The things in our past matter. They make us who we are today. They define us. We can pretend they didn’t happen. We can ignore them. We can even forget about them. But they were all a part of our journey to where we are right now.
If you have slept with 10 people you have slept with 10 people. You can pretend one or two never happened. You can block them out, or forget about them, but that doesn’t change the fact that you have slept with 10 people.
The tradition of comic books is that a characters journey continues. Somebody created that character (Say Bob Kane with Batman) and told that characters story for a time until somebody else took over. And, if said character is successful (like, say Batman) this continues to happen for many years. When a new writer comes in she or he may not acknowledge everything that the previous writers have done with a character but those things still happened. A writer may kill a character, change a costume, and turn a hero to villain. The next writer can continue that or go back to status quo. But the story continues.
Unless you are DC Comics. IF you are DC Comics you can decide that nothing from the past happened. The characters have no history. No writers or creators had ever worked on said characters prior to last year. Batman has only been around a year. Superman too.
But even that would be ok, I guess. The past never happened. Sure. New beginnings. Got it.
But that isn’t what they did. What they did was started over and said the past never happened…except the parts that did. And they aren’t going to tell us what did or did not happen. Why? Because they don’t know. They are making things up as they go along.
Their most successful books pre DCnU? The Batman books and Green Lantern. So, with those….the past happened. Except the stuff that didn’t. Other books that didn’t sell as well? Whole new beginning.
So, for not know what has happened and what hasn’t, for ignoring all the amazing work of past creators, and for just plain old having their heads up their asses….Fuck you DC.
