MCU - This Thread Wasn’t Made For You

[JGP]

3 minutes ago, mormont said:

You and I remember the 80s very differently.

I spent a good part of my early years sitting before the altar of the comic spinner, reading for hours. There was no larger comic community or discussions where I grew up. Continuity came up later for me as well. 

Edited November 6, 2023 by JGP

[IlyaP]

1 minute ago, JGP said:

I spent a good part of my early years sitting before the altar of the comic spinner, reading for hours. There was no larger comic community or discussions where I grew up. Continuity came up later for me as well. 

**X-Cutioner's Song and the Spider-Man Clone Saga have entered the chat.**

[Argonath Diver]

I suppose I ducked out of the more hard-core comic fandom of my fellow childhood nerds when I jumped ship to baseball cards circa ~89, @mormant! Hah. 

[Kalbear]

Heck, before you get into X-Cutioner's song you have Inferno, and you have the Fall of the Mutants, and you have the X-Tinction agenda.

And if you want to go old school you've got Secret Wars! That had the origin of Venom!

[IlyaP]

6 minutes ago, Kalbear said:

Heck, before you get into X-Cutioner's song you have Inferno, and you have the Fall of the Mutants, and you have the X-Tinction agenda.

And if you want to go old school you've got Secret Wars! That had the origin of Venom!

Ah yes, the fabric replicator in Secret Wars issue 8. 

[IlyaP]

8 minutes ago, Kalbear said:

Heck, before you get into X-Cutioner's song you have Inferno, and you have the Fall of the Mutants, and you have the X-Tinction agenda.

And of course Mutant Massacre, which - as would be revealed years and years later, involved Gambit. 

Man, comics are wild.

[Kalbear]

And before THAT, X-men was big on in-comic continuity with things like the Phoenix and Dark Phoenix saga, Rogue's storyline, the Magneto trials, the various Days of Future stuff, Cable's eventual origin, Wolverine's origin as weapon X...I dunno. X-men was huge on continuity. I wasn't in to much in the way of other comics so perhaps those didn't have as much, but X-Men was pretty nuts for multi-year story arcs and returns of character beats and giant crossover events. 

[Jaxom 1974]

I was always impressed when I'd read something Avengers and there'd be an image of an explosion over near the Baxter Building, and you'd get an editorial note to head over to pick up the latest FF to see what was going on...

There was a time where the books were just tighter in general, if not direct, in aspects of continuity. Until Wolverine started guesting in any and every book, writers had to have legitimate reasons for someone crossing over...

[Deadlines? What Deadlines?]

I watched a bit of a Dan Murrell video about streaming numbers for recent MCU/SW content on D+.

Yikes. Not the end of the world exactly but definitely trending the wrong way. 

[SpaceChampion]

 

[mormont]

9 hours ago, JGP said:

I spent a good part of my early years sitting before the altar of the comic spinner, reading for hours. There was no larger comic community or discussions where I grew up. Continuity came up later for me as well. 

Yeah, but even if you just read the comics, the letters pages were full of people discussing continuity. The stories were full of editors' notes referring you to other comics, past or present.

There was a point when comics writers and fans didn't care about continuity, but that point had passed by the '80s. You need to go back to the '60s for that.

[Ran]

9 hours ago, Kalbear said:

and you have the X-Tinction agenda.

 

Genosha delenda est!

Continuity was definitely a big thing in the 80s, just look through any Batman or Spider-Man from the era to see the helpful editorial notes. But at the same time, I'm sure a lot of people didn't necessarily think of it as "continuity", but just a natural part of a consistent story universe.

In a response to letters from fans in All-Star Squadron #18 (published 1983), Roy Thomas wrote that another fan had come up with a great term for what that comic was doing: "Retroactive Continuity". Per Wikipedia, this is the first printed use of the term in comics.

[Heartofice]

When I was younger I used to collect Uncanny X-Men, and about 10 years ago I went back to read them from the start. 

Continuity, or the sense of one long timeline, sort of exists at points. You can read a lot of that Claremont period and view its continuity, but after a while it all tends to break down. Is Magneto a good guy, a bad guy, a good guy?! There are so many stories and plot lines the continuity doesn't entirely work. It has its own sort of logic however. I think there is an expectation in comics that there are runs of stories that tie together and there are just bits of plot that don't fit.

So like Spider-man: Life story, where all the events of Spider-man's life actually happen in a period of time over his life and as he gets older, that is real continuity. Of course that doesn't happen in the comics, he fights a million different villains and most of those incidents are forgotten almost instantly. 

[sifth]

2 hours ago, Heartofice said:

When I was younger I used to collect Uncanny X-Men, and about 10 years ago I went back to read them from the start. 

Continuity, or the sense of one long timeline, sort of exists at points. You can read a lot of that Claremont period and view its continuity, but after a while it all tends to break down. Is Magneto a good guy, a bad guy, a good guy?! There are so many stories and plot lines the continuity doesn't entirely work. It has its own sort of logic however. I think there is an expectation in comics that there are runs of stories that tie together and there are just bits of plot that don't fit.

So like Spider-man: Life story, where all the events of Spider-man's life actually happen in a period of time over his life and as he gets older, that is real continuity. Of course that doesn't happen in the comics, he fights a million different villains and most of those incidents are forgotten almost instantly. 

You know my favorite is Batman. His age always remains the same, yet all of his Robins and Batgirls always grow up and have careers away from him.

[IlyaP]

3 hours ago, mormont said:

There was a point when comics writers and fans didn't care about continuity, but that point had passed by the '80s. You need to go back to the '60s for that.

So many little boxes in the comics with notes like "*See Uncanny X-Men issue 204, where X Happened"

Everywhere. 

I can't remember a time when the X-books weren't obsessed with continuity and finding little ways to suggest readers ought to go and spend more money to buy issues they missed. For example, issue 289 of Uncanny X-Men, which alludes to an adventure had by Mystique and Wolverine, where a continuity caption says "After their adventure in Wolverine #52".

This was also *especially* true during crossovers, where, ye gods, the amount of backstory required to make sense of everything...!

[DaveSumm]

Final Marvels trailer, in which they try to imply that this is some kind of Endgame sequel. Pretty desperate stuff.

Edited November 7, 2023 by DaveSumm

[Heartofice]

4 minutes ago, DaveSumm said:

Final Marvels trailer, in which they desperately try to imply that this is some kind of Endgame sequel. Pretty desperate stuff.
 

 

"Did you love the Avengers?
Did you love Tony Stark as Iron Man?
Did you love the Infinity Stones saga?
Did you love Endgame?

Then you will be mostly disappointed by The Marvels! Which has nothing to do with any of that and is worse in every single way!

Marvels is out in cinemas now! PLEASE WATCH IT... we need this."

[SpaceChampion]

 

[Rhom]

3 hours ago, DaveSumm said:

Final Marvels trailer, in which they try to imply that this is some kind of Endgame sequel. Pretty desperate stuff.

Did he scream out "Black girl magic"????  

Tell me I misheard that.

[Werthead]

21 hours ago, mormont said:

You and I remember the 80s very differently.

I remember (well, I still have them) the 1980s Transformers UK comics from Marvel discussing how the comics and TV show take place in different continuities (apart from the movie, which happens in both), and, later on, how there are different timelines and characters travelling in time can create new timelines. Pretty complex stuff for a comic aimed at pre-teens.

The biggest storyline in the comics, Target: 2006, hinged on tricking a time-travelling Galvatron into thinking he'd killed somebody who was clearly alive in his future, so he assumed (wrongly) that he'd travelled into a parallel universe where nothing he did would impact on his reality (where he'd built a giant space cannon under the surface of the Earth to kill Unicron and free himself from its control), so he abandoned his plan and returned to the future. The letters pages afterwards was just full of 8-year-olds going "what?"