First, thank you for the kind words, Kaisius!

You’re absolutely right, there’s no requirement that anyone catch up on the entire back story of a comic. If that were the case, there’d never be any series that got past a few dozen issues. And certainly, when I got into comics as a kid, most of the series that I followed (Spider-Man, Iron Man, etc.), were already into triple digits.

But I think these number-reseting stunts are more for new readers, and also for people who may have missed out on comics in their youth. When I was a kid, comics cost about $.75, and you could find them in convenience stores and grocery stores. And in the days before cable TV, video games, and the Internet, comics were a cheap and accessible entertainment.

Then the comics landscape shifted. The direct market disappeared, so you generally could only find comics in specialized comic stores. And as the quality of the printing increased, so did the price, until it cost a few bucks per issue. At that point, comics were no longer a simple distraction that you might pick up as an impulse buy while you were getting a Snickers at the corner convenience store. They became a specialty item. People who liked the latest superhero movie and wanted to check out the comics it was based on would first have to find a comics store, and then found themselves overwhelmed by the racks and racks of issues, and in many cases, multiple titles for the character they were interested in. Then, finding that the latest issue was the 520th in the series, they might decide that their $3 or $4 could be better spent on something else.

Clearly, the numbering and the back story is probably the least of the comics industry’s problems. Making comics cheaper and more available might have a greater impact. Of course, there’s only so much that can be done in that area. Rebooting the entire universe and starting from scratch probably seems like the easiest way to shake things up.

I’m not really clear on whether or not there will be new origin stories for everyone. Since they’re releasing 52 new series in one month, that would be a lot of brand new superheroes in the universe all at once. But at this point, nothing would surprise me.

I understand why Stan did things that way in his day, but it made for some pretty clunky writing. In every issue of Spider-Man, there’d be a panel where Peter Parker would think “Ever since that radioactive spider bit me…” or “My failure to act cost Uncle Ben his life. I can’t let that happen again!” There’s a fine line between being accessible for newbies and being annoying for your regular readers.

One of Stan Lee’s old rules of writing for comics was “Every issue is someone’s first issue.” I don’t know if it holds true today like it did back in the ’60s and ’70s; if you go back and read some of the Silver Age comics you can pick up some of the tricks they used to keep readers who’d missed the previous issue(s) from getting too confused.

Anyway, it depresses me to pick up an issue of a comic and find a full page synopsis of “The Story So Far…”. It makes sense for comics that are going to be collected eventually that the writer not remind the reader every 24 pages of what’s happened, but it makes it a little less fun to just grab a series one is unfamiliar with.

I do know that as you’ve mentioned, continuity scares people off. Also, I know that the comics in the average store are intimidating to kids. Or at least to my kids.

When I brought them in on “Free Comic Book Day,” one of my daughters asked me, “Where is the kids’ section?” and then I realized that there wasn’t any. Once they got their free comics and I picked up the ones I was going to buy, there wasn’t any reason for them to stay in the store.

So maybe there ought to be a kids line too?

Or maybe a gateway line that continually produces mini-series for characters that’s oriented toward people who don’t know 20 years of history?

Anyway, I hope it works for DC. Rebooting for the current era seems like the sort of thing that should happen, but doing it and keeping current readers has got to be a challenge.

Yeah, that’s a good point. To the average non-comics-reader, three years of back story may be just as intimidating as 60 or 70. Still, I think that DC’s extensive library of back issues, with multiple continuities and reboots, was so tangled that something needed to happen. Also, I wonder if the easy availability of digital back issues will make people more likely to dive in after a couple of years.

The problem is, that it doesn’t take long for the new launch to become packed with backstory. No more than a couple years and you’ll have people saying theres to much to catch up in order to start reading. That’s what happened with the Ultimates.

Personally I think I’ll give them a shot. Because like many, I’m just too overwhelmed by backstory to start reading DC at the moment.