DCs Continuity Is a Mess but That’s Part of Its Charm

DC Comics created what modern fans would recognize as superheroes way back in 1938 with Action Comics #1. Since then, DC has been one of the leading names in superheroes, creating characters that have grabbed readers and held them for decades. DC’s Absolute Universe is reminding readers why they love DC, but the sales success of the Absolute books actually has been rare for DC in recent years. DC has something of a checkered reputation among fans of superhero comics, and for good reason. DC has a much more cluttered and convoluted continuity than Marvel, and that has made it hard for fans to get into DC. Superhero comics are known for being very complicated, but DC goes so far past complicated that many of its characters and teams have completely lost their popularity because fans just didn’t want to deal with it.

DC brought the multiverse into superhero comics, something which helped define the publisher for years but also made things much more complicated than anyone realized. DC’s long-running love affair with creating, destroying, and re-creating its multiverse can be looked at as a problem, but most DC fans wouldn’t want it any other way. DC can be a mess, but that’s part of why we love it so much.

DC’s Tangled Timeline Gives Fans Unprecedented Freedom and Has Led to Amazing Stories

DC’s mess began in 1956. DC had created an entire universe of heroes and villains in the late ’30s and ’40s, but the sales crater that superhero comics hit after World War II and in the early ’50s made it all go away. Young fans moved on from their favorites in the Justice Society, with only big names like Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman staying around. Showcase #4 introduced an all-new Flash, Barry Allen. Fans loved Barry and then it was off to races, with DC rebooting their classic characters like Green Lantern and Hawkman, creating entirely new versions of these characters that were unrelated to what came before. Older fans and writers wanted to see the original versions of the heroes they grew up with come back, though, and DC made one of the mystifying decisions in the history of superhero comics.

Instead of just saying all of their old books happened in the past of the same Earth, readers would get Earth-2 starting in The Flash #121. This led to the Justice Society and the Justice League crossing over with Justice League of America #21 and DC was off to the multiversal races. The DC Multiverse was a great way of showcasing all the Golden Age characters DC had access to, and allowed the publisher to drop cool crossovers comics whenever they wanted. However, as DC’s sales fell, the publisher decided to do away with their multiverse with Crisis on Infinite Earths, starting a cycle of multiversal creation and destruction that would last until this day.

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Trying to convince Marvel readers to get into DC is like pulling teeth, but here’s the thing — the complications of DC continuity is half of the fun. Every longtime DC fan has their own head canon for the DC Multiverse, one that is meticulously built from years of reading comics. While there’s something to be said about Marvel’s method, there’s a freedom to DC’s tangled continuity that most non-DC readers don’t realize. Nothing has to count or everything can count, and constructing the DC timeline in your head is a lot of fun. While DC definitely likes to put out books that give an official timeline, like the upcoming The New History of the DC Universe, fans are the ultimate arbiters of what DC is. The tangles of DC continuity lead down amazing roads, stories that might not “count” but are still worthwhile.

Now obviously, there have been problems with DC continuity. Look at the histories of characters like the Legion of Superheroes or Hawkman, even Batwoman, and it’s easy to see how complicated these characters are. However, without DC’s approach to continuity, we never would have gotten the Legion’s “Five Years Later” or the ’90s reboot or the Threeboot. Without Crisis nuking the history of Hawkman, we never would have gotten “The Return of Hawkman” or the ’20s Hawkman series or the awesomeness that is Kendra Saunders as Hawkgirl. We never would have gotten the current version of Batwoman. We never would have gotten “Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?”. Some of DC’s best moments never would have gotten published if the publisher had the clean continuity of Marvel. DC can be messy and hard to figure out — did the New 52 actually happen or did just some of it happen? — but if it wasn’t, readers would lose out on the freedom that makes DC such a great superhero publisher.

DC Is a Beautiful Mess

Can DC be a mess? Of course it can, and there have been times when that mess has had a detrimental effect on the comics themselves — go and look at the Hawkgod post-Zero Hour Hawkman status quo — but there’s something about the insanity that is DC history. It’s an extremely rewarding feeling to be able to explain to someone the history of the Justice Society, watching their eyes glaze over. There’s something awesome about the way that DC tries to reboot everything every ten years, and readers have gotten many of the greatest event comics of all time because of that. Reading DC can be frustrating sometimes, watching them reboot stuff you love and replacing it with stuff you don’t, but most DC fans wouldn’t have it any other way.

For every huge mistake like the New 52, there’s an amazing decision like “Dawn of DC”. For every event book that’s aftermath doesn’t hit perfectly, like the weird Bronze Age reboot we got from Infinite Crisis that never really solidified, we get books like Crisis on Infinite Earths that change things for the better. Look at DC’s current “All-In” publishing initiative. Does anyone really know what version of DC they’re using? Is it pre-Crisis or post-Crisis, or some amalgam of the two? It doesn’t matter. That’s the glory of DC’s beautiful mess; as long as the stories are good, fans can live with it. Marvel has a rigid history that can make or break stories. DC is fluid and malleable, and that’s a huge part of the fun.