evrlvnbluidthng asked:

How would you say Marvel's approach to continuity has changed since it started with "Fantastic Four" issue 1 back in 1962? Based on my reading of some articles on the subject and my own experience reading "Fantastic Four" it seems like there was a shift in the early '90s and perhaps one or more since then. For instance, I think some might suggest that adherence to continuity was more rigid prior to the early '90s and characters experience more natural and lasting development.

brevoortformspring answered:

Well, this is a long and complicated question. The short answer is that the approach to continuity always suited the moment, and what seemed to work the best at that time. In the earliest days, Stan didn’t have any use for anything beyond the broadest version of continuity. And it’s no wonder—he didn’t think these new characters would last for five years when he started, let alone fifty. So he had the characters aging more or less in real time, and it was only after seven or eight years that he started to realize that he needed to slow things down in order to allow for greater longevity. It was really Roy Thomas who was the first to care about continuity in the manner you’re speaking about—and even then, what Roy cared about the most in those days was the comics that he himself read, whether those were ones that Stan had written a few years earlier, or ones from the golden age that he’d read as a child. Roy both did a lot of integrating of the assorted elements of the Marvel Universe and also created an environment when he was EIC that engendered an importance on continuity, something he instilled in a number of writers that followed him, including folks like Steve Englehart.By the 80s, you see a shift beginning to take place, simply due to the fact that the books have run so long. It was during this period that the “seven year rule” was first devised, which postulated that it had been perhaps seven years since FANTASTIC FOUR #1 in story time, regardless of how many real-world years had passed. This meant that things would be updated on a rolling basis: the Fantastic Four were no longer trying to be the first ones to reach the moon, they were testing an interstellar warp engine And so forth. But at the same time, Mark Gruenwald’s invention and perfection of the Official handbook of the Marvel Universe attempted to codify everything in the Marvel cosmology, and taught entire generations of fans to think about these stories in that way. Eventually, as time moved on, more and more people became comfortable with the fact that it wasn’t always going to be possible to maintain absolutely every fact that was being dragged around behind the Marvel Universe for fifty years. All of those stories about our heroes battling Communist villains, for example, became a problem after the fall of the Soviet Union—it’s been so long since that event that even though the “seven year rule” has now expanded to something closer to thirteen years, still none of that stuff works. And for the vast majority of readers, that’s fine, as they never read those stories (at least not in their formative years) anyway. Readers became much more concerned with “their own personal canon”—that is, those stories that they had read that felt crucial and important to them, the ones that formed their own understanding of the characters in question. Maintaining the essentials, the essence of the characters, became much more the focus than hanging on to every bit of the minutiae.And in all likelihood, ten years from now, the focus will have shifted again, in order to deal with where we find ourselves at that point.