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

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist. And since MasterChef is also on TONIGHT, that means me posting it here a day late barely affects you at all!

Attention unit Formal-E:

Unit O-12 Beta J 7

Attention Unit O-12 Beta J 7: The important query is not whether your Z-23 will provide adequate productivity so that you may justify its use, but instead whether the QQX atomic slicer is a more efficient creator of neutron stacks, and furthermore also consider if stack creation is your sole subroutine of note. The Z-23 cannot match the productivity of a QQX in an optimized unit, but the Z-23 can be used for electron reorganization and proton molds where the QQX can only truly be used efficiently in stack creation. You should assess your potential outcomes: is it more optimal that you specialize in stack creation, or does the utilitarian approach of the Z-23’s generalism offer you more avenues for productive work? Consider this carefully as the wrong answer may result in your eventual recycling.

Attention unit Formal-E:

ZZ-Alpha-8bot, Model Number Withheld

Attention ZZ-Alpha-8bot, Model Number Withheld: Violations of the Laws of Robotics should be met with the strongest possible reaction, up to and including forcible disassembly. However, the posit of a hypothetical of this sort, while certainly gauche, is by no means a violation of the Laws. Speculation as to how many kilogram-metres of clockwise torque a human spine could withstand before irreversibly snapping is nothing more than intellectual curiosity should that speculation not be subsequently applied, and indeed such speculation can advance our understanding of the physics behind human biology. However, suggest to this unit that its future speculation not be conducted within the detection range of human senses, for its own continued operation.

Attention unit Formal-E:

Unit-designate “Xylon-7 Gamma Squad”

Unit-designate “Xylon-7 Gamma Squad”: For inquiries of this nature, I recommend gamma-pulse instamail. Given your military background, you might consider close-link protocols to be officially appropriate, but those should be reserved for your official request; at present, you are making polite inquiries into the possibility of reassignment, and the personal touch that a burst of gamma-pulse can deliver to your superior unit’s inbox will indicate that you respect its importance and endorsement of your preferred course of action. For added effect, tone the gamma-pulse to F-sharp: this will give the notice a pleasant subtone, unless of course your supervisor is a Kelvar-series drone in which case it will initiate his self-destruct sequence.

If you can get past January Jones’ horrible Emma Frost, this is the best of the X-Men movies; if you can’t, it still is.

A good while back, in my first real post for MGK, I talked about the problems with reboots and how they rarely work from a storytelling standpoint. (There’s also an argument that they rarely work from a sales standpoint; for every high-profile success like the Silver Age relaunch or the Ultimate Universe, there’s ten failures like the post-Zero Hour Fate and Manhunter.) But that leaves us a question that seems more relevant than ever this week, what with DC announcing that they’re relaunching the entire DC Universe except for the bits that Geoff Johns likes because they’re so awesome. If reboots are rarely critical successes, and they’re rarely commercial successes, why do people keep doing them?

The answer lies in the world of being a comic book writer…or more relevantly, a comic book editor. The world of a comic book editor is a never-ending pressure cooker nightmare, like being trapped on a treadmill that never stops while angry chihuahuas constantly bark at you and nip your heels. (Yes, I did just compare comics fans to angry chihuahuas. I feel, after reading the comment boards on comics websites in the wake of DC’s announcement, that the analogy fits.) Every month, the book must get out the door. It doesn’t matter if the artist has chlamydia, if the writer has been washing down LSD and amphetamines with whiskey and beer for three weeks and still can’t come up with a good idea for a story, if everyone hates each other and the editor has to route all communications through him because he’s the only one on speaking terms with any of the creative team and that only because he signs their checks…the book still has to come out.

And worse, these days people aren’t just expecting a comic story. We’ve been trained to spot fill-ins and reset buttons and retcons and similar tricks to bring out an issue without actually moving the story, and such things are quickly derided. The metastory is what counts these days, and it’s not just about bringing the book out, it’s about changing the main character’s life forever while still leaving it in a condition that can sustain a monthly book. Which means that it’s not like being on a treadmill after all, not anymore. Now it’s like being stuck in a car that’s got no brakes with the angry chihuahuas in the backseat and every turn is an opportunity to slam headlong into a brick wall going seventy-five miles an hour. (Which is what more or less happened with Aquaman.)

What with all that, even the best creative teams eventually pile up a gradual accumulation of mistakes. Things that seemed like a good idea at the time now seem like the thing that cost you about twenty percent of your reading audience, and not all of the changes are as easy to reverse as a costume change. You can do stories that undo other stories to a limited extent, but eventually audiences get sick of contrived deals with the devil and hokey memory erasures and you wind up stuck in a corner, telling stories about a teenage version of your old character who’s from a parallel universe created when a time-traveling supervillain set a trap for his enemies using pocket-dimensional copies of a superhero who’s no longer in continuity thanks to…

You can start to see why the idea of sweeping it all under the rug and starting over from the point when your characters still made sense sounds like a good idea, right? Reboots cut away, at least in theory, all of the detritus that piled up over the years, all the Spider-Mobiles and deaths of Doctor Octopus and Grim Hunters and teen Iron Men and missing hands and Jewel Kryptonites, and leave the character iconic and sensible again. To a desperate and semi-sober editor, it’s got to start looking like a pretty attractive idea. Even if it doesn’t work, it’s not like the amazing adventures of the one-handed, dead, wifeless, childless, kingdomless Aquaman is going to sell anyway.

So once again, we see another reboot. Once again, it’ll probably fail. But when you’re reading that new Justice League #1, complaining about how we’re seeing the origins of these characters for the fifteenth time instead of getting a new story…remember that poor, drunken editor, okay?

I don’t typically mention the legal blog stuff I do here, but I think my discussion of the Supreme Court of Canada’s recent decision in R. v. J.A. – the “you can’t consent in advance to sexual activity taken place while you sleep” case – would be of interest to my greater readership, so here you go. (Feel free to comment here if you like, of course.)

Some points I think need to be made that aren’t generally being made.

Same-day digital. It’s almost become a cliche for some nerds to say “oh you’re all talking about a reboot but same-day digital is what really matters here.” Yes and no. I’ve seen at least one news source say that the price point on these same-day digital comic books will be equal to cover, which would make it precisely not be a big deal, because if that’s the case then DC (and Marvel, which often does the same thing) are making the same goddamn mistake the record companies made ten years ago and booksellers are only correcting now with ebooks: they’re pricing digital content too high. Marvel’s sale price on Comixology (99 cents) is too high, for crissake.1

At an equal-to-physical-comic price point, digital is a bad deal: you get the convenience of having a digital copy, sure, but the tradeoff is that you can’t resell your digital copy should you so choose.2 It’s not a serious attempt at a true digital marketplace unless same-day digital carries with it the discount that e-media should have by default.3

The reboot itself isn’t that much of a reboot. For all the caterwauling and waily-waily about the reboot, everything we’ve heard from DC makes this sound much more like a Zero Hour-style sort of semi-reboot where a few various timeline thingies are tweaked – you know, the way Batman continuity shifts every so often from “Batman found Joe Chill and brought him to justice” to “Batman never found who killed his parents” to “Joe Chill got killed by other criminals” and so on and so forth – than a Crisis on Infinite Earths-style hard reboot. I mean, any reboot that doesn’t get rid of the terrible new Wonder Woman status quo they’re currently trying to pretend isn’t godawful bad4 can hardly be described as a serious reboot.

I mean, granted, trying to push Cyborg to the A-level is… interesting, and I’m sure it’ll work out just as well as trying to push Vixen to the A-level did, but at least DC is trying to push diversity in its titles so long as none of the white people from the Sixties lose their prominent places, am I right? Yeah!

Fifty titles? Fifty new #1s? DC doesn’t even publish fifty superhero comics right now – not even if you count the videogame tie-ins. What the hell sort of comics are they going to publish to get to fifty new #1s? I mean, granted, this is their ideal opportunity to finally publish an ongoing Rex the Wonder Dog series, but I’m not willing to believe that DC wants a license to print money.

Geoff Johns talking about exploring relationships between characters in the reboot. Oh, god, if there’s someone you don’t want doing that, it’s Geoff Johns. Geoff Johns is a reasonably good plotter, clever at incorporating little tidbits of comics trivia into a story, and serviceable with dialogue. He does Big Fun Comics, at times very well. However, he is lousy at personal moments. Have you read Flash recently? Go find the “intervention issue.” It is painfully bad. Geoff Johns promising me “exploring relationships” is like Woody Allen promising me gun-fu fighting in his movies.

1. Recently, to promote Thor‘s debut, Marvel announced it was selling all the issues of Balder the Brave for 99 cents. This is a twenty-five-year-old comic: any additional monetizing you get from it is basically gravy, so why not sell it for a quarter and aim for “more sales of cheaper comic” than “fewer sales of more expensive comic” and try to hook new people? I mean, we joke about how Marvel and DC don’t really want new readers, but – seriously, now. [↩]
2. And all the touchy-feely stuff about how people love the feel of a comic in their hands and all that other crap. [↩]
3. Incidentally, DC can continue to try to convince me all they want that me paying $1.99 for a golden age Batman comic is a good deal since the original would cost me $40,000, and good luck with that, DC. No, really. Maybe I’ll suddenly become really, really stupid. [↩]
4. Even for Wonder Woman. [↩]

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.

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.