Endur said:
Marvel ignores continuity. Each writer/editor team decides pretty much on their own what they are going to do. At least that is the impression I have gained from reading Captain America.
DC had a greater emphasis on continuity, but since the 80's, has rebooted the universe several times. Crisis on Infinte Earths, etc.
Oddly enough, back in the day this was a reverse situation. DC had to do its "Crisis on Infinite Earths" bit because they never paid much attention to continuity, and had all kinds of Elseworlds books, alternate Earths, alternate timelines, multiple titles, and no real consideration for continuity. It became a big mess for them, and they tried to clean it up, a couple of times, with varying degrees of success. Currently, they are very continuity conscious, to the extent that they recently hired on two well-known writers (Geoff Johns and Grant Morrison) in a continuity oriented editorial capacity. For the last couple of years, in particular (since the Titans/Young Justice crossover), DC has had a "long-term" plan for bringing more of a sense of shared universe to all of their titles, across the board, which is finally coming to fruition this year, in the Prelude to Infinite Crisis and its related titles. They've had some editorial shakeups to facilitate this, as well as many other changes.
WayneLigon said:
...and now we're going into some other sort of continuity-changing event with 'Infinite Crisis'.
I don't get the sense that its a continuity change on the scale of Crisis or Zero Hour- no retcons or anything that are going on, at least from what I can tell. Just a tightening and refocusing of the shared universe feel of DC, and of the titles (and brands, such as the Bat-family of books) in general.
On the other hand, Marvel seemed to have a lot more emphasis on the shared universe continuity from its earliest days. Part of which had a lot to do with the fact that, at its inception, most of the titles were all written by one man, Stan Lee, so they couldn't help but benefit. Even post-Stan, though, there was largely a great degree of interconnectedness among the titles. I think it was at its strongest point during Jim Shooter's era, because of Shooter's management style and editorial mandates. It got to a degree of ridiculousness at some point, I think largely during the Harras era, though it might have started during the end of Shooter's run- to the point where you'd get little editorial "see issue #xx" notes in several panels on the same page at some points. To be fair, I don't think this was all of Harras' fault, I think a lot had to do with Mark Gruenwald, who was an amazing writer and trivia-guru, but could sometimes be a little excessive in his use of continuity. Tom DeFalco is another writer/editor who does the same.
In any case, Marvel fell into its current "continuity-lite" phase when Joe Quesada became EIC. Continuity was basically thrown out the window, under the premise that it hindered new readers from coming into the comics industry, and that getting rid of all that pesky continuity would change that... nevermind that comics haven't really been successfully getting new readers even since that change, and that the audience who reads them is largely the same audience that likes that continuity... or seemingly so, anyway, depending on what info/statistics you read/believe.
Marvel is currently having a "Crisis on Infinite Earths" sort of storyline (House of M) that may or may not bring a sense of shared universe back into Marvel. Remains to be seen, but there are definitely some massive changes that are to result, and there are strong hints that there may be some retcons involved as well.
