^But those were partial reboots at best.
Which I noted and addressed by pointing out that DC's reboots were actually partial as well, especially the latest one where Morrison's Batman and Johns' GL were pretty much carried over completely from pre-Flashpoint
Yes, obviously neither company is completely committed to a single approach, but there is a difference in how they present it and justify it in-universe. DC has repeatedly shown massive events taking place that have rewritten the entire course of history and created new timelines,
although some elements usually survive the timeline shift or get reintroduced in some form after a while. Marvel has persisted in the pretense that its continuity is a single continuous whole,
although sometimes it modifies parts of it. The difference is in which is the rule and which is the exception.
Except that in practice Peter was clearly younger and Aunt May didn't die, ie, stuff didn't happen. Therefore, a reboot.
In practice, yes, obviously. But I'm talking about the theory, the explanation presented in-universe. The claim was that only certain events were altered while the overall timeline remained intact, as opposed to the DC method where the entire timeline is rewritten wholesale except for certain events that carry over.
And then there are things like the John Byrne reboot of Spidey's origin story, which was poorly received and subsequently ignored. When Marvel has tried to do DC-style continuity rewrites
Wait. I thought you said Marvel prided itself on not doing DC-style continuity rewrites?
You've missed your calling. Instead of working on adaptations for Marvel you should be some politicians' press secretary.
There is no excuse for this kind of childish hostility. Are you honestly trying to engage in a discussion, or are you just looking for excuses to insult and argue with people? If it's the latter, then I have no interest in continuing the discussion.
What I'm saying is that Marvel
prefers to present itself as a continuous, unbroken history, partly
because the occasional exceptions they've made to that rule have worked out poorly. So I'm not saying they've never tried it. I'm saying that their
occasional dabbles with doing it have been poorly received so they prefer not to do it on the whole -- as opposed to DC, which has wholeheartedly embraced the practice of universe-wide continuity reboots on a recurring basis. Yes, of course the two companies do similar things on occasion, but they
present them differently and emphasize them differently. As a matter of company identity and image, DC is the company that reboots everything from scratch roughly once a decade while Marvel is the company that pretends its entire history still counts even while continuously rewriting the details.
When DC has tried DC-style continuity reboots it generally hasn't stuck either. Further evidence that Marvel's reboots are, in fact, not that different than DC's.
But it hasn't stuck
in a different way. Byrne's
Spider-Man reboot only affected that one character and was abandoned within a year and never spoken of again. That did sort of happen with
Superman: Birthright, but on the whole, DC's reboots are universe-wide and only get retconned piecemeal after years or decades. There's an obvious difference of degree.
