That is not true for all of the characters from what we have seen so far.
Except that, uh, it is. Pretty much every character has been de-aged, if only by a few years. (Others, like Alan Scott have been de-aged by *decades*.) I am not against this in principle. It simply is what it is. (I would have preferred that Alan Scott and Jay Garrick simply died and were replaced. But, whatever.
You are saying that little has changed because we still have Kyle Rayner as Green Lantern or Tim Drake as the Red Robin (tiddly diddly deet, twiddly diddtly deet, twid-did, diddly deet, he rocks in the tree-tops all day long, rockin' and a rollin' and oh lord I am so tired) and Barry Allen is the Flash.
Now, for Kyle to be a GL, Hal needs to have gone crazy....after Coast City was wiped out....during the "Reign of the Supermen" after Superman was apparently killed by Doomsday. (Many, the last 5 years were *really* hectic in the DC huh?) Or, more likely , we just assume that those events did not happen as they did pre-"Flash Point".
At this point, it looks like Wally West was never the Flash. What happened when Barry died in CoIE? Did he die? Did CoIE even happen? (My guess on the last two questions is "no", which also resolves the first.) Having a character death completely undone is far from unprecedented. Supergirl's death in CoIE was undone by CoIE itself. Initially, it was because Kara never existed. Then, shortly before the Crisis Trilogy, Supergirl was re-introduced as if nothing had happened....because nothing in fact had happened. (And, the snot-blob copyright place-holder Supergirl of the 90s has been written out entirely as of "Infinite Crisis".)
No it does not. Altering the events of the universe just alters the events of the universe, but it is still the same universe.
Not in real terms.
For the purposes of current DC, Tim Drake was never Robin. Martion Manhunter was a charter member of Storm Watch. Superboy was not created by Cadmus after "Doomsday" but as a counter-measure to superhumans (with some bad-guy conspiracy stuff mixed in).
Change is a constant in comics. It depends on how much and how that relates to the larger comic book universe around it.
I have to disagree. Marvel is all about *not* changing. I flipped through "Galactic Storm" recently, and plan to read all the way through soonishly. How many of the big changes made in that story, never mind others that were evident at the time, stuck? How many times since then have the Avengers and other characters been set back to basic-spec?
This isn't so extreme as a hero never having become the hero in the first place and all the consequences that implies, as you'd suggest with your "exercise". Here for example, Bruce Wayne still became Batman and he still had a flock of Robin sidekicks. Sure some of the hows and whys are a bit different, but they still ended up pretty much in the same place they were before Flashpoint didn't they? Just because some events have changed or didn't happen doesn't make it a different universe. And you can't just ignore that some events have carried over as well. It's the same universe, only given a somewhat different shape if you will.
Why do I get the feeling that you are cleverly misunderstanding Anderson's point? (It is possible to understand his point and disagree with it.)
Wally West was not the Flash. Tim Drake was never Robin. Obsidian and Jade never fucking existed. That does not sound like the old DCU that we all know. (And, I am saying this as somebody who is okay in principle with the various changes.)
And, yes, other characters are more or less in the place that DC put them before "Flash Point". But, the how and why they got there is different. What Anderson and O6 are saying is that the character's origins have, by necessity, changed after "Flash Point" (as described above). Some events simply did not happen. Others would have happened much differently. The leaves readers with a basic sense that "some stuff happened over the last 5 to 10 years", but it is effectively *new* stuff that happened. In practical terms, DC has started over from scratch. (Most any story you read is going to have some events assumed in its past because very few stories start with some variation "In the beginning....")
And after 12 months, that's really a problem.
Excactly.
This is even more of a problem considering that DC has plenty of institutional know-how for handing this sort of thing. Based on reports that we have heard, there was no planning for what to do after "Flash Point". Nobody told Perez what he was supposed to be doing with Superman, and there was confusion.
An even better example and piece of evidence for DC's poor planning (and this totally warrants a larger font):
DC is editing books after they have been published, distributed and sold. Look at the comparison scans that were linked earlier in the thread. "Tim Drake was Robin. Whoops, no he was not." That kind of "tweak" would have been extreme after CoIE, when DC was still on the learning curve. Now, it just shows that DC was not planning ahead beyond "let's hit the reset button". DC was arguably selling unfinished comics as part of their "New 52" promotion.
Keep in mind that I am saying this as somebody who is liking some of the New 52. "Earth 2" completely over-writes some old comics that I liked. But, I am liking that book. (Aside: I just realized that Earth 2, the planet, looks a lot like Apokolips. Given that Earth 2's gods are all dead, I gotta wonder what this means....) But, DC has been sloppy at the editorial level.
Dom
-kinda wants to read "Nightwing" and "Red Hood" this week.....
