Has DC continuity gotten more confusing since Crisis on Infinite Earths?

[Electricmastro]

To my understanding, the main intention of Crisis on Infinite Earths was to make DC continuity less confusing for new readers, but since then in these last 35 years, with the release of Zero Hour, Infinite Crisis, Final Crisis, Flashpoint, Convergence, and other such comics, I’m somehow getting the feeling that DC continuity has become less friendly for newcomers getting into DC comics, even with the various #1 issues intended to serve as starting points.

What are your thoughts?

[jb681131]

To my understanding, the main intention of Crisis on Infinite Earths was to make DC continuity less confusing for new readers, but since then in these last 35 years, with the release of Zero Hour, Infinite Crisis, Final Crisis, Flashpoint, Convergence, and other such comics, I’m somehow getting the feeling that DC continuity has become less friendly for newcomers getting into DC comics, even with the various #1 issues intended to serve as starting points.

What are your thoughts?

Well officialy since COIE there are 2 eras. The Pre-Flashpoint and the Post-Flashpoint.
I will say that the Pre-Flashpoint is not so hard to follow.
Then the Post-Flashpoint is not so hard if you ignore Earth-2 and Convergence wich are optional and not really on the main storyline.
What is confusing is the current events, with multiple ones at the same time (Doomsday Clock + Dark Knight: Metal / Doom War + Heroes in Crisis + Leviathan + Apokalipse War).

[SiegePerilous02]

Pre-COIE continuity definitely had some quirks and screw ups, but as a whole I think it was much less convoluted than what came after.

I understand that they basically had to do it because they were going under and they needed something big, but I wish they hadn't and we'd gotten the pre-COIE to progress from where it was. There was a lot of good stuff post-COIE, but a lot of it could have existed either as is or with a little tweaking within the pre-COIE set up. It is the root cause of all continuity problems, but the way the creators under DiDio's reign went about trying to fix it definitely made it much worse whereas other creative minds may have been able to undo it much more deftly.

[Sacred Knight]

Yeah it has. Basically with each succeeding effort to attempt to fix inconsistency and confusion, they create more inconsistency and confusion. The initial post Crisis era, COIE-to-Zero Hour, had its issues. That's documented. But in retrospect it was way more cohesive than everything that came after (though really it never succeeded in being less confusing or more accessible than what came before). Zero Hour created more issues, IC even more issues. When they put that history to bed at the time with Flashpoint, you could see very similar repeated mistakes with the New 52 in what was supposed to be a full and clean reboot. They just don't learn.

Then, when the decision was made to bring the old continuity back, they were bringing back a continuity that already was broken in many ways. Their answer? Make it worse by merging it with the rebooted continuity. Its just...well its already been said, they don't learn from their mistakes. They can't leave well enough alone, and then on top of that they can't even reboot properly when its came to that either. This is the result. Heavy Metal is going to take the next stab at fixing things. The chances are much higher it too takes things to a new level of incoherency.

[CaptCleghorn]

Since COIE, DC's been tweaking and attempting to fix their continuity. It was no longer a string of stories which may or may not have conflicted, but stories designed to make past stories work. Which was a good goal to have, but often the finish wasn't defined well enough to give everyone the same target to shoot for. Now post-Flashpoint, DC's been having too many "continuity repair" stories. Doomsday Clock, Justice/Doom War, Metal, etc.
I'm easily a sucker for a continuity warping epic, but the conclusion of each of these aren't really endings. They're all lead-ins to another story.

[Citizen Kane]

I thought it was fine until New 52. That's when everything got much more confusing. So, yes, things have just gotten worse since CoIE.

[DrNewGod]

In some respects, Pre-CoIE was cleaner than what came after. It was definitely cleaner than what it had become just before Flashpoint.

Immediately after CoIE,things were not all that messy. There were pretty large question marks hanging over Power Girl, Wonder Girl, Fury, and the time that had passed between Byrne's Man of Steel mini and his Superman relaunch. Still (in my recollection), it didn't start to get head-scratchy until DC retrofitted Troia, and launched Hawkworld as an ongoing monthly. And it got progressively worse as it went forward, with continual attempts at historical patch-plumbing and writers insisting on restoring their childhood sacred cows.

At the same time, Pre-CoIE Superman's environment was thick! He was The Last Son of Krypton (except for is cousin, a bottled city full of miniaturized refugees, and a veritable army of criminals in a ghost prison). He had a full-time gig as a reporter, and then TV anchor, but still spent oodles of time out in space while a legion of robots substituted for him. He had this constant romantic quadrangle going between Clark, Kal-el, Lois, and Lana (plus Lori and others). To keep things challenging for him, kryptonite had become more abundant than sand. He could travel through time, but didn't learn about the great crises of the future and try to avert them.

Superman's surroundings were also sometimes a little silly (at least to the emerging aesthetic of the day). He had a super-dog, super-horse, super-cat, super-monkey. One of his most dangerous adversaries was - literally - a cosmic western desperado riding a space pegasus.

Wonder Woman was not much better off. She'd been through at least two Trevor deaths and resurrections by Crisis, and a giant, racist-caricature, mustachioed egg was on her roll of major villains.

All that said, looking back, the continuity might have been heavy, but it wasn't unmanageable. As SiegePerilous02 points out, Crisis seems to have had less to do with cleaning up the backstory than with trying to salvage really valuable IPs that were sinking, and it did that. If cleaning up had really been the goal, they would have followed Plan A, and done a cold reboot, ala Nu52.

Further, Batman had been in dire need of rehabilitation in 1968, and they did it without burning Wayne Manor to the ground. They reset him in one issue, without explicitly writing out anything, and just wrote in him a way that worked better for the times. You don't want Wonder Woman looking through time with her magic sphere, don't write about it. You don't want Superman fighting a fetishy-Zardoz knockoff, forbid using the character. Incentivize writers that want to write the kind of pitch you think will work.

Still, I can see why DC thought it had to do something dramatic, and they did deliver on that.

As to your question on the current continuity's accessibility? I'm not sure there's a real difference there for the causal reader.

I drop in from time to time on the current issues, and I'm not seeing stuff that a new reader couldn't fathom. If they start trying to swim up stream and look into the past? That's a different story.

[SiegePerilous02]

In some respects, Pre-CoIE was cleaner than what came after. It was definitely cleaner than what it had become just before Flashpoint.

Immediately after CoIE,things were not all that messy. There were pretty large question marks hanging over Power Girl, Wonder Girl, Fury, and the time that had passed between Byrne's Man of Steel mini and his Superman relaunch. Still (in my recollection), it didn't start to get head-scratchy until DC retrofitted Troia, and launched Hawkworld as an ongoing monthly. And it got progressively worse as it went forward, with continual attempts at historical patch-plumbing and writers insisting on restoring their childhood sacred cows.

At the same time, Pre-CoIE Superman's environment was thick! He was The Last Son of Krypton (except for is cousin, a bottled city full of miniaturized refugees, and a veritable army of criminals in a ghost prison). He had a full-time gig as a reporter, and then TV anchor, but still spent oodles of time out in space while a legion of robots substituted for him. He had this constant romantic quadrangle going between Clark, Kal-el, Lois, and Lana (plus Lori and others). To keep things challenging for him, kryptonite had become more abundant than sand. He could travel through time, but didn't learn about the great crises of the future and try to avert them.

Superman's surroundings were also sometimes a little silly (at least to the emerging aesthetic of the day). He had a super-dog, super-horse, super-cat, super-monkey. One of his most dangerous adversaries was - literally - a cosmic western desperado riding a space pegasus.

Wonder Woman was not much better off. She'd been through at least two Trevor deaths and resurrections by Crisis, and a giant, racist-caricature, mustachioed egg was on her roll of major villains.

All that said, looking back, the continuity might have been heavy, but it wasn't unmanageable. As SiegePerilous02 points out, Crisis seems to have had less to do with cleaning up the backstory than with trying to salvage really valuable IPs that were sinking, and it did that. If cleaning up had really been the goal, they would have followed Plan A, and done a cold reboot, ala Nu52.

Further, Batman had been in dire need of rehabilitation in 1968, and they did it without burning Wayne Manor to the ground. They reset him in one issue, without explicitly writing out anything, and just wrote in him a way that worked better for the times. You don't want Wonder Woman looking through time with her magic sphere, don't write about it. You don't want Superman fighting a fetishy-Zardoz knockoff, forbid using the character. Incentivize writers that want to write the kind of pitch you think will work.

Still, I can see why DC thought it had to do some dramatic, and they did deliver on that.

Exactly.

Really, for Superman and Wonder Woman in particular, a lot of the tweaks they went with didn't require a new reboot. They wanted Superman as the only Kryptonian? That was already in the process of happening. Lex going "legit" and moving beyond the Superman/Lois/Clark love triangle would have been easy to do. The only thing that would be difficult to do was the Kents, but you can resurrect them. Meanwhile, Kara sacrificing herself then promptly being erased from canon ("I'll never forget you Kara." lol) just seems mean spirited. And creates confusion, because it assumes nobody will ever see any old issues with Kryptonian Supergirl in them, so clearly she existed.

With Wonder Woman, just stop killing Steve like he's Kenny, have her ditch the secret identity, flesh out more individual Amazons and revamp the villains and mythological figures (which is done all the time without reboots). This could have been done without royally screwing up Donna Troy.

[ducklord]

As others have pointed out, we're really talking about (at least) 3 major "buckets" of continuity:

Pre-COIE: Not that hard to follow. There was about fifty years worth of accrued stories (some of it quite silly), but most readers back then seemed content to ignore the most egregiously awful/contradictory stuff, or at the very least shuffle it off to Earth-B But the multiverse was pretty easy to keep track of, and rarely intruded on the month-to-month reading.

Post-Crisis/Pre-Flashpoint: Despite the increasingly complexity of the DCU, and the increasing attention paid to continuity, it wasn't that hard to follow, either. All Pre-Crisis stories were relegated to "maybe that happened," which allowed for a lot of wiggle room, and, over time, most of the old stuff was successfully layered into the backstories with the new stuff.

Post-Crisis continuity got really dodgy on about three or four fronts:
1) Moving Katar Hol's arrival on Earth to the present day. One little caption box in the Hawkworld mini-series screwed up the continuity of Hawkman, the JLA, the Justice Society, and several other characters... and it's never truly been fixed.
2) The elimination of Superboy. Personally, I'm not a big fan of ANY Superboy as a character, particularly the "Superman as a boy" version. But his staggered elimination from Legion history (okay, it was a pocket universe version, no, wait, we can't use the pocket universe version anymore) really kneecapped the Legion for a long time.
3) Moving Wonder Woman's arrival to Man's World to the present day. Although those early Perez Wonder Woman stories were REALLY good, removing Wonder Woman as a founding member of the JLA, and the HIDEOUS knock-on effects to Donna Troy's continuity just weren't worth it.

Post-Flashpoint:
If you're someone who cares about continuity, I have no idea how you can keep the Post-Flashpoint continuity straight in your head. Was Cyborg ever a member of the Titans? Where is Power Girl from? Who the heck is Donna Troy? Did those messed up versions of Impulse and Superboy ever really exist? Or have we basically reverted to the post-Crisis continuity now, with some minor timeline tweaks? Who knows?

[Holt]

Rebirth is confusing because like COIE before it, what was kept and what was discarded seems to have largely been decided on a case by case basis. For instance I recall Christopher Priest saying that he was flat-out ignoring the New 52 Deathstroke stuff and taking the original Wolfman/Perez stories as canon (which is why Jericho and Ravager are way more like their classic counterparts than their New 52 versions, including Rose being half-Asian once again), but then it's clear that at the very least most of the new characters created for the New 52 (Simon Baz, Jessica Cruz, Wallace West, ect.) are still in continuity.

The Justice League and Teen Titans were hit very hard by this since Rebirth clearly restored some of the pre-Flashpoint history, so what is or isn't canon anymore is up in the air.

[Nite-Wing]

DC creates a lot of its own issues
It would be better to just ignore things and let them play out instead of fixing everything
Superman is approaching Hawkman levels of character reboots and the entire universe is now suffering because of it
Now you have a merged new 52 and rebirth continuity and no one can say for sure what happened or didn't happen because everything was just combined together
Some things apply to certain character like WW and Superman while Batman and Green Lantern have to basically ignore a lot of the sweeping changes because their corners of the universe never had a problem to begin with

Teen titans and Titans gen boy that's another problem coming in the future but it would be best for them to just ignore it

[Lonewolf36]

To my knowledge the DC Earth has been rebooted at least 8 times with soft and hard reboots.
Pre Crisis Earth - Everything separate Pre Crisis on Infinite Earths. Reboot becomes Post Crisis Earth.
Post Crisis Earth - Earth-1, 2, 4, S, and X merge altering some histories and wiping some characters. Reboot becomes Post Zero Hour Earth.
Post Zero Hour Earth - Some characters get tweaked trying to fix inconsistencies since the Post Crisis happened. becomes Post Infinite Crisis Earth.
Post Infinity Crisis Earth - Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman's Pre Crisis on Infinite Earths histories restored along with other changes. Briefly becomes Earth-Trinity before rebooting to normal.
Post Trinity Earth - Only minor changes such a Tomorrow Woman being fully human as opposed to an android. Still considered Post Infinite Crisis Earth. Reboot to Post Milestone Merged Earth.
Post Milestone Merged Earth - Only major changes is Milestone characters and histories added. Still considered Post Infinite Crisis Earth. Reboot to the Post Flashpont New 52 Earth.
New 52 Earth - For the most part histories of all the characters are altered. Reboot to Rebirth Earth.
Rebirth Earth - Keeping elements of the New 52 as well as restoring some of the previous histories.
But to answer the question it is way more confusing even to the writers themselves.

[Riv86672]

To my knowledge the DC Earth has been rebooted at least 8 times with soft and hard reboots.
Pre Crisis Earth - Everything separate Pre Crisis on Infinite Earths. Reboot becomes Post Crisis Earth.
Post Crisis Earth - Earth-1, 2, 4, S, and X merge altering some histories and wiping some characters. Reboot becomes Post Zero Hour Earth.
Post Zero Hour Earth - Some characters get tweaked trying to fix inconsistencies since the Post Crisis happened. becomes Post Infinite Crisis Earth.
Post Infinity Crisis Earth - Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman's Pre Crisis on Infinite Earths histories restored along with other changes. Briefly becomes Earth-Trinity before rebooting to normal.
Post Trinity Earth - Only minor changes such a Tomorrow Woman being fully human as opposed to an android. Still considered Post Infinite Crisis Earth. Reboot to Post Milestone Merged Earth.
Post Milestone Merged Earth - Only major changes is Milestone characters and histories added. Still considered Post Infinite Crisis Earth. Reboot to the Post Flashpont New 52 Earth.
New 52 Earth - For the most part histories of all the characters are altered. Reboot to Rebirth Earth.
Rebirth Earth - Keeping elements of the New 52 as well as restoring some of the previous histories.
But to answer the question it is way more confusing even to the writers themselves.

Yeah thats way too many reboots.

[Factor]

Yes. And it's been even more of a mess ever since The New 52. They had the opportunity to fix things in Rebirth and actually managed to make everything even more convoluted.
Only die-hard fans like us would even try making some kind of sense of DC's continuity.

[superduperman]

Yes. That was easy. Look, it was necessary from a financial standpoint. I don't think there's any way to argue against that at this point. A year earlier Marvel was seriously looking at taking them over and the only reason they didn't was some lawsuit filed by First Comics. That's how close we got to Marvel publishing DC books. So I get it. But there were a lot of mistakes made that undermined their own efforts. As a Superman fan this is especially frustrating because no other character outside of maybe Donna Troy has had so many reboots. Every time a new TV show or movie comes out, the character gets changed to align with them. Which just messes up their history even more.

I'm now in the camp that says they should just go back to pre-Crisis continuity. It wouldn't fix everything and you would have to account for things like the Super-marraige, but it would at least be more stable than what we have now. Pre-Crisis continuity was a lot like what Marvel has now. A floating timeline and continuity that changes as needed.