The more things change... in comics

*eyetwitch*

I read just as many 60s comic books as I did early 90s comic books growing up. I've never understood the whole "the backstory is too COMPLICATED" line, if you're interested in the characters then you learn as you go, simple as that.

I'd argue that there really isn't that much to learn if you just want to enjoy them month to month, either. Just pick up whatever issue's current, and you'll learn soon enough.

Indeed, few characters need a major explanation of their history.

Though Captain America and Red Skull having come over from the Timely era to Marvel era definitely need some, and so would Phantom (original Ghost Rider) Rider due to all the changes and name being reassigned to Johnny Blaze and Dan Ketch.

Take the Magic: The Gathering 'What Color Are You?' Quiz.

Its clearly not as simple as that, for the people who say that.

But the point I was making was not that the continuity history is too complicated, but rather that the comic book companies wanted to have it both ways: they wanted to claim rich histories, because that appealed to the readers that were deep fans and continuity nuts. But they didn't want to compel their authors to be beholden to that history, and they wanted to attract new readers with the claim that the very same deep history that the established fans discussed constantly were things they didn't need to know to make the books approachable.

But the truth is that its extremely difficult to simultaneously appeal to the continuity fans and the casual readers constantly over decades, especially when you are also doing stunt cross-over events every year on top of that. That's why they keep rebooting things, and then just dragging the old continuity right back into the reboot, and then rebooting again.


I believe the comic book property movies tend to have such wide appeal specifically because they combine iconic characters for which there is a touchstone to the audience, presented from scratch with no direct connection to the comic book history they are pulled from. You don't need to have read every Conan Doyle Sherlock Holmes story to enjoy the movies or the Sherlock series; you don't need to have read every Ian Fleming novel to enjoy the James Bond movies. They take iconic characters and re-present them cleanly to the audiences. There's a sense that the audience is seeing all there is to see, that they aren't seeing only an "incomplete" version of the story. I think that the recent superhero movies do the same thing, in a different medium where its expected and thus not generally frowned upon (and the ones that do complain the translation is not "faithful" are usually a tiny minority of the target movie going audience). The person watching the Avengers who is not a comic book fan is on roughly the same footing as the person that has read the Avengers comic since 1968.

But reboots and restarts within the same medium have a much greater difficulty in shaking the past. Its just too easy and too tempting to return to that rich playground of material. So they end up constantly bouncing between trying to start fresh and trying to build legacies. And that's basically the last twenty five years of the Marvel and DC Universes in a nutshell.

The TPBs are certainly the best way to read Planetary, particularly knowing the series is now complete.