DC Movies- if at first you don't succeed...

[Pattern Ghost]

Well, at least Hawk Man and Donna Troy have good, consistent continuities!

[Old Man]

I'll never quite understand the obsession comics fans have with continuity.  I love comics but I don't think a realistic overall timeline is compatible with the genre.  Bruce Wayne must be almost 100 years old by now FFS.

[Greywind]

1 hour ago, csyphrett said:

I have no problem with legacy characters, diversity, or trying a new angle on an old character. I don't agree that writers, artists, or editors are putting much thought into what they are creating except maybe for Miles Morales. In the legacy characters that I have seen, the personal history of the characters involved are railed.

 

Connor Hawke is the son of Green Arrow and a Temple maid. There is no point in Green Arrow's timeline when this could have happened. And if it did happen at the point indicated by Dixon, Connor would only have been 5 to 10 years old when he was intro'd.

 

(Sidenote here: I think Mike Grell's Green Arrow and the Hal Jordan Green Lantern were actually supposed to be ten to fifteen years older than what they should have been because the writers or editors couldn't do math. Same with Black Lightning. His timeline is manure.)

  

Jaime Reyes is using Dan Garrett's old beetle. So Garrett's beetle switched from being a mystic artifact to a superscience artifact that no one could figure out because no one knew the password that just latches on to Jaime to spark an alien invasion after thousands of years. Why doesn't it use the same powers?

 

The gay Green Lantern is Alan Scott who after a hundred years on the job, four romances/marriages, two grown kids that he didn't know were his, has suddenly come out of the closet.

 

Jack Knight, Starman, is nothing but retcons from one end to the other and most of them were not good. Ted Knight being part of the Manhattan Project is such a failure in research, it's the first thing that jumps to mind when someone says name a character whose history was railed.

 

Thunder and Lightning, Black Lightning's daughters, should not have been created because Black Lightning has only been around as long as Firestorm, and his actual age is a little older than Nightwing. He broke up with his wife before they had kids, and moved to Gotham City from Metropolis with no signs of being reconciled with her, and in point of fact I cannot recall him even dealing with her all the years the Outsiders ran. Then boom his time with the Outsiders is railed and he is married, middle aged and has two almost adult kids.

 

Teen Titans, period. 

 

The in-universe explanation is that the characters are being rewritten every time they save the universe. The real explanation is the writers come up with an idea which a thousand fan fiction writers have already done, and go let's make this official. Then they retcon whatever they need to for their idea to fit because it would be harder for Jaime to just find another blue beetle, Connor not to be Oliver's kid but related to him, Black Lightning to be Static's teacher.

 

And there are hundreds of other things done the same way on the whim of the writer such as Superboy being the clone of Lex Luthor, or Cyborg founding the Justice League instead of the Teen Titans, or Firestorm being a fire elemental.

CES                 

 

Crisis on Infinite Earths happened, for one thing. After that, a lot of wiggle room was left open.

[zslane]

I don't mind the occasional legacy character. They do make sense to a degree. Look how many actors come from a family of actors. Same with military families, or musician families. Passing the baton of a superhero career to a younger generation is completely plausible. However, in most cases I would still expect the new generation of heroes to at least have their own costumes, names, and possibly powers. Kids aren't clones.

 

But what we're often seeing today is all together different. For instance, taking a woman from South America and calling her Wonder Woman just to check off a box on a corporate diversity agenda sheet is not, IMO, worthy of praise. Nor is taking the name Superman and sticking it on whatever non-Caucasian "Kryptonian survivor" happens to pander to the current social justice climate. Just make these characters into their own superheroes, like Marvel did with America Chavez (Miss America). Marvel wanted a character that ticked three minority boxes off the diversity agenda sheet: Hispanic, female, and gay. Instead of making her the new Captain America, they re-used an old, obscure hero name from the 1940s that nobody remembers, essentially reinventing her from scratch.

[Christopher R Taylor]

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Connor Hawke is the son of Green Arrow and a Temple maid. There is no point in Green Arrow's timeline when this could have happened. And if it did happen at the point indicated by Dixon, Connor would only have been 5 to 10 years old when he was intro'd.

 

He was well written and an interesting character, though, and timelines in comics are always a disaster (Franklin Richards has been a toddler since the 1960s, for example).

 

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I'll never quite understand the obsession comics fans have with continuity

 

Yeah I'm in the same boat.  I like it when they don't do ridiculous contradictions but this fixation with everything fitting perfectly on a spreadsheet baffles me.

[slikmar]

The thing that annoys me is that DC had been well on their way to doing a good job of the Legacy thing. Kyle had replaced Hal, with some really good stories. Wally had replaced Barry. Roy had replaced Oliver. They didnt replace the "big 3" though Dick could have replaced Bruce and they had replaced the Robins. Barring her retro'd screwed up history, Donna could have replaced Diana at some point, but wasn't needed as both Diana and Superman were long lived. As mentioned above, Atom and Blue Beetle had been replaced pretty well. Then writers decided they wanted to do Hal, Oliver and Barry stories, so they were brought back. In bringing back Oliver, they even played on it where he was in the JL satellite and Kyle and Wally were there and he was asking if everyone was replaced. If this was some alternate universe or something.

[Greywind]

2 hours ago, Christopher R Taylor said:

 

He was well written and an interesting character, though, and timelines in comics are always a disaster (Franklin Richards has been a toddler since the 1960s, for example).

 

 

Franklin's age, which is the subject of much controversy within the Marvel Comics Scaling Timeline, has never been fully stated, although often joked about or hinted at.^[49]

• Franklin was five years old during Onslaught's actions.^[27]
• Franklin was seven during the events of Secret Invasion: Fantastic Four #2.
• Franklin's eighth birthday was celebrated in 4 #1.
• Tom Brevoort has stated that, in the real world year of 2014, he was eight years old.^[85]

[Christopher R Taylor]

The reason they stall Franklin growing up is because that absolutely fixes Sue Storm in time, and turns her from hot young mom into matronly middle aged woman.  Which I would be cool with but apparently they have a real fear of.

 

John Byrne had her miscarry her second attempt at a child and I think she can no longer have kids, which is a good solution to the quandary if a sad one

[csyphrett]

13 hours ago, Greywind said:

 

Crisis on Infinite Earths happened, for one thing. After that, a lot of wiggle room was left open.

They have had ten rewriting crisis since then. Think about that. I saw the DC History book on the book shelf and laughed.

CES

3 hours ago, slikmar said:

The thing that annoys me is that DC had been well on their way to doing a good job of the Legacy thing. Kyle had replaced Hal, with some really good stories. Wally had replaced Barry. Roy had replaced Oliver. They didnt replace the "big 3" though Dick could have replaced Bruce and they had replaced the Robins. Barring her retro'd screwed up history, Donna could have replaced Diana at some point, but wasn't needed as both Diana and Superman were long lived. As mentioned above, Atom and Blue Beetle had been replaced pretty well. Then writers decided they wanted to do Hal, Oliver and Barry stories, so they were brought back. In bringing back Oliver, they even played on it where he was in the JL satellite and Kyle and Wally were there and he was asking if everyone was replaced. If this was some alternate universe or something.

Dan Didio, the former top dog, said get rid of all the legacy guys and bring back the old guys, and then went out of his way to give the shaft to Nightwing and Wally West. Everything bad that has happened to those characters has been because Didio hated them.

CES  

[Grailknight]

2 hours ago, Christopher R Taylor said:

The reason they stall Franklin growing up is because that absolutely fixes Sue Storm in time, and turns her from hot young mom into matronly middle aged woman.  Which I would be cool with but apparently they have a real fear of.

 

John Byrne had her miscarry her second attempt at a child and I think she can no longer have kids, which is a good solution to the quandary if a sad one

 

Nope, after the miscarriage, the had a daughter named Valeria. She has Reed's intelligence and may have Sue's powers.

[Greywind]

7 minutes ago, Grailknight said:

 

Nope, after the miscarriage, the had a daughter named Valeria. She has Reed's intelligence and may have Sue's powers.

 

I thought the "miscarriage" was Valeria, who had been taken at birth.

The lesson to be learned is: don't boink in the Negative Zone.

[slikmar]

12 minutes ago, Greywind said:

 

I thought the "miscarriage" was Valeria, who had been taken at birth.

The lesson to be learned is: don't boink in the Negative Zone.

so a double reverse in side a held perimeter retcon. first, miscarriage so no babies, then a kidnapping.

[Grailknight]

Well according to Fandom, she was the miscarriage but Franklin(the nascent god) placed her in stasis for a time and then she was placed back into Sue's womb. She was still causing the radiation problem and they had to turn to Doom for help with a safe delivery. Apparently she has no demonstrated powers except intellect on a par with her father's which developed at the age of 3.

[Christopher R Taylor]

I loved that issue, it was so sad and so well done, with Reed trying to get paranoid madman Doc Ock who is a leading expert in radiation to just help

[Bazza]

Franklin Richards has also been a teenager/early 20s who led his own team. 

[Bazza]

And to answer Old Man about continuity. There is three ways this has gone.:
1) episodic - not continuity except for within the current story/episode.
2) Narrative: Each episode/scenario is part of a longer narrative. With this the series is treated as one consistent narrative. 
3) Inter-series narratives. with Marvel's silver Age titles, Stan Lee set them in NYC. Due to this Marvel decided that events in one title would affect other titles. This made the nascent "Marvel Universe" more realistic. Granted this storytelling conceit was easier to pull off with only a handful of titles. Now it it is a mess. 

[csyphrett]

22 hours ago, Old Man said:

I'll never quite understand the obsession comics fans have with continuity.  I love comics but I don't think a realistic overall timeline is compatible with the genre.  Bruce Wayne must be almost 100 years old by now FFS.

if you have a single series of episodes like early television, then the only thing that matters for continuity is that Majors Healy and Nelson work together, and one always has a problem that is exaggerated by the other.

 

When you have a shared universe like Wild Cards or Thieves' World, every writer has to know what every other writer is doing, or at least the editor does so he doesn't have Tempus split the city in half while Shadowspawn is trying to steal the Sea King's horn from the city vault, or if Tempus does split the city, it isn't where Shadowspawn is actually working.

 

DC's writers and editors are like we want Batman being pregnant with Aquaman's kid and then asking some other writer to figure out how he is going to handle that for JLA

CES  

[Starlord]

Gal Gadot Confirmed Reports That Joss Whedon "Threatened" Her While Shooting "Justice League"

[Spence]

On 5/8/2021 at 11:07 PM, csyphrett said:

 

DC's writers and editors are like we want Batman being pregnant with Aquaman's kid and then asking some other writer to figure out how he is going to handle that for JLA

Nooooooooo!!!!!

What have you done? 

Now the idea is out there.

 

I can just see the DC movies 2024 slate........

 

[Christopher R Taylor]

Quote

Gal Gadot Confirmed Reports That Joss Whedon "Threatened" Her While Shooting "Justice League"

 

Yeah he kind of has this humble, kindly, grateful public persona but reports from the people who actually worked under him are not very flattering and he appears to treat women (particularly younger women) like trash

 

[zslane]

Wasn't Gal Gadot pregnant at the time of those reshoots? Maybe Whedon just has some irrational enmity towards pregnant women (ala Charisma Carpenter).

[Old Man]

“Just”?

[csyphrett]

Whedon has something. Michelle Trachtenburg confirmed they had rule on the set of Buffy that he wasn't allowed to be alone with her.

CES

5 hours ago, Spence said:

Nooooooooo!!!!!

What have you done? 

Now the idea is out there.

 

I can just see the DC movies 2024 slate........

 

You're old. This has been such a thing, there has been a lawsuit over male pregnancy and who can write it

CES

[Matt the Bruins]

On 5/8/2021 at 1:44 AM, csyphrett said:

The gay Green Lantern is Alan Scott who after a hundred years on the job, four romances/marriages, two grown kids that he didn't know were his, has suddenly come out of the closet.

 

Late-in-life coming outs after living a heteronormative life for decades is actually a very common story among LGBTQ people. It stands to reason at least a couple of comic book characters would follow suit, and it looks like Alan Scott got tapped for the job (and before him Bobby Drake, though he's probably been in his early 30s since the older version came out). At least choosing Alan doesn't invalidate any really strong or happy marriages/relationships like it would have with, say, Jay Garrick or Wesley Dodds.

 

6 hours ago, Christopher R Taylor said:

Yeah he kind of has this humble, kindly, grateful public persona

 

Say what? I've been a fan of the man's work for decades, but he's always been egotistical, and whiny/sulky whenever anyone criticizes his work or disagrees with him. It's just the blatantly misogynistic stuff that's been news in the last few years. Ask Donald Sutherland or Halle Berry how humble and grateful he is...

[Spence]

4 hours ago, csyphrett said:

Whedon has something. Michelle Trachtenburg confirmed they had rule on the set of Buffy that he wasn't allowed to be alone with her.

CES

You're old. This has been such a thing, there has been a lawsuit over male pregnancy and who can write it

CES

 

Really?  Really really?

 

I know I haven't been buying many comics in the last few years (decades??) because the quality (IMO) cratered in the 90's and never even tried to get back. 

 

But this is actually a thing?  I was being snarky.  If true, I am definitely not missing anything.