DC has announced it will reboot its whole blamed universe in September, launching fifty new first issues and generally tweaking continuity to “where our characters are younger and the stories are being told for today’s audience.” I have some thoughts about this.
First, DC has done this before. A lot. You can argue that the Silver Age DC Universe was simply a massive reboot of the publisher’s Golden Age line. But more to the point, DC has attempted this “everything is starting over (well except some things)” stunt no less than four times in the last twenty-five years, in the aftermath of Crisis On Infinite Earths, Zero Hour, Infinite Crisis, and now Flashpoint. (I’m not even going to count all the times WildStorm did this stuff, all the way into oblivion.) Frankly, if it was such a good idea in the long term, they wouldn’t need to keep doing it so frequently in the short term.
The heart of the matter is that this is a very top-down, corporate approach to marketing DC comics, completely in keeping with Dan Didio’s editorial style for years now. The publisher doesn’t do what’s best for each individual title or character; rather it tries to apply one idea to all the titles and characters at once. Everything has to connect with everything else–Wonder Woman will effectively be rebooted as a spinoff of Flashpoint, a Flash storyline presaged by Time Masters: Vanishing Point, a tie-in to a Batman storyline needlessly connected to Final Crisis, a story about whatever the hell Grant Morrison is smoking, and so on. Whether Wonder Woman needed this, or indeed if this makes any sense to do with Wonder Woman at this point in time, is both unimportant and unconsidered as far as DC is concerned.
There are all kinds of problems with this sort of line-wide reboot. We know this because, as noted, DC has tried this three times before and never gotten it just right. It’s pretty clear from the press release that some continuity will be more rebooted than others, which is only a good idea if you want even more characters to be as confusing as Hawkman, Donna Troy, and Power Girl. But it’s to be expected, because you know that DC isn’t about to retcon away everything Geoff Johns has done with Green Lantern for the last six years, or tell Grant Morrison that he has to abandon the last six issues of Batman, Incorporated and start over.
So a lot of questions are left unanswered. For example, if Batman’s going to be a little younger, does that mean Dick Grayson or Tim Drake will be Robin again? And DC had better answer that carefully, lest they completely fubar whatever continuity they want to carry over in, say, Teen Titans or Batgirl. Did Hank Hall still flip out and kill Dawn Granger before becoming Monarch? If not, what happened instead, and will that story ever be told? I don’t think it’s sustainable to have a lot of illusory backstory (e.g., Black Canary was a founding member of the Justice League, the Matrix version of Supergirl never existed, etc.) floating around, because it simply creates new headaches prompting further reboots. Dan Didio, Jim Lee, and Geoff Johns don’t have answers to these questions; they’re going to leave the details to the poor sods who have to actually write most of the comics. The task of telling good stories will necessarily be secondary to world-building and bookkeeping.
Trying to launch fifty #1 issues in September is a horrible idea, best summed up by the fact that DC will end up having to market fifty #5 issues in January. (That’s assuming none of these mega-hyped titles run embarrassingly late from the outset, but I think I can safely say at least four of them will.) A better approach would be to roll out each title’s bold new direction more gradually, allowing readers time to get sold on a new Justice League series before you blitz them with three or four new Batman series. But of course, that approach would be incompatible with the “big bang” of rebirthing the whole universe from the top down, which is vital if you want to get the publishers’ names in USA Today.
Will any of this actually boost DC’s sales? Probably, at least in the short term. But who cares about the short term? It’s clearly very easy to boost sales in the short term–just hotshot some gimmick with a hot creative team or a renumbering trick or a crossover. In the long term, all this does is erode the confidence of the existing fan base, such as the readers who jumped on with the last company-wide gimmick five years ago. You can attract new readers with a reboot or a revamp, but not if you do it so frequently that people know they’re jumping onto a lame duck. The post-Crisis Flash #1 was a big deal because DC had never done anything like that before with one of their main characters. The post-Flashpoint Flash #1 isn’t going to mean anything because DC hasn’t done anything like that to the Flash since, uh…2010.
A couple of years ago Domino’s Pizza started a daring ad campaign where they admitted their pizza was shit so people would believe they really changed their recipe. I suppose it worked for a lot of people, but I haven’t ordered Domino’s ever since. I kind of liked the old recipe, and the ad campaign made me feel like a total idiot for liking Domino’s, and moreover I now cynically expect them to one day admit the new recipe sucks too. This is sort of how I feel about DC. They’re going to tell me I should get on board their hot new Superman revamp because he’s gonna be younger and more relateable, when the only problem with Superman was that the exact same peckers thought it’d be a good idea to have James Robinson and J. Michael Straczynski tell moody boring stories about Superman (and/or Mon-El) moping around doing stupid crap nobody wants to see. There are some obvious solutions to my concerns about the character (hint: maybe Superman should punch a bad guy sometime this century). But when it comes to fixing its comics, DC only has one tool, and it’s worn out.
Related Articles
50 users responded in this post
I wonder how this reboot is going to work. I can see the potential for Superman-comics. They could become more in touch with the Smallville-series; so they can wheel in the viewers who want to read more about the tv-version of Lois/Lana and chloe. But it will probably just be more of the same.
Wouldn’t the time to make Superman in line with Smallville be about, oh say, 8 years ago?
Rebooting this soon is a tacit admission that the last reboot was a failure. Yet, as pointed out, the same folks are still in charge. Why should we have any confidence in the outcomes?
Does younger mean unmarried? That would be a shame, because married Lois is a much better option than perpetual dupe Lois.
Why is it that everyone is yammering about yet another goddamned reboot that will be rendered meaningless within five years and ignoring the great big huge giant bomb that DC just dropped on the industry?
Same-day digital. Every single retailers worst nightmare has just been made flesh (well, second-worst. It’s not like Marvel has done it…yet.) And the response? “Hmm, do you think Jim Lee did a good job redesigning those costumes?”
I’m witholding judgement until I see what creative teams are on what books.
With characters going “younger”, where does this leave the characters who are already younger? What will happen to a fleet of Robins and ex-Robins, swathes of the (Teen) Titans, the current Batgirl? What about Superboy?
And then there’s the winning question of: what the hell are they going to do to the Legion of Super-Heroes THIS time?
I agree heartily with John – the same-day digital delivery is clearly a part of the reboot, and may even be the entire reason for it. If you look at the press release carefully, the discussion of the reboot itself seems the big deal, but it all seems a bit of smoke and mirrors to distract from their new digital plan. The language they use clearly implies that the distribution is the thing that they are *really* excited about.
@Seavey: Because print moving to digital in 2011 is dog-bites-man–it was inevitable and it speaks for itself. It really doesn’t make any difference to me whether I’m reading DC comics on paper or on an iPad (particularly since I don’t have an iPad). It does, however, matter a lot to me if the characters appearing in those comics bear no resemblance to the ones I actually want to read about.
Also I really hate Jim Lee’s costume designs and Geoff Johns’s writing style is beginning to grate on me, so the prospect of them rebuilding the entire DCU in their image fills me with dread.
It doesn’t make a difference to you, perhaps, but it makes a lot of difference to a comics store owner. Same-day digital is going to take a bite out of their business that will leave a lot of these guys bleeding out on the floor.
I mean, don’t get me wrong, I agree with everything you said in your post and this is going to suck donkey balls because Geoff Johns “can’t write worth sour owl poop” (to quote Harlan Ellison’s immortal words about Gene Roddenberry.) But the bigger issue to me is that DC just got the long knives out, and Marvel might not have any choice but to follow. And if Marvel and DC both go digital, it’s goodbye print comics. Not even the most indie-friendly retailer can survive without the Big Two.
Someone on SD suggested all these number 1s may be the equivalent of the 0 issues in Zero Hour and then they’d go back to normal.
Jim Smith, you’re a prince in my book. Some seriously astute analysis, especially when it concerns the role of DC editorial. Despite the reorganizations following Paul Levitz’s departure, these are indeed the same incompetents who’ve been running the ship into the ground for the better part of a decade now. How different this all feels from the heady early days of the Quesada-Jemas tandem, who over the course of two years gradually cleaned house internally, attracted new talent and revamped books, characters and concepts as needed on an individual basis. It’s all nice and well to have Jim Lee redesign fifty characters and Geoff Johns write the big guns, but what good is that going to do if they have to be drawn every month by the likes of Don Kramer and a vast legions of fill-in artists and written by Peter Tomasi and J.T. Krul? The more I think about it, the more misguided this whole reboot seems.
Ah yes, the other reason why I stopped reading monthly comics about a decade ago. (the primary being the”epic world shaking giant crossover events that occur like clockwork every damn summer”
Now days I settle for getting some trades from the library when the mood hits me, and buying a few things here and there from writers I like. The big two have been pretty much dead as creative forces for a long time now, stopping by to watch the corpse twitch is having less and less appeal every year.
John, I don’t think it’s goodbye print comics, at least not for a few years. Not everyone wants to or is used to reading comics on a tablet or a smartphone. Android doesn’t even have the specific company apps yet. To me, the routines, the format, the pricing, and the rules are still up in the air.
I’m not saying there won’t be reprecussions for retailers in the near and long term, but I predict a format change for comics themselves instead of some sort of armageddon. Maybe instead of these individual floppies, they will be bundled into similar themes, like Superman family or All the Damn X-Men Books.
So… uh… (shifts nervously) … will I be able to fill a Kindle with Doom Patrol? ‘Cause, I mean, it doesn’t have to happen all at once, but if I could…
But more seriously, I suspect I’ll care more when I see the full list of titles. I’m going to care about Superman about as much as I’ve always cared about Superman, but a rebooted Doom Patrol or Booster Gold will make me curious.
Same day digital from a big publisher, on top of ‘traditional’ booksellers carrying a wide range of TPBs, is a sign that comic shop owners need to start retraining themselves now so they can find work in the next 2 – 3 years.
Oh, and as for the same-day digital delivery…it was going to happen sooner or later. Already, any internet-savy funnybook fan can download 95% of the week’s new comics within 24 hours of them hitting the stores: you don’t think that bites into comic shops’ bottom line?
More importantly, in the more than two decades that I’ve been a comics’ fan, I’ve read endless ruminations about the shift from the newsstands and the supermarket checkouts to the direct market, and the impact it had on the industry. Now, some have argued that it was a necessary evil that couldn’t have been avoided, others blame the DM for causing the slow but steady drop in readership and the fact that too few kids are coming up behind us to sustain long-term viability.
Well, maybe this shift to digital publishing as the new standard (with maybe print-on-demand in the future and nicely designed collections of critically and/or commercially successful stories for on the shelf) is the next necessary evil, albeit one that’ll reverse the trend and allow a younger and tech-savy generations growing up now to reconnect with comics in a way everybody has been clamoring for all this time.
If that happens (and why not?), I’m not going to shed tears over a whole bunch of DM stores biting the big one. The good stores, the smart stores, the ones worthy of all the Support Your LCS initiatives over the years will survive and prosper as stores specialized in all things geek, cult and cool, while most of the casualties will be among those dimly-lit, subterranean clutterholes run by the type of socially-inept retards that give our hobby a bad name. If that’s not progress, I don’t know what is.
Does this reboot include the Legion, by chance? Because that would be hilarious.
What was the point of getting Jim Lee to “redesign” the JLA costumes? It looks like all he did was to tweak some elements here and there. Just enough to make, say, Superman lose his iconic look (WTF is with that collar) for no real benefit.
Random observations.
Were things actually better in the mid to late nineties, when titles that weren’t team books were self-contained for the most part and an ‘event’ was something that lasted for one month (Underworld Unleashed, DC1M) rather than dragging on for like a year? I remember loving that format all to hell; I could follow a title like, say Impulse, or Robin, without needing to pay attention to a lot of tie-ins, and when the monthly events happened they felt like bonuses, getting a special dessert rather than having to eat my veggies.
Or is that just nostalgia talking, the same nostalgia that makes Geoff Johns attempts to make everything exactly like it was when he was a teenager so aggravating?
@John; Speaking of Johns, it’s not that Geoff Johns CAN’T write. It’s that if he loves an established property, letting him molest it turns it to shit. His handling of original properties is strong, especially original TV properties; Titan Maximum was pretty hilarious, for example.
You’re bang-on correct about same-day digital being the big deal, tho. I can’t even hazard a prediction as to how that’ll turn out, but its damn sure a bigger deal than ‘Man, look at Wonder Woman’s costume. What the hell, dude?’
@Dane; I think it would be extremely healthy for the industry to move to producing the majority of their in the ‘giant brick of comics’ format. If it were up to me, I’d do it thusly; titles that could support it still get a glossy, collectable pamphlet.
Titles that CAN’T support that by themselves are bundled together into something like a two hundred some odd page volume of MANY different titles, printed on cheaper quality paper and not really designed to last a long time, but dramatically reducing costs compared to all those titles being put out separately. Maybe those titles would be closely related (you’d pay ten-twenty dollars for a monthly brick of ‘Ultimate Universe’) or more loosely related (DC Presents Showcase: Every JLA Second-Stringer Ever).
Characters that on their own would wither and die, occasionally appearing in the background of a huge fight, would band together and survive that way in their shared volume. You’d have to pay ten or fifteen bucks to get your fix of Manhunter, but you’d GET Manhunter, and maybe some of the seven or so other titles in her brick are ALSO awesome.
Which leads to the kicker… the characters in those bricks would also, where appropriate, all get individual, high-quality trades, printed on QUALITY paper compared to the bricks and designed to stand up on peoples bookshelves.
This means you can do things like designate one slot in a brick for a new characters experimental mini, and if its a critical success he gets a trade and a permanent slot, and if a failure you lose very little. And it means people will READ your experimental new character, because he’s in that brick with established lines people are buying anyway.
I’m sorry, did I go off on a rant? I went off on a rant.
But yeah, the digital thing? That was the REAL news.
The digital thing makes it sound like you can only get same day digital if you get a print copy in a store so it’s too half-assed to be the huge news that people make it out to be.
I’m a little worried that Secret Six and Jonah Hex (the only monthly books I still read) won’t survive the change. Then again, that’s as good an excuse to cut myself off of monthlies as any.
Some of the changes have me really scratching my head. Birds of Prey without Simone didn’t work last time and the implied new direction sounds too much like the Gotham City Sirens failure. This seems like a perfect opportunity to fix Wonder Woman … but they’re sticking with the current mess. I think it’s great that Fabian is getting a high profile book like Teen Titans … but the linewide de-aging makes me wonder who he’ll actually be able to use. The state of the Batfamily has me really worried (I’d hate to lose the new Batgirl). I don’t see how a book like Booster Gold could exist without a rich DC history to draw upon.
Oh, and then there are the obvious Legion issues.
Still, it’s nice to see Morrison on Superman again.
Is this really a Crisis-style universe reboot, with half of previous continuity being in and half being out and no real idea which is which until it comes up? I was led to believe this was an Ultimate Marvel sort of thing, if Marvel had cancelled every 616 book when they launched it.
There’s one other interesting bit in this, although it’s more of the “what the dog didn’t do in the night” style. What name is missing from this announcement, and really, anything from DC, whether comics or Hollywood, for quite a while now?
One Diane Nelson, who’s supposed to be running Warner’s DC division across the board. Since appointing the triumvirate for the comics, I can’t recall any mention of her or statements from her. Which seems a bit odd.
so, where does this leave the Milestone characters, i wonder?
On reflection, I also wonder about Milestone. And whether or not DC may not go whole hog and fold in bits of Wildstorm.
I can’t imagine why anyone would get emotionally involved in any DC title if they keep pulling this crap.
I don’t care what they do to Wonder Woman, because its going to suck as always.
I wonder how much of the emotional spectrum garbage will be rewritten, will Mogo and Dex Starr be younger versions of themselves as well? Will the Black Lanterns be written as angsty teenagers?
Will Batman begin to read like Twilight in order to “capture a younger audience”?
Well, the whole delayed Who’s Who in the DCU should hopefully cover a “what is in and what is out” in terms of continuity stuff.
Hopefully what they do is more of a “we are defining the ‘timing’ of say, Superman’s debut, the day Bruce adopted Dick, etc. Keeping most of the status quo the same, but compressing the events that led up to them so that they are more recent. So, hopefully, the Batmen, Red Hood, Red Robin, Robin scenario stays the same, with Bruce and Dick a bit younger, [maybe Bruce wasn’t very far into his career when he adopted Dick, wasn’t as old when he started being Batman, Dick became Nightwing a bit earlier, etc …]
So, that would put the big names in say their early 30’s, the original teen titans in their early 20’s, the young justice titans in their mid to late teens, etc.
JSA is a big question. If they remove them completely (and have them as ‘visitors from Earth 2) that hurts the JSA as a legacy thing (unless they launch an Earth 2 based series). It makes Superman/JLA the “founders” of the superhero movement basically.
If they keep JSA as is, there would be a longer period where heroes didn’t exist after the JSA was disbanded by congress. [Or they have to make up some ‘middle aged heroes’ that filled in during the intervening time.
Or they have to create some sort of weird situation where the JSA’s started after WW2 (which does fix the ‘why didn’t they just go after Hitler’ question without having to come up with the Spear of Destiny) Having those heroes “rise” during the 50’s, 60’s and 70’s would be strange … and could turn the JSA’s disbanding into less of a McCarthyism thing, and instead tie it into the Nixon/Vietnam era, and have it be part of an anti-authority thing. So they don’t get shut down by the government, but instead by the people.
I agree about how this discourages involvement. I just looked at the current LSH and found myself thinking it was the first time in ages I’d liked the Legion … but I don’t know there’s much point to picking i tup now.
And as the post notes, so many past Major Changes have been rebooted, the urge to pick up any of this new lineup is nil.
The Big Brick idea wouldn’t work any better for me. A bunch of different strips for a dime was fine in the Golden Age, but at today’s prices, not so appealing (I’m not a fan of the new Manhunted and I’d begrudge having to spend money on her to get someone I liked).
I’m also not sure that “everyone’s younger” is such a plus. Sure, Spider-Man was a huge hit in the Silver Age as a teenage hero, but Reed and Ben were pushing 40, Tony Stark was clearly above 30 and as a kid I figured most of DC’s super-heroes were in the same range. Didn’t discourage me.
Actually, the new Domino’s pizza is quite tasty, and although I didn’t think the old recipe was terrible, the new one is definitely better. You ought to give it a try.
Walter: “If they keep JSA as is, there would be a longer period where heroes didn’t exist after the JSA was disbanded by congress. [Or they have to make up some ‘middle aged heroes’ that filled in during the intervening time.”
Which marvel has done quite well: The First Line, the Blue Marvel, the Monster Hunters etc.
@TobyS: I try to buy my pizza from the shops that aren’t owned by far right magnates who spend a vast chunk of their fortune trying to get the government to deprive me of my reproductive rights.
@BlackBloc – Fair enough. I try to buy my pizza from quality local places, but last year I had to do pizza dinners for some kids I was responsible for and Domino’s ran some big coupon deals to promote their new recipe.
I make my political statements by warping-I-mean-shaping* the minds of the kids that I teach. You hit them in the pocketbook, I hit them in the voting booth.
*-my actual mode of talking to kids about politics is basically listening to them and then engaging them with a lot of questions about the efficacy and humanity of the positions they’re parroting. It works for both nascent plutocrats and budding communists!
I honestly thought this was a joke at first. Didn’t 52 just finish up? Wasn’t that a whole thing where they established 52 canonical universes? Like…Watchemen is one of them?
That press release reads like an April Fool’s joke by someone who speaks english as a second language. I’m really excited about the “focus on the interpersonal relationships within DC’s trademark superteam.” Man, that’ll be new.
@John, I don’t think that digital is going to kill print comics, short or long term. As long as they are priced the same I don’t see a lot of folks abandoning floppies (of course, I don’t own a kindle/ipad/nook, so what the hell do I know?).
But, damn, is Jim Lee the wrong guy to redesign DC characters, or what? He’s a fine artist, but every design looks like another Wildstorm knock-off of his 90’s X-Men run. Superman’s changes might be minor (although I bet he got rid of the red trunks, since that’s the first thing to go in any redesign. I’m shocked they didn’t give him gloves), but they’re always the wrong thing to change. Why make the god-like alien character look more militaristic? That’ll put people at ease. And I hate Sumo-Cyborg just as much as I hated Sumo-Luthor Lee created for the DC Universe game.
Sounds like the perfect jumping off point for a lot of us.
Make mine Invincible! Or the Savage Dragon! Or Orc Stain! Or basically anything that has a single writer who can follow his vision.
I can’t wait for Clark Kent to make a deal with Etrigan which causes everyone to forget that he was ever married to Lois Lane, so he can go back to the hip, swinging lifestyle of a clumsy nebbish.
@john2.0 ah but digital comics aren’t the same price as floppies – they’re about £1.19 (so just shy of $2) for a normal issue.
I’m not sure if Zero Hour or Infinite Crisis were reboots to the same level they are proposing here, so I’m not sold on the core premise of your argument. For that matter, I think the basic idea – clear out the clutter of years of stories every so often – is not an inherently bad one.
So what I’m trying to say is, I’m confident an approach like this could work. I just don’t really trust current DC to get it right. I don’t want to see the damage done to new heroes in yet another attempt to restore the glory days, and I suspect that is exactly what will happen.
Also, I feel similarly about Dominos. Or, rather – I liked their old pizza, and find the new one almost completely inedible. The actual commercials about how bad their pizza was… well, didn’t really offend me, just struck me as silly.
@Enlight: According to MGK, and other media I’ve seen on the subject, the same-day digital comics will be the same price as the floppies.
But, again, I don’t buy digital comics, and I don’t have a pull-list either, so I might be wrong.
Thank God I gave up on DC years ago.
Aw, fuck you Geoff Johns.
@BlackBloc and @Toby S.
I try to make my own pizza instead of buying it. 😉
(and actually, I do fairly well at it, if I do say so myself)
As for the reboot, if they don’t completely scrap their existing universe and start over, they’re just making the same mistake they made with Crisis, and they’ll have the same problems within five years, if that.
And Smith is absolutely right (and the only writer I’ve seen to make this connection): the Silver Age was merely a reboot of the Golden Age. The difference is that the Silver Age writers actually had the courage to create versions of the Flash, Green Lantern, Hawkman, and Atom that had nothing to do with their predecessors. If the core seven of the revamped Justice League aren’t the same character concepts as the current ones, I’ll be shocked.
I’ve heard the Silver Age cited as the original reboot before. But I don’t think it’s comparable. DC had no super-hero universe at that time except for Supes, Bats, WW and their backup features. Even though some fans still remembered the Golden Age versions, it wasn’t the same as getting an issue of All-Star Comics and discovering the JSA had been replaced by the JSA.
I think DC’s Silver Age superhero revival is comparable in the sense that if it happened today–if DC simply replaced all its books with westerns and then a decade or more later finally brought back Green Lantern but it’s a completely different concept–fans would be extremely disappointed that the old concept is being abandoned. That disappointment would be comparable to what people experienced with the post-Crisis revamps, I think. I couldn’t tell if you if Alan Scott fans in 1959 were just as disappointed by Hal Jordan (I would imagine they pragmatically took whatever they could get) but I think the transition from one version of a property to another is always at best bittersweet, no matter how gradual the transition is.
I don’t suppose the DCU’s Flashpoint will feature Amy Jo Johnson, will it?
Sometimes, I hate being right. I knew things would get like this back when Infinite Crisis was coming out.
I was just hoping DC would take longer to get to the “stick a fork in it, our monthly comics are done” point so that sanity might prevail and somebody might finally take creative control away from DiDio and Johns before it was too late.
What they need to do is get rid of Johns and DiDio and then do an event where it turns out that everything for the last ten years or so happened in some weird parallel universe. And then make some sort of pledge that nobody will lose a hand or get raped for at least a year.
Same day digital delivery’s been around for years.
It’s just that now DC wants people to pay them three dollars for it.
They’d better not permanently renumber Action Comics. I want my #1000!
Hear, hear.
I still more than half believe that DC will use the Superman clone idea from Morrison’s All-star to “remove” troubling portions of the origin that they will have problems with due to pending litigation.