DC's New 52: Reviews and Discussion (Spoilers welcolme and likely)

Instead of a hard reboot I would have just started up an Ultimate style line which in some ways the 52'Verse would appear to be. I would keep the regular "New Earth" continuity while starting up the new line. You could even call it 52'Verse like I do. Or 52DCU if you wanted to.

 

Same here. Then the wouldn't have had to do all that resetting the numbering B.S. and undoing characters like Oracle that turned me off DC cold turkey. Last week was the first week in 5 years I never bought a single DC Comic. This week I picked up a couple of independents and Doctor Who Magazine and that was about it. (I saw the cover of the new Detective and man it's ugly.) I put the money I'd have spent on DC towards the new Nikita Blu-ray set. The only DC I plan to buy in the near future is the final issue of Detective which I missed due to being on holiday and it's sold out everywhere.

Alex

 

I completely agree with a hard reboot. It strikes me as a little silly when, with the alternate Earths, DC has a built in mechanism for a reboot and they never use it.

Just move the action to another Earth--stop making up multiple ones for every Elseworlds story--when you want a reboot.

If COIE and IC were left intact but suddenly one Earth was the Golden Age, another was the Silver Age, another the Bronze Age, Post Crisis/New Earth, and now the RELaunched Earth then you actually to get to have your cake and eat it too.

 

I sort of agree with that statement. My "plan" would have been to relaunch all of the lesser books with jumping on points. I miss those. Back when I got into comics every year and a half or so, comics would have a jumping on point where stories were continued, but the characters were somewhat reintroduced and the book was made accesible to the new reader. So I would have done that on all the books like Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, The Flash, Green Lantern and others. They would have all started at #1 to make advertising easier. And DC would use this time to do some experimentation with books that they are currently with the Dark line and the Edge line. I would have kept Detective Comics and Action Comics in their original numbering and I would have kept them as anthology titles, but still run based. People get to have a free run at the Bat family or the Superman family respective without worries of timelines and what not.

I also would have created an Ultimate line, except not called that. DC should have done this years ago when they were on a film kick (Batman Begins, Superman Returns, The Dark Knight). I'd have Ultimate Batman, Ultimate Superman and Ultimate Justice League (Aquaman, Martian Manhunter, The Flash, Green Lantern, Wonder Woman and maybe a couple others). I also may have a Green Lantern title focusing on a Green Lantern not in Justice League. Maybe Teen Titans as well, but I'd tool it so that the characters have nothing to do with Batman, Superman or Justice League characters.

I think this would be the best way to get new readers and keep old fans happy.

 

Wizard Magazine already demonstrated how to do a proper DC Ultimate line...with a few adjustments to their plot suggestions it could have been easily done.

 

Iirc, the All-Star thing was originally pitched as a sort of DC version of the Ultimate line.

Instead, it became a pair of vanity projects, one good, one bad, and as far I can tell the line is basically dead?

The thing about even hard reboots is that... well, look at the Ultimate universe. Can we honestly say that thing didn't get mired in its own continuity? (Indeed, as I understand, Ultimatum was originally going to be a universe-closer, with a reboot to follow--this is partly why it clears the decks to the extent it does, the other part being Jeph Loeb's sublimated issues over his own personal tragedy, or, if one's being less charitable, his inability to write a comic properly.) It's always gonna happen in any serial story. Nature of the beast.

 

^I'm with you guys here too. I honestly don't understand why they had to end the New Earth stuff. Marvel seems to be doing fine with both the Ultimate and regular Marvel lines and don't see why DC couldn't do it too.

 

The All Star line is essentially dead now thanks to continuous delays. Volume two of All Star Batman and Robin (which I was actually kind of looking forward to) was retitled Dark Knight, Boy Wonder and was supposed to come out in Feb. Jim Lee at SDCC stated that he has completed all his work for the series but publication has been withdrawn due to focusing on the relaunch. Adam Hughs was supposed to be writing and drawing All Star Batgirl and All Star Wonder Woman but nothing has happened on those books in years.

 

+1

 

That's true, but it lasted nearly a decade. A decade is practically an eternity in comic book time.

Either way, I think this would have been the best way to maximize readership without making older fans angry, which I have noticed a lot of. When I got into comics, I used jumping on points that were advertised. Uncanny X-Men, Avengers, Green Arrow, Flash, JSA, Batman, and others were all books that I got into, not due to a reboot, but because of an advertised jumping on point.

 

If they were doing their jobs right, every damn issue should be a "jumping on point". Fans getting hung up on continuity rather than the characters means they aren't doing a good job either. I rather read 12 good stand alone Batman stories rather than a bad 12 part continuity driven Batman arc.

 

One shot standalones are all well and good, but I prefer multipart story arcs and really trying to make them accessible is only detrimental to the integrity of the story.

 

Isn't the "Earth One" graphic novels DC's newest attempt to ape Marvel's Ultimate line?

Erm...it lasted three years and had only two titles (one of which came out irregularly) before being folded.

 

Making a story inaccessible is detrimental to long term success for the book, the character and the company. The goal is/should be to increase readership not cater to a rapidly dwindling fanbase with an encyclopedic knowledge of continuity.

 

Geoff Johns has stated that Earth One isn't an attempt to Ultimatize anything but to capture the "graphic novel" readership.

 

I'd agree, if the standard "unit" of comics weren't so tiny.

Like, if the unit of comics were 300 page OGNs, I'd be on your bandwagon, shooting buffalo, fording rivers and losing children to cholera. Absolutely.

However, when the unit of comics is a 20 page thin-mint, I don't think I agree at all. I know I use Watchmen as an example for everything, but it'd be confusing experience to start with chapter 8. Why do you want to take away Watchmen?

Sandman might be a good counterpoint. I started reading that in singles, either at the beginning or halfway through World's End, which, which involved standalone tales being told within a connected framing sequence.

But since I chose your counterargument for you, it's not a good one. This is because I am unfair.

After World's End came Kindly Ones. Unsurprisingly, since that was the last storyline with Morpheus (spoiler!), there was a lot that I had to just accept I wouldn't understand in order to move through it. Like, who the hell is Lyta Hall? (Edit: they do tell you, I guess, but my God, this is one the worst-designed flashback sequences in the history of comics, throwing you back to verbatim scenes from Doll's House but with zero context. I actually recall it being misprinted, too, if I'm not mistaken.) And who is Orpheus? Who is Alianora? Who is Rose Walker? Who is Zelda? Faerie? Hey, that girl's a guy! And so's this one? Why is the pale magic ladyboy who smokes too much worried about Rose's heart? Why has this guy been asleep for years? And so on?

But in the light of the Sandman collections, Kindly Ones is what I remember as powerful and moving and special. World's End, by contrast, despite being new reader-accessible, remains a solid collection of short stories, but basically a curio.

ETA: although even then the last part of World's End, the one with the funeral procession, is entirely pointless outside of the wider context of the series, and specifically either Brief Lives (is it Orpheus' funeral?) and Kindly Ones (spoiler, it's not).

I can pledge that I won't have Connor Hawke have sex with some woman just to prove that he's not gay. Oh, Chuck Dixon, you silly goose.

Actually, that was one of my favorite things about Connor. Women were all the time throwing themselves at him and he didn't care because he wanted to deny them his essence.

 

Heh, I knew who Lyta Hall was. Because I know continuity. (Irony?)

Chickens vs Eggs: Storys that work great for the trades aren't that great in monthy intallments, but the trades are great for collecting arcs. Cant have the trades without the monthlies...

Hard to put that genie back in the bottle.

 

I remember ten years ago the vanguard prediction was that a nearly total shift to trade-like entities, that is original graphic novels, would have been accomplished by this time.

Instead, for whatever reason, the digital marketplace seems to be dominated by a singles mentality. As if comics are equivalent to album tracks. Ellis wrote a thing about it the other day, noting that Transmet's not being sold as ten collections, but 60 single issues.

I don't really know why this hasn't happened. I mean, short stories are well and good, but you don't see successful book franchises--your Harry Potters, your Twilights--doled out like Charles Dickens serials.

 

I think somewhere along the line comics adapted a television format in the sense that writers construct story arcs and characters arcs and there is often references now to "seasons" (Grant Morrison has recently referred to his first year on Batman, Inc as "season one"). Comics have become paper TV, if that makes any sense.

 

Yeah, that's a good analogy.

But TV seasons take breaks, and comics have the advantage of being able to time breaks at any point of editorial choosing, since they're not constrained by a broadcast schedule (publication schedules are still important, but there's a far greater flexibility--I mean, obviously, behold Batwoman).