That's A Nice Crop, But You Poisoned Your Neighbor's Well

I can't remember exactly when I started taking the selective approach to continuity. I must have seen someone say they only considered stories they liked to "count", while stories they didn't like didn't count, and I realized that was a swell idea. Why waste time being angry with how much I disliked Sins Past, when I could just ignore it?

It might have been Cassandra Cain. Reading Adam Beechen's attempt in his Batgirl mini-series to detail why Cass did all that crazy stuff post-One Year Later, but how she wasn't responsible for her actions, specifically. Looking over that two-page info dump, I thought it would have been better to not discuss the attacks on Supergirl, the trying to kill her father. Just don't mention it and it'll go away. Though if I was espousing that philosophy, I must have already adopted it, so maybe it was One More Day. Either way, I started applying it regularly, discounting War Games, or Chuck Austen's Uncanny X-Men work, or whatever. Removing the relevant comics from collection helped. If the comic offends me, throw it out.

Over the weekend, I reread Steve Engelhart's Hellcat mini-series from 2000. It's an interesting read, though significantly darker than Kathryn Immonen's Patsy Walker: Hellcat mini-series, since Engelhart was dealing with Patsy's adjusting to being alive again, after being trapped in Hell because she committed suicide. They both count in my Hellcat continuity. In the course of the story, Patsy winds up back in Hell and finds Mockingbird, who is there, I guess for killing Phantom Rider. Patsy wants to help Bobbi escape, Bobbi wants to know about Hawkeye. That Secret Invasion said Bobbi was a prisoner of Skrulls, not dead, doesn't matter because I can ignore it easily enough. That Hawkeye and Mockingbird was building on that imprisonment as an experience Bobbi that affects who Bobbi is, a little trickier, since I liked the concept of the series, if not always the execution. I've settled on either Bobbi's trying to deal with her experiences in Hell, rather than Skrulls (and was brought back through handwave, magic, handwave, something something, Scarlet Witch), or the Skrull gods made a deal to get her out of Hell so their followers could impersonate her, and kept her prisoner. The explanation isn't the point. The point is my version of one character's continuity impacted another, tangentially related character.

I've been thinking recently about characters I like. What I like about them, what stories support that interpretation. It's partially because I've been thinking of doing some list posts, and also I think it's better to be able to explain what I like about something, rather than just say "I like it." Which I don't always succeed at, but it's worth a go. This leads us to Batman. I haven't made my dislike of Batman (Bruce Wayne version) a secret. I don't tend to like uptight authoritarians, for one thing*. The other thing is, there are a lot of stories about Tim Drake, or Cass, or Stephanie Brown I like, where Bats acts like a jerk. I count Robin #88-91 because I like that rather than sulk over Batman's latest overreach**, Tim traveled to the other side of the world (fighting mini-yetis and King Snake) to rescue a classmate, who turned out to be the new Naja-Naja of Kobra. The flip side of this is Batman's actions helped kick the whole thing off, so they end up "counting" as well. There are a lot of situations like that, and they all add up into me liking Tim/Steph/Cass, while Batman sits as a character I could do without seeing in any more comics. I do have a few Batman comics*** where he's OK by me, but they're usually older (pre-Knightfall), so I order it as a progression from "Dark Knight, but still nice to his allies", to "Complete asshole to everyone".

Civil War is the same thing. It's definitely altered how I perceive Tony Stark and Reed Richards, and it's one more piece of evidence in the "For such a smart guy, Spider-Man can be real stupid sometimes" file. Didn't help my perception of Ms. Marvel, either, though her reuniting Julia Carpenter with her daughter helped a lot. It'd be better to ignore it entirely, but there were tie-ins I liked (X-Factor, Cable/Deadpool), and stories I loved that were built off what followed, like Richard Rider's return home. Having the Initiative, having the New Warriors reviled, Speedball as Penance, murderers like Venom revered as heroes, all that crap works for a story where Nova can't believe how much stuff has changed, and decides he's better off in space. Plus, it would have been harder to have Rich's verbal smackdown of Tony in Nova #2 if Tony hadn't actually been punching Captain America over legislation while Nova was off saving the whole damn universe.

It's like a community with one water source. You have a farmer, and he uses some of the water for irrigation, and combined with some fertilizer, it makes his crops grow. That's the character with a story I like. But there's a potential side effect, if the water the farmer uses runs off back into the overall supply, and carries some of the fertilizer with it, and others can wind up suffering as a result. It's not be the intended result, but it still happens.

* See also Cyclops, and Captain America for the first 15 years or so I read comics. I think Kurt Busiek sold me on him, somehow. Or I got old enough the speechifying didn't seem so ridiculous.

** In this case, Batman has decided Spoiler should be properly trained (unless it's another futile attempt to convince her she's not good enough), so she's working with him. He needs to check on Tim, but rather than face Alfred (they were on the outs over something), he tells Steph Tim's secret identity and sends her instead. This is after Tim kept his identity from her for however long they'd known each other out of loyalty to Batman. Oh, and Batman certainly hadn't told Stephanie who he was, no sirree.

*** Between Batman and Detective Comics, there's 8 comics total. But two of those star Azrael as Batman, one if Bruce getting his back broken by Bane, not one of Bruce's finest moments, and another is one of my dad's comics, which I kept for the Elongated Man backup story.