[JohnBooty]

Either decision is kind of rough, artistically.

Ditching existing canon often kind of sucks for all the reasons you said.

On the other hand, when you have reams and reams and reams of existing canon you kind of write yourself into a corner. Imagine writing a new Batman story and needing to cross-check it against all existing Batman material ever written to make sure you haven't contradicted anything. If every Batman story ever written was canon I'm sure we'd have every second of his life accounted for already! So at some point I think you just have to throw some of it overboard...