I was in a discussion about die-hard continuity recently and came up with an analogy that works for me and maybe ya'll as well. See if you follow my train of thought on this...

The first time I heard "A Hazy Shade of Winter" was by The Bangles around 1988. What I didn't learn until a couple years later was that Paul Simon wrote the song and recorded it with Art Garfunkle around 1966. I had been familiar with Simon and Garfunkle's work and even owned their "Bridge Over Troubled Water" vinyl album. I just wasn't previously familiar with Hazy Shade by them.

To this day, the first group I think of when I hear the song title is The Bangles. I like both versions a lot, but it's just an association thing for me.

If we apply the logic that some comic book continuity people require to the song, then The Bangles version would have to have a four minute intro added explaining where the song had been for the past 22 years and the times and events it was written under.

Switching back to reality, we have a cover song that was fairly popular among the 80s generation and who applied the lyrics to the events of their time. Fans of the original version have a couple of choices:

1. Ignoring the 80's version and saying, "Kids today just don't know good music" (as their parents said to them back in the 60s) as they put on their copy of the Simon & Garfunkle album (Bookends?).

2. They could enjoy both versions and keep an extra warm place in their heart for the original.

Cover songs to me (and I've thrown this out in a previous thread) are similar to reboots and retellings of stories in comics. They're presented using the current trends of the time to appeal to the popular masses (in both cases usually young people.)

Meanwhile, older fans still have the original tales they remembered best to hold onto, while the current generation gets to feel that they're experiencing it for the first time.

With die-hard continuity, each retelling feels like reading a history book with all the back story and explanations that go into it. (Think how much thinner JLA/Avengers would be if it didn't try to appeal to the continuity fans with an issue and a half explanation of how the two teams met up.)

I love a cover song that leads me to a renewed enthusiasm for the original.

Never cared for Talking Heads' "Take Me to The River," but it did reacquaint me with Al Green --

-- and for that, I thank them.

The analogy has a lot going for it, but there is a big difference in that pop songs are individual creations with a beginning and an end, whereas comic books are serial creations that go on and on and on. A new cover version does not overtake the old version when it is released, while a comic book "reboot" does.

Maybe a better analogy would be a shakeup in a rock group's membership: Sammy Hagar singing for Van Halen, Fleetwood Mac the blues band becoming Fleetwood Mac the soft rockers, Styx touring without Dennis DeYoung, etc. There exist fans who cannot forgive any of these groups for making changes, even in the face of interesting or fun work by the new lineup.

(Yes, I listened to a lot of classic rock when I was growing up.)

Brendan Howard

Of course, Simon & Garfunkel’s version of “Hazy Shade” has an entire verse that the Bangles opted to discard. It goes: “It’s so funny how my memory skips/While looking over manuscripts of unpublished rhymes/Drinking my vodka and lime.” Now, you may not consider this to be all that brilliant a verse. The Bangles obviously didn’t. But deleting it is sort of like deleting Miracle Man from Ultimate FF continuity, which they’ll no doubt do. It’s not a major part of the mythos. Hell, maybe the mythos is actually made stronger by pretending he never existed. But, for some oddball reason, I like having him in there, just the same, just as I like having that line in the song. Besides, we eventually get to the point where Madonna is covering “American Pie” and pretty much throwing out the whole goddamn song in its entirety. That’s when we know that the pop song remakes (and, by extension, comic book reboots) have gone too far.

"God Save The King" or "America"? -- hmmmmm.

From Brendon- The analogy has a lot going for it, but there is a big difference in that pop songs are individual creations with a beginning and an end, whereas comic books are serial creations that go on and on and on. A new cover version does not overtake the old version when it is released, while a comic book "reboot" does.

Comics as they were done for the first 30+ years (and possibly 40+ depending on how you look at 60's Marvel stories) had stories with beginning, middles and end and weren't the soap operas they became. The example I think of is the one I heard how Mort Weisinger had a list of stories he would have the writers trot out every three or four years because he knew most of the readership had changed in that time and wouldn't recongnize the stories.

I like your Fleetwood Mac analogy. That one works for me too. Not as much related to continuity as preferences for creators on books.