Board Thread:Comics/@comment-43505-20160203015524/@comment-1013969-20160820124607

Jatex7 wrote: I'm personally on the fence about reboot after reboot style writing. With the New 52 already becoming convoluted with the Darkseid War having characters such as Bruce Wayne Batman and the current Batman comic having Jim Gordon Batman instead, it may be the best decision but it certainly won't be a popular one. Having multiple realities and earths is a pretty common problem for DC and comics in general and there already has been a ton of rebooting events like Crisis on Infinite Earths or Convergence, i just wish there was a better way to fix the problem rather than a start from scratch redo.

The multiple realities and Earths wasn't the problem.

The problem was writers claiming it "too confusing" to readers (i.e. the writers were confused about who was on what Earth) even though about every story that did take on another spent about a full page explaining the concept.

Even back then one could see over at Marvel that trying to keep everything on one particular Earth while not sending continuity into a death spiral was impossible.

Within a year DC nuked its whole one Earth one timeline concept with the pocket universe saga. Meanwhile over at Marvel you got a doubling down of the whole Rachel Summers migraine with the start of the whole Madelyne Pryor-Jean Gray mess.

Then DC gave us the headache inducing mess that was Hawkman. Somewhere in this mess IIRC was when we got the whole 'is it Doom or a Doombot?' plot device to explain Doom's erratic behavior.

With no multiverse to put stories that didn't really fit, the DCU quickly degenerated into a confused mess.

Which necessitated a reboot which quickly degenerated into a confused mess...which necessitated another reboot which (yes you guessed it) also quickly degenerated into a confused mess.

[Comics Alliance has a very good article] on this.

You had Crisis, Mon-el punching the Trapper's block off resulting in an one issue alternate 30th century, then Zero Hour, then Hypertime, then the Legion getting rebooted all on its own three times, Infinite Crisis, 52 (series), and Flashpoint.

Finally DC said screw it and nuked the results of Crisis itself from orbit with Convergence.