Continuity crises: Also at Ninth Art, Paul O'Brien looks at the pleasures and perils of comics continuity:

"Because of the way the audience has been trained to respond, continuity still means money. So commercial pressures lead publishers to fudge the issue. Stories with glaring continuity obstacles will be blithely asserted as canonical, regardless. On occasion, stories that aren't in continuity at all will be released without actually clarifying the point, in the hope that nobody will notice. The current PUNISHER series appears to be out of continuity, for example (it gives a completely irreconcilable version of Microchip's history). God only knows whether ROSE AND THORN is meant to be in DC continuity. I spent half an hour trying to work it out, and I was left none the wiser."