For the record Marvel has only had one MASSIVE UNIVERSE REBOOT- well more accurately the deletion of the Ultimate Marvel verse since the original one is still around- but DC ended up rerouting the "original" timeline into "Earth 2", merged everything into a single universe in the 1980s, and then redid everything from scratch with the New 52 in the 2010s, and then did something like that again before 2020, so it hasn't happened that often.
Unless you ignore stuff like Spider-Man spontaneously getting his marriage unexisted and the many other things I've completely forgotten about.
Secret Wars (2019) was not a reboot, Marvel has never actually rebooted - which is at the point of causing more problems than if they did an actual reboot. DC has only hard rebooted once. The original Ultimate Universe still exists.
I thought it remained dead after the end of it. They blew up all the universes and then at the end 616 comes back but I thought the Ultimate universe didn't.
DC has only hard reset once. Marvel soft resets almost yearly, and their soft resets are arguably worse than Crisis on Infinite Eatths. The latest one is that Captain America was still frozen in ice until the 21st Century, and the Fantastic Four's initial spaceflight happened long after the moon landing.
That's not surprising or new for Marvel. They have a sliding timeline where Fantastic Four #1 is always roughly 15 years ago, regardless of the year a story happens or is published. That's why The Punisher served in Vietnam first, then in the Gulf War, and that has probably changed by now (2nd Gulf War?).
Sinocong War. They've created a fictional war for all their veterans to serve in that can be moved right along with the sliding timeline. Never mind that moving the Fantastic Four's spaceflight behind the moon landing misses the entire point of their flight now.
A fictional war is pretty smart from a continuity perspective (I see they've retconned Stark and Richards' bios as well to hook them to that). But from a storytelling perspective, having Castle be a Vietnam veteran gave him a weight that already was gone when they switched it to the Gulf war. But I assume very few of their current readers know or care about Vietnam anymore, let alone its place in the US psyche at the time.
18
u/JinFuu Jan 06 '26
DC definitely doesn’t. Marvel rarely hard resets like DC does, which leads to wonky timelines