Any other franchise of pop fiction have as convoluted a continuity as DC Comics?

[CaptCleghorn]

Honestly, James Bond continuity is only 'convoluted' if you really think too much about it.

The Bond films are largely meant to be episodic. Its all the same guy. Whether you want to believe that Connery's Bond is in a different universe to Dalton's Bond is entirely up to you, but it makes no difference to the narrative of the films. Craig's Bond is a total reboot - yes, the last couple of films have paid homage to a lot of classic stuff, but that doesn't strictly bring those old films back 'in continuity'. Let's see how they handle the franchise after Craig leaves...

The books are simpler. There are Fleming's novels which are largely consistent (apart from a few subtle retcons to Bond's backstory in the later books). A bunch of the recent continuation novels are set in and around the Fleming Bond timeline.

Then you have the continuation novels by authors John Gardener and Raymond Benson, both of which update Bond to the 80's and 90's respectively but maintain the Fleming novels as a vague backstory. Ultimately though, the stories are mostly episodic, so it doesn't really matter much.

And that's the key. Fleming did set his last few books up with a continuity between them. The lastest Horowitz books fit into the Fleming novels and time period. Modern day novels leave out much of the limitations lack of tech in the Fleming days.

The films had little continuity, excluding the obviously separate Craig films. The little continuity that existed was pretty much restricted to the marriage, even the horrible "buy you a delicatessan" line in "Spy Who Loved Me" But your point that "It really doesn't matter" is valid. But any examination of it does show a mess, albeit one with no real solution.

[Jim Kelly]

If you wanted to view DC's myriad of continuities positively, then you could see it as the great thing about DC. There's so much. Like George Harrison sang, "It's all too much for me to take."

They have so many properties and so much history that it can only be explained by two-dimensional string theory. It's a Mandelbrot Set--wonderful to look at, impossible to fully comprehend.