Yes, Barr has outright admitted he never wrote that story to be "Year Two" and wasn't giving any thought to Frank Miller nor to any defined Post-Crisis continuity when he wrote it.



This is the first I've heard of this. I guess, if Babs was a baby in Year One, she would end up being younger than Dick. I'd always assumed that James Jr. was a deliberate effort to remove Babs from continuity, but there may be something to this. Thanks for sharing.



I have an easy time dismissing LoTDK because it was edited by Andy Helfer and not O'Neil. If O'Neil wasn't supervising continuity enough in his own office, you can be sure he wasn't aligning it with anyone else's.




Undoubtedly. I can't help but wonder how much of this is indirectly due to Jim Shooter. His efforts to more tightly align Marvel in the mid-1980s and create major crossover events certainly got DC's attention and seemed to be the future of comic publishing, but by the time the Post Crisis reboot was beginning to happen, Shooter had already made a lot of enemies with his tight control and editorial vision. Top writers were coming to DC because of Shooter and complaining loudly about him while doing so. So here's DC, on the cusp of executing their plans to be more like Marvel and then suddenly realizing that, if they follow through with being more like Marvel, they might end up with a rebellion on their hands.

I do think that, while clearly there were quite a few bumps in the road, DC continuity was pretty reasonable by the time I cared about in 1992-1993.. just in time for them to 'fix' it again with Zero Hour.. that was the beginning of the end, I think.

I agree, but I think this had less to do with editorial oversight and more to do with editors hiring and empowering creative teams that really cared about ironing out the details themselves: Wolfman on Batman, Ordway, Stern, and Jurgens on Superman, Perez on Wonder Woman, Giffen and DeMatteis on Justice League, Wolfman on New Titans, Giffen and Grant on L.E.G.I.O.N., Truman on Hawkworld, Owsley and Giffen on Green Lantern, and Morrison on Animal Man.

It really seems like DC's mentality in a post-Jim Shooter comic book world was to hire good people and just let them do their thing. For all that was wrong with comics in the early '90s, it really seems like each of these creative teams was doing something right.

While I totally agree with the full reboot of Superman (as I've written elsewhere on this forum I'm convinced that Man of Iron Pre-Crisis was unsalvageable) I don't see why pick on Byrne. He was hired to do a job, it was at the top that decided the reboot. I understand that obviously readers have by now associated his name with the Post-Crisis Superman but it was, well, a team effort, wasn't it?

All well and good, tark. And you're right, it might have worked, IF THEY HAD STUCK TO IT.

But they didn't. They couldn't. Too many more convoluted stories were first required to make "sense" of the new whatever it was- cosmos, Earth, galaxy? See Hawkman. See Superboy and the "pocket universe." See the new old JLA. Then they realized that nobody in their audience wanted stories about one earth, one solar system, one galaxy.

What they might have wanted was a manageable universe as Marvel had for a couple of years there in the early 60s. But comics readers had grown used to worlds within worlds, parallel universes, alternate futures, other dimensions, worlds vibrating in the same place in space-time as very similar, but not quite exact worlds and so on. These were reliable tropes (also great crutches for writers) and "stories told on an "epic scale" no longer meant a book-length "complete novel"  team-up between the Doom Patrol and the Flash.

Yes, DC continuity had become confining, but that was entirely the fault of the fanboys who had become the writers and editors. They made it so because they were forever worrying about whether Batman had met the Mad Hatter twice or three times before. And the fanboys wound up making the new continuity even more confining. You've gotta love the guy, but Roy Thomas and his obsessive need to tie everything with one big four-color bow didn't help. 

This as opposed to the Old Guard's way of dealing with this kind of pedantry: Stan Lee awarding no-prizes for continuity errors or Kanigher and Weisinger simply laughing them off and saying to the fans, "Lighten up, Francis" when somebody bitched about the difference in the number of Sgt. Rock's siblings in OAAW 121 and OAAW 135.

Ignorance can be bliss, and nobody would have noticed if various aspects of DC's history had simply been ignored, as Schwartz did with Mopey and the Flash. He basically said "We blew it," so forget that fershlugginer story and let's all move on.

You don't buy a new house and refill it when you decide the attic needs a cleaning. DC's fanboy writers not only burned down the old house, they refilled a newer, bigger one with the same s**t, just gussied up in computer colors.

Another instance in which the creators took themselves and what they were doing way, way too seriously. Somebody needed to drop the F-bomb in the middle of the COIE planning. F as in F-U-N!

Once again, you beat me to it.


Now I really do enjoy picking on Byrne, but not because I hold him responsible for the reboot.

While I can agree the Post-Crisis DC Universe wasn't managed in the best possibile way, there were characters stuck in a creative swamp who could be saved only by a total reboot (like Superman and Wonder Woman). Perhaps COIE wasn't the best possible solution but beat the alternatives Wonder Woman changing again city, job and another version of Steve Trevor or Lex Luthor wanting to destroy the world because he suffered of early baldness. Again.