People have been emailing and asking me what I think about the editorial/story implications of the DC reboot (beyond obvious snark, anyway), and I’ve been resisting the urge to talk about that because the books aren’t out yet and for all I know there are 52 works of genius coming at us every month starting in August or September or whenever this happens. Which won’t be the case, obviously, because Rob Liefeld working Hawk and Dove means there will be at least one comic coming out of the reboot which will be hilariously nigh-unreadable. But that still leaves 51 books.1
But what I can say is that looking at the solicits, the reboot looks awfully like DC wanting to have its cake and eat it too.
Here’s the thing: I understand the appeal of a clean reboot. Start from scratch. Day One of the new DC Universe. This is not a bad idea: Crisis on Infinite Earths gave DC the opportunity to do so and they largely squandered it by rebooting some titles (notably the Superman books) and letting others just sort of meander onwards (Flash, for example, was a book completely rooted in what happened in Crisis) so that the result was a bit of a well-intentioned mess. A well-intentioned mess that created some really great comics, mind you, but a mess nonetheless and one that didn’t achieve DC’s goal of simplifying continuity and creating a perfect start point for new readers across the line.
DC appears to be doing this again with the reboot, where the philosophy is, so far as I can tell, “whatever’s selling well stays more or less as is, and everything else, start from scratch as we like.” This has odd results. Damian Wayne being Robin, for example, has no place in a continuity-wide reboot, because Damian is the result of years of storytelling, but worse than that is the fact that in postboot DC, all four Robins are still around, and as they do that they’re also de-aging Batman a bit, with the result that Batman will apparently have taken in Dick Grayson as his ward at the age of eighteen or so.2 Similarly, all of the various-colour Lantern Corps are sticking around, because I guess people really like Larfleeze.3
I like Damian and the various Lanterns.4 But these are things you toss in a linewide reboot: that’s the cost of doing a reboot properly. Never mind that keeping the stuff you want to keep just embitters fans who feel like they’re losing out on stuff they like on an arbitrary basis (Barbara Gordon as Oracle, Superman and Lois being married, Secret Six, and so forth); by keeping the complicated stuff that sells better, you’re losing your “this is your start point” appeal of the reboot.
I could go on about how some of the titles also don’t just “feel” like DC comics – but that’s another post for another day.5
- Of course, the important question for DC is “can they realistically expect there to be a new audience willing to pay $150 a month to keep up with the entire DC Universe?” and the answer is “probably not, but maybe they know something I don’t.” [↩]
- This actually isn’t that bad an idea, because face it, Bruce taking in Dick was always a sort of a stupid idea to begin with and it actually makes more sense if Bruce is young and maybe a bit headstrong in making this sort of decision. But it definitely doesn’t work so well with what DC’s idea of Batman should be. [↩]
- Other than Larfleeze and Sinestro, does anybody at all care about any of the other various-colour Lanterns? Anybody at all? Maybe people like that Blue Lantern who looks like an elephant? I dunno. [↩]
- Although I think the Rainbow Lanterns are almost completely out of gas at this point and in six months we’re all just going to be sick of them; after three or four years of more or less dominating DC’s storylines it was bound to happen. [↩]
- Which will probably also involve a complaint about Superman’s terrible new costume. [↩]
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What do you think of Wildstorm and Vertigo (entrenched) characters joining the DC universe?
I still hold that the reboot is more about making a big splash when going the digital route – you might not DL all 52, but perhaps the lapsed comic read DLs 1 or 3, which is a win for DC (short-term, anyway).
However, this kind of reboot just makes me wonder how long before certain writers either 1) flip things back to the way they were, or 2) have to write through another major event that “redefines the entire core of the character. Again. For realz this time. We promise.”
@Jonathan: The Wildstorm characters in the DC proper universe seems weird to me. They aren’t a good fit, especially considering the Wildstorm mini-series where Captain Atom (?) came over from the DC universe to tell everyone off for being too mean.
Very good answer. I really wish DC had gone the Ultimate route with just a few high quality titles making a fresh start. This just looks like a mess.
Hey, Dex-Starr is awesome. But I really have a bad feeling about this reboot. I mean, I was really starting to like Batman Inc. and all that, and now… zap, rebooty call!
I would buy a comic about a flying cat destroying things, but alas that doesn’t seem to be the way they’re going with the character.
My theory is that some of the comics are taking place at different points along the timeline. They’ve announced this for Action and Superman; why assume that the Batman in JLI and the Batman in Justice League and the Batman in Batman and the Batman in Detective are all Bruce at the same stage in his life? I’m also hoping Batgirl turns out to be “untold tales of Barbara Gordon before she got shot” instead of having her and Damian be established as contemporaries.
“why assume that the Batman in JLI and the Batman in Justice League and the Batman in Batman and the Batman in Detective are all Bruce at the same stage in his life?”
Because they’ve said they want to appeal to new readers. What you described is an interesting idea but it would run counter to the stated goal of the relaunch. (Not that that isn’t keeping them from publishing multiple Batman titles, selectively incorporating aspects of existing continuity, etc. etc. – so I wouldn’t rule it out either.)
@malakim2099 Yeah, “Ruffles The Rage Kitty” was the first character I thought of, too, when he mentioned jettisoning the other Corps.
But let’s be honest: either Dex-Starr or Larfleeze could probably be made to work without the baggage of having Rainbow Corps around. Just reintroduce them with new origins that grant them similar powers to what they have now. “Angry Cat That Disintegrates People With Vomit” in particular can be done in any number of ways (see Earthworm Jim).
Jeffwik, that’s a potentially interesting idea, but it’ll be a disaster for continuity. It’ll be impossible to keep everything straight if they do that, to say nothing of how difficult that would make it to do any kind of crossover story. For me personally, that’s not so very vital; I try to be reasonable about the fact that there will be some continuity drift over the years. That’s just a fact of life. But it would defeat the alleged purpose of this reboot very quickly.
Kid Kyoto, I think some form of Ultimates lines would have been a better approach from the point of view of not alienating fans who were happy with things as they have been. (I think that originally the All-Star titles were supposed to be DC’s version of the Ultimates, but then, well, ASBAR.) But I also think UnSub is right: this reboot is about hyping up the move to digital, and launching a few Ultimates titles would not have done that.
UnSub, the problem is that DC has been trying for years now to figure out what to do with the WildStorm characters, without much success. A lot of the WildStorm characters were at one time hugely popular, and of course DC would like very much to recapture some of that success. At the same time, if it’s not currently worthwhile to maintain a separate WildStorm imprint, what else is DC to do with these characters but fold them into the mainstream DCU? (And I liked Captain Atom: Armageddon.)
I will say that while keeping the Rainbow Lantern Brigade may not be the smartest move on DC’s part, at least they’re sticking Kyle with them this time rather than Hal, which makes more sense given that Kyle is a functioning adult who knows how to work with others and Hal is a self-important asshole.
@Johnathan: Just when I thought a Bad IdeaTM could not get worse, I learned about Stormwatch. And Apollo and Midnighter. The ENTIRE point of the Authority, Apollo and Midnighter especially, was to point at the JLA, Superman and Batman especially, and shout “These characters are CENSORED ridiculous!”
“the reboot looks awfully like DC wanting to have its cake and eat it too”
Absolutely. You can’t simultaneously claim that you’re rolling your characters back to their younger, less experienced selves while saying that all the popular stories are still in continuity. (One of their editors has said that Killing Joke is still in continuity, which boggles the mind. So you jettison the surprisingly good outcome of that appalling women-in-refrigerators story–Oracle–while keeping the appalling WIF story?)
The worst part is that you know the confusion is just going to result in another decade of uninspired continuity patches and crossover “fixes”–another decade of Donna Troy and Hawkman, Zero Hour and Infinite Crisis and 52 and Flashpoint. And given most of the creators involved, I doubt we’ll even get the great series we got from the last well-intentioned mess.
Is it just me, or is the Frankenstein stuff a blatant attempt to copy Hellboy and the B.P.R.D.?
Hey, *I* like Saint Walker. There’s very few devotedly kind altruists in the DCU (after Leslie Tompkins, I’m drawing a blank), and I love that he’s written like an Army chaplain from a war story, a man of peace who is not an ounce less tough than his comrades, always seeking the better way. (I have many problems with Blackest Night, and certainly didn’t read all of it, but his scene at the end where he buries the civilian dead is genuinely moving.)
Speaking of war stories, I’ve gotta say I’m impressed that DC is actually genre-diversifying their line: September will see war, pulp adventure, fantasy, science-fiction, horror, and western comics on the stands, with seemingly minimal cape-presence. Heaven knows how good they’ll be, how well they’ll do, and how much support they’ll get from DC/TW, but I think it’s a step in the right direction.
Maybe I’m just not mature enough for funny books, but the Rainbow Brigade is a short step from All-Rainbow Pony Unicorn Pegasus Space Crime-Fighting Stories For Kittens, and I STILL don’t want to read it.
In this newest set of revisions, it really looks like Batman will have gone through four, if not five, Robins, in as many years.
That’s not a legacy, that’s carelessness.
There’s definitely something to waiting till the books come out. As it stands right now it seems a few of the solicits contradict each other; Superboy & Teen Titans comes to mind. We’re also getting wildly varied information from many people at DC which is making this Reboot/Not a Reboot thing more confusing than whether or not the Superhuman Registration Act is voluntary or not.
Teen Titans is definitely making it hard, with at least a few comments and interviews seeming to imply Tim Drake is a blogger turned hero, not a Robin specifically, but that he did figure out Bruce’s Identity so, maybe? In the end, I’d be more than happy if this turns out to be a one issue media circus to launch their version of an “Ultimates” line before returning to the universe we know, ( for certain uncertain definitions of ‘know’ after the last few reboots), but I think judging by the Green Lantern continuity sticking around, we can discount that possibility.
drmedula, it’s not just you.
well i like larfleeze (i hear daffy duck whenever i read him so…) & sinestro (who honestly was the ONLY necessary resurrection out of GL rebirth ) but as you say for jordan & beast boy, I say fuck that little dipshit damian wayne!
that said i found superboy’s new costume hilarious ( now if they bring his personnality back , i’ll be satisfied), I mean, really ? paper with duct tape?
Anyway, the moral of the story is COIE is always imitated but never surpassed, so stop trying DC…
if they are rebooting certain characters but not others, they are simply repeating the same mistakes and expecting better results. I get the horrifying feeling that this is a ruling-by-committee focused more on keeping up whatever profit margin they have without recognizing the fans’ concerns re: continuity and established mythology.
Something just occurred to me: This whole “new fans are put off by backstory” argument…how do we “know” this? Is there anything to support this, surveys, focus groups, anything?
@kaisius: The only places where I’ve ever heard that new fans are put off by backstory are comic book discussion forums, which by their nature are populated by old fans.
I’ve had a thought here: this is DC trying to bring the 90s back as well. Or thinking of the reboot through that 90s prism. The 90s was when comics boomed and a lot of what appears here reflects 90s “feel”. For instance, when was the last time Liefeld (who I have no personal objection to) was relevant to comics? Or the last time Jim Lee really made a splash with new characters / ideas?
Looking at a lot of the relaunched comics (or proposed relaunches) just feels very 90s to me. I can’t help but think that DC is looking back at the salad days and thinking if they repeat the look / feel / attitude then fans will come flocking back (even if they DL the comics rather than go into stores).
@Oneminutemonkey Batman runs the Robin position as an unpaid internship. The second they start asking for some kind of permanence, it’s on to the next one.
@RichardAK I agree. However, it is a rare character that gets folded into the DC Universe and survives on page, let along prospers. There are a few (Captain Marvel, for instance), but for every one of them there is a Milestone U that is dead and buried in the continuity.
Funny thing is I think that DC could make an Authority movie much easier than they could a JLA movie, but that’s a separate story.
Saidi, I don’t think the piece of paper with the S logo on it is part of Conner’s new costume. From the image it looks like Kid Flash put it on his back as a joke.
Maybe, just maybe this is a well thought out plan? Imagine if the current DCU is somehow trapped in a bubble universe somewhere, so that when this reboot gets rebooted, they can have another EVENT that allows the status quo to be re-established.
You never know.
Personally I am not sure why DC have chosen to do this, I really dont see the need. Geoff Johns rainbow lanterns was a cool idea that has really been a dissapointment. As was Darkest Night and Brightest Day.
I will give Morrisons Superman a read (and I really dont like the big blue, so even Morrison may not be able to keep me as a reader). Depending on what happens to the Bat family, I can see me dropping most of my current pullist.
However as was stated at the top of the article, These books have not come out yet and they may well be amazing. Yet I cant get rid of the feeling that this whole Reboot was dreamt up after a heavy nights drinking.
In other news I am enjoying most of Flashpoint and its spin offs but thats because its alternate universe stuff (even if its not supposed to be) and thats always interesting.
Hmmm…. While I absolutely agree with the main point that rebooting while keeping “the good stuff” is pretty idiotic and doomed to failure, I can actually think of a good reason to keep the Rainbow Lanterns around.
See, with any reboot of Green Lantern, you’re eventually going to have fans demanding to see Star Sapphire or the thing with the color yellow brought up, and then writers will have to think up a way to put those things into continuity while making some amount of sense and not sounding ridiculous (not always an easy task, as we have seen). If you start off, though, by saying, “Look, there are all these other Lantern corps over here, and always have been *coughcough*” you’ve got a pretty decent way to handle things built in.
Now, how you’d start up a Rainbow Corps comic that wasn’t really frontloaded with continuity, I have no idea. But I can see a reason to have them in-universe, at least.
If comics weren’t so dad-blasted expensive, I’d be tempted to pick up all the new number ones like I did with the zero issues after zero hour. Then, I’d see which ones I liked and which I didn’t before finding out that all but one of the ones I liked was going to be cancelled after six issues.
With the internet, getting into convoluted continuity is easier than ever. Kids got into Claremont X-men in droves and that was a tangled mess. The soap-operatics drew people in nonetheless.
Anyway I think DC is just using the word ‘reboot’ since it sounds more compelling than ‘big event.’ Big events have become a joke with their claims of change that amount to a few minor characters being killed most of the time.
It also lets Geoff Johns drag DC’s continuity just a little bit closer to his idealized childhood without having to write a bunch of issues of Batgirl himself.
Did you like Emerald Knights? You should watch Emerald Knights.
Y’know, the more I think about it, the more the whole “continuity and such discourages new readers” is bullshit. Kids don’t care about continuity, they just wanna see their favorite characters do cool stuff and will grow to appreciate it eventually, and older readers have any number of ways (see: the internet) of finding out what they want/need to know, not to mention just asking more experienced fans for information.
For example, two of my best friends have gotten into comics over the past year or so (one thanks to me, the other thanks to the Young Justice cartoon), and neither have had much issue with continuity or backstory; they either researched it or asked me about i; same with my younger brother. In my experience, as long as you can give people a place (or places) to start, with a maybe a general idea of where to go from there, they’ll be fine. In that respect, launching a slew of number ones isn’t a bad idea, but the changes to continuity are unnecessary and just serve to alienate the existing fanbase; in fact, the latter friend I mentioned was just complaining to me about the new changes and how they’re screwing things up just as she was getting her footing (and cancelling red robin, which she adores). Such changes can often do more harm than good.
I don’t read Green Lantern, so what’s with all the dislike of the Rainbow Brigade (is that a canon term or a fan nickname)? They seem like a great concept to me. It takes a sentence or two to explain them. “They’re like Green Lanterns, but with different colors that correspond to different emotions powering the rings. [This character] is a [Blah] Lantern powered by [blah].” It’s an easy way to introduce lots of different possible stories, conflicts, and characters. If the fans are tired of them or a writer doesn’t want to write them, can’t they just not appear for a while? I mean, Batman’s entire supporting cast doesn’t show up in every single story. Did something weird happen with the execution?
I think a lot of readers say that continuity helped to draw them in – it did with me, and the giant X-Men backstory and such – but comic fans are weird people. We are. The sort of thing that turns us on is very different from the “real” world. I think the really important thing about the whole relaunch is that DC appears to be willing to reach outside of its fanbase for the first time in decades.
Count me in as a reader who was always intrigued by continuity and earlier stories, even moreso as a kid: (American) comics just seemed like such a vast, epic saga of interlocking adventures and recurring characters, I was hooked for life. Though I do think there’s a larger audience out there for the Big Two’s properties than the current fanbase, I’m also of the opinion that the vast majority of that audience would also enjoy discovering all the weird stories leading up to whatever point they jump-on. What I do think is important (and often overlooked) is for series to be at least somewhat self-contained. There’s a large audience for serialized fiction, but an entity like HBO doesn’t create a profitably large amount of loyal viewers by telling all the really important Sopranos stories in mini-series and TV-movies separate from the main series, they understand that for an audience to invest in complex storytelling the presentation has to be clear and linear.
Oh, and TSB, to answer your question: what makes Green Lantern a cool character/concept in my book is the whole space-cop (or space-sheriff) angle, with one Lantern per sector stretching out as a thin green line of law and order across the universe, and the badge/sheriff’s star having the added bonus of being an awesome super-weapon that’s visually interesting to boot. Focusing on the powersource of said super-weapon, ie willpower, and suddenly claiming willpower is an emotion (rather than a character trait that can be fueled by everything from compassion and faith to rage and greed, etc.) and then creating all these different-colored Lanterns that aren’t space-cops, but…uh…what are they again? Okay, well, never mind, but all that shit just distracts from the true appeal of the whole beautiful, elegant Lensman-with-a-better-gimmick space-cop schtick. I mean, having Sinestro (a fascist Green Lantern gone rogue) set up a rival law-n-order franchise is pretty neat (and makes a lot of sense), but Rage Lanterns? Hope Lanterns? Love Lanterns? All with their own home planet and byzantine plan for the Cosmos? Blegh. Oh, and now they’re all teaming up to…er…learn how it takes the whole spectrum of ’emotions’ to succeed? PASS.
Prowler: I’d never thought about it that way, but when you put it like that, I have to agree with you. Especially the willpower thing – I admit that for some reason I thought Green Lanterns were supposed to be inspired by courage or something (which isn’t really an emotion either, I guess).
Honestly, I suspect this reboot is mandated by folks far higher up than Dan Didio and Geoff Johns. I’d elaborate, but many bloggers have beaten me to the punch on it.
TSB, I’m sure that if the green lantern/willpower connection weren’t so well established, they’d have made them the Lanterns of Courage, since it fits with the overall theme.
Would that have meant Link from the Legend of Zelda games was retroactively a Green Lantern?
Pardon the ramble, but I must:
The relaunch is DC admitting that the medium-term survival of the direct market is dubious and the future is in digital distribution. Which, well, yeah.
The print side of the DC house is dying, and they’ve tried all sorts of crap to get people into comic stores to revive it. Given that neither a decade or so of “Free Comic Book Day” nor a decade-plus of blockbuster movies from comic book properties has done jack squat to juice sales numbers, the DM is clearly a dead issue. Even with the hard-core fanbase it has, numbers have continued to drop for years. They can’t stop it.
And here’s the dirty truth: the content is largely irrelevant to the problem; it’s the distribution that’s killing them. The DM is terrible for attracting new customers, and is a wonderfully profitable strategy with a built-in end date.
All that’s left for print comics is to run out the clock. We don’t like to admit it, but we all know this is true.
So DC has decided that they’ll push the issue, figuring that having a lead time over Marvel in the inevitable switchover will improve their market position. Better publicity, more chance of enticing early adopters, etc. DC is an intellectual property firm with a publishing wing. This move makes total sense in that light.
The “52 series” shotgun approach also is less crazy when you consider the digital side of things. It’s not like those failed series go away, nor do they have to bother with trade paperbacks. Probably thirty of those titles will die hideous deaths early on. But they’ll live on in DC’s online library for however long that exists. If “I, Vampire” doesn’t do well at first, there’s a chance that someday, just by sitting there, it’ll end up recouping its production costs and possibly turning a profit as people here and there, in dribs and drabs, pick it up for whatever reason. (Somebody at Warner Brothers has read “The Long Tail.”) Freed from the strictures of physical printing and availability, they could, possibly, do well with a whole new model.
Also, given that the digital audience theoretically is different from the LCS-every-Wednesday crowd, it makes sense to diversify the offerings. This is what it looks like when they’re reaching out to the regular people. (Sgt. Rock? Blackhawks?)
The boldness of the move is impressive. They’re admitting that the DM is dying and can’t be saved, so they’re pushing ahead to the next big thing.
Though they’re hedging their bets really hard by making the new product so much like the old.
I’d call that a big fat mistake, but I’m just Some Jerk What Is On the Internet, so I’m probably wrong.
@The Prowler: That’s a pretty good explanation for why the whole Rainbow Lantern thing sucks.
It’s also based on bad science (people are saying now that indigo shouldn’t really count since Sir Isaac Newton threw in an extra shade of blue just so he could have seven colors for symbolic reasons and that violet shouldn’t count either since it’s too close to indigo, meaning that there’s really only five colors in the rainbow if you want to get technical).
And there’s this lazy Western culture bias that still bugs me a little. Why is red rage? Why is yellow fear? Those colors have other meanings in cultures right here on Earth, and yet for some reason most alien species apparently think like white Americans about this sort of stuff.
And why is orange greed? That’s clearly a case of having a color left over and arbitrarily assigning it to something negative just because it’s in between red and yellow.
And since when is death an emotion? That’s worse than willpower.
So… why isn’t green envy then? Or something to do with nature, since everything else is way too Eurocentric to be good science fiction?
I don’t like being reminded of mood rings from the Seventies either. And the very term “emotional spectrum” keeps throwing that one back in my face.
It’s like Johns took a simple concept that wasn’t broken and “fixed” it by creating his own version of the Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers.
I can kind of see why other people like the idea of a yellow lantern corps more than I do (if one evil opposite is good, more evil opposites should be better… or something). But Johns really should have stopped there before he got carried away.
.
This reboot is a mixture of letting go and not letting go all in the same clusterfuck.
They should just wipe the slate clean and start with 15 or so titles, including the seven core members of the JLA, and other influential figure throughout the DC Universe.