How good are comics with continuity.

[Draco Weyr]

I am just wondering... the only ones I really ever got into, being the Superman one, had a wonderful multi-verse storyline which could explain away the various inconsistancys that occured over the years.

But anyway, I am just wondering how good are comics with their continuity, especially as the fact that most comics go over decades and thus there is a huge bible of infomation for them to have.

I know that some soap opera have there own individual coninuity bible, that is always refered back to, do comics have this, or what is the story?

This is something that really interests me, and I would love the opinion of all the bigger comic readers out there.

 

[Tabitha]

I don't think I could rightly describe myself as a 'bigger' comic reader (although my waistline might persuade you otherwise ). It has been a few years since I have read comics regularly, although I still pick up the occasional trade paperback.

Speaking from a DC point of view, I would have to say that continuity is NOT a strong point in comics. Over the last twenty years DC have had (at least) two events, billed as crossover extravaganzas, that seemed aimed at sorting out the whole mess of different versions of the same characters. Crisis on Infinite Earths happened in the mid 80s, and basically all those alternate versions got phased out to make one big storyline. I haven't read it in a while, but it is a cracking story, and has lovely George Perez art.
Zero Hour came later, and to be honest I am not sure what happened continuity-wise with that one. I remember characters popping up who had been binned during Crisis (Batgirl, for example - in the main continuity had been crippled and become Oracle, but in Zero Hour there was both Batgirl and Oracle).

Anyway, I am confusing myself here, because I don't really remember it all that clearly
What I wanted to say in this post was that continuity problems really don't bother me in comics, because there is always some way to sort them out, and generally speaking they DO get sorted out eventually. There have been so many revisions of characters, even following the Crisis and Zero Hour craziness, that if you couldn't roll with the punches you would end up being a very very angry person...

 

[ray gower]

I think continuity in the comic world largely depends upon over what period you are talking about.

If we take the years where the characters are under the influence of a single team, then the continuity is actually quite good.

If one is inclined to take the characters whole career, then one is treading into very difficult country. Superman for instance is vastly different now to how he was in the early 60's and that was different to his original incarnation. This however is reasonable, the people that create the stories are (or were) vastly different.

As Tabitha observed the producers periodically try to bring some of the different characters together, trying to produce a common story and the result, whilst often an good action story, is a real lash up and almost always manage not to explain why the characters they are rivetting together are totally different.

All this, of course, ignores where two or more series are running in parrallel e.g. JSA, Batman and/or Superman etc, where two sets of artists/writers are producing different things from each other

 

[Tabitha]

Yep. When Grant Morrison started working on his revamp of the JLA a few years back, he was using the "big seven" - i.e. Superman, Batman, Flash, Green Lantern, Wonder Woman, Martian Manhunter and Aquaman. At the same time each of these characters had their own stories in their own individual comics (or in the case of Bats and Supes - multiple comics), so questions often arose about when certain team stories were occurring compared to solo stories. Add the occasional crossover into the mix and it starts to get a bit confusing!