As I look back at my recent posts about
Archie and
Jimmy Olsen I realize that design of the
New Archie character is basically the same as the 1970s design of
Jimmy! I guess
Archie Comics decided if
DC wasn't going to make much use of
Jimmy that
they may as well go for it. And that's not the only thing
Archie has appropriated from
DC over the years. I'm talking about The Imaginary Story.
Of course I know that
every story in a superhero or
Archie comic book is an imaginary story, but I'm referring to the stories that fall outside of accepted canon.
How many times has
Lois Lane married
Superman, after all? Sometimes it was a dream and sometimes it was a hoax, but sometimes it was an imaginary story. Oh, and there
was that time it was a then-canonical story (and also that other time when it was the
Lois and
Superman of
Earth-2!) Likewise a couple of years back,
Archie married
Betty. I mean,
Archie married
Veronica. That's the thing, it was never stated that those were imaginary stories or what, they just printed the things for the reader to do with them whatever he chose.
DC did this themselves in the early 1970s with the "
Super-Sons" of
Superman and
Batman. Who were they and where did they come from? No explanation, and no labelling as imaginary stories. I found those issues of
World's Finest Comics very confounding as they were being published!
I forget if it was
Murray Boltinoff or
Robert Kanigher (or both) who said that continuity would not rule out the telling of a good story. But then
Kanigher himself worked himself up into a tizzy that a post-war
Sgt.
Rock was running
missions with
Batman over in
The Brave and the Bold because creator
Kanigher had not given the word that
Rock would survive
WWII.
Fast-forward to present day. It seems that both
DC and
Marvel are blowing up their respective continuities so they can tell whatever stories they want with whatever characters they want. I'll be watching and reading with interest and hope that the two companies don't go too far. Longtime readers might well feel cheated if something they like about a universe does not return; for example, the
Green Arrow 'character' that debuted in
DC's
New 52 a couple of years back was a charmless cipher bearing no resemblance to the
Green Arrow I had known for decades.
Anyway, rest assured that we have NO INTENTION of blowing up
hayfamzone continuity.
Whew!