I feel like in the 2000s Comics writers stopped caring about continunity amd just wanted the characters to tell their own stories, something this video touches on with Tom King: https://youtu.be/fQStjcSR-YI?si=DHdKOPIutCuo8NjO
And you know i dont think I can blame them, if the original Ultimate Universe and the current Absolute Universe show, but the former might have been a poison pill considering Brian Michael Bendis and his approach to retcons in the main continuity...or is that just me?
I think the thing about this is that you can't really point to the 2000s specifically as the precise point where this started happening. There's always been turning points for various characters basically going back to the start where a hotshot rolls in and sandblasts an existing character into a more pleasing shape for whatever story they want to tell; arguably Byrne's 80s retool of Superman was an example of this, but it's hardly alone. This is one of those situations where it really does come down to thinking it was good if it worked and bad if it didn't work; I actually happen to really like a lot of what Bendis was doing conceptually in the early 2000s, while also recognizing that his status quo was built on the viscera of the characters he didn't give a shit about who he threw under the bus during Avengers Disassembled. On the flip side of things, I think a lot of the famously controversial characterization choices that Mark Millar made during the construction of the Ultimate Universe were in fact very strongly informed in-jokes about the silver-age iterations of the characters; they were often very ugly or crass jokes, but very little of Millar's work at Marvel comes from a place of apathy for what came before. In broad strokes I think this is true also of the New Ultimate Universe and the Absolute universe; from what I've read of both, truly arbitrary changes to the continuity are fairly thin on the ground for both of them, with New Ultimate in particular basically being one long in-joke. Many of the individual superstar writers at both companies trade pretty heavily at the moment on the degree to which they Take Continuity Seriously (Al Ewing being the prototypical example of this, but there are many others.)
I personally have gotten the vibe to some extent that there's been a shift towards individual creators being the ones to Take Continuity Seriously, rather than there being a strong editorial drive to cross the "i's and dot the "t's- although it's not a hill I'll die on, I think it's easier, and more creatively profitable, to be an individual rooting through the historical annals to ensure what you're working on aligns with the previous work done with the character, than it is to be a editorial team trying to haul the vast web of absurdity into constant perfect alignment, particularly once imbroglios like The New 52 have pre-emptively eliminated the possibility of decisively succeeding.
My evidence that this is the case is, of course, entirely anecdotal, and most likely exactly as much of a just-so story as the assertion I'm responding to. But to make everything about Marvel Zombies for a minute, I flipped through a recent Exiles storyline where they did a gag team composed entirely of alternate versions of Wolverine, including a zombie wolverine from the original Marvel Zombies continuity of Earth-2149. But the first thing is, right, that 2149 Wolverine was decisively killed off in 2009 or so. Killed by, you guessed it, another dimensional copy of Wolverine, who also turned into a zombie. Nobody in 2025 caught that. It felt like the result of someone hurriedly googling the number for the zombie dimension, without bothering to check if any actual story progression had occurred there at any point.
But the other thing is that they already did an All-Wolverine gag team in an Exiles book back in the mid 2000s, closer to the publication of the original Marvel Zombies. That team also included a zombie Wolverine, and that time somebody actually did bother to check what had happened to Wolverine-2149, and they made a point of specifying that this zombie Wolverine was from a timeline nearly identical to, but distinct from, Earth-2149. So the fact the story arc was done a second time at all raises "who's driving the bus" questions, and the fact that they bothered to nitpick this discrepancy when they did it the first time might imply an overall shift in how anal-retentive they generally are about this. But it might not.
According to the Marvel Wiki (I haven't been able to find a definitive link to the podcast or newsletter where he did this) Joe Quesada at one point jokingly canonized the 2149 version of Felicity Hardy as having a twin sister working under the name of "Night Cat," because a fan wrote in with a continuity error regarding when she actually got infected. This is a very Simpsons-skeleton-xylophone question to ask at all, it's an appropriately tongue in cheek response, very in-keeping with the No-Prize ethos. How seriously do we think they take the No-Prize ethos these days? How seriously should they take it? Do you think anybody at all would care enough to write in for a no-prize on the Death Story run they released through the Red Band imprint last Halloween? Or the Punisher-themed run they're putting out this Halloween? I don't think so. All I can conclusively say is that they used to be comically visibly anal about the continuity for Marvel Zombies specifically, and they aren't anymore. I can't generalize any more about the state of the industry than that, but others can feel free to.
