By Zach Rabiroff — Continuity is a dirty word. Sean Howe’s Marvel Comics: The Untold Story contains a quote from the turn of the millennium in which Hollywood executives scoffed at the “Talmudic continuity scholars in Marvel editorial” whose loyalty to “the holy litany of Stan and Jack” made comics impenetrable to anyone outside the Android’s Dungeon. It’s an ethos that has taken firm hold over the past two decades, as a greater commitment to the individual whims of creators and a desire to clean the slate for a new (and potentially imaginary) crop of young readers have combined to make the story of the Marvel Universe something more like credit reading than a sacred text.