My conversation with employee Nathan.
Me: “It used to be that the readership turnover in comics was pretty high…a kid would read comics for a few years, grow out of it, and be replaced by another kid, and so on. When that was happening, the publisher didn’t have to overly worry about keeping continuity straight for years, or decades, on end. If something in issue #144 was contradicted by something in issue #418, it wasn’t likely anyone in the audience was going to notice.
“The turnover isn’t so high anymore…there’s not a whole lot of new blood entering the hobby, and there are more and more people dominating the comics market who are like me, who’ve read comics for decades, and who, sad to say, notice when something in Superman/Batman #1 contradicts something from the 20-year-old Man of Steel mini-series. It for people like that, like me, that continuity-cleaning series like Crisis on Infinite Earths and Infinite Crisis are created.”
Nathan: “So you killed Superboy!”