I’ve noticed another strange trend in comic books lately, mainly dealing with how writers handle continuity. It all boils down to the following rule:

• If a story was published within the past five years, it is unbreakable continuity. If it was published more than five years ago, continuity doesn’t matter.

(The exception to this is the Grant Morrison Corollary, as defined by my roommate: if a story was published in the 1950s, it is unbreakable continuity. If not, continuity doesn’t apply. If you’ve read Morrison’s recent works within the DC Comics universe, then you know exactly what I’m talking about.)

I’ll be the first to admit that continuity can be a mess sometimes, especially when dealing with characters who have many decades’ worth of published adventures (like Superman, Batman, Spider-Man, and the X-Men). Sometimes, if there’s some random minor storyline from a single issue 1973 that simply will not work with a character in 2009, then it’s okay to retcon that one to fix it.

What I do not agree with is when sweeping changes are made to decades of history, just to quickly satisfy the needs of a modern story. The biggest example of this is one you’ve already read about on this very blog: the return of Hal Jordan in the pages of Green Lantern. Was bringing Hal back and making him a hero again going to be a difficult task? Quite possibly. Did the story have to run roughshod over sixty years of continuity to do so? Absolutely not. Hal could very easily have been resurrected without retconning anything at all, let alone severely altering the history of Green Lantern since the character’s inception!

The same thing happened during the controversial Spider-Man story “One More Day,” which saw the villain Mephisto “take” Peter Parker and Mary-Jane’s marriage. By “taking,” I mean he removed it from history! That naturally caused a slew of continuity problems…which the powers-that-be at Marvel Comics are ignoring, of course.

So why does this happen? I believe there are two answers. The first is simple fanboyism. I don’t mean fanboys as in the fans; I’m talking about the writers. There’s nothing wrong with a writer being a fan of the character they are writing; that should come with the territory. However, if the writer is a rabid fanboy of said character, we run into problems.

I know it seems like Geoff Johns is a favorite target of mine, but I’m extensively familiar with his work, so I have to use him as an example. Johns does not like Kyle Rayner at all, and has gone on record saying the he doesn’t find the character the least bit interesting. Kyle was introduced to replace Hal Jordan as Green Lantern in 1994. Since Hal’s return, though, Kyle’s had few shining moments…and those have only been realized through other authors. (Johns even made him the host for Parallax for a brief time, and you know damned well that was meant as a middle finger to Kyle fans!) Johns is in charge of the Green Lantern line at DC Comics, and Kyle’s been relegated to a background role in the secondary book, Green Lantern Corps. In fact, many Green Lantern fans won’t even read that one! (This has been confirmed by my friendly neighborhood comic book shop.)

As you can see, when a writer is a fanboy, it essentially puts blinders on him (or her). Their favorite character (or incarnation thereof) takes precedence over all else, and whatever came before can just be swept away. Aside from a poor method of writing, am I the only one who finds it somewhat disrespectful to the creators who worked so hard on the character in the past?

Alright, let’s move on to the second cause of this short-term storytelling in comics. The other problem lies with the readership, or more accurately, the way comic book readership has changed with the times. We live in a high-speed culture now, with ever-shortening attention spans due to constant bombardment of information via the Internet. Most comic book readers don’t have the drive or the time to read a lot of back issues; they want a big story now, without having to do a lot of research into anything that may have come before. A few years of story is fine, but anything further back? Forget it. Editors’ notes are another recent casualty that prove this; remember when there was an asterisk in dialogue, and a small box at the bottom of the page told you to check a specific back issue for details on that plot point? You almost never see those anymore.

Comic book storytelling used to have a much grander scope than this recent narrow vision. We can only hope the trend reverses at some point, but it’s not looking good.