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Infinite Frontier writer Joshua Williamson discusses how to handle DC continuity and what works best while crafting stories and planning their future.
The continuity of DC Comics can be difficult to trace and understand, but writer Joshua Williamson has adopted his own interpretation when crafting stories and characters.
In a recent interview with The Beat, the writer responsible for Infinite Frontier said that for him, there is “no hard and fast rule” when navigating the murky waters of continuity. The DC Multiverse, now Omniverse, has had a multitude of crises and reboots over the years for the sake of telling new stories. But after the recent reset with Dark Nights: Death Metal and the push that all of DC’s history matters, Williamson believes that writers must make a choice about what happened and did not happen.
“I kind of cherry pick,” he says. “I feel like everything that happened before The New 52 happened, and it gets muddy in places, obviously. But you kind of cherry pick what works best for you and your story.”
The New 52 was a period in DC Comics that received mixed reactions from fans. The Flashpoint event saw the universe rewritten, giving writers more control over their storytelling and allowing new readers to jump on without much or any knowledge of DC’s past. However, this period also saw many fan favorite plotlines and characters erased from existence, such as Wally West’s version of The Flash, who did not return to the universe until the DC Rebirth era began.
Williamson has made a habit of bringing back characters from comics’ past, such as the speedsters like Max Mercury during his run on The Flash. He was not focused on every puzzle piece of the timeline fitting together perfectly though. “My goal was to tell a cool Flash story,” he said, “I didn’t know the big picture stuff.”
By bringing back Mercury, Williamson learned that there is no need to redesign characters and their stories just because they have not been seen for some time, but to take the aspects of their identities and history that will best suit them when they return. “I had a plan…I was going to reinvent his origin. I had all these plans to modernize him, and was told, no, his origin is his origin. He is who he is, so when you bring him back, you bring him back as he was.”
Williamson now had this in mind for another character that disappeared with The New 52, the son of Green Arrow, Connor Hawke, who the writer recently returned to DC continuity in his Robin series. With his Rebirth experience, the writer knew that he did not need to change anything of the character’s history, but to simply write the story he wanted with him. “I just used their story from before. I didn’t make it up, I didn’t reinvent it.”
For DC writers today, Williamson is of the mindset that as long as what is chosen from DC history improves the story told, then that is the path to take with a book. “We talk about it. We talk about what we’re going to do and how it can work, and you try to figure out the math for that character. Really, at the end of the day you’re just trying to tell the best story possible.”
Source: The Beat
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