Originally Posted by
Kurt Busiek
I'm tempted to say, "They should hire me to fix it all," but probably a better answer is that you don't need a reboot event to rework a series' past. You can just do it, without the event.
The reason to do the event is to call attention to it, as a way to boost sales. That's what CRISIS ON INFINITE EARTHS did, enormously successfully, and what DC keeps trying to recapture, to apparently diminishing returns.
I think the events are worth doing only to the extent that they boost sales and keep the sales up. If they don't boost sales, there's no point in doing the event, and if they boost sales but not for very long, they're not worth the trouble (and the alienation of fans from current continuity by 'erasing' whatever continuity drew them in in the first place).
So if you get good sales juice out of it, well, that's one thing.
Otherwise, it's like doing your laundry in public. Just fix the books, make them be about what they're supposed to be about, at their core, ignore the stuff that detracts from that and move on. Tell stories that will excite readers and win over fans. A growing percentage of the market gets these stories in book form, alongside other books from earlier continuities, so don't worry too much about it all fitting together. They have access to multiple approaches to Batman any way, and they're not looking for "the consistent one" so much as "a good one."
When I recently did a Prankster story for the NEW YEAR'S EVIL special, the editors and I talked briefly about the question of "what continuity is this in?" since the worlds had been reordered since I last wrote my version of the Prankster, and someone had introduced a new, unrelated version, but even that version might not be in continuity any more.
What we decided was, screw it, I'm doing the Prankster I like.
And if that Prankster showed up in the modern Superman books, so what? If people like him and like the stories, that's fine.
And if someone wants to bring back that other Prankster and have the two of them fight, well, that's fine too. Or if you ignore that other one forever, that too. We're here to tell stories more than we're here to make catalogues.
So I don't think the events are needed, unless you have a reasonable expectation that you'll get some long-term benefit out of it.
But if you have that expectation, go for it.
[Still, you're better off making the books good first, rather than "fixing" the continuity and then screwing all the books up again anyway.]
kdb