But surely that’s the point. To people who care about continuity, all the issues of the various Spiderman comics tell _one_ story – one written by many different writers, but nevertheless a single story.

That you see them as multiple different stories that need not agree with each other is the root of the disagreement.

In your previous post you wondered about what stories could be told with Hypertime and your examples avoided what I think is it’s most interesting side effect: that the strands of hypertime are bound spatially as well as temporally. In the usual parallel worlds set-up you have two worlds that are identical except that Jimmy has the same hairstyle, in hypertime those two *are* the same, until you see Jimmy, at which point there are two universes, and the observer splits into each one.

So Man-Things Swamp really could be the Nexus of all realities, if it’s pristine and isolated enough it could be spread out over a million different hyperstrands, whereas in New York the strand is bifurcated to death, you can’t turn a corner without collapsing another bunch of possibilities and reducing the set of universes in which you exist: it’s why the city makes you ill, a dull soul-rot you can’t quite get rid of, all those little *details* you picked up there bind you to an ever decreasing reality. And it’s probably why all the aliens and the monsters end up there: reality is thinner.

The best hypertime story, to my mind

I thought that line of thought was kind of nuts, but this was the time when the Direct Market was starting to bloom and I’m sure the sentiment was widespread enough for DC’s powers that be to take note.

That said, even though I liked the Crisis comic itself at the time and was curious about this revamped universe … I have to admit that I wasn’t all that thrilled by “Man of Steel” or George Perez’s Wonder Woman revamps and the Legion Of Super-Heroes never did fully recover from the evaporation of Superboy.

In fact – other than Mike Baron’s Flash – the stuff I did like seemed less a direct product of the Crisis than simply a matter of letting talented creators play with the toys a bit. (i.e. the Giffen/DeMatteis/Maguire Justice League; Frank Miller’s Batman: Year One, less a revamp than a refocusing I’d argue and later on Grant Morrison’s Doom Patrol).

Plus, Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing started a ways before COIE if I recall correctly.

So, I don’t know if DC really needed a Crisis after all … beyond the PR value, that is. At the time, Marvel successfully implemented “bold new directions” in certain titles without such trickery … and the idea was to make DC more competitive with the House Of Ideas, right?

(Of course, nowadays both companies actively employ Deus Ex Machina ret-cons to “fix” characters like Spidey and Superman … so obviously I’m outside of the mainstream here …)

Wow. That’s the most I’ve written about comics in ages. Thanks for the inspiration!

Ack, that comment too is one where I let the thread slip…cripes, what’s up with me today?