Backstory and the DC reboot

According to DC’s new promotional FAQ, the upcoming reboot will be “an accessible entry point” because they’re starting the characters over, from ground zero. The millions of new readers they anticipate will be able to get in on the ground floor.
Except, of course, Green Lantern, Batman and Flash will continue more or less as they are, with all the continuity they’ve accumulated. And many of the Big Events of the past (Crisis on Infinite Earths, Infinite Crisis, Identity Crisis, Killing Joke) are still in continuity——I get the feeling it’s so they claim to be giving die-hard fans and complete newbies what they want (personally I’d sooner see the Clark/Lois marriage survive than Identity Crisis, but I don’t get a vote).
Trouble is, these are completely contradictory.
Take Hal Jordan. Here’s a guy who started as a super-hero, then became the super-villain Parallax, then died. Then became the Spectre. Then returned to life and became Green Lantern again (while Parallax turned out to be a god of fear that had just borrowed his body).
Or Jason Todd. He started out as a circus acrobat who became the second Robin. Then he was retconned into a street punk who became the second Robin. Then he died. Then he came back as the villainous Red Hood. Then he became the anti-heroic Red Hood, which is his role in the new Red Hood and the Outlaws.
I’ve been reading comics since I was six, and when I read a one-paragraph CV like that, even I think it sounds a little much.
Scott Lobdell, the author of the Red Hood book, disagrees. His position is that you don’t learn anything about a character or a person on first meeting; people will gradually learn who Jason is, why he does what he does and how he wound up the way he is.
Which makes a certain sense. When I started reading Marvel’s Avengers, the members included Captain America (WW II hero revived from suspended animation), Hawkeye (former criminal, now reformed) and the Scarlet With and Quicksilver (former evil mutants, now reformed). I didn’t know any of that, and didn’t need to know that to follow the stories (I did gradually learn as I picked up back issues here and there).
I’m still not sure it will work. Backstories today——both as a result of years more stories and just changes in storytelling style——tend to play a much larger role than they used to. And like I said, if you’re not used to comics (and I mean comic books, not the ‘toons or the movies), Jason and Hal have a lot of history.
In general, this can be an issue for any sort of serialized storytelling. At one extreme you have, say, the James Bond films: You can watch and enjoy almost any James Bond movie without having a knowledge of his previous films. They’re self contained. Ditto Sherlock Holmes stories, most pulp adventures and many 1960s TV shows (original Star Trek for instance). Plus a lot of series detective fiction.
At the other extreme, you have stories where if you don’t start from the beginning, you’re going to be lost. Hellboy flopped for me because I started with the third mini-series and had no idea why he was fighting cyborg Nazi gorillas or who the various ghosts were; when I went back to the first Hellboy series, everything made sense.
Somewhere in between, you have stories where knowing the backstory (which includes character relationships) enhances your enjoyment but isn’t essential for it.
Some series range across the scale. My Applied Science stories are mostly stand alone, but some of them will definitely suffer if you haven’t read the others.
None of these are inherently superior, either in craft or in marketing. Stand-alone stories are obviously easier if you want to attract casual readers, or if you don’t want to be tied in to a long-running plotline. On the other hand, you can do a lot if you have three, four or more novels or short stories (or TV seasons) to tell one big story in.
Even a complicated backstory can be intriguing, inspiring readers to look up what came before. Or it can leave you feeling in the dark about character motivations and key plot points.
In cases like Red Hood and the Outlaws, DC had better cross its fingers the reaction is the former.