Originally Posted by
twincast
Replying to a handful of posts that stood out to me on the last few pages after a very long absence (part two):
One word: Price. Another word: Value. Since the '90s crash Big Two comics have been stuck in a self-inflicted hyperinflating feedback loop of ever more expensive collectors' items for an ever smaller collectors' market. Production values to match may justify part of that, but if those price you out of the competition in perceived value (which lies mostly in the roughly accurate assumed amount of story based on page count), drop them like a hot potato!
That is basically a revisit of acknowledging Hypertime in-universe, and there's a juicy trippy story in exploring that beyond the tasty morsels in Doomsday Clock, but I doubt Bendis will dive deep into any of this as it runs exactly counter to the "accessible" mission statement.
To be fair, it isn't a complete myth. Well, not so much in and of itself, but when comparing to other options. Personally, I would have started with Spider-Man and Batman comics in elementary school in the '90s (instead of catching up on them digitally later on) if I had known a shop in my home town to carry them consistently (like they did - and still do - with Disney comics), but when the manga boom hit in my teens I found it very much a relief to know that almost all stories would get an actual ending, which discouraged me from diving into super-heroes comics, but soon after came Ultimate Spider-Man et al. with the sweet combination of a fresh jumping-on point to a deliberately kept small number of series and thitherto uncommon extremely convenient collected editions, which then provided the basis for me to spread out from Earth-1610 to (monthly releases of) Earth-616 and New Earth. Several years later event fatigue and slaughter fatigue had made me drop out of Earth-616 and Earth-1610, respectively, almost completely, and the New 52 killed several series I was avidly following in one fell swoop. The point of this anecdotal personal account of mine being that having jumping-on points out of or low in continuity - like DC's new line of graphic novels formerly known as DC Zoom and DC Ink - to hook people is a good thing, but rebooting your main universe is pure folly.
As for the Legion's reputation for having a complicated continuity, that is entirely undeserved. It was one of the first super-hero series to actually have continuity and it was the first to really get screwed over by retcons (the Earth Two series had an easier transition to New Earth, Hawkman was a minor title, and frankly both share a similar reputation since that time, anyway), but neither of these have been even remotely remarkable among the Big Two for decades now - and other than said messy series of patches between Crisis on Infinite Earths and Zero Hour: Crisis in Time! trying to fix what the former broke until giving up on this with the latter none of it has ever been complicated. Every Legion reboot has been a clear cut and almost entirely self-contained, making them much easier to keep track of than any given popular DC hero like Superman or Batman, which have in turn since been hit with a semi-regular series of retcons (Zero Hour, Infinite Crisis, New 52, DC Rebirth, and occasionally in between), often gradual, and never quite clear on what is all canon now.
They didn't? [Urge to list all the depth (including prophecies) Dumb and Dumber removed for the express purpose of "accessibility" and all the utter nonsense they added because they couldn't write cohesive stories with consistent characters (let alone competent commanders) if their lives depended on it intensifies.]
For what it's worth, going by the very, very green costume (and Element Lad already being covered), I'm pretty sure the lad behind Jan on the cover is Condo Arlik. And I seriously hope the lad behind Dawnstar is Lyle Norg (and written much like his Reboot incarnation). (And the two better be dating.)