Meanwhile, at Robot 6...

I have a review of some length up regarding Stan Lee's Mighty 7 #1, which was a pretty horrible comic book, but a somewhat interesting one nonetheless. You can read the piece by clicking here.

A much better read, however, is Tom Bondurant's column on some of the problems with continuity DC's 52-boot has and will cause. Bondurant focuses on the fact that it was a highly selective reboot—everything that wasn't Green Lantern or Batman was given a hard, complete reboot—and the problems that causes.

For example, the last issue of Green Lantern featured Black Hand in the thrall of the Indigo Tribe, where he was left at the end of Blackest Night, which presumably still happened, only differently than the version we all read. Then he gets to picking at the Geoff Johns run on the Green Lantern franchise, and what the reboot means: Was Hal Jordan ever The Spectre? (Remember, the Spectre's generation of superheroes never existed in current continuity). Was he ever Parallax?

It gets messier the longer you think about any of this stuff. If Hal Jordan was still Parallax (Blackest Night and Sinestro Corps War were referenced in "New 52" Green Lantern, and Kyle Rayner still exists), then did Zero Hour still happen? How could it, though, if Barbara Gordon has always been Batgirl, or if Hawk didn't kill Dove and become Monarch in Armageddon 2001 or if Damage wasn't there to restart the un-made universe, since Damage probably never existed?

If Hal Jordan was still Parallax, then presumably Coast City was still destroyed during "Reign of the Supermen," so that story presumably still happened, only it somehow happened without Steel, Superboy or Supergirl. And if "Reign" happened, then "The Death of Superman" still happened only, again, without Supergirl, or the Justice League of America at the time that appeared in it, and without Lois Lane even knowing Superman's identity.

The "easy" answer would be, of course, to not think about this stuff at all, but then, DC has to quit eating the cake it won't let us have, and continuing the GL and Batman franchises as if the rest of the DCU wasn't rebooted. The likely answer, the one DC's editors must tell themselves and their creators, is that all of those stories still happened, just not in the way we remember them, or not in the way they were originally published.

Which is, frankly, several million times more complicated than whatever the original situation was that a reboot was originally supposed to make more clear. Seriously, try to imagine just "The Death of Superman" and "Reign of the Supermen" sans the elements we now know couldn't have been a part of them. They'd be completely different stories. I don't see how suggesting that unseen, unreadable, imaginary versions of stories that already exist is in any way less confusing or complicated or in any way more "new reader" friendly than just letting the stories that exist continue to exist and within your selective fictional history.

Personally, I would have preferred a universe-wide relaunch (new #1s, new titles, new creative teams and directions with a focus on new readers and new stories) to the continuity reboot they went with, as this fix, like every attempt to fix this problem, simply exacerbates the problem.

But if DC was going to do a hard realunch, then they should have done a hard relaunch of 100% of their DCU titles, not 75% of them, because, as Abraham Lincoln once said, a superhero universe rebooted against itself cannot stand and, as Bondurant's column points toward, the "New 52" is starting to creak.

Hopefully their next big crossover event involving "Pandora" will fix things by de-rebooting things, although I'm fine if that doesn't happen for another year or two, and they just let the "New 52" run its course first.