His few actually cutting-edge works - primarily Watchmen and Miracleman/ Marvelman - worked to undermine retro nostalgia, and to show what costumed heroes might be like, psychologically and physically, in something more like a real world. Continuity, these days, is just the name of another dead comics company - Marvel and DC tell you what the past is today, and they’ll tell you differently tomorrow, and if you don’t like it, well, where else can you get your stories of Superman and Spider-Man?Īlan Moore isn’t part of our new world, of course - even if everything else had been different, and DC hadn’t screwed him over at every possible turn over the last two decades, his sensibility couldn’t fit into the current soup of cynicism - and his superhero comics come from the ’80s and ’90s rather than now.
Now continuity is just another commodity: carefully spooned out, measured by drops and pints and liters, controlled almost day-by-day by the two big comics companies, as they alternate shocking reveals with the inevitable returns to the fan-preferred status quo ante. When “ Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?” first appeared, in the then-last issues of Action Comics and Superman in the fall of 1986, as the decks were being cleared for what still looked then like a fresh start for DC Comics’s characters in the wake of Crisis on Infinite Earths, continuity was still something in large part built by the fans, a collective work of imagination linking the most interesting and resonant parts of a thousand stories told over five decades. If you know this story at all, you know the quote: “This is an imaginary story…aren’t they all?” That would be true but trite if it weren’t for the fanatical identification of the superhero reader with his favorite characters - and, even more so, with the continuity of their stories.
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