It’s a crazy thought. Honestly, I think it’s a crazy idea to even try, because I think that reboots eventually necessitate retelling of old stories because a character is more than the sum of his or her origin. (You couldn’t even write a completely clean “Hawk and Dove”, for example, because the character of Hawk is defined by the loss of his brother and having to deal with the rage and grief that he can’t control, and the character of Dove makes this explicit by never quite fitting into his life the way that his brother did. So either you have to rush through Don’s career and retell his death, or you’re not really rebooting the character.) But if I did it, acknowledging the fact that it’s crazy and unworkable and probably in the long run not that commercial (yes, the #1 issues are selling well. #1 issues always sell well. Call me in a year when it’s gone down to “The DC 37!”) …then here’s what I’d do.
1) It wouldn’t necessarily be a shared universe. I know that I’ve argued passionately in favor of shared universes, and as a general rule I’m in favor of them because they make coming up with story ideas easier, but I really do think that this is something I’d take a long hard look at before I signed off on it. MGK had a long and excellent post about how some characters don’t belong in the same universe, and if you’re restarting everything from scratch, this is one of those things you can decide not to do. Batman seems a lot less like a crazy person living out his childhood revenge fantasies when you don’t have to keep explaining away why he doesn’t just recruit a couple dozen superheroes with actual powers to help him keep the peace in Gotham. Adam Strange became an explicit nightmare to write once you had to start trying to figure out ways to keep him away from Rann in a shared universe where every third person had a spaceship. And so on…it might be fun to organize the universes by thematic consistency.
2) It would be more ethnically diverse. There really is no reason, apart from nostalgia and white male privilege, why the Big Seven heroes of the DC Universe should be six white guys and a white woman. Aquaman could have a look more reminiscent of a Pacific Islander, while Green Lantern could be Chinese. Wonder Woman could actually look like she comes from Greece instead of having classically WASPish features, and the Flash could be Hispanic. Really, the only one of them that should be a white male is Batman, because his origin is tied up in being Gotham “old money” and the sense of struggling against a background of white male privilege that didn’t save his parents from being mugged and killed informs the story. But yes, even Superman could be any ethnicity you wanted him to be.
3) It would break with tradition. Not so much in the specific details of the stories; the last thing you want is gimmicky “You thought Sinestro would be a bad guy, but in this reality, it’s Kilowog who gets a yellow ring!” twists. But honestly, the usual stable of reliable comics pros are the last people you want writing these series. Get some people who aren’t big comics fans, writers who come out of a different background and aren’t as likely to want to get their favorite stories back into continuity. The original Crisis benefited greatly from having people who were writers first and fans second picking up the reins after the universe changed, and a new DC Universe needs more Alan Moores and fewer Grant Morrisons. (And yes, Grant Morrison is a traditionalist. Anyone who thinks Grant Morrison is constantly innovating and coming up with new ideas just hasn’t read enough Silver Age comics to know what stories he’s homaging.)
4) It wouldn’t just be a bunch of superhero books. This is one thing they’ve done pretty well in the new DC Universe. There’s a fantasy series, a few horror comics, some war stories…we’re still light-years away from the era where only a few superheroes could carry their own books and Jerry Lewis was a major seller, but they made an effort. There’s still room for improvement, though. A relaunch of Adam Strange wouldn’t hurt, for example.
5) It would actually be a reboot. Despite claiming that this is a fresh new start and a jumping-on point for new readers, the DC Universe is picking up about five years into the story, and furthermore, it’s very clearly picking up where the old universe left off in a lot of cases. It’s hard to even pretend that the “new” Green Lantern isn’t meant to be just a continuation of the old, and Hawk and Dove is more or less taking Brightest Day as a part of its continuity…and that says nothing of the fact that Batman is on his fourth Robin in five years. DC either wants new readers to feel welcome or it doesn’t. “Rebooting” while keeping the same convoluted storylines and lack of exposition is the worst of both worlds. (OK, that was just blatant editorializing.)
That’s for starters, at least. Any thoughts on how you’d reboot a 75-year old comic book universe? Share them in the comments!
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Rule one- Dead is dead is dead. Nothing and nobody comes back. This is what legacy characters are for.
Rule two- Time advances. Might be at a wird pace but time goes on, people get older, they move on to other things.
Rule three- Stories have structure. They are plotted. Each hero has a beginning a middle, a high point, a resolution and an end.
Rule four- no hero can be reset to square one. No bringing back Barry, no back tracking Hal, no retuning Jean Gery for 948th time since last tuesday. This stops nostalgia freaks rewinding the continuity, bringing back the honored dead, or having the devil broker divore-abortions.
The first thing I’d do in any Reboot is simple; I would finish the last one.
Closure is important in any story, and I don’t just mean finish the arcs. Though the arcs they left hanging are a major issue. I would want to give these heroes a proper send-off. The closure of their story in a way that makes sense for them and gives them the respect they deserve. They may still go on fighting after, they’re heroes, of course they will, but we should at least feel complete at the end of it.
This really was DC’s big chance to give their decades old continuity and the characters involved their very own Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow. It’s just wrong to leave these characters without some proper resolution. I get that they weren’t going for a true reboot, but that just makes this whole mess more confusing. I would have rather they wrapped up the old Universe and brought in the new one. I would have at least felt DC cared about the characters as more than just brands.
I hate to say it, because I’ve never been a Marvel fan, but the only way to do a reboot on the scale that you’re talking about is to do something like Marvel did with the Ultimates series. Establish a continuity outside the continuity. That way you can tinker with origins/ethnicities to your hearts content without having to care about what the die hard fanboys think.
For starters, if I were going to start everything five years after superheroes went public (which isn’t entirely a bad idea), I’d kick thing off with a six-part mini-series to get everyone up to speed, starting with Clark Kent’s arrival in Metropolis (with the first issue ending with Superman saving Lois Lane), and ending with the Justice League forming. (I’d lead into it with a quick online teaser detailing the week about 30 years ago when Superman’s ship landed, Bruce Wayne’s parents were killed, and Hypolyta prayed to the gods to animate a certain clay doll (or gave birth to the “love child” she had with Hercules; I haven’t decided yet).) I’d keep the Big 3 basically the same, but play up Wonder Woman’s classical Greek features (I agree with you on THAT point, at least). I’d more or less stick with the Silver Age origins of a few other key players, but with a few tweaks here and there (f’r instance, I’d have Ollie Queen lose his fortune while he’s trapped on the island, so the growth of his social conscience goes hand in hand with his origin). For a lot of the minor characters, I’d probably take the Tangent approach, and start with the name only, and change everything else.
I’d rewrite the backstories that worked in 1938 but are just grandfathered in today. In 2011, the Waynes would never have got within a mile of Joe Chill, Clark Kent would never have joined a mainstream newspaper, and so on. I haven’t worked out exactly what to replace them with, but there must be some modern equivalents.
@Gareth Wilson: You’re forgetting, the Waynes would’ve been shot in the early-to-mid 80’s. I can see it happening then. (And Clark Kent wold probably be working for a cable news outlet, which would make a nice homage to his GBS days in the early 80’s.)
I don’t think the 5 years old thing is, per se, a bad idea. It means that, when we get things rolling our characters’ realtion to the public is more or less the way it’s going to be.
I agree with The Crazed Spruce, though. I’d start up with a limited series (6 to 12 parts) called somethig like “New DC Origins” or “New DC: The Beginning” to sumarize the first 5 years. That’s where I’d tell the main heroes and villains origins.
Fair enough. I suppose you could have a kind of reverse “Bonfire of the Vanities” situation. As for Clark Kent I’m not sure that if you created him today that he’d be any kind of journalist.
But de-journalisting Clark would be tough, as it’s one of the few backstories non-comics fans know.
I think you’re overcomplicating Hawk and Dove. They were around (even if not regularly) 15 years before Don died so I don’t see why Don’s death is integral to the character (their creator obviously didn’t think so). Though I think something like their B&B appearance (where their 30something and still locked in their late-sixties belief systems) might be more interesting than doing teenagers.
But I do agree that you’re going to get a lot of retreads of old stories, much the same way that new writers in the 1970s would reuse old villains–it’s a way to test their sense of the material and find how they’d do it differently.
I’m still scratching my head over Green Arrow? If they’re going to go retro, I’d think there’s more nostalgia for the radical firebrand than the millionaire Bat-clone
I like The Crazed Spruce’s idea, with the minor modification that the rebooted titles would start in the same month as the expository mini-series. The idea would be that the titles themselves are done-in-one stories with the occasional two-parter cliffhanger which show the character in action, whilst the mini series and eventual trade tells the origins of the heroes and their team-ups.
I would like to have, for example, a Justice League #1 where the team actually gets together by page 22.
I think putting Moore and Morrison on different ends of a Traditionalist – Innovator spectrum does both a disservice; both of them have filled both roles at different points in their careers, and in any case what makes either of them interesting has very little to do with that spectrum at all. (Also the shared universe superhero work of either is among their least interesting work).
Bringing in writers from a non-superhero background is a good idea because those writers will have ideas and preoccupations that go beyond the regular superhero obsessions.
Honestly the most sensible thing for a DC reboot would be for them to start acting like a proper publisher, with the superhero IP-farm being reduced to a few books, and the rest being creator owned work.
The thought of Wonder Woman with a Ptolemy nose makes me grin like a madwoman. And thanks for making me remember Sunshine Superman (the character, not the song)
Sorry for being so damn wordy, but I’m going to be so damn wordy. (I love all of Seavey’s five — these would be additions.)
Fun is not a dirty word. Comics should be enjoyable. Each and every issue should be fun for the reader. Not one comic will be published to “address continuity questions” or be a joyless slog to extend a story arc or any other dead weight. Far, far too many comics of the last era were joyless and alien to the concept of fun. That era is over. It will not be mourned.
The rebooting of the DC Universe is not an excuse to retell “classic” stories with a modern veneer. You are not in a cover band. Write originals. Exceptions are allowed for origin stories. Which will not be done to death, thank you.
Not every character should be a retread. Yes, you’re being given a very full toybox to play with. That’s no excuse to not create fresh toys. Superman needs Luthor, yes, but he could get a lot of mileage out of conflict with the Masters of Reality or Summanus, the God of Night Thunder.
Sexual violence is not an acceptable story element. Late-period old DC (and Marvel) worked in an astonishing amount of rape and sexual degradation of women. That’s over. While it is possible to write great stories using sexual violence, and it can be done with skill and sensitivity, it seldom was. Striving for “realism” or, worse, “badassitude” by introducing these elements is pathetic. Those stories read like angry little men venting their hostilities towards women. Should you have that hostility within you, sublimate it into the superhero idiom, rather than apply it directly. Look, we’re creating stories about men and women in bright-colored spandex flying through the air and solving their problems by punching giant robots. We’re deep into the realm of metaphor. Work with that in mind. Much of the best work in the medium was created when baser urges and anger was shaped by art into different forms. Sublimate, sublimate, sublimate.
The Bechdel Test. A few comics should pass this test each month. Editorial won’t force it on anyone. There’s no penalty. But keep it in mind.
Think movies, not sitcoms. Late-period DC centered its appeal on immersion. Readers would use the comics to create a mosaic of a fictional world, and would immerse themselves within it. They were expected to enjoy the sheer act of hangin’ with the heroes, like how sitcoms are primarily about the viewers spending time with their “teevee friends.” This approach is dead. Comics are for stories, where readers are expected to enjoy them because they contain gripping starts, middles, and ends. Think of movies. The “immersion experience” takes too many comics to work, which drives away only the most hardcore fans, and comics aren’t good at it anyway. World-building is a nice side project. It is not the core one.
Tone down the cheesecake. We’re looking to pick up more female readers. To avoid turning off that demographic en masse, cheesecake is to be toned down from current levels. Sexiness is fine, too much skin is not. Ass shots and “boob socks” are not welcome. And Wonder Woman wears pants now. Let’s not have our biggest and most important heroine continue running around in a swimsuit, shall we? The loss of appeal to the horny fanboy set will not likely dent sales much; the increase of appeal to the fangirl set should more than make up for it.
I don’t follow comics thoroughly enough to have an educated opinion on how to reboot (read: I have rarely read comics and acquired most of my comics knowledge from movies, Wikipedia, and blogs like this). However, I can see that time period would be a crucial thing to address. John says that Superman’s race is mutable. If Superman first appeared in the 1930’s, that would be the opposite of true unless you wanted to tell a very, very different story (as fanfic writer fresne does brilliantly here). On the other hand, if you wanted to start from scratch in a contemporary society, you have to imagine a universe where no one has the concept of “superhero” pre-set or you have to imagine where the concept of “superhero” would come from sans Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman et al.
So if I were rebooting iconic series, I’d probably want to do something drastic and relegate all (or at least most) heroes to a fictional-universe-within-the-universe and imagine what happens when a few eerie analogs start showing up in the “real” world. How well would not-Clark Kent operate if everyone expects superheroes to have a secret identity? How much could you twist the character to where the readers can recognize the same archetype without the in-universe characters saying, “Hmm, I wonder if this dark vigilante is better known as a wealthy playboy with a tragic past?” How many characters would I want to grandfather in as always-there? (“Well, actually, Aquaman is very loosely based on real stories of Atlantis – someone dropped Hints to the comics-writers because they were tired of comics revolving around surface events only.”)
And I really like Fawkes’ idea of finishing the old one. The only reason to reboot should be a dead end for the un-rebooted storyline; give it the respect of finishing and ending.
I agree with Fawkes. End the old series. Give the creators a year to wrap things up. Bring the stories to an end. Full stop. Period.
Then, breathe. Wait a month. Begin anew. And when you begin again, stick to one series per character for the first year.
Commercially that’s probably suicide and I know a lot of folks would hate it but that’s probably what it would take to get me to read start reading superhero comics again. The endless continuity and need to pay attention to multiple series is more than my tired old brain wants to deal with. These days I read stand alone graphic novels or manga because I like having all the story in one place.
BR’s points are awesome (except I’m a rabid defender of Wonder Woman’s classic costume, which is perfectly dignified if you’re not constantly calling attention to it).
Grant Morrison is indeed an innovator, it’s just that a lot of his innovations (mostly in the last few years) reference Silver Age stuff, but they go well beyond “homages”. And stuff like Doom Patrol was always mostly original. Lately I think he’s been writing to what he perceives superhero fans want, but I don’t think that’s where his inclinations lie.
El Acordeonachi makes a good point too. The reason why this reboot, and many of the ideas being thrown around here, aren’t really good for new readers is that they’re too self-conscious about being reboots. A comic truly intended for new readers would just matter-of-factly present a new, accessible story with its own, comprehensible continuity (every story ever written has “backstory”, you don’t need to constantly start at the beginning to introduce the concept of superheroes, we’ve all seen the movie. It’s only the really bizarre stuff like what’s happened to Supergirl in the last few decades that would bewilder new readers, and that’s the kind of stuff you can rework).
Really, I think it’s not the “shared universe” that needs to be dropped so much as the idea of book-to-book continuity. That was never a big thing in the DC universe until Marvel became a player, and it’s always been an ill fit. So I say, give each book its own continuity. Have Batman’s own book be set in a world where he (well, and his Robins and Batgirls and so on) are the only superheroes. Then when he shows up on Justice League, he can live in a world where he used their help to clean up Gotham City, and that’s why he can spend all his time tackling cosmic threats with the JLA. You can even let certain elements of his story fall by the wayside as needed–people used to do it all the time. No one needed a continuity fix for The Batman of Zur-En-Arrh, it just didn’t need to be referenced for decades until Grant Morrison dug it up and did something interesting with it. Then the next writer could forget it as well. My point is, stop trying to pretend these decades-long stories written and drawn by dozens of different people have some coherent master plan, and just accept that continuity changes for every new writer and book.
Oops, I blockquoted myself by accident. That was supposed to be in response to John’s comment that “Superman could be any ethnicity you wanted him to be.”
The only reboots I’ve ever seen that have worked are what I call “inline reboots.” I can’t think of one ever used in comics, but I can cite two examples from television — Star Trek: The Next Generation and Doctor Who. In both cases, rather than restarting the story by going back to square one, the creators simply took advantage of the time lag between the old series and the new and had time pass between the end of the first volume and the start of the second.
I don’t see why that couldn’t be done in comics, although the lag time between “volume 1” and “volume 2” might need to be more conceptual than literal, as in all the comics stop at the end of the December issue, and the January issue picks up 5 years later. Even so, I think it would be the best way to go.
The more I’m reading these new titles the more I think DC should have gone with a full reboot. Start from a clean slate with everybody and do something innovative. I think they did a great job of convincing everyone that this relaunch/revamp was a good idea, but then they’ve half-assed the whole thing. Some books like Green Lantern and Batman didn’t get touched, while some like Superboy and Green Arrow are getting major revamps. It’s more than a little confusing and the pieces are fitting awkwardly together.
So yes, they should have done Ultimate DC.
I’m probably a bigger fan of deeply connected community than most of y’all here, so it’s not surprising that I’d go a slightly different route and Reboot the DCU into a long-standing multigenerational story, with characters appearing more or less the same year their original books came out. (So we’re on Superman’s grandkid as the main powerhouse now, and probably the third Batman as well. Probably in both cases the original is still around as elder statesmen but the middle one died somewhere in the nineties.)
And there books wouldn’t all be set in the present, either. Maybe about 20-25% would go there, with the rest of the books set in the time period that actually makes sense for the character or group.
(I’d lean towards a ‘every good story happened unless there’s a really good reason why it couldn’t’ attitude towards building the ~100 year continuity, have roving continuity editors empowered to overrule writers when necessary, and within that encourage people to go wild with cross-timeframe foreshadowing stuff and some time-travel-based crossovers once every two or three years or so.)
1) Fire everyone.
2) Replace them all with talented young up-and-comers who haven’t been able to hold a steady job since graduation, and know next to nothing about the DC Universe and mainstream comics in general. Make sure at least 40-60% of the staff are women, and that +/- 50% of the staff are mentally healthy.
3) Think up a list of 52 titles, regardless of any previous influence such as sales numbers, popularity, etc.
4) Assign everyone to three or less of the 52 titles via a lottery.
5) Carefully arrange conditions so that none of the writing & editing staff can be simultaneously working AND sober at any one time.
6) Make sure the artists fully understand that they have complete control over the page structure as they see fit, and that the only essential part of the scripts are the amount of pages and the dialogue.
7) Prevent the marketing teams from having any power over what is published and how it is published, above the level of one or two helpful suggestions.
8) Make no official announcements until the month before any of it happens. Send some deliberately misleading hints to any and all comic book news and rumour sites.
9) State that anyone who tries to kill off a character and/or bring a character back from the dead without justifying the move in a full report to the Editor-in-Chief will be fired instantly.
10) PROFIT, MOTHERFUCKER
The Daily Planet has absolute journalistic integrity. It can in no way whatsoever be considered a “mainstream” newspaper these days. 😛
My reboot… would be one in which Clark, Bruce, and Diana were all legacy characters.
“Iron” Munro was the Golden Age Superman, and never got beyond the leap-tall-buildings power level. In the Seventies or Eighties, he acquired a sidekick — “the Superboy from Krypton,” who rapidly eclipsed Munro in power and eventually took his retired mentor’s place.
Hippolyta was the GA Wonder Woman, but without any time travel shenanigans thank you very much John Byrne. Diana may be Steve Trevor’s daughter in this version, haven’t decided yet.
The first Batman was Kent “Who knows what evil” Allard. There have probably been at least two Batmen in between him and Bruce.
(All the other old standards follow the Golden Age – Silver Age succession established post-Crisis, albeit with the time frame somewhat altered. Wally is the current Flash.)
Clark, Diana, and Bruce thus come into their mature identities as highly trained individuals, heirs to eighty-plus years of heroic experience, and used to working with each other and other supers. They probably formed the nucleus of a Teen Titans group before establishing/inheriting the Justice League.
What would I do? I’m not sure what I’d do about the ageless, sliding timescale, comic book time thing – my personal reaction is to say that I dislike it and would love to see time passing in real time, but I seem to remember reading an interesting defense of the concept on this very blog somewhere or other – but whatever policy I choose, I’d make it line-wide and stick with it for good, or at least until the next reboot. No characters like John Constantine or Frank Castle who are theoretically in the same universe as everyone else so it’s too bad that they’ve aged more than everyone else. No teens aging cyclically as writers keep on giving them adult love lives and character development, but when a new writer gets their hands on the character they’re back to being a 14-year-old like when they were introduced. Either everyone ages, and at the same rate, or no one does. (Personally, I think it’s only really a problem for child characters, but this is getting complicated enough for a blog post all its own.)
I’d allow power levels to change over time. (This, too, I’d try to be pretty strict and careful about.) This kind of thing can be seen in Watchmen, and in the Golden Age/Silver Age dichotomy. I agree with Seavey that there’s a bit of tension in having Gotham Batman and JL-Batman in the same universe… but sometimes you want Gotham Batman to encounter someone like Superman. Here’s the explanation, or at least a spur-of-the-moment one: the street-level characters came first, but after a certain amount of time more powerful characters developed and street-level characters’ careers ended, or at least they stopped making a difference. If you really need to do a first meeting between a street-level and a cosmic-level character, then do it by flashback or something.
DC gave themselves 52 universes back in 52, and didn’t really do anything with them. One of them should have been an Ultimate DC universe, build it up organically, and if it overtakes the original, let it.
Let the old universe age, and at some point give the heroes an ending. Retire, pass on the mantle, settle down and have kids, die saving puppies from a burning building, whatever is most appropriate for the character.
Batman should be killed by some stupid street punk. He faces danger every time he goes out there, and his luck has just got to run out. Yeah, sure, someone gets saved, but he should die at the hands of some no-account hood, like his parents did.
About the dead is dead rule, sorry here’s a better one ; here’s a simpler one, DON’T KILL THE FRIGGIN CHARACTER IN THE FIRST FUCKING PLACE! Or better yet , if you must do it, GIVE SAID CHARACTER A VERY BADASS, WONDERFUL, AWESOME SEND-OFF & ACTUALLY A CORE PART OF THE DAMN STORY!
“no retuning Jean Gery for 948th time since last tuesday”
1 Jean dies all time is one of the most annoying misdirected cliches & the biggest load of BS since Hank the wife beater shit.( & from what I’ve read none of them deserve these accusations) If you say Magneto instead , we have a deal!
@ BR:Now these are perfect points… but what ‘s a Bechdel test? Does it concern the survival potential of a title?
The Bechdel Test. Which is a great rule of thumb for a factor that concerns the survival of comics. Although if anyone started using it as a strict test instead of a rule of thumb, it’d probably be worse than useless.
I have no problem rehashing certain stories that have already been told and putting a modern spin on them as long as they meet certain requirements.
An origin is important to a character but not all characters are best remembered for their origins. It’s a cliché but the journey is often the important part. It’s okay to showcase Batman’s perseverance by retelling a story where he comes back from the death of a partner. Or being crippled by a villain who proved to be too much for him. Or the destruction of his city. Either you reference these things or you show them because they shaped who the character is. Just give it a little time if you’re going to show them because …
It is NOT okay to retell a story (even an origin) that you JUST told a few years ago. The current Blue Beetle has little enough back-story that you can get away with doing a quick recap of his last series while explaining (or just ignoring) any weird continuity discrepancies as you go along; telling the same story you told five years ago with minor tweaks is a shameless money grab. As much as I hate to admit it, Action Comics falls in here too. I generally enjoy Grant Morrison’s Superman (more so than I enjoy Grant or Superman separately) but I’d rather see him do something NEW with the character. How many times has Superman’s origin been revisited in the last ten years? Didn’t Secret Origins retcon AND the Earth One reimagining just come out last year? If bookstores still existed I’d wish them good luck moving their unsold copies of Birthright.
Lots of ideas here I personally would like to see, but I’m pretty sure the only one that resembles a legitimately proven money-making plan is MisterBug’s.
Also the recent Starfire* controversy got me thinking; I actually don’t mind when they do new things with characters but they shouldn’t totally abandon what was successful. Classic comic Starfire is a marginally popular character. Cartoon Starfire is a HUGELY popular character. DCnU Starfire should have been more like cartoon Starfire. Instead they took a one aspect of classic comic Starfire (she’s very comfortable with her sexuality), turned it up to 11 (making her a slut), threw away everything else, and learned nothing from their highly successful Teen Titans cartoon.
(At least the Static they introduced to the DCU a few years back seemed to be a combination of the Milestone one and the cartoon one)
*Incidentally, I’m a bit puzzled by the LACK of controversy RE Roy Harper. They clearly have no idea what made that character special either.
First and Foremost:
You never, ever, in a million years, change Superman’s suit.
EVER.
You can change his race, you can change whatever else you want, hell, you can even make Clark Kent not a reporter (Supercop might be interesting), but you do not. fuck. With the super suit.
Batman’s suit can change. Hell, it’s changed multiple times over the last three quarters of a century.
Green Lantern’s suit will stay pretty much the same, except for the times where it wasn’t.
I’m not a fan of changing Wonder Woman’s suit because I’m a traditionalist and a chauvinist pig, but I’ll allow it.
The Flash is allowed costume changes, if only because that helmet was a little silly.
I don’t care if you think Supes’ underwear-outside-of-his-pants looks stupid, I don’t care that you think his cape is impractical, you keep it the way it was when he first debuted in Action Comics #1.
Yeah… You can’t really mess too much with Batman or Superman (although I love the idea of Superman being Iron Munro’s former sidekick) because there are generations of people who still expect them to be like the traditional versions that everybody remembers.
But still… If we really wanted to make Superman more realistic, he would have gotten laid off by the Daily Planet about eight years ago and he would now be in business for himself with some kind of blog or Internet start-up. Or reduced to freelancing for an Associated Content-type site while he works on a novel.
“I used to be an award winning cops and crime reporter. Now I write four articles a week for Salon.”
Something like that anyway…