significantly different when it came time to reboot him in the 1980s post-crisis, even though it retained the same basic ideas and story beats. For Wonder Woman and Superman this was an even bigger deal as for the most part their whole origins as understood in the 1980s were burned down and started over representing a drastically almost opposite direction for their characters. And of course 90% of their then established history was just outright deleted, in Wonder Woman’s case this being 100%. Every post-crisis WW story is the ENTIRE HISTORY of post-Crisis Wonder Woman, nothing was carried over from pre-crisis.

 A soft reboot by contrast is something more like what happened in the 1990s with Zero Hour. In Zero Hour the then established lore and histories of every character were retained near identically and only smaller details were changed or tweaked. Those could have big knock on affects but those were not deliberate on the part of the authors.

  Why am I defining what a hard and a soft reboot is? Because Comicstorian claims that DC engage in them every 4-7 years and this is objectively untrue.

 The FIRST reboot DC technically engaged in was in the 1950s when they created Barry Allan, a new iteration of the Golden Age hero the Flash, thus dawned the Silver Age of comics.

 Whilst the intention to create a new version of the Flash was deliberate, calling this a reboot as we understand the term today is kind of weird because back in the 1950s the notion of a sequential continuity that mattered in defining who exactly the characters were simply didn’t exist for DC comics. They just had general ideas of who every character was and then just did whatever they wanted, even recycling ideas every 5 or so years because it was felt that the readership would rotate in and out within that time. no mention of such similar plots occurring was ever brought up even though technically they were happening to the exact same versions of the exact same characters who’d experienced near damn the same things before.

 That type of storytelling just didn’t exist for the characters. Basically Barry Allan was created as the new Flash, interacted with Superman and Batman the way Jay Garrick did all the while handwaving that Jay Garrick was just a comic book character because the writers were like “Fuck it. No one cares and it doesn’t matter.”

 Except fans did care and thus it wound up mattering. Fans wrote in asking how Jay Garrick could be a comic book character in the DC Universe when they’ve seen stories where he wasn’t and where he wasn’t and how the fuck Barry Allan thinks he’s the first Flash.

 This is when DC ‘rebooted’ their continuity by establishing that the Golden Age stories happened on ‘Earth 2’ and all the silver age and beyond stories were on ‘Earth 1’, with the exact point of transition for individual characters varying. This was never the authorial intention by anyone. As far as 1950s Superman writers knew or cared up until that point they’d just been writing the same Superman who showed up in 1938. Same deal with Batman though DC tried to claim that Earth 2 Batman was the guy who didn’t have a yellow oval on his chest and Earth 1 was the guy who did.

 With the concept installed they then went wild with it telling stories about Earth 1 and Earth 2 and how they were similar yet different, e.g. they married Earth 2 Superman and killed Earth 2 Batman whilst they remained committed to Earth 1 (their main versions) Superman staying single and Earth 1 Batman obviously staying alive.

  This wasn’t a reboot that occurred due to freshen things up or anything. It was just the Flash writer not giving a shit and doing what he wanted and DC pulling an explanation out of thing air to justify it.

  Their first true reboot was in the 1980s when they did Crisis on Infinite Earths and in the story combined Earth 1 and Earth 2 whilst deleting parts of it and every other universe so that they could reshape their whole line of comics.

 Did they do this just because you know the old continuity had been around for awhile and it was time to freshen things up and make it more modern?

 No they did it because the writers of DC didn’t want to deal with the insane contradictory mess the old DC universe (that hadn’t had much planning and developed haphazardly) and also because they wanted their universe to be more like Marvel’s.

 Remember that. the biggest reboot DC ever did was because they wanted their universe to be like Marvel’s because Marvel’s, which was like 20-25 years old at the time, was more successful.

  Then the next reboot was Zero Hour in the mid-1990s. Did THIS exist to freshen things up and modernize it?

 Fuck no.

 Zero Hour mostly existed to pay off a Green Lantern storyline and more significantly to just clean up continuity snafus that had cropped up because DC hadn’t perfectly planned out everything the first time they rebooted in the 1980s.

 Then came Superman: Birthright in like 2003. This was originally meant as a non-canon update of Superman’s origin by uber Superman fanboy Mark Waid, recycling ideas from a failed pitch he (and Mark Millar and Grant Morrisson) had made in 2000 to also reboot Superman.*

 But then it was folded into DC’s continuity effectively replacing Superman’s origin story from the 1980s by John Byrne although DC kinda sorta pretended like BOTH origins counted and like between them this is Superman’s actual canonical origin and Birthright contradicted nothing.

 Except it did and they later explained that Superman’s history, along with other alterations to the DC universe pre-2006 had occurred due to Superboy Prime punching a fucking wall which causes reality altering shockwaves or some shit like that I don’t know.

 That idea cropped up in the 2006 event comic Infinite Crisis which was a direct sequel to Crisis on Infinite Earths and another soft reboot of DC’s history but kind of a bigger one than in Zero Hour. Whilst Birthright was an unintentional reboot of just Superman, Infinite Crisis was a deliberate soft rebooting of the entire DC universe.

 Because it was just again time to freshen things up, modernize the characters and inject some creative energy into the universe?

  Lol noooooooooooooooooooooooooooope!

  Infinite Crisis existed primarily out of the mind of writer Goeff Johns and to a lesser extent Dan Didio, EIC of DC Comics.

 In not so many words both have more or less admitted their desire to work for DC was specifically to restore Barry Allan and Hal Jordan as the Flash and Green Lantern respectively after the former died and got replaced in Crisis on Infinite Earths and the latter went evil and got replaced in the 1990s Ron Marx run of GL.

 And when you know this and look at their statements and work before and after Infinite Crisis along with what actually happens and the unsubtle metacommentary within the story it becomes obvious why the story really existed.

 The story existed because John and Didio, like Waid, Morrisson, Millar and probably other people at DC,were butthurt that the versions of the DC characters they grew up on had been rebooted way back in the 1980s in COIE.

 And there is plenty of circumstantial evidence supporting this.

 In the 2000s DC had slowly but surely already been working in silver age elements back into the DC universe, for example Superman was dealing with lots of different types of kryptonite, reintroducing his cousin Supergirl and his dog Krypto and getting steadily more and more overpowered. This is in spite of the 1980s reboot specifically wanting to restrict kryptonite to just the green kind, powering down Superman and make him distinctly the lone survivor of Krypton.

 The Superman 2000s pitch by Waid, Morrisson and Millar is very revealing because it makes it very clear that the Superman/Lois Lane marriage (something that was born very directly out of the new directions of the post-crisis era) needed to go so they could get back to the Supes/Lois/Clark love triangle. In fact the proposed story of the pitch was all about Superman rebooting his history in order to save Lois’ life which would mean undoing their marriage. Along with that the pitch made Superman even more sci-fi and powered up again evoking the silver age all of them have been on record as adoring.

 Even if you were unaware of this Morrisson’s All-Star Superman story was built off the back of being a love letter to the silver age Superman stories and his Batman run adopts a Silver age story as a key foundation stone for the story he wanted to tell.

 Johns equally makes his adoration of the silver age obvious in almost everything he does, even referencing how great a new silver age of superheores will be in an episode of Smallville he wrote.

 When Johns personally wrote Superman’s rebooted origin after Infinite Crisis he re-established various silver age elements into Superman lore, including his being Superboy as a teen, his membership in the Legion of Super Heroes, Lex Luthor being a childhood friend of Clark’s and him losing his hair as a result.

 The big takeaway from Infinite Crisis? It existed because DC’s staff wanted to recreate the status quos they loved as kids and because they hated the post-crisis stuff for the most part because it erased those versions. This is especially true of Mark Waid who is candid about how mad he was that Superman got rebooted by John Byrne and asked at a panel in his youth when the ‘real’ version (pre-crisis version) was going to come back.

 Wonder Woman herself underwent a kind of reboot too under J. Michael Straczynski’s tenure where her history got futzed with. This wasn’t an isolated incident.

  Then DC did their second (or third if you wanna count the Earth 1-2 shit) hard reboot in 2011.

 The story was Flashpoint and it set up the New 52 era. The Nu52 was again Silver Age inspired but used shitty 1990s tropes at the same time. Because Jim Lee had been given a position of power in DC by this point.

 What followed was for almost every character five years of near solid deterioration. Wonder Woman and Superman got fucked especially hard, not only because they were shipped together (thus fulfilling a stupid Silver-Bronze Age ship born out of Diana being able to not die during sex with Clark) but because their characters were just....broken.

 Diana devolved into this kind of Xena/300 character who had a biological Daddy (just like in the Silver Age) a mother with blonde hair (just like in the Silver Age) and generally began to have her narrative revolve around the men in her life like Ares, Zeus, Orion, her brother, Apollo, Superman, etc (just. Like. In. The. Silver. Age!)

 Now that wasn’t the case for Superman. He just went back to being an isolated alien God whom Lois Lane didn’t think much of and being overpowered as fuck. They just added him this lame young and unsure of himself bullshit to make him more like post-One More Day Spider-Man. A reboot trying to make a DC character more like a Marvel one, who’d have thunk it?

  Meanwhile over in Batman Barbra Gordon went back to being able to walk and became Batgirl again in essentially the identical costume she had in the Silver Age and Bruce Wayne briefly dated rarely seen Silver/Bronze Age girlfriend Julie Madison.

 Barry Allan meanwhile was the one and the only Flash, Wally West the defining post-Crisis Flash had never even held the mantle and was not going to.

  Basically if Infinite Crisis was the powers that be warping the DC universe to more resemble what it was like when they were kids in the Silver Age then the Nu52 was them just erasing the DC universe and replacing it with their shitty Silver Age fanfiction. It was what they obviously had deep down wanted to do back in Infinite Crisis if they’d been allowed.

  And I cannot stress this enough, it failed.

 It failed spectacularly.

 It was the single most promoted DC reboot ever with TV adds, they made an effort to court the digital comics crowd, they had new #1s to entice new readers, they got rid of all their old history to (in theory) REALLY entice new readers.

 And their sales spiked...at first.

  Then gradually died and died and died.

 Except for Batman, the character who famously changed the least  from one reboot into the next, retaining most of his over all history.

 It got so bad that DC reintroduced the pre-Flashpoint Superman (complete with his wife Lois and now with their new son Jon) and had them co-exist in the primary DC universe alongside nu52 Superman.

 Then they killed Nu52 Superman off and had pre-FP Superman decide to fill in for him.

 And this was all part of an initiative called DC Rebirth in 2016. What was DC Rebirth?

 DC Rebirth was an effort to essentially reinstate a lot of the history and directions of the DC characters from the post-crisis/pre-flashpoint era (so like 1986-2011) BACK into the DC universe via you guess it, soft rebooting it.

 Was this just because it’d been 5 years now so it’s time to freshen things up?

 Jesus Christ no. DC Rebirth existed as  an apology for having rebooted in the new 52!

 Again Superman was a microcosm of this. Not only was the pre-flashpoint Superman, the guy with most of the history from 1986-2011, now the primary Superman but in a 2017 story called Superman: Reborn DC cosmically integrated him into the prime DC universe so that his history now stated he had ALWAYS been there as the main defining Superman and all that happened was he wore the nu52 Superman’s costume for awhile.

 His history though was essentially the one we got from after Infinite Crisis so in effect they reverse rebooted  Superman because the 2011 rebooted version of him was so aweful.

 Wonder Woman got much the same treatment with ANOTHER new origin for her but one more in line with her Golden Age and Post-crisis origin that threw out the trash from the 2011 nu52 origin.

 Sales and critical acclaim for DC over all increased after Rebirth and fans were loud and vocal about how much they appreciated DC essentially fixing what they’d broken in 2011, with Superman being perhaps the biggest example.

 Superman had something like 7+ reboots across his 80 year history and the DC universe over all about 6 across the same span of time.

 Meanwhile Marvel between 1961-present has never rebooted their continuity and...has usually outsold DC.

 In fact the only DC title that regularly tends to outsell major Marvel titles is Batman. That character who again has been altered the least reboot to reboot.

 What is the big takeaway from all this? Well

 a)      DC didn’t reboot (be it soft or hard) every 4-7 years. The Earth 1 and 2 concepts showed up something like 18ish years after the DC universe began. COIE occurred around 20 years later. Zero Hour was 8 years after COIE ended. Infinite Crisis was 12 years later. Flashpoint/the New 52 was 5 years after that and Rebirth was 5 years after that

b)      Reboots never occurred for the sake of keeping things fresh or a sincere desire to generate new creative directions. They existed either to plug holes by careless writing (Earth2 and Zero Hour), purely corporate reasons (like making things more like Marvel), an attempt to recapture nostalgia (Infinite Crisis, New 52, Rebirth) or a desire to ‘fix’ whatever older reboots ‘broke’ (Infinite Crisis/New 52, Rebirth)

c)       Reboots are not creatively healthy, they just lead to more and more retcons and reboot turning everything into a clusterfuck

d)      Maintaining a fairly consistent continuity is actually creatively and financially more sensible hence DC is routinely outsold by the company that has never rebooted