As Dwayne McDuffie kicks off his tenure on Justice League of America, Timothy Callahan and Andrew Gardner revisit Brad Meltzer and Ed Benes’ opening storyline, “The Tornado’s Path”:
Even if the series is an attempt to move forward, it hinges too much on a convoluted legacy.
This is the dilemma of the super-hero comic in the 21st Century. Neither Marvel or DC has a continuity that makes any kind of sense (in the big picture), and yet both companies have fans and creators who are obsessed with continuity, but only the continuity that they, themselves, care about. I’m sure there are people who care about every little continuity detail, but everyone I know seems to be willing to ignore the completely ridiculous things that have happened (the Clone Saga in Spider-Man, the relative ages of various heroes, Maxwell Lord) while expecting writers to adhere to the continuity that they, the readers, care about. Continuity should matter, since it’s just internal storytelling consistency on a grand scale, but it can’t matter in the Marvel and DC universes because the continuity is already corrupt beyond reason.
The second storyline, “The Lightning Saga,” will be collected in February.
