Would it be better if the two main super hero universes just left any continuity behind and only have stories where each story arc or graphic novel is its own thing, completely unrelated to any other story?  Where the setup can be wildly different each time like What If and Elseworlds?  We've had decades of one continuous fictional reality for each of the big two companies anyway, where everything has been done and done to death, so would it matter if it ends now?  Would this be a good thing since it's almost like going full circle, right back to the way Marvel and DC comics used to be, with single issue stories that weren't hampered by every single story that came before.  Just in a more extreme form where even basic consistent backgrounds don't have to necessarily be followed.

Plus, the continuities keep getting flummoxed, inverted, rebooted, and discarded over and over again...

There may as well be no continuity any longer. It's weird that the companies still pretend there is.

In my experience, it is the younger fans who grew up on the TV shows or movies (or unrelated book series where the characters are often taken from birth or childhood to old age or death) who expect the same from the comics they have just discovered.

I am the only one I know (in person or somewhere like this forum) who splits it by company.  I firmly believe that the DC heroes are mostly timeless/iconic and should never change.  On the other hand, I expect the Marvel heroes to slowly age and change.  But that is not because I've been reading too long, but possibly (I am now wondering) because that is what I was exposed to when I first came on board in the 70's.  Spider-Man had already graduated from high school (which I saw in MARVEL TALES), moved on to college, even graduated from college fairly early on for me, saw his great love Gwen Stacy die (and I saw her father die in reprints), and dealt with the death of his arch-enemy Norman Osborn/Green Goblin and the "sequels" of Harry Osborn taking over for him, and then even the Hobgoblin taking Harry's place, etc.  Mr. Fantastic and the Invisible Girl were parents who aged along with with their son Franklin, and the X-Men were no longer teens but now young adults who experienced a lot of Uncanny change.

It is ironic to me that it is the DC heroes who keep aging and changing (even through numerous reboots)--Superman and Batman both have sons, all the favorite TEEN Titans are no longer teens, and old JSA favorites have all been aged out of usability (did anybody really want to see a 100-year-old Johnny Thunder being mistreated in the old folks home?)--while the Marvel characters have settled into being ageless and re-settable.  (Things like Spider-Man or Daredevil's identities being revealed and then being forgotten prove it.  Peter Parker being a rich CEO for two years is as temporary as Archie and pals experiencing the lives of King Arthur and his Knights in a one-off story.)

For my money, Watchmen and DKR were both very well made stories that happened to be set in a violent and grim milieu. The unfortunate takeaway by the imitators was they were good because they were in a violent and grim milieu (heck, I used to make my own cruddy home-made comics and I did the same idiot imitation in my own creations, because I wanted my stuff to be awesome like Dark Knight. I did keep my thought balloons though).

The thing that I find inexplicable was The Killing Joke. Because that was Moore operating directly in the main continuity of DC and it was just reprehensible and ugly and not even a good story.

Have I entered the Twilight Zone?

I have never understood the appeal of that story. Each to their own, of course, but I was very disappointed with it. 

I used to have an informal meet-up with some folks that used to talk about comics. They all liked it. Fine. But when I said I didn't, you'd have thought I'd confessed to being Jack the Ripper. If looks could kill!

If people like it, more power to them. I don't like or get SAGA, either, but if online reviews are anything to go by, it's considered the best thing since sliced bread. But THE KILLING JOKE is one story whose popularity continues to baffle me.

With Doc, those brain operations were a weird sort of pulp novel conceit, forgivable at the time because they worked. The criminals led better lives. Society was made safer. "Identity Crisis" commits the same sin, but the lobotomies they perform do not in fact work, nor was there ever the slightest reason for the JLA to think they would. Only Batman stands against these police state tactics (see also: Gruenwald's "Squadron Supreme" mini-series) and he gets lobotomized along with the others for his troubles. "Identity Crisis" should have been the very last comic DC ever published, in much the same way "Civil War" should have been the last book Marvel ever put out. Both reduced their characters to murderous, venal creeps. 

In the case of "The Killing Joke," however, ugly as the events therein are, the story itself is redeemed by the Batman's attempt, his last attempt perhaps, at finding the remnants of whatever was once human inside the Joker, and later, his following through on his promise to Gordon that he would bring the Joker in "by the book." 

We see the events that broke an otherwise blameless man, shattered his psyche, and turned him into a murderer. Of course, insanity doesn't really work that way (see also: Two-Face,) and so Moore himself has said that the book doesn't accurately describe real characters behaving in anything resembling a realistic fashion. One of his regrets with the book was that the conflict takes place between two characters who in no way behave like real people, and is thus a commentary on nothing except the Batman/Joker conflict itself as it appears in the comics. It has no value aside from that. 

In writing a piece that called for a measure of understanding for the mentally ill, he was not able to write the Joker as someone who accurately represented those concerns. "Killing Joke" remains, nonetheless, one of the very, very few comics out there that actually treats the Joker as if he is insane, and not some brilliantly fiendish genius who has the whole justice system snowed as to his state of mind. Does the guy belong in an asylum or doesn't he? The comics seem to want to have it both ways, and thus the police, the courts, and the medical community are constantly made to look like suckers.

It's been said that "The Killing Joke" was originally intended as a Batman annual, and that Moore never intended it to appear as some sort of deluxe, stand-alone volume. I wonder if that original scheduling was to take place during one of DC's "Elseworlds" events. The Batmobile and the photo of the 50's-era Bat-Family would seem to place the book outside of DC's then-current, Post-Crisis continuity. I can't help but wonder if Moore's infamous call to Len Wein, the book's editor, requesting permission to shoot Barbara Gordon (to which he was told, after Wein checked with Publisher Jeanette Kahn, "cripple the bitch") took place because the book was now being published in continuity rather than the way it was originally conceived. 

Just a theory, but the comic itself doesn't fit in well at all with what had been set down in Crisis and established afterwards. It was also in production for a very long time. I can't help thinking it was never intended to have the impact that it did, either within the DC Universe or without.

***

Moore didn't intend for THE KILLING JOKE to be a canonical tale and was surprised when it suddenly became one. He also considers it to be among his worst writings (it is). 

I say this even though I liked Barbara Gordon as Oracle. (Though when Batman's broken back was healed I thought "oh, so Batman has to get all better at the drop of a hat, but Batgirl has to stay disabled? That's real classy.") 

I don't have a problem at all with stories about super-people aimed at older readers being printed, but they really need to be set in universes entirely apart from mainstream DC and Marvel. That's what STORWATCH and THE AUTHORITY were, and I liked them quite a lot, at least during the Warren Ellis years. 

Of course, then came The New 52 and the Wildstorm Universe characters were shoehorned into the same universe as the Justice League, Teen Titans, etc. And it Did. Not. Work. At. All.

Hell, it was such a stupid idea that it seems that everyone's completely forgotten about it. We haven't even seen Apollo and Midnighter since 2016.