Legion World Forums LEGION COMPANION Dr. Gym'll's Cultural Rarities Could Marvel Do With A Reboot?

With DC's reboot now 8 months old, do you think Marvel's Universe could do with a similar overhaul? Granted, the New 52 has met with mixed reactions. There are some things that I think have been done rather well, and other things... not so much. But I think something needed to be done to get DC out from under its own convoluted history.

But could Marvel do with some of the same? Granted, they tried it years ago with Heroes Reborn, but I think that suffered more from execution than intent. They tried too hard to reinvent the wheel. But I think they have seriously weighted down the Universe in history. The X-Universe alone has overgrown to the point that it can't contain itself.

My suggestion would be a soft reboot. Not so much to reinvent the wheel, but to get things back to basics. Simplify things in such a way that new readers could jump on board without feeling they have 50 years of history to get caught up on. get things back to basics and focused. Maybe a chance bring back heroes who are either dead or just fallen off the radar.

Thoughts?

I have strong issues with reboots. So for me, it's nice to go to something that hasn't been completely altered.

I think if they do it, they should go all the way, and make a clean break with the past. No half-baked nostalgic mush with only selective alterations like in the post-HR late 90s.

I take exception with the statement that DC had to "get out from under" its history.

History (real or fictional) can be fun and can fill in the back story and inform the present of whatever story is being told. The problem is that Marvel and DC become willing slaves to their histories to the point where everything has to refer to something else or they throw the history out altogether.

DC uses the thinking that it has to "get out from under" its history as an excuse to do reboots. The problem here is that many fans have years, even decades, invested in that history. Throwing it out is like throwing out world history before the United States. It gives people a distorted view of their place in the world and throws out all the good that previous generations built upon. Throwing out a fictional character's history does pretty much the same thing: It deprives the character (and the fans) of the philosophical and emotional values that made the character appealing in the first place.

Marvel's characters, by contrast, live in a continuously receding time bubble in which characters not only do not age but they actually seem to age backwards (at least the X-Men did, last time I checked). Here writers are free to ignore anything resembling real character development so long as they keep the heroes moving from one crisis to the next.

Reboots solve nothing. Good stories that use a character's history without being enslaved to it would go a long way to restoring order and appeal to both universes.

I wonder if I'm supposed to be one of the fans who'd benefit from a Marvel reboot.

Dog knows, I was a huge X-Men fan back in the day, but I have zero interest in trying to unravel everything the various splinters, offspring, crossovers, big tie-in events, and so on have been doing since 1986 or so. Same with characters like Spider-Man.

Honestly, though, I'm not sure it would help. But even if I decided that the reboot was the greatest thing since sliced bread, a lot of other fans wouldn't be happy. Maybe Marvel could just do a good job of keeping the older books in print or online for an affordable price. (With the caveat that I'd have a very different measure of "affordable" than the people running the place likely do.)

Rather than reboots (for either company), my preference would be like the Englehart/Rogers Dark Detective or Alex Ross' Justice - let creators revisit past continuities when stories warrant.

Universes are fine when it's a line when an average collector can realistically be expected to follow the entire line (or most of it), but there is no real reason every book has to be shoe-horned into one.

Continuity should be a tool to help contextualize, no a rigid dogma to follow at all costs. Yes, some fans place continuity above and beyond all, but they will never be enough to sustain any universe (and hardly any title) over the long haul.

When I say get out from under its own history, what I mean is its history since the first Crisis. The problem has been that they created their own nightmare by first consolidating their universe. Since then, they did a number of smaller reboots that just made things worse (Man of Steel and its effect on the Legion comes to mind). Each ¨event¨ just makes things worse as they try to fix all the mistakes they made. The New 52 wasn't a horrible idea, at this point. Although it probably should have been a complete relaunch, because their continuity is harder to figure out than ever.

With Marvel, they just have such an overwhelmingly cluttered universe, with so many ¨universal event mega-crossovers¨ that I don't know how anyone can be expected to figure it out. And I used to read alot more Marvel than DC. They've had so many deaths and rebirths, dopplegangers, new people in old costumes (and then old people back in old costumes), contradictory histories... It just doesn't lend itself to trying out new titles.

But hey... my opinion is only my opinion

I am a ginormous fan of third-tier or 'forgotten' characters, that writers like Kurt Busiek and Peter David (and Grant Morrison and even Brian Bendis) like to drag out of mothballs and revitalize.

If a reboot means that oddballs like the Force of July or the All-Star Squadron or the Heroes of Lallor or Infinity, Inc. or the Power Company are going to be tossed by the wayside and abandoned (notwithstanding many of them being dead, on any given Sunday...), I'd rather have no Reboots at all, whether hard, soft, perky or flaccid.

I picked DC teams as examples, 'cause of the usefulness of Cosmic Teams in finding a list of such teams, but Marvel has plenty of 'third-tier' or otherwise mostly abandoned characters I like as well, like the Acolytes or the New Warriors or Beta Flight or the Dark Riders.

Reboots just pare down a rich abundance of story elements, character development and cool (and occasionally so awful that they are funny!) characters, IMO.

Marvel also has the advantage of having embraced their multiverse, with an entire Ultimate line devoted to a much pared down version of their classic characters, allowing them to pretty much already tip their hand in both tills, with one line to appeal to the new readers who feel intimidated by the continuity, and another line to appeal to those who grew up on those old stories, and don't want to read about all new characters with the same names and powers.

A total reboot/relaunch would probably get me to try former faves like Avengers, X-Men and Fantastic 4 again.

But Set makes a valid point about tossing the babies out with the bathwater... if there's a total reboot/relaunch, what then happens to YOUNG AVENGERS and NEW MUTANTS just to name 2...

"Babies with the bathwater" is exactly the phrase I was going to use re: line-wide reboots. Marvel usually had the good sense of just starting another world when they wanted to try something different, without burning bridges.

DC did however have one brilliant idea in this area: Hypertime. No need to designate specific worlds. Whatever it is, it's out there somewhere. All the old universes and all the ones they haven't dreamt up yet.

And then of course they dropped it.

I'll agree with Sonny Boy.

HYPERTIME was the PERFECT solution.

I'm against reboots. I'd rather they simply establish the status quo--whatever it is--and simplify things by not dwelling on continuty until it benefits the story.

I'd favour simplification as well. People say the Legion is confusing, but I find the X-Men line bewildering now.

They should only reboot characters that have fundamental flaws or just aren't relevant anymore. I'm not too familiar with Marvel these days - all those mega-events are tiresome.

If you think of something like the end of the Legion's 5YL era, it all got pretty confusing, muddled with some characters pretty much beyond repair (Rokk as the Time Trapper). There a reboot was probably beneficial, if not essential.

while I have been enjoying the books I'm reading in the new 52, my feelings on reboots are closer to Cobie's. The generation of comics writers who came up in the 70s were mostly avid fans who had read comics for years before becoming professionals. That's about the same time that continuity became such an important concept in comics, especially in the mid-80's. My sense is that before that, no one in the business really worried about whether something that happened in a Superman story 20 years prior was "canon." If the story you wrote was good, but contradicted something that happened earlier, who cares? It's still a good story, right? The thinking that prevailed since the 70s/80s is that no, if it's not consistent with history, it's not a good story.

I'd like to see both companies move more in the direction of allowing writers to violate continuity for the sake of story more often. Keep a consistent sense of the personalities of the characters, but don't feel totally beholden to the past otherwise. At the risk of heresy, they're just comics; I don't think any of us expect War and Peace out of the floppies.