So this is basically an attempt at doing Marvel's sliding timescale retroactively? Idk lol. It works for Marvel because they've used it from the start, more doubtful it'd work if you force it 80 years into your stories
So this is basically an attempt at doing Marvel's sliding timescale retroactively? Idk lol. It works for Marvel because they've used it from the start, more doubtful it'd work if you force it 80 years into your stories
I wouldn't classify it that way. I'd say DC spend decades mostly using a sliding time scale. The is the opposite of that, since we are keeping the actual years and historical events. With a sliding timescale, it would be Batman debuted X years before present (that number slowly increasing as characters slowly aged), whereas here it's pegged to 1939.
Well, the sliding timeline in Marvel is somewhat different because the characters aren't ageless and the timeline/debuts of characters remains contemporary. It's just that instead of WWII being a focal point for a character's origin or whatever, it becomes the Korean War...then the Vietnam War...then the Gulf War...then Afghanistan...etc.. But Peter Parker, for example, was still born only 25 years ago in the current Marvel timeline - not in 1947 (as would have been the case when he debuted in 1962).
With DC now, the idea is that the timeline isn't sliding - it's linear. So say Superman was supposed to be 25-years-old in 1938 when he debuted, making him born in 1913. He's now 108-years-old in today's DC with his entire history of stories occurring but still appears only 25-years-old (or thereabouts) because apparently time moves differently in the DCU. The same goes for Batman, Wonder Woman, Green Lantern, Flash, etc.. The idea is that rather than update events to make the characters contemporary, they can just say Superman still operated in WWII, the Silver Age, Post-Crisis, etc. and all those stories are canon.
The problem with that, of course, is that DC has wiped out its history and completely revamped events & characters so many times that trying to canonize everything makes the characters' own history completely contradictory, which is why Jurgens has already had to place a caveat on things by saying not everything will fit/some things will have to be cut. This is why Batman apparently never used a gun during his career even though he absolutely did in the Golden Age and in Year Two. The irony with that with fans who are supporting this by saying it allows more creative freedom for the writers is that it clearly doesn't if DC is already putting restrictions on stories or events that can't be used/revisited (such as Batman using a gun).
This whole reality reset is just overly complicated and unsatisfying to me.
Almost everything counts, but maybe you're not sure what fits and what doesn't is worse than a more defined reboot that we have.
Marvel's sliding timeline works because they've done it all along. DC has done too many reboots to make it all work without it being a Frankenstein's monster of ill matched pieces. Some characters it works better for than others. But Wonder Woman can't be both a clay statue brought to life and the daughter of Zeus, she can't have fallen in love with young Steve and come to America and took on a secret identity and also have made friends with old Steve and came to America without a secret identity. Lex can't be both Superboy's teenage friend in Smallville who became a young super villain in and out of prison since he was a boy and a CEO who was a pillar of the community.
This feels like it's going to be a big mess and will all get fixed with another reboot a few years down the road. DC just can't stop picking at their continuity instead of focusing on moving forward.
I dropped a lot of titles with New 52, and while Rebirth brought me back, I still think the pre New 52 era was better. I think every reboot they do alienates some of their readers, and they won't all come back.
"Kids don't care **** about superhero comic books. And if they do, they probably start with manga, with One Punch-Man or My Hero Academia. " -ImOctavius.
Again, the fact that we have two, 2-page articles trying to explain to us what exactly a Linearverse is tells you how needlessly complicated DC is making things.
Something else that just popped in my head...if Batman has been operating since 1939, his body has been through some serious hell in 82 years of fighting crime.
Good point. Though I guess comic characters have generally healed far too easily/well, so that one really isn't problematic to me.Something else that just popped in my head...if Batman has been operating since 1939, his body has been through some serious hell in 82 years of fighting crime.
My problem with that is that, while understanding these are fictional characters and comic books, Batman is supposed to be the one mortal character DC has. If you start giving him special healing abilities or make him immortal/ageless...I don't know, that just doesn't sit well with me.
While I do agree that it's extremely frustrating how often Batman seems to have superpowers (we often see him engaging in leaps too high and feats of strength too extreme), the healing is just a tv trope - shot this week, okay next week. And comic books often follow along the same way. Really the 10-20 years he's already had in previous continuity should have wrecked his body pretty well.
"Kids don't care **** about superhero comic books. And if they do, they probably start with manga, with One Punch-Man or My Hero Academia. " -ImOctavius.
Yeah, they probably haven't explained it very well. Or kept it deliberately vague.
Agreed. Which is why I think "everything counts" when it comes to DC is more akin to "Everything counts as much as possible". The Post-COIE/Rebirth-ish framework they've been following will serve as the base, and they'll add in as much stuff from other eras as they can...while acknowledging that previous iterations of continuity 'happened' in some sense.
The misunderstanding is that this is immediately coming off the heels of the "Omniverse" revelation in Metal that established the characters remembered their past realities - not necessarily experienced it. Not to mention the "Metaverse" solution Johns tried coming up with at the end of Doomsday Clock a little over a year ago (I can't even explain that one).
So I think fans are understandably confused on what this means. But I think 100% there's no doubt that the Linearverse is supposed to establish all these characters have been operating since their publication debuts.
The concept that I thought up some years ago and which I've post a few times on this board, is that there's an Earth out there where everything has already happened. On this Earth are the major characters--like Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Flash, Black Canary--and they've been around for decades. They've lived through all the major story lines for those characters and they know how it all works out for them. That would be like the reference point Earth and it wouldn't really be an Earth for active plots--but we would see them observing all the other Earths, where their counterparts are going through the lives they've already lived. So it would be like this Earth is how things are supposed to work out--the Ur Earth--but then all the other Earths are the variable Earths that sometimes follow the same pattern but sometimes go in a very different direction.
Why are DC management obsessed with this stuff so much? Marvel's been around for decades as well but they give their readers the benefit of the doubt to understand that when several decades worth of writers and artists have worked on a character you just need to accept there will occasionally be inconsistencies.
I honestly don't get why DC is so fixated on having to conclusively define their continuity when most people I know will happily just accept that there are going to be different and sometimes inconsistent approaches over a body of work that spans decades and then we just move on with our lives! This constant focus on minutiae over stories really turns me off wanting to read their comics at all the more they pull crap like this tbh