••

It's the sliding scale. My "old stuff was better," so as current work moves further and further into the Past, it assumes the mantle of "old" and therefore "better."

••

I have decided your posts can only be read as satire. Poor satire, but satire nonetheless.

••

This is a kind of creeping rot that infects not only large segments of fandom, but pros, too. Most especially, pros who were themselves fans.

I have expended much energy arguing the point that the characters do not know everything we know. When I was working on X-MEN, I constantly bumped heads with Chris on this point. "Everybody knows their secret identities by now," he would say, and I would ask HOW "everybody" would know. The team members didn't exactly have a scintillating social life. Unlike Peter Parker or Clark Kent, they did not hang out with a lot of people who had met both "versions" of themselves. But Chris was viewing the characters from outside, with the all-encompassing eye of the reader.

When I was rebooting Superman, I came up against this a lot. It seemed each tweak to the established mythos would unleash a torrent of mail crying "Now everyone will know Clark Kent is Superman!" And yet there was no logic to these complaints. They were on parr with insisting Donald Trump and I are the same person, since we have never been seen in the same room at the same time!

•••

Let us pause in fond remembrance of a time when THAT could still happen!