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

Yeah, the year or so before Flashpoint things were definitely petering out. I thought Blackest Night was very solid, but the incredible promise of New Krypton resulted in a very rushed and disappointing ending. It's a real shame that Johns wrote the opening arc but not the bulk of that storyline.

I'm still not happy with the reboot, though. The wealth of DC lies in its deep continuity. I love reading a comic with a ton of character cameos where I have no idea who they are, but if I want I can go back and research their elaborate history. Particularly in JSA. Everything is just so shallow now there's no history, and the history does exist is jumbled and confused because who knows what's canon or not anymore. I'm pretty much down to Batman and Justice League at this point.

 

QFT

I'd add Green Lantern to that as well. Since only Bats and GL avoided being reset by New 52.

All I do is read New 52 Batman, GL and Justice League. I can't get in to New 52 Supes, TT, Flash and some other titles they publish. Not saying it's all bad but some characters I don't read; e.g. Batgirl and Batwoman.


Although I'm willing to give Azzerello's WW a try once all volumes have been collected.

 

Once Johns left GL I immediately lost interest. I still have to read the Godhead crossover, is it any good?

 

I haven't read Godhead. I'm behind with New 52. I've been catching up with Marvel for the last 2 months.

 

The whole "New Krypton" thing was fascinating, and it was such a widespread change to the Superman status quo that I didn't see any way that it could be put back into the bottle.

And then, of course, it was. "War of the Supermen" was plainly terrible.

Which was unfortunate. Because I really liked the Nightwing/Flamebird team.

 

Robinson was just a terrible choice for Superman and the fact that they replaced Kurt Busiek for him boggles the mind in retrospect as well as the fact they pretty much had the American government genociding New Krypton to get rid of it (why not just send it into the Phantom Zone or into space?). Still Sterling Gates on Supergirl was probably the best thing that came out of it.

 

Yeah I was always disappointed that Johns had to leave his Superman run in order to fully focus on "Blackest Night". "War of the Supermen" was an incredibly disappointing grand finale to his run.

 

I dropped Superman during Busiek's run. His "Camelot Falls" storyline started out quite strong, but then due to scheduling issues, kind of petered out. His stuff after that was terrible, in my opinion. I dropped it during the "Insect Queen" storyline, after suffering through the pointless "The Third Kryptonian."

Robinson's first arc on Superman was lacklustre, but I enjoyed his "New Krypton" stuff with Mon-El (I've always had a soft-spot for the character). Granted it wasn't as good as Rucka's work on Action with Nightwing and Flamebird.

I wonder how quickly they got the reboot together. Johns seemed to be headed somewhere on The Flash with the giant mirror that shattered, releasing the Mirror Lords (one of which may have possessed Iris, if the Rogue's from the future could be trusted, which of course, they couldn't). Johns also seemed to be leading towards a new status-quo for Firestorm, as Brightest Day ended with the reveal that Firestorm was going to go into meltdown and set-off a new big bang.

It's interesting how many of the other series seemed to reach natural end-points pre-New 52, except for some of Johns' works.

 

Batman wound up getting a reset anyway.

 

Firestorm and Hawkman both were going to be relaunched as new titles headed by Brian Clevinger and James Robinson respectively, but either due to a combination of Flashpoint and editorial they got replaced by Gail Simone and Tony Daniel instead.

The teams for Batgirl, Teen Titans and JLA, all had further and very elaborate plans that got destroyed by Flashpoint. For Snyder's Batman run, I have heard that the Court of Owls that started Batman was originally written and intended for Dickbats.

 

Firestorm has thoroughly been ruined in the New 52.

 

As was Captain Atom. And Hawk & Dove. And Superboy.

I'm not a New 52 hater, but there's a lot of characters I enjoyed before that I won't touch now.

 

52 origin stories in one month.

A few of them had to be scraping the creative barrel.

 

I do remember that. I'm just saying that if Geoff Johns was an architect of the New52, it's odd that his ideas were the ones that stick with me the most as being set-up and never followed through.

As a Firestorm fan, I was excited about Clevinger.

I understand that, as I was reading Batgirl, which had a great, if somewhat rushed ending. Teen Titans just wrapped up a major storyline.

I just meant that the last pre-New52 story-lines for comics such as Batgirl wrapped up things (even if a bit rushed), whereas Johns left more wide-open.

Speaking of which, I kind of felt gypped that we never got an answer as to mystery of who the Black Beetle was that Johns introduced in Booster Gold, Jurgens used, and Sturges, in the Blue Beetle Second Feature, teased.

 

I had high hopes for Firestorm(it did go 20 issues though) but it started with such racial schtick I dropped it.
My other high hope was that Captain Atom would finally get a chance to shine, they squandered that.

On the flip side I got 18 issues of Frankenstein Agent of SHADE, about 12 more than I originally thought would happen and a years worth of a revived Resurrection Man book that was fun while it lasted.

 

It's very clear that he is not the architect of the Nu52 despite FP being used as a launching point for the reboot. Most likely it seems to be Dan Didio who has wanted to reboot DC apparently since Infinite Crisis.

 

^ Yep I've read similar things. I also think it was BC who stated that Johns has been a counterpoint to many things that DiDio has wanted to do. We should probably count our blessings that Johns is in the position he has, or we'd have a truly messed up DCU.

 

I hope someday the behind the scenes stuff gets aired. Johns gets a lot of flak as the one behind a lot of these decisions. If you guys are right, the poor guy seems to have taken the place of Didio as the source of fan's outrage. And, if you remember, fans certainly took out their anger on him at the idea he wanted to kill Nightwing.

 

Dan Didio is the Joe Quesada (Marvel's former EIC) of DC. People hate his decisions and he gets a lot of aspersions cast at him for them.