Board Thread:Administrative/@comment-61022-20161124005352/@comment-61022-20161208200905

So here's another suggestion:

Maybe should differentiate is between original flashbacks (meaning a flashback that reveals something new for the first time) and a recap flashback needs to be made.

Really, when you think about flashbacks from back in the day that rehash a previous story, they were really a precursor to the recap pages we have today. In the 80s this was common where every comic usually devoted a page or two midstory recapping everything that happened before that was relevant. (the original Secret Wars II and Squadron Supreme are great examples of this where a few pages of story was used to recap things mid story)

Perhaps before we even tackle the issue with different points of continuity we need to first differentiate flashbacks in different ways.

Like for example, lets take the first battle between the Fantastic Four and Doctor Doom from, that's an original point in continuity because that story was first told there.

There is a flashback of that battle in when the Fantastic Four are reading fan-mail. That sequence was the FF members pointing out how Sue was useful to the team (to readers who didn't like her). They are merely retelling the events of that story without adding anything new.

Meanwhile also revisits that same story as the Thing relates to it to the Hulk in the "present". This telling of the story adds new perspective (as it's told from Ben's point of view) and adds details that have previously been unrevealed.

Presently, we consider both the retelling in FF #11 and Hard Knocks #1 flashbacks.

Perhaps, we should instead consider flashbacks that add nothing new as recaps and flashbacks that do reveal something new as actual Flashbacks.

Then we'd only need to create a template, then we can differentiate between characters who appear in a recap and characters who appear as flashbacks that add something new to continuity. They can all be filtered into "Other".

This also resolves the issue right now with how to deal with characters who only appear in the recap page of newer comics.

It also eliminates the string of length green tags that makes the appearance lists cluttered.

This of course still doesn't solve the problems of listing characters twice or maybe even three times.