User blog:Hatebunny/The DCnU, and why we have not made new pages

I'm re-posting this from the Talk:DCnU page, on account of the fact that I think more people need to read it, and understand why I want them to stop whining and just begrudgingly accept that the people who control the company who creates the comics they love are stupid.

I am currently very groggy from muscle relaxants, but you shall all hear my words as though they are drooling out of the mouth of god. The reason we have not made new pages is certainly because it's a major hassle, but our logic does make sense. DC has changed continuity on a grand scale at least three times prior to Flashpoint. The major way in Crisis on Infinite Earths actually showed you that they were erasing all the other earths and then squishing them all into one. That was how you knew it was a "New Earth". The next time they messed with continuity was Zero Hour. What happened there? They changed the timeline. What did that mean for New Earth? Nothing. It was still New Earth - its timeline had just changed. Then it happened again with Infinite Crisis. All of the Many earths squished back into one (and yet somehow not squished back into one... DIDIO!!!). Why didn't we make a new universe then? 'Cause it was obviously the same universe, with only minor alterations.

Flashpoint came along and on the last page, we get this scene where Pandora takes the separate universes of Wildstorm, Dakotaverse, Vertigo, and DC and then squishes them all together by making just one timeline - the "right" timeline. This means that while we see all of these other characters in the DCnU, it isn't a change of universe that brought them there, it's a change of timeline - just as the alternate present shown in Flashpoint is a timeline, and not a universe. I will now demonstrate all of this via badly drawn diagram:



So, as you can see (maybe), with the crisis, all of the earth's get mushed into New Earth. Then you have Zero Hour and Infinite Crisis - which essentially do nothing to New Earth. Then, at some point, and for no reason, the Dakotaverse was incorporated into New Earth (and we didn't make new pages). Then Flashpoint happens, and the Wildstorm Universe and Vertigo Universe come together with the current one. Now, by a strange twist of publishing rigmarole, Vertigo now continues as its own universe, on account of there now being two separate John Constantines being published at the same time. We did create a new page for him.

Now, the reason why people are up in arms about this is valid to a point. The reason that this whole thing is totally fucked up and doesn't work is because DC 'did not think this through at all. It was a marketing gimmick, and it was a ploy to give the writers a bit more freedom (though it doesn't sound like they're getting any more than usual). As you could see from Flashpoint, timeline changes can be very, very drastic to the point that the reality you have come to know is unrecognizable. This is the case here.

We have used an in-universe explanation as to why this is still New Earth. Why it especially doesn't seem to make sense to our opposition, as readers, is because they have actually moved us back in time as readers, and thereby condensed something like ten years of continuity into 5 years - or even 20 years into 3 years. People with analytic minds will see, with relatively little inspection, that most of Batman's pre-flashpoint continuity is still in tact - which makes no freakin' sense, given that he's only supposed to have been active for 5 years. Again, this is not our fault. This is DC's fault. Bad planning.

Having said all of that, I am not convinced that we shouldn't make new pages. I am merely explaining why we haven't - which is logically sound in comparison to the planning that went into making the DCnU happen. Their in-universe explanation is/was insufficient. And they - the editorial staff - don't give a crap about our obsessive need to catalogue their characters and histories in a specific way. All they wanted was to mix things up.

That said, the colossal fuck-up that is that lack of planning may be exactly why we need new pages. I am not, however, going to be in favour of their implementation until one of two things happens:

There must be an in-universe demonstration (possibly through this Trinity War event) that the DCnU is not a permanent thing. I see it coming on the horizon like a foot out of a mouth. OR' DC must fuck its new continuity up to the point where not even the external logic which we applied to the events shown to us can save it from being something other than what they told us it was.

If necessary, you may substitute all of the above with "Dan DiDio, and much of his editorial staff, do not think about how to make the marketing gimmick they want to employ make sense in-universe. They care much more about what that gimmick is, and how it will make them competitive with their competitors." That is all. Tough it.