You should get out more...

-M

-M

Apparently, the Porridge remake features the original Fletcher's grandson, doing a stretch for cybercrime. Sounds terrible, but at any rate, they're on this Sunday, so we shall see...

I would be very surprised if the term 'jew-fro' has ever been used here.

I love continuity in comics. It's one of the aspects that drew me to comics in the first place, as a kid. I haven't read a new comic in 15 years so I don't know what's what in modern comics, but in comics of the 70s (for example) I love to see how longer storylines develop the years. I'm currently reading the Eternals story arc in Thor(1979). It's a dreary storyline, but... I enjoy seeing how the storyline is progressing in it's third year of publication. I enjoy that a lot.

I'm not so obsessed with continuity that I would stress off placing entire comics between panels of other comics, when reading. I know of sites/lists/people that do that. It's fine. But not for me. I like it if I'm reading Thor and he references something that just happened in Avengers and I've already read that, I also like it if the title references/uses something from years earlier. Makes it seem like growth/progression is taking place.

I love continuity in TV, too. Since a lot of TV shows were shown out of production order I like to find out (if I can) if production order is the way to go and compile lists of the episodes the way the should be watched. For a lot of old TV shows this info is out there. Either other fans have done the work, or writers/producers go on record saying what the intended order is.

So, to me anyways, continuity matters.

I haven't read the Celestials storyline that featured The Eternals in years. I remember liking it but maybe it doesnt stand the test of time. I did like the footnotes that encourages your seeking out of past events that they had in those Marvel mags.

Continuity is fun. I love the feeling that there's a crazy, wild world out there beyond the stories I'm reading with all sorts of wild adventures going on that I have no knowledge of.

When I was a kid, it was very rare for me to have a complete run of a comic series. I'd pick up bits and pieces here and there, and one of the 100% certain ways to make me buy a comic was to put a character on the cover I'd never seen before. I remember, for instance, seeing pictures of Black Lightning for years before ever reading a story in which he actually appeared. As a result, I was a sucker for team books, team-up books and anything involving Earth-2 because the characters were familiar, but you hardly ever got to see them.
I'd LOVE it when they'd have those little editorial footnotes (* - To find out what Spidey's talking about, check out this month's 'Avengers' - on sale now!) or (* - a slightly biased retelling of events from 'Fantastic Four' #13).

In those heady, pre-internet days, stories like 'The Dark Phoenix Saga' were told in hushed tones. We knew vaguely what it was about, and that it was important, but we had no idea whether we'd ever get to actually READ those stories!
Back then, 'Contuinity' meant that my branemeats were fizzing with exciting supposition and imagination!

Seriously, imagine my excitement at reading a reprint of 'DC Comics presents...' #12, with Superman and Mister Miracle.
Here's a character I've never heard of, with a CRAZY costume and who's a professional stuntman... but what's all this about strange space gods? I was awhirl for months imagining what secrets lurked behind the tantalizing tidbits in this single otherwise innocuous story.

Is it any wonder that I'm a massive fan of projects like Keith Giffen's 5YL Legion, where details are dispensed with an eyedropper, and it feels like each month you're getting a tiny handful of jigsaw pieces which will eventually turn into... who knows what? Or Paul Grist's wonderful 'The Weird World of Jack Staff', which invites you to an amazing world of costumed crimefighters, mystery-solving investigators who are at least as enigmatic as anything they investigate, invisible cat burglars, Victorian Gentlemen adventurers, Vampire Hunting Junkmen, and countless others... and expects you to figure out just what's going on as you go along. Or Alan Moore's Tom Strong, which gives us a character who's been around for almost a century, and hints at some of his adventures before diving headlong into an all-new one?


On the other hand, there's this weird fetishization of continuity in a lot of mainstream ongoing comics.
In these days, where corporations are concerned with 'franchises' rather than characters, and are interested in seeing just how much narrative they can squeeze out of any particular concept, we've ended up with a weird tail wagging the dog thing where, instead of the continuity providing a little extra spice to a thrilling adventure narrative, which can be enjoyed on its own merit, we're presented with nothing BUT seasoning with very little in the way of the original flavour left. It's at the point where whether Batman solves the mystery, escapes the deathtrap or stops the supervillain's evil plan is irrelevant, and the only thing that matters is whether the story 'really happened' and how it fits in with all the other stories.
Which all seems a bit like the snake eating its own tail to me.