Haven't seen any examples outside of WomderWomana books.
It's just now most of everything happened and the best parts but not all of it.
ITS TRUE!!!
For giggles, I had planned on reading Rucka’s run Rebirth WW and listing how many of Azzerello’s changes and the New 52ism were dumped down the memory hole. Since Rucka wrote Diana like he never left the book back in the early 2000s. But then I’d have to read Rebirth JL under Brian Hitch and that bored me. So my WW read never happened.
It all happened is just a cop out. Because DC refuses to keep a continuity. I enjoyed Grant Morrison pointing this out with his line about DC and their “nevours COIE reboots”, every 5 years.
The only two reboots that were done out of compulsion were Crisis on Infinite Earths and Flashpoint. Every other reboot was done out of necessity, precisely because there were huge holes in continuity since DC wanted to change some things but not everything, or immediately saw why the "streamlined take" was way more problematic (like the Justice League and Superman having undesired origin stories)
Not at all to me. Not satisfied. I pretty much jump shipped from DC as a whole (aside from a few titles) when Rebirth happened.
Honestly, I loved the New 52. It was like DC’s own Ultimate line. What DC should have done was downsized the number of main-titles, and had two publishing lines. DC-Prime, and DC-52. But whatever. It’s in the past now.
Honestly, though? If they would do it again? Another crisis to set just “one” coherent universe, they need to sit down in a huddle and really plot out a DC comic universe for a long term approach instead of just this flying at the seat of their pants approach it feels like they been on since… 2018? 2019?
I think overall it's worked for me.
Stuff like Waid's current Superman-Batman book wouldn't have happened a few years ago, without this approach. I think "everything counts" has allowed DC to course correct on a few characters, and I think it's freed up the talent to tell the kind of stories they want to tell without having to deal with all the crap continuity bullsh*t the DCU has cycled through since Infinite Crisis.
At the same time, the wishy washy canon has made immersion a little harder. It's difficult to get deeply invested in a character's journey when you're no longer sure what that journey looks like. And I miss the deep dive, tightly controlled history of post-Crisis, where you could follow a character almost day-to-day and have it all track and make sense.
But the books I read have been better these last 18-ish months than they were before. I'm enjoying stuff like Action, Nightwing, GL, etc., more than I have in years. And while I'm annoyed that the continuity isn't as tight as it was in the 90's, the thing that *really* matters is the entertainment value of the book in my hands right now, and as far as that goes, I'm quite satisfied. If "everything counts" is the price I have to pay for quality comics, then I pay it gladly.
That said, it'd be damn nice if we had a basic continuity framework, and had a rough idea of what history looks like. But that hope died with the New52, if not the early 2000's when all the pre-Crisis stuff started coming home, squeezing between the post-Crisis elements whether they fit together or not.
"We all know the truth: more connects us than separates us. But in times of crisis the wise build bridges, while the foolish build barriers. We must find a way to look after one another, as if we were one single tribe."
~ Black Panther.
Writing about comics https://bookofhsssh.blogspot.com
I love the ideal and underlying philosophy of it, but the execution has been...uneven at best.
Buried Alien (The Fastest Post Alive!)
Buried Alien - THE FASTEST POST ALIVE!
First CBR Appearance (Historical): November, 1996
First CBR Appearance (Modern): April, 2014
You don't have to read Hitch's Rebirth JL. I didn't. I just started with Rucka's Rebirth one shot then the beginning of his WW run and worked my way through. The WW in Rucka's first run and the one in Rebirth are very different. Not just in personality but in tone and style as well. His first run featured a grown up serious Diana, his second run featured a young, naive Diana who was just figuring things out.
Recently I've come to realize how much of a missed opportunity IC was. It's like they spent their time trying to fix everything that was not broken while leaving the actual broken stuff unattended.
Having Diana debut earlier and becoming a founding member like she originally was should have fixed all the continuity issues that the JL had with her absence. It would have also fixed Donna Troy's origin back to what it used to be. The Robin that appeared briefly in War of the Gods can always be retconned to have been Dick Grayson instead of Tim Drake. JLA: Year One would have still happened but now Diana was around in that timeline. Hawkworld being placed 15 years earlier in the timeline (around the time of Batman: YO and MoS) should have fixed Hawkman's continuity as well.
Superman: Birthright should have never been made into Superman's main backstory. They should have just continued that as an alternate universe. Like DC's answer to Marvel's Ultimate Line of books.
Instead we ended up two Superman origin stories in less than a decade, Wonder Woman being turned into Warrior Woman and various attempts to erase her history and mythology, Donna Troy became even more of a mess that was never attended to and Hawkman is still in the same spot he was in a decade ago.
So.....like the old Earth 1 and Earth 2 difference?
The CBR Community Guidelines & Rules | Report but also PM me directly
The problem there is that's a MASSIVE amount of continuity re-writing, and... I don't think anyone will ever do that.
Which is why I think they went with "everything counts". The amount of work to actually figure out how all the past stories would fit is just too much. It's not just how some stories have histories that just.... don't fit together, it's also the sheer number of stories and the connections between stories.
The easy way to handle stuff like the Lisa Kent story is to just go "well that's Earth-91, and Earth-91 is weird like that". But... the whole point of CoIE was to wreck the old multiverse so that Earth-91 doesn't exist anymore. And, well... they never finished putting the pieces together after that. they tried several times, but the problem kept getting worse.
Is that the one where the Legion tries to defeat the Fatal Five by throwing Twinkies at them, and Mano, whose power is the disc on his hand that disintegrates whatever it touches, gets frustrated because he keeps accidentally disintegrating Twinkies -- or the one where he happily eats the Twinkies because Twinkies are indestructible?
I'm asking for Post-Crisis Aquaman back. I want a time-displaced, Peter David-era hook-handed Orin to show up, see the New 52/Johns-era Aquaman, decide this loser is a blonde Superman wannabe with a stick up his blowhole, and literally stab him in the head with his cybernetic harpoon hand sticking out the other side. Then I want Orin to cybernetically rotate his hook, still stuck in Aquadouche's skull, at high speed, thus turning his brain into a Slurpie as a slightly obscure but just as ham-fisted "Right back atcha, jerk" to Alex Ross.
IIRC, they found a way to reconcile JLA: Year One with Silver Age continuity by revealing that there were eight founders (Black Canary being the eighth) and that Batman, Superman and Wonder Woman all took a backseat for the first year or so of the team. But I don't think they ever explained how Wonder Woman's history was supposed to work - I think there were hints that her Pre-COIE history was restored (specifically the I-Ching ''Diana Prince'' era) and that Donna was back to her original origin, but nothing beyond that.
I think they just didn't bother with Hawkworld because by then Katar Hol was firmly in limbo and Carter Hall was the only Hawkman.
With Superman, I think they were trying to make him more Silver Age-ish (or rather Donner-ish) while keeping the base of Post-COIE continuity intact and leaving the backstory pretty vague - Secret Origins came out literally at the fag end of this continuity. I feel there was a real missed opportunity here to do with Superman what Morrison was doing with Batman - establish that many Pre-COIE stories happened to Superman at some point, even if the base template of his continuity was Post-COIE. Yes, things would be a lot more complicated than it was with Batman, but with a little effort it could have worked. Stick to Post-COIE in the major details (Luthor being a corporate mogul for the most part, the Kents being alive), lean towards Pre-COIE in some of the smaller but important details (rocketship instead of birthing matrix, Clark being Superboy in Smallville and with the LOSH) and otherwise, where there are no major contradictions, be as inclusive as possible (other Kryptonians exist and Superman semi-frequently encountered them, other variants of kryptonite existed, Superman fought multiple incarnations of Brainiac, Clark once did a stint as a TV reporter earlier in his career and fought the Sand-Superman etc.) I guess they were moving towards something like this but it never really materialized.