On Aug 16, 6:08 pm, Duggy <Paul.Dug...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> This "separate but linked" thing is the worst of both worlds.
I've gotta disagree. The "worst of both worlds" is arbitrarily
dividing the two lines so that it's never clear what particular story
is applicable to a given universe. Did Lyta Hall's son become the lord
of the Dreaming? Presumably so, since its been referenced repeatedly
in both lines. When Grant Morrison refers to Daniel in an issue of
JLA, he's referring to the Daniel that appeared in _Sandman_. When
John Arcudi depicts Dorothy Spinner and Coagula as major plot elements
in his run of _Doom Patrol_, it's a clear an obvious reference to
Rachel Pollack's run. Claiming the two universes are wholly distinct
and that each only has occasional and arbitrary similarities to the
other is pointless and confusing: if the two universes are the same,
they are the same, and should be treated as such, with a reasonable
expectation that events depicted in the one are not in flat
contradiction with events depicted in the other.
I honestly don't see the problem with the current situation, where the
Vertigo "universe" remains "a long bus ride" from the the more
mainstream DCU. The DCU is a large enough place that Tim Hunter
doesn't need to bumping into Clark Kent on a regular basis (or at all,
really), and on the rare occasions when a writer does want to exploit
some bit of prior continuity, they can do so without a lot of
unnecessary mucking around and establi****ng precisely what events are
canon for which universe. In short, don't sweat the details.
On the even rarer occasion when a writer wants to go into really
uncharted territory, so be it. The last _Books of Magic_ series was
explicitly set in an alternate reality, IIRC, allowing it to use
characters like John Constantine and Zatanna without concern to how it
impacted those characters anywhere else. When Peter Milligan destroyed
San Francisco in _Shade_, it effectively divorced that series not only
from the main DCU, but also the rest of "Earth-V." All this obsession
over continuity in a line that doesn't really observe much continuity
in the first place strikes me as a silly.
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