User blog comment:M1shawhan/Continuity!!! Marvel, why have you forsaken me?!? - Rant/@comment-62206-20100504060518

There are a couple continuity sins that really annoy me. I've even ranted about it in the past!

(1) Characters in too many places at the same time. Once upon a time characters guest-starring in one book would be absent in another, or at least we'd get a footnote saying 'this happens before/after the events in XYZ #P'. Now Wolverine is involved in how many multiple-month stories at the same damn time? Given some of these books never really have a break for downtime or other books, there is no plausible explanation other than 'this book happened *last year* or even *three years ago* (publication-wise) relative to that other book', and that's just stupid.

(2) Character-development continuity. For example, James Proudstar *stopped using the codename Warpath in X-Force ~60*, and developed a lot as a character in the pages of X-Force. But he returns to the X-Men and BAM, we're back to New Mutants 98 Warpath. WTF? Did X-Force not happen? Sam Guthrie is in a similar boat - great tactical leadership in X-Force, goes to X-Men and becomes useless, goes back to X-Force and is awesome again, and is now in New Mutants being mostly useless. Seriously, can writers actually bother to read about the history of the characters they're writing. Just because you don't like the history doesn't mean you can pretend it didn't happen!

(3) Re-interpreting an old story in a way that makes the old story worse. Stop that. The best example is of course the retcon of UXM 101-137 so that it wasn't actually Jean. That tore the heart and soul out of the Dark Phoenix storyline.