Hi!

Has Marvel considered doing a multi-part series that will help to explain what is and what isnt relevant in their universe?

Groups like the Avengers and the Fantastic Four which have been around, like, forever, must have a lot of adventures which could be retroactive if ever they chose to realign the time-lines...

DC did a stock take - eliminating characters while introducing new ones in the CRISIS, and then took the drastic step of wiping out years of character-history....then rewriting a lot of people's origins and so forth...

When will it be Marvel's turn to do a mass clearence of characters?

I think you'll find that Marvel is using "House of M" to do their house cleaning.

Ah, i see....thanks for the info, Scott!

Marvel has been using a looser form of continuity for years now. How can Wolverine be on 4 teams at once? I'm not sure it matters anymore.

There's also the Ultimate universe which is basically a rebooted Marvel Universe with a separate continuity.

I think Crisis and Zero Hour confused things more than they cleared anything up. I can't think of any DC character pre-Crisis that was in the completely convoluted state that Power Girl, Black Canary, Hawkman, and so many others sunk to. Stories so bogged down in nonsense that it took decades before you could really use them again.

If you don't want the Beatles to have been at the Fantastic Four wedding, the best thing to do is to just not bring it up again. Creating a complicated story to officially remove stuff just dominos out of control. If Flash Thompson didn't go to Vietnam, then "X" didn't happen; if "X" is gone, "Y couldn't have happened; take "Y" out, then how does "Z" make sense...etc. Before you know it, Flash Thompson was actually his own father in half the issues, Black Widow has to be retconned into an enforcer for the Russian Mob because Communism fell before she was born, etc. etc. It's not worth it.

I hate paradoxes like that

I think Marvel has had less continuity problems simply because they've chosen to ignore stuff whenever it suits them rather than even bother trying to resolve continuity glitches that come up. The whole "Teen Tony" thing is a big example of this (they simply ignored it for years then explained it away in a couple of panels later on).

They also subtely mentions changes here or there. In Captain America recently i remember reading something about Cap only being around 10 years, etc. Cyclops stated his age as 28 years a few years ago in a comic.

They've always aged really slow...but now it's becoming that they weren't around for certain events.

I mean in 2020 Steve Rogers will make a comment about being in suspended animation still during Sept 11th.

They've now stated outright that HoM will bring no retroactive changes.