Recapping the Continuity Bottle

With DC's next big reboot looming (a rose by any other name...), I've decided to at least attempt to complete my model for comic book continuity. But since those discussions occurred more than 3 years ago, I thought I'd start with a recap just to get myself and everyone else back up to speed.

It all started with my musings on what I called Bubble Worlds - a concept that tried to explain the writing strategy of certain superhero comics series that expanded a character's universe not with the usual dynastic model of supporting cast and contextualizing city, but by building the universe around the character outward in space or backward in time. The rainbow Corps in Green Lantern, for example, or Iron Fist's retroactively created legacy (other examples included Wonder Woman's Greek myth ghetto - as a negative way to "bubble" - and Swamp Thing's leaking bubble, its concepts infecting the rest of the DCU. This generated some discussion here and on other blogs, and in answer to Thought Balloonists' intelligent riposte about how some of these bubbles were created through retroactive continuity, I postulated that comics universes are continually being retconned. In that article, I claimed that every writer wrote a character slightly (or outrageously) differently, that every artist drew that same character differently, and that was all, in a way, retcon. The very idea that time slowed down for characters, so that they'd celebrated more Christmases than they should and seen more presidents come in and out of the White House than most of their readers, was also a kind of continual retcon (and a largely unacknowledged one, even by those who scream bloody murder at more event-driven retcons).

At this point, I proposed a MODEL, which I called the Continuity Bottle, in which continually shifting Continuity Fluid would hold all of a universe's characters and concepts. It's important to note that this is not a TOOL for creators to work from, but rather a way to look at how the work of comics creators interact in a shared universe.
I'll let you read the original articles if you're interested, but to quickly recap, the article put forth the following concepts:
-Each character (and team) is at a center of a molecule (the Absorbascon's "dynastic model") swimming in the continuity fluid and containing all characters and concepts that usually connect to it (Superman is connected to Lois Lane, Metropolis, Lex Luthor, etc.). These molecules can connect to other molecules to simulate team-ups, villains crossing over from hero to hero or participation in a team.
-Bubble Worlds are areas around dynastic molecules that represent the entire world (or history, since continuity fluid also contains past and future) surrounding certain characters (the galaxy according to Green Lantern, or Opal City's history, for example).
-Partitions are semi-porous barriers that curtain off a part of continuity, such as Vertigo's DC properties, an Elseworld or the part of Wildstorm that sometimes interacts with the DCU. The fluid behind these barriers is different from the rest of the bottle's and does not mix with it, though characters may infrequently enter or escape.
-Because the fluid isn't static inside the bottle, the characters swimming in it are continually being updated and retconned.
-A universal reboot is akin to shaking the bottle and letting the constituents reform and adapt to the new fluid - often changed by pouring another continuity bottle into the first, as was done with the Charlton, Fawcett, etc. heroes.
-The old continuity is nonetheless saved behind Continuity Walls at the bottom of the bottle. As concepts from former continuities reappear in the new continuity, we might imagine Continuity Funnels feeding the new fluid with older elements. Funnels between bottles also exist to explain cross-company crossovers and obvious pastiches of another company's (continuity's) characters.
-Finally, in another article, I added the idea of Tonal Pockets. This postulates a different consistency to continuity fluid that explains why, in the same universe, Plastic Man lives an almost cartoon life, while Batman's existence is so much more gritty. Dynastic molecules (like those) may prefer a certain fluid consistency, though they sometimes swim through a different pocket.

I left that one with "To be continued..." Ouch! More than three years later, and I haven't made good on that promise. But I've given myself until Flushpoint to finish my thesis and my model, in time to discuss DC's new continuity using the vocabulary created. Wish me luck!