8. Re-Embrace Continuity (But Dont Die By It)...
During his controversial X-Men re-vamp at Marvel, writer Grant Morrison suggested that Marvels extensive (and confusing) continuity should be used merely as window dressing for new, uncluttered stories. Realistically, this is the way it should always be done. You dont want new readers to go tripping into a long, extended web of stories that they werent there for, but, equally, by starting everything all over again you run the risk of giving readers nothing to latch onto. A fine example of this is the phenomenon of the comic book death. Because so many heroes have died over a short space of time, only to return a scant few months later, modern fans tend not to care about the death of a hero anymore. With too much whitewashing and too many minor reboots, there will be nothing upon which to build stories - and this will lead to an eventual erosion of reader interest. What will eventually happen if this process is left unchecked is the complete collapse of a characters core integrity, meaning that every writer will write the characters differently, with no consistency from issue to issue. Last week, Batman gave it all up to become a gay burlesque dancer, this week; hes toting a gun and going on a killing spree. Dont get us wrong, itll be awesome for the right creative teams, but such an approach will suck BIG TIME over the long term and it will require a long and arduous recovery. Removing any sense of occasion (oh, itll all be rebooted next month anyway) from comic book storytelling would present a fatal mistake. As readers, we KNOW that the ideal status quo will eventually be restored, no matter what changes are made to it. What we dont know is how and when. DC should work within this principle at all times.