Recently I said that Marvel and DC have two different storytelling paradigms: DC’s is fantastic and Marvel’s pseudorealistic. Marvel heroes work best when the essential ludicrousness of their situation isn’t ignored, and the humdrum problems of everyday human life intrude: Spider-Man has to hustle to keep a job or a girlfriend, Iron Man has to be paranoid about staying on the wagon, the Fantastic Four squabble with one another as families do, Hank Pym has to remind himself “don’t beat up any women today,” and so forth. Even someone like Captain America, who’s pretty close to morally perfect, grapples with temptation from time to time, even if in Cap’s case that temptation is usually “be too proactive in doing good.” And generally speaking, Marvel’s pseudorealistic tone works across the line.

Except for Dr. Strange, and this is why, I think, so few writers these days are capable of cranking out a truly great Dr. Strange story. Dr. Strange isn’t conflicted. Dr. Strange isn’t on the hero’s journey. Dr. Strange left Joseph Campbell behind a long while ago: he’s a character who entered the superheroic stage fully formed. He’s already finished his hero’s journey. He has overcome his flaws. Dr. Strange doesn’t attend AA meetings for his drinking problem because he no longer craves booze; he doesn’t need rage therapy for his anger issues because he’s already solved them. He doesn’t fear his own death, not even a little bit. His only flaws, such as they are, are essentially virtues writ large: a stubborn refusal to give up in the face of overwhelming odds is not exactly a detriment to one’s character.

This should not be surprising. Dr. Strange only begins his run as a superhero after he has trained for years with the Ancient One. Quite possibly longer than years, in fact – years to us, maybe, but time can be subjectively manipulated in the right hands or right places. His studies probably lasted for decades or even centuries. On top of that Dr. Strange has been to war alongside the Vishanti, a war that lasted for over a thousand years. He doesn’t look old, because he chooses not to – but he is old, and with age comes perspective and acceptance.

Now, I understand that for some people this is a minus. These are the same people who think Superman is boring because he has no flaws, and that’s a perfectly valid opinion. Wrong, mind you, but perfectly valid. Flaws do not define a character or make him boring: bad writing does that. Flaws don’t make interesting stories: conflict does. Flaws just provide one type of internal conflict; choices present another, and the best stories involving Superman and Dr. Strange are about the choices they have to make. (Or about external conflict, which is heaps of fun.) Superman has the “can’t save them all” story, which gets reused regularly (and is vitally important for understanding the character); Dr. Strange has the “must condemn someone to save the world” story (same).

Really, the good Doctor is the Marvel Universe’s equivalent of Superman in so many ways: he’s the 800-pound gorilla of superheroing in his continuity, the guy who, if he shows up in practically any other title, outclasses everybody else when he’s being written right. (Which is rare.) He’s a source of near-infinite compassion, which is his true superpower when you consider that he is more or less a god walking among men. And all of this, incidentally, just demonstrates how pointless the Sentry really was: the Marvel Universe never needed a Superman analogue, because it already had one.

I normally don’t post things that overtly disagree with MGK, because he’s gracious enough to let me use his site and the much larger audience it provides, but after reading his post on DC and Wildstorm I felt that a different perspective might be warranted. Because while he thinks it’s yet another mistake in a DC relaunch that at this point couldn’t be much worse if they made Batman into a wisecracking dog, I actually feel like it’s the one sensible thing they’ve done in the entire mess and I wanted to offer my thoughts as to why.

The reasons are rooted in the basic concepts behind a shared universe: People want to see their favorite superheroes team up, and they will pay money for the privilege. Sure, it’s crass and mercenary and treats these characters as though they were nothing more than a commodity to be exploited…but it’s also true. When Character A teams up with Character B, it attracts the fans of both characters. As such, there is a strong incentive to make it as easy as possible for characters to bump into each other and have team-ups, fights, and generally interact.

MGK feels that there are limits to that concept; the DC Universe has a certain tone, he argues, that gets disrupted if you try to bring in heroes who are too disparate from the “core” DC characters. You can’t have a grim and gritty vigilante like Wild Dog or Vigilante, or a roguish hitman like Hitman… (a hitman named Hitman and a vigilante named Vigilante. Never let it be said that the heroes of DC don’t have a flair for evocative names…) because it’s difficult to believe that they could be part of the same universe as Batman and Superman.

The problem with this should be obvious: They are part of the same universe as Batman and Superman. So are the Secret Six, the Suicide Squad, Checkmate, the Doom Patrol…hell, it could be convincingly argued that the post-Year One Batman is so disparate in tone from the rest of the Justice League that it’s honestly harder to believe that Superman would team up with Batman than with Gen13. DC’s tone of light-hearted fantasy superheroic adventures has always had cracks in it that led to a seamy underbelly that somehow escaped Superman”s notice, even if you somehow forget that until 1993, John Constantine and Morpheus were considered part of the DC Universe.

This is because a superhero universe was never created as a single seamless entity by a single creative vision. It’s the slow, steady accretion of concepts at the hands of hundreds of different people, many of whom were under the impression that they weren’t even working in a shared universe when they wrote their series. Expecting consistency is like expecting your dreams to make logical sense, and trying to figure out why Superman never arrests Wild Dog is akin to that moment in the dream just before you wake up when you try to figure out why your Aunt Susan is married to a dog. It’s never going to make sense, and all it really does is throw you out of the dream.

In that light, the idea of folding Wildstorm into the DC Universe is, in principle, an excellent one. Alternate universes are a fun idea, but having to explain how Robin wound up flipping into Earth-50 every time you want him to team up with Fairchild and Static Shock is a right royal pain up the fucking arse and should be avoided. It’s better to just have a single “main” universe and branch off from there. It even works from a conceptual point of view; you can think of the Wildstorm characters as being part of the covert, espionage-oriented underworld that also produces Checkmate and the Suicide Squad. Organizations like International Operations stay under Superman’s radar, and guys like Grifter work at their level to stop them.

Of course, everyone seems to be ignoring how concepts like WildCATs, Gen13, the original Stormwatch and Welcome to Tranquility could actually work in the DC Universe in favor of complaining about how the Authority wouldn’t. Which illuminates a fairly basic point: The Authority didn’t really work that well in the Wildstorm Universe either. They’re not a good shared-universe team, because they tend to change the shape of the fictional universe they’re in. A universe with the Authority in it rapidly becomes filled with people who either agree with the Authority and do the same things they do, or disagree and try to stop them. No matter how you do things, you should spin the Authority off into another continuity entirely that they don’t have to share.

So yes, in principle it’s an excellent idea to merge the Wildstorm and DC Universes. In practice…these were the books they picked? No Gen13, no WildCATs, but they think a Voodoo solo book is going to be a big seller? Ohhh…kay. And the relaunched Stormwatch seems like it’s going to feel more like a watered-down Authority, although I reserve the right to change my mind about that based on the talent of Paul Cornell (who I’ve been a fan of since he was writing fucking awesome Doctor Who novels in the 1990s.) Looking at the lineup they’ve given us, rather than the options they had available, it’s pretty easy to see how “Christ no” could have been the response.

Bob asks:

The DC relaunch is folding the Wildstorm Universe into the DCU proper. Is this a good idea?

Christ no.

Many many other people have already criticized the way the reboot seems to be taking all of the worst ideas from the 90s and creating something that’s instantly dated, but what the inclusion of the Wildstorm universe into the DC proper makes pretty clear is that DC’s current editorial direction is one that’s wildly in conflict with its traditional tone, the one that produces its best stories. Tonewise, you can’t run DC like Marvel, or Image, or anything else. A company’s properties do, to some extent, dictate the stories you can tell within that company.

For an excellent example of this in the context of a different company, consider the Sentry at Marvel, who was just terrible and awkward no matter what Marvel tried to do with him because once you got past the premise of a forgotten Superman analogue, you suddenly had to deal with the fact that a Superman analogue just doesn’t work in the Marvel universe, and not just because of power level (because, honestly, Dr. Strange or the Silver Surfer could, in any properly written story, kick his ass). A Superman analogue doesn’t work because Marvel’s core tone is one of pseudorealistic storytelling in a superhero universe – even the truly ludicrous story elements are treated as completely realistic and plausible, and part of realism and plausibility is that even Captain America and Spider-Man, on occasion, will lose their shit and get depressed or enraged or what have you. You can’t really do that with Superman: his real superpower, as so many have said, is his bottomless well of compassion, and in a Marvel context you need to go really high up the food chain to get to beings with that sort of power over themselves.1

If Marvel’s core tone has always been pseudorealism, then DC’s has always been fantastic. Marvel doesn’t just lack Superman analogues; it lacks Batman analogues too, because Batman is just as implausible a person as Superman is and in the “real world’ Batman would be kind of crazy or a douchebag. Like Nighthawk, for example, who has been both. It was DC that first went to the alternate-universe crack pipe and who still has crazed explanations for everything even today (as opposed to Marvel, which decided that its multiverse would be casually policed by a number of organizations, be they multiple Captain Britains or multiple Reed Richards2 because in Marvel a multiverse means another stab at plausibility in an otherwise insane setting); it was DC that constantly comes up with variations on its core characters reverberating through all space and time so it can have an explanation for why Pirate Batman is on Earth-71 or whatever it is this week; it was DC that let Grant Morrison write Final Crisis.

I mean: people love the idea of Wild Dog being the DCU’s Punisher equivalent, but Wild Dog can only exist as a series for so long before people ask “when is Superman going to notice the insane vigilante?” See also: Vigilante, any non-cowboy incarnation. See also: Hitman, which ended on a grace note in JLA/Hitman when Garth Ennis rightly pointed out that Superman might not morally judge Tommy for being an assassin, but wouldn’t be able to let it slide, either. The Punisher works in the Marvel Universe precisely because there are no Batmans or Supermans there to stop him: there are only your Daredevils and Spider-Mans who are not godlike beings and can’t necessarily stop him, and your Nick Furies who instead try to exploit him. “[DCU hero] fights [murderous supposedly-heroic vigilante]” is one of DC’s storytelling staples, and that’s because it’s a core part of their tone: the noble knight rather who defeats Sandor Clegane every time.3 Which is fantastic. And that’s fine. That’s the story the DCU is good at telling.

DC’s incorporated other superhero universes into their core universe before, of course, with diminishing results. The Charlton and Quality characters slipped in smoothly enough; the Fawcett ones, less so, because Captain Marvel’s tone is cartoonier and lighter than DC’s, even when DC is at its lightest, and the result has been a horrible “champion of magic” role for Captain Marvel that has never really fit. The integration of Milestone worked even less well because most of Milestone’s heroes have their genesis in a giant industrial accident/government conspiracy and many of them are out-and-out killers, because the Milestone tone was even grittier and more cynical than Marvel’s was. (Blood Syndicate was a fantastic comic book, but it’s also about a freaking superpowered gang and never pretended to be anything else.)

So: Wildstorm. Which just seems like a clusterfuck from the beginning, because look what they’re incorporating directly: Grifter as the superhero equivalent of Roddy Piper in They Live, Voodoo reimagined in a solo “misunderstood hero” role, and Apollo and Midnighter and Jack Hawksmoor (at least) in a new Stormwatch along with the Martian Manhunter. The Grifter idea sounds like an attempt to do an end-run around DC’s core tone without having to deal with the “when DOES Superman arrest Wild Dog?” problem, the Voodoo thing could be perfectly normal or suck (because the DCU shouldn’t have misunderstood heroes, because Superman is always willing to sit down with a rookie hero for five minutes over a hot pretzel with mustard and have a chat), and the Stormwatch book is such a massive clash in tone – teaming up Authority members, and remember these are characters from a book whose core tone was “this is what the Justice League would be like if they weren’t stupid,” with the Martian Manhunter, a character who embodies the DCU’s core ideals better than almost anybody.

And that’s just what we know about. For all we know there’s a WildC.A.T.S team somewhere waiting to debut with Geo-Force on it for some reason. Which would be a bad, bad idea, but not as bad as putting the Authority in the DC Universe proper.

EDIT TO ADD: Apparently DC editorial feels really, really strongly that Superman should not rescue kittens from trees, which makes absolutely no sense to me.

1. See: Dr. Strange. More on this next week. [↩]
2. Or, okay, multiple Dr. Stranges, mea culpa. [↩]
3. Game of Thrones references! Woo. [↩]

Via Pajiba:

One thing I feel needs mentioning: this is not Martin Campbell’s cut of the film, but the studio’s. I live in New Orleans where it was shot, I read the shooting script, all of which was painstakingly filmed with intense research, and all of that was left on the cutting room floor — a sort of combination of what happened to Daredevil and Watchmen, respectively — character development sacrificed for CG, scenes made irrelevant by removing their setup. The movie in the theater starts with an explanation of mythos that is made redundant by the more natural, scripted questions from Hal when he gets the ring. Ten minutes of childhood Hal, Carol, and Hector that sets up Hal’s first ring construct is reduced to an awkwardly placed flashback in the middle of another scene. The training with the ring is almost completely excised except for one minor scene. Most appallingly, the ending completely deletes the fact that Kilowog, Sinestro, and Toma-Re arrive at the end and help Hal defeat Parallax. Not to mention Parallax was supposed to be a 3rd act reveal after we spend the film worried about Hammond going evil, not the main villain for the entire film. I sincerely hope we get a director’s cut or at least all the deleted scenes on the video release.

Is it just me, or do those studio changes seem responsible for a lot of what wasn’t good about the movie? This sort of makes it sound like Green Lantern got the Kingdom of Heaven treatment: reasonably decent film cut down by studio into crap-burger.

Due to some family issues, Davinder’s had to take a brief break, but rest assured Al’Rashad will recommence as soon as he is able.

(FYI: Spoilers, obviously.)

So… yeah. It’s okay. It really doesn’t deserve the critical beating it’s taking; it’s certainly more entertaining than, say, Daredevil (which has a Rottentomatoes score nearly double that of Green Lantern) or Ghost Rider (three percent higher) or Spider-Man 3 (forty percent higher). Ryan Reynolds gives a strong performance, as expected; Mark Strong is a very good Sinestro (despite his disappointing amount of screen time), Geoffrey Rush is simply charming as the voice of Tomar-Re (making him a clear audience favorite), the effects look much better than they did in the trailer, and the direction and editing is as professional as one would expect from Martin Campbell, who makes easy-to-follow-with-your-eyes action movies and was largely the reason The Mask of Zorro was as good as it was.

But it’s not especially good either, and I think the reason it’s getting such a critical drubbing is because instinctively we all recognize one thing: Green Lantern is, from a writer’s perspective, slow-pitch softball. Of all the DC heroes, the only superhero with an origin story that lends itself to film so smoothly is Batman – even Superman doesn’t have as simple and easy-to-write an origin story as Green Lantern does (because Superman’s powers are part of who he is rather than something that happens to him, which makes all the difference in the world). Guy gets ring, guy is exposed to wider universe because of ring, guy has adventure with ring. Done.

But Green Lantern isn’t happy to play at that level; instead, it makes this movie about Hal Jordan overcoming his fear in order to save the day, which is terminally lame. Quick, count the number of times Indiana Jones expresses self-doubt in Raiders of the Lost Ark – that’s the level we’re playing at here. Seeing Hal whining onscreen about how he’s not brave enough (and make no mistake, this is the greater part of the movie we’re talking about here) doesn’t make him relatable; it makes him a pussy. People have to deal with all kinds of real-world crap: cancer, unemployment, having cancer while being unemployed, whatever. Hal Jordan has a magic fucking wishing-ring and watching him complain about it takes the audience out of the movie, because nobody in the world thinks “yeah, if I had a magic wishing-ring and got to fly through space, I would totally freak out like a loser wimp.”

And beyond that, the movie is simply stupid in a number of ways, most of them tied to Parallax being the movie’s villain. (In the movie, he’s a former Guardian who decided to try out the energy of fear as a weapon and was corrupted by it.) Before the movie begins, Abin Sur traps Parallax in “the hidden sector” – in a prison that only takes some folks stumbling on it by accident for Parallax to escape, so apparently Abin Sur was kind of stupid, I guess. The entire movie hinges on the Green Lanterns and the Guardians not realizing that you can overcome fear, so having Hal Jordan come in and lecture these immortal beings about a concept a third-grader could explain is just silly. And the post-credit reveal (Sinestro donning the Fear Ring and getting his Sinestro Corps costume) is similarly terrible, because the entire movie has negated the point of Sinestro doing that in the first place: he wanted to use the Fear Ring because he was afraid standard Green Lantern rings couldn’t handle Parallax, but this comes after Hal smokes Parallax, so… why is Sinestro doing this?

(The movie also has a lot of Explainer’s Disease, which makes sense given that Geoff Johns was so involved in it. The entire concept of the Green Lantern Corps, Oa, and so forth is explained in a voiceover at the beginning of the film, which takes all the Green Lantern stuff and makes it blase by explaining it a second time for Hal’s benefit. Show, don’t tell – how is this hard?)

Anyway. It’s not bad, although the 3D version is a complete waste of time. It’s just not great, and this one, especially with the talent involved, definitely had the capacity to be great. That’s the fault of the script and nothing else.

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

1. 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.” [↩]
2. 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. [↩]
3. 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. [↩]
4. 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. [↩]
5. Which will probably also involve a complaint about Superman’s terrible new costume. [↩]

And so concludes Book Two – we are already 25 percent finished. (Or not, if I decide to eventually pace it to nine issues instead. Now I know how George R. R. Martin feels.) The entire second issue is now archived in the Al’Rashad page (button at right).

Book Three commences shortly. Tip your waiters!

Actually, she’s almost five and a half, now. And she loves superheroes. In the mornings, on the way to school, she is frequently Batgirl who changes into Spider-Man Girl who is, in turn, secretly Green Lantern, and that’s when she’s not being Violet and assigning members of the family their identities as Mister Incredible, Dash, Elastigirl, and “the nice Syndrome”. (There was a point, I think, where she watched ‘The Incredibles’ every day for a solid month.) And so when she told me she wanted to watch ‘Spider-Man 2’, I wasn’t really a bit surprised.

But here’s the funny thing about what everyone considers the best of the Spider-Man trilogy…she couldn’t finish it. She didn’t even get halfway through before she said, “Daddy John, I don’t think I want to finish this,” and we swapped DVDs to ‘A Bug’s Life’ instead. And when she did? I wasn’t a bit surprised then, either. Because while it does do a lot right, it’s only when you watch it with a little kid that you notice…

1. It takes a long time to get going. After the great opening sequence where Spidey tries to deliver a pizza, which held her attention pretty well, there’s a long stretch of wandering around and hearing about what a failure Peter Parker is. We don’t even see Otto Octavius until twenty minutes in, and he doesn’t become a villain until a little over the forty-minute mark. To an adult who sympathizes with Peter’s struggle at juggling all the different elements of his life, there’s a lot of compelling stuff going on. My daughter? She was asking, “Where did Spider-Man go?” a lot. Which reminds me…

2. There’s not much Spider-Man in it. Admittedly, part of this is because she didn’t stick with it through to the end, where there are a couple of big Spidey set-pieces…but again, this is a kid. Time dilates when you’re five and watching an Amazing Spider-Man movie and all you keep getting is people standing around and talking. This movie is front-loaded with people having conversations about money, grades and emotional commitment, three things guaranteed not to be nearly as interesting as the prospect of Spider-Man fighting Doctor Octopus. Generally, the second movie of a superhero series is a lot more exciting because they’ve gotten all the origin stuff out of the way and can get straight to the action, but ‘Spider-Man 2’ spends just as long on set-up as the first movie did. And worse…

3. It’s repetitive as all hell. The movie opens with Aasif Mandvi telling Peter that he’s coming off as sloppy and irresponsible, and Peter knows but can’t say that it’s because he’s trying to be Spider-Man on top of everything else. This is followed, immediately, by Jameson telling Peter that he’s coming off as sloppy and irresponsible, and Peter knows but can’t say that it’s because he’s trying to be Spider-Man on top of everything else. We then get Curt Connors, Mary Jane, Otto Octavius and Peter’s landlord all chiming in on the same theme. (I’ve never watched the deleted scenes for this film. Presumably, it features Betty Brant, Robbie, Aunt May, Harry Osborn, and that guy in the elevator all explaining to Peter what a loser he is.) Oh, yeah, and…

4. It makes Spider-Man out to be a total loser. This is something that it’s hard to blame Sam Raimi for completely. He’s working in a different medium. A movie doesn’t have time to do just a little bit of Peter’s personal life here and there and develop a theme; if they want to show that it’s hard to balance Peter Parker’s life with Spider-Man’s, they only have two hours to fit it in along with a whole plot about a supervillain, too. Even so, I think the movie misunderstands the point of the Spider-Man series. It’s not that being Spider-Man and Peter Parker is hard, it’s that being Spider-Man and Peter Parker is hard but Peter manages anyway. The original “Spider-Man No More!” storyline wasn’t about Peter giving up being Spider-Man; it was about Peter resolving to give up Spider-Man and failing completely because the first time he saw someone in danger, he couldn’t stop himself from helping out. (Something the movie completely botches, sorry.) Peter has trouble making rent, he misses the occasional date, his grades could be better, but he doesn’t totally fail at life. Movie Spidey spends a lot of time wearing his “but! but I! but!” face and getting chewed out.

So while it does have a 93% fresh rating on the Rotten Tomato meter, ‘Spider-Man 2’ completely failed the “Can it enthrall my daughter?” test. (As opposed to the first ‘Spider-Man’ movie, which she called “the best movie ever.” This apparently supplants her previous “best movie ever”, ‘Toy Story 3’.) Now of course, some of you will point out that Sam Raimi wasn’t making that movie for kids, that he was making a serious and mature Spider-Man film for grown-ups and I have no business showing it to a little kid and expecting her to be entertained…but before you do, take just one minute to think about the implications of trying to argue that kids should have no right to watch a Spider-Man movie and be entertained by it. Okay? Okay.

Ezra Klein argues that Professor X was wrong to dream of peace when the dream of “shared prosperity” would be stronger. I don’t entirely agree, because although prosperity doesn’t have to be zero-sum, the nature of mutant powers would place them frequently into competition with basic labour.

Ezra rightly identifies that a power set like Storm’s would provide a unique and indispensable service to businesses and governments, but that’s because Storm has a power that’s both fairly rare (weather control) and dramatically useful in a way that regular human business can’t easily duplicate. Most mutants, though, don’t have powers of that sort. How many mutants are just big strong dudes? Answer: lots of them. And in the real world, if you’re a big strong dude with no other skills (assuming these mutants wish to use their powers for profit), you’ll end up in manual labour of some sort, and then you will see resentment. How many normal-human construction jobs does a Colossus or a Strong Guy replace? For that matter, how can professional couriers be able to compete with mutants who can fly under their own power?

I strongly suspect that unions would, in these circumstances, put strict hiring quotas on mutants (and most likely gene-wide, because how can you prove that you aren’t strong or can’t fly?) and then we’re just back to square one – and that’s before you get to the psychics, who would inevitably be barred from any number of professions, and genome-based resentment on either side of the coin would almost certainly follow. And with that, the dream of shared prosperity becomes restricted to those outliers, the mutants who don’t potentially threaten human prosperity and who can provide useful services to humans. That’s not equality, and in the real-world scenario it’s why Magneto is right.

EDIT TO ADD: In comments Fistfulloffists says: “Even a society made up entirely of mutants would, realistically, suck.” Which isn’t entirely inaccurate, because all-mutant societies would almost certainly have some degree of labour immobility. Are you a big strong guy? Then society most likely demands – either explicitly or simply through cultural conditioning – that you go be a labourer. Energy blasts? Welcome to the energy sector. Indeed, there were more than a few hints in the comics that Genosha (pre-genocide) was somewhat like this. Which could arguably make mutant societies less able to progress – what happens when an Einstein or an Edison just happens to be a being of living steel and therefore most immediately and obviously useful at manual landscaping? As another example, Hank McCoy’s mutation isn’t that he’s a smart guy – it’s that he’s physically agile and powerful, and his brains are sort of a genetic non-mutation bonus. Hank is an example of what existing in a non-power-normative – e.g., human – society can do for a mutant.

Dan Didio: “When we have a book about teenagers, we want it to feel like it’s a book about teenagers.”

The average age of the writers working on the “teenager” books in the DCU reboot is 47.6. If you take away Sterling Gates on Hawk and Dove (which doesn’t seem to be a “teenager” book, but who knows, reboot?), it’s 51.

I’m just saying.

NEW DC UNIVERSE #1: Wonder Woman
PREMISE: Looks like it’s basically Wonder Woman, more or less
NUMBER OF ISSUES BEFORE IT IS CANCELLED OR RELAUNCHED: 32
HOW REBOOTYLICIOUS? Reboot Hill

NEW DC UNIVERSE #1: Aquaman
PREMISE: “Geoff Johns made Green Lantern into a hot comics sensation! Surely he can do the same for Aquaman! Everybody loves Aquaman!”
NUMBER OF ISSUES BEFORE IT IS CANCELLED OR RELAUNCHED: 27
HOW REBOOTYLICIOUS? Reboot loader

NEW DC UNIVERSE #1: The Flash
PREMISE: The Flash – now with a chinstrap!
NUMBER OF ISSUES BEFORE IT IS CANCELLED OR RELAUNCHED: 56
HOW REBOOTYLICIOUS? Rebootane fuel

NEW DC UNIVERSE #1: The Fury of Firestorm
PREMISE: Restart the entire Firestorm mythos with Jason and Ronnie as two kids in high school from different sides of the tracks! It’s like Veronica Mars except with more nuclear energy!
NUMBER OF ISSUES BEFORE IT IS CANCELLED OR RELAUNCHED: 19
HOW REBOOTYLICIOUS? Too much rebooty in the pants

NEW DC UNIVERSE #1: The Savage Hawkman
PREMISE: Hawkman has been rebooted approximately seventeen times now and maybe this time will be the charm!
NUMBER OF ISSUES BEFORE IT IS CANCELLED OR RELAUNCHED: 21
HOW REBOOTYLICIOUS? Shake that rebooty

NEW DC UNIVERSE #1: Green Arrow
PREMISE: “Green Arrow’s costume in Smallville was awesome. Let’s do something with that.”
NUMBER OF ISSUES BEFORE IT IS CANCELLED OR RELAUNCHED: 39
HOW REBOOTYLICIOUS? Rebooty meat

NEW DC UNIVERSE #1: Justice League International
PREMISE: They were gonna do this anyway so what the hell, let’s make it part of the new #1s
NUMBER OF ISSUES BEFORE IT IS CANCELLED OR RELAUNCHED: 49
HOW REBOOTYLICIOUS? Not even a little

NEW DC UNIVERSE #1: Mister Terrific
PREMISE: He’s diverse and he already exists! Give that man a title!
NUMBER OF ISSUES BEFORE IT IS CANCELLED OR RELAUNCHED: 14
HOW REBOOTYLICIOUS? Die with your reboots on

NEW DC UNIVERSE #1: Captain Atom
PREMISE: Dr. Manhattan: The Series
NUMBER OF ISSUES BEFORE IT IS CANCELLED OR RELAUNCHED: 7
HOW REBOOTYLICIOUS? Bet your reboots

NEW DC UNIVERSE #1: DC Universe Presents
PREMISE: “I bet this time an anthology title will work, and if it doesn’t, we just have material for the next few DC Christmas Specials.”
NUMBER OF ISSUES BEFORE IT IS CANCELLED OR RELAUNCHED: 9
HOW REBOOTYLICIOUS? Reboot camp

NEW DC UNIVERSE #1: Justice League
PREMISE: The Justice League, but with Cyborg for some reason
NUMBER OF ISSUES BEFORE IT IS CANCELLED OR RELAUNCHED: 56
HOW REBOOTYLICIOUS? Next season’s reboots

NEW DC UNIVERSE #1: Green Lantern
PREMISE: “Everything else is rebooting but this sells, so… yeah, this is pretty much the same thing.”
NUMBER OF ISSUES BEFORE IT IS CANCELLED OR RELAUNCHED: 88
HOW REBOOTYLICIOUS? Not much rebooty

NEW DC UNIVERSE #1: Green Lantern Corps
PREMISE: See Green Lantern, remove Hal Jordan, add Guy Gardner and John Stewart
NUMBER OF ISSUES BEFORE IT IS CANCELLED OR RELAUNCHED: 54
HOW REBOOTYLICIOUS? A bit of rebooty

NEW DC UNIVERSE #1: The New Guardians
PREMISE: Justice League Rings, or Any Excuse To Keep Writing Larfleeze Dialogue
NUMBER OF ISSUES BEFORE IT IS CANCELLED OR RELAUNCHED: 26
HOW REBOOTYLICIOUS? Doc Marten rebooty

NEW DC UNIVERSE #1: Red Lanterns
PREMISE: Like Green Lantern Corps but TO THE EXTREEEEEEEEEEEEME like Mountain Dew Code Red
NUMBER OF ISSUES BEFORE IT IS CANCELLED OR RELAUNCHED: 22
HOW REBOOTYLICIOUS? Reboot disk

NEW DC UNIVERSE #1: Batman
PREMISE: Seriously?
NUMBER OF ISSUES BEFORE IT IS CANCELLED OR RELAUNCHED: It’ll just get renumbered, but whenever they would hit a big round number for Batman‘s original numbering
HOW REBOOTYLICIOUS? No.

NEW DC UNIVERSE #1: Detective Comics
PREMISE: There’s this guy called Batman, who is a detective
NUMBER OF ISSUES BEFORE IT IS CANCELLED OR RELAUNCHED: See Batman
HOW REBOOTYLICIOUS? Also no.

NEW DC UNIVERSE #1: Batman and Robin
PREMISE: Bruce and Damian together at last, which isn’t creepy at all
NUMBER OF ISSUES BEFORE IT IS CANCELLED OR RELAUNCHED: 67
HOW REBOOTYLICIOUS? Slightly rebooty

NEW DC UNIVERSE #1: Batman: The Dark Knight
PREMISE: “If we relaunch this at #1 maybe we can just release the first two issues again and then maybe we’ll get out four issues this year.”
NUMBER OF ISSUES BEFORE IT IS CANCELLED OR RELAUNCHED: 8 (“it’s a miniseries! That was the idea!”)
HOW REBOOTYLICIOUS? Barely rebooty

NEW DC UNIVERSE #1: Batwoman
PREMISE: See Justice League International, but with more diversity because she’s gay
NUMBER OF ISSUES BEFORE IT IS CANCELLED OR RELAUNCHED: Six issues after JH Williams leaves
HOW REBOOTYLICIOUS? Not very rebooty

NEW DC UNIVERSE #1: Batgirl
PREMISE: “Okay, we know that Oracle is one of the best ideas the DCU has ever received and she’s really popular the way she is, but how about we go back to the way it was when we were kids?”
NUMBER OF ISSUES BEFORE IT IS CANCELLED OR RELAUNCHED: 39
HOW REBOOTYLICIOUS? Shake shake shake that rebooty

NEW DC UNIVERSE #1: Catwoman
PREMISE: It’s Catwoman, duh
NUMBER OF ISSUES BEFORE IT IS CANCELLED OR RELAUNCHED: 40
HOW REBOOTYLICIOUS? Slightly rebooty

NEW DC UNIVERSE #1: Birds of Prey
PREMISE: “Black Canary and Friends” will always sell! Always! Regardless of who her friends might be! (In this case it is Katana, Poison Ivy and… somebody else.)
NUMBER OF ISSUES BEFORE IT IS CANCELLED OR RELAUNCHED: 22
HOW REBOOTYLICIOUS? Tastes like rebooty

NEW DC UNIVERSE #1: Nightwing
PREMISE: Dick Grayson as Batman was really popular and made a lot of sense, so how about forgetting all of that and pretending it’s 1999 again? Can we all agree on that? With the equivalent sales levels, while we’re at it?
NUMBER OF ISSUES BEFORE IT IS CANCELLED OR RELAUNCHED: 72
HOW REBOOTYLICIOUS? Vaguely rebooty

NEW DC UNIVERSE #1: Red Hood and the Outlaws
PREMISE: “I got an idea: people weren’t reading Outsiders because the title was too good. Let’s come up with a new title. One that’s even worse.”
NUMBER OF ISSUES BEFORE IT IS CANCELLED OR RELAUNCHED: 16
HOW REBOOTYLICIOUS? Smells like rebooty

NEW DC UNIVERSE #1: Batwing
PREMISE: What if Token from South Park was Batman?
NUMBER OF ISSUES BEFORE IT IS CANCELLED OR RELAUNCHED: 14
HOW REBOOTYLICIOUS? New age rebooty

NEW DC UNIVERSE #1: Justice League Dark
PREMISE: Justice League is a DC brand they haven’t watered down yet, so now it’s their turn
NUMBER OF ISSUES BEFORE IT IS CANCELLED OR RELAUNCHED: 18
HOW REBOOTYLICIOUS? Global rebooty empire

NEW DC UNIVERSE #1: Animal Man
PREMISE: Eventually someone will write this comic as well as Grant Morrison did and maybe this time is the time it will happen
NUMBER OF ISSUES BEFORE IT IS CANCELLED OR RELAUNCHED: 12
HOW REBOOTYLICIOUS? Big bad rebooty

NEW DC UNIVERSE #1: Demon Knights
PREMISE: Etrigan is not being evil, apparently, so I don’t care
NUMBER OF ISSUES BEFORE IT IS CANCELLED OR RELAUNCHED: 16
HOW REBOOTYLICIOUS? Age old rebooty

NEW DC UNIVERSE #1: Frankenstein, Agent of SHADE
PREMISE: It’s Frankenstein!
NUMBER OF ISSUES BEFORE IT IS CANCELLED OR RELAUNCHED: 20
HOW REBOOTYLICIOUS? Slim rebooty

NEW DC UNIVERSE #1: Resurrection Man
PREMISE: “Let’s throw the elitist nerds a bone.”
NUMBER OF ISSUES BEFORE IT IS CANCELLED OR RELAUNCHED: 16
HOW REBOOTYLICIOUS? Skinny rebooty

NEW DC UNIVERSE #1: I, Vampire
PREMISE: The DCU, for people who don’t like superheroes but do like vampires
NUMBER OF ISSUES BEFORE IT IS CANCELLED OR RELAUNCHED: 14
HOW REBOOTYLICIOUS? Tight rebooty

NEW DC UNIVERSE #1: Voodoo
PREMISE: …no idea really
NUMBER OF ISSUES BEFORE IT IS CANCELLED OR RELAUNCHED: 12
HOW REBOOTYLICIOUS? Brand new rebooty

NEW DC UNIVERSE #1: Legion of Super-Heroes
PREMISE: Just let Paul Levitz do whatever he wants
NUMBER OF ISSUES BEFORE IT IS CANCELLED OR RELAUNCHED: 35
HOW REBOOTYLICIOUS? Rebooty don’t play that way

NEW DC UNIVERSE #1: Legion Lost
PREMISE: Maybe this time the market will bear a second LSH title!
NUMBER OF ISSUES BEFORE IT IS CANCELLED OR RELAUNCHED: 14
HOW REBOOTYLICIOUS? Rebooty shake

NEW DC UNIVERSE #1: Teen Titans
PREMISE: In a new DCU, the Teen Titans we currently know don’t exist, so… let’s make them exist in different, edgy ways
NUMBER OF ISSUES BEFORE IT IS CANCELLED OR RELAUNCHED: 21
HOW REBOOTYLICIOUS? Rebooty stank

NEW DC UNIVERSE #1: Static Shock
PREMISE: DC boldly steps up to the plate… a decade later!
NUMBER OF ISSUES BEFORE IT IS CANCELLED OR RELAUNCHED: 27
HOW REBOOTYLICIOUS? Barely rebooty

NEW DC UNIVERSE #1: Hawk and Dove
PREMISE: …Liefeld? Really?
NUMBER OF ISSUES BEFORE IT IS CANCELLED OR RELAUNCHED: 15
HOW REBOOTYLICIOUS? No-feet rebooty