I think your premise is fatally flawed, in that in no way is the primary purpose of comic book stories to fit in with what came before. Put another way, you can have a story that fits in perfectly with everything else in 50+ years of publishing history, but that doesn’t make it a god story–in fact, it may make it an incredibly dull story if it’s a recitation of just how the events of now are concurrent with the events of 1964 or whatever. On the other hand, if you compose a story that touches people emotionally, the vast majority of readers are not going to care one whit that you’ve contradicted something from 1964–they’re not even going to notice it. As I tell our editors, the continuity exists to service the stories, the stories do not exist to service the continuity.
Anonymous
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Comics are basically puzzle pieces whose primary purpose is to fit in well with the previous 50+ years of puzzle pieces that came before them. A good story is one that fits cleanly into the notches left by its predecessors. When you're gone the people who take over your job are going to have to spend a lot of time and energy getting all your puzzle pieces to fit in anything resembling a coherent fashion.