The Evolution of the Marvel Universe

[destro]

I'd say that the cracks were showing in the late 80s. By that point you had to be a scholar to keep track of everything that had happened in the MU.

Many of the writers valiantly tried to keep some sort of continuity going up through the early 2000s, but by that point so many ret-cons had happened, stuff like Wolverine being involved in so many character's early histories that nobody could keep track of it. And the new generation of writers (maybe understandably) just stopped trying for the most part.

The days when you would get little editorial blurbs like "hey this story takes place between Spider-Man x and Marvel Team up y" were long gone, and having the same characters appearing in many titles a month become the norm. There was no way to keep track of it anymore.

Marvel's new stance seems to be that for the most part only the big past events in the characters lives will ever be referenced. Anything that contradicts non-important (in their eyes at least) stories is viewed as fine.

So the Marvel Universe still exists. It makes some attempt to reconcile big events of the past and modern continuity straight (say the last 10 years). Everything else may or may not have happened depending on whether a modern writer needs to contradict it to tell their story.

Which is a good or bad thing depending on how you look at it.

[Venomous Mask]

Marvel definitely needs to get ahold of its continuity, but I like modern Marvel; it's awesome to see how much its expanded since the 60s.

[earl]

It's good when it's good.


I was a doubting Thomas for quite a bit of the run expecting to be let down, but man Hickman really nailed his Fantastic Four run and pretty much threw it down to other creators, that yeah you can do this with these characters and history.

Bendis is pretty much loathed on the bulletin boards, but I think he was the only one to really pull of a sequel and add his own thing to to Daredevil.

Thing is that Marvel just cannot nail the big story at all. All of the big stories for the past few years really just fail as a story being told from beginning to end. They are too spread out to really hold up or the central series is just a long dumb fight scene.

[Phil Maurice]

Makes me wonder what the earliest MU retcon of any consequence might've been.

I'm sure this one will be disqualified for various reasons, but in Fantastic Four #1 the team steals a rocket so that the first people in space will be Americans and not "commies" as Sue puts it. This entire outing is completely unnecessary since Dr. Horace Grayson had fled Earth for Uranus (heh) back in the thirties along with his infant son Robert, who would later become Marvel Boy (Marvel Boy #1, Dec. 1950). During his brief 50s appearances, Marvel Boy routinely travelled back and forth to. . .the planet after Saturn, at least once with a civilian stowaway.

The Graysons were from Trenton, New Jersey. So America was already first in the space race decades before FF #1.