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March 17, 1998

98076

What's wrong with current DC continuity?

  1. Superman was killed, then brought back with long hair, then turned into Freakazoid, then split into twins...the current creative teams seem determined to revive all of the Silver Age Superman stories, but turned into massive "events" and without any sense of fun.
  2. Hal Jordan was turned into a psychotic mass-murderer, then killed, the Green Lantern Corps wiped out, etc., etc., you've heard the rant ad nauseam.
  3. Oliver Queen was killed (in a fairly straightforward, if unbelievable, fashion) and his place taken by his illegitimate son who was raised in some remote monastery where developing a personality was apparently forbidden.
  4. Batman's back was broken, then made better; Barbara Gordon's back was broken (in a really rotten story, to boot), but not made better. Now the writers seem intent on visiting each of the Horsemen of the Apocalypse on Gotham City in turn.
  5. Batman never did find his parent's killer. Nor did he attend college. The current version of Batman is a vengeance-driven monomaniac, more the Count of Monte Cristo than Sherlock Holmes.
  6. Hawkman was retconned out of existence (sort-of) and replaced with some homicidal avatar of the Hawk God or some such nonsense, so now no decent writer will touch the character with a ten-foot pole.
  7. Aquaman's hand was cut off, replaced with a harpoon, and now he's not a super-hero and never was a super-hero.
  8. Superboy is a wise-ass teenage clone of Superman. Supergirl is a shape-shifting former devil-worshipper. Krypto never existed.
  9. The Atom was youthened (and stupified) into a know-nothing teen-ager.
  10. Flash--actually there's nothing particularly wrong with Flash that having Waid and Augustyn back wouldn't cure.
  11. Wonder Woman's dead, or turned to clay, or something, and the role is now being filled by Hippolyta, or something. If I have the details wrong, I'm relieved, because I think the less I know of this the better.
  12. Adam Strange is not the hero of Rann, but the sperm-donor of Rann, and Alanna is dead (last I heard--I'm praying Mark fixes this up in the upcoming JLA arc).
  13. Metamorpho was given a really ugly and pointless redesign and then killed--excuse me, rendered inert, like it makes a difference, since they buried him--through what was basically authorial fiat (or at least I don't see any reason why those events should have killed him--or even injured him).
  14. Lobo exists.

Choose any ten of the above.

Posted by joshua at March 17, 1998 12:00 AM