In the post-Marvel Cinematic Universe era, it’s hard to find a savvy pop culture maven who can’t define “continuity,” whether they’re talking about comics, movies, TV, or video games. To me, as a lifelong superhero comics fan, it is most prominently the idea that a couple of 60- to 90-year-old story settings are not merely interconnected, but contiguous. That they’re not just built on dozens of disconnected stories happening in the same reality, but that every new story should cohere with what came before.

There’s more than one way to shepherd a massive, multigenerational continuity, and frankly, I find such attempts fascinating. I collect them like glass orbs to ponder. I study them like pinned moths. And every single one of them reveals the same eternal conflict: a constant, straining tension between the ideal of the story and the reality of telling it.

DC Comics has developed a custom of periodically restarting its timeline, once it becomes too much to ask fans to catch up on decades’ worth of storylines of wildly differing quality. Marvel is a single timeline of densely packed retroactive changes surrounded by a snarl of parallel earths and alternate timelines — because, yeah, that one gray-canon setting where Wolverine was hella old slapped extremely hard, and we’d like to see more stories there in the future. Hypertime and the Marvel No-Prize are exercises in creating Watsonian explanations for the Doylist reality that sometimes comics creators make things that break continuity, whether accidentally, or on purpose because it made an individual story better.

Rigid continuity does not come naturally to collaborative storytelling, and each of these approaches is a tacit acknowledgment of that cold, hard fact — because if things were otherwise, we wouldn’t need an approach in the first place. Now, if you ask me, this is not a hot take. But every time I talk about how continuity not only shouldn’t matter but already doesn’t, it seems to make people mad.

The most common comeback I hear is: But if you don’t have consistent continuity, nobody’s going to be able to get invested in the story.

And it’s worth being clear that when I say that “continuity doesn’t actually matter that........

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