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

That can easily backfire, though. I don't even intend to continue buying half of the books that I bought last month. A large bulk of the sales were people giving the books a chance and deciding which ones they wanted to keep reading. Sales on plenty of books are going to plummet like a rock (I'm looking at you Red Hood and the Outlaws)

 

See, this is why I think he should--yes, I said should-- have used REBOOT rather than RELAUNCH. For all intents and purposes it IS a reboot as much more has been started at the beginning than has continued.

A reboot, to me, means starting over. What has happened before hasn't happened. That doesn't mean it can't not have happened, it just means don't assume it has.

relaunch, to me, means a continuation with a fresh coat of paint. Things are carrying on from the past. Like the new Dallas that's coming out. It's not a reboot. It's a relaunch of an old franchise. And then you run into these problems of what has "happened"--again, not that it really matters much in terms of the present, but fans want to know.

Just call it a reboot. And you're starting 5 years into the lives of the heroes. None of the books I read would be different. Not even the Batman of Green Lantern books.

 

Yes, except that while you can make the case for that definition of "reboot," your definition of "relaunch" is a personal one. It has no precise meaning as regards this kind of thing.

The reason for not calling it a reboot - beyond that being a pretty negative term to most fans of anything in popular culture - is that it suggests that everything is being reset from zero. That is far from the case here. How much each character will change varies, and a lot of it has yet to be determined. I don't know what other descriptions might have been considered for this, if any, but if the choice was simply between "reboot" and "relaunch" then they chose thoughtfully.

As to the question of direct retailers miscalculating their second-month buys based on some titles not going over well - this is where their vaunted familiarity with their customer base ought to come in, hmm? Presumably they have some sense of which books people were excited by and which ones were duds, and will place their reorders accordingly.

 

If it was a true reboot then books like Green Lantern, Legion of Superheroes, and Batman would have started from scratch like the rest of the universe seems to have done. I think this is why they have chosen to call it a relaunch. It's a relaunching of their universe with new number one's and new takes on some of their characters. Simple as that.

 

Agreed. And I think that's a part of the problem... well, it's not a problem, things are selling well. I think it's the "continuity" problem...

Why? Why would they have to start from zero? It didn't with COIE. It didn't with Zero Hour. And those events LITERALLY had the Universe starting over.

Why would you start from scratch if you were rebooting Batman? There are a lot of elements that work. Same for GL. Just continue to use those elements.

But a reboot means you have no OBLIGATION regarding which stories happened or didn't happen.

AND, if you're coming into the middle of things... as they have done in this reboot/relauch, it still means not starting from scratch.

90% of the DCU has been rebooted. Even Superman was rebooted. But they didn't start from scratch. They are using the elements that worked and recast them into a new universe.

 

More like elements that still made them money.

 

Isn't that the definition of "worked"?

 

I have some of the same questions you do Zoom, believe me pretty much nothing DC has explained or said about the New 52 makes sense to me. Selling out all the books is fine and dandy but it is going to be interesting to see how they do in month two and beyond. As I've stated from when this first broke, it seems DC just wanted to eat their cake. They were afraid of alienating a portion of their fan base while claiming this is all for new readers. To attract casual fans and people who have never picked up a comic book. It'd be interesting to see if there are any kind of stats that this has actually happened as the months go by.

 

Apparently the upcoming Huntress mini-series will have eventual connections to Justice Society. Link.

First in-story hints of a multiverse? Or was the Earth-2 concept a false rumor? Or something else completely?

 

Interesting...Paul Levitz is writing this.

 

I seem to recall hearing this is the Bertinelli Huntress and not the Wayne one. I have to wonder how they'll connected it to the JSA.

 

It makes sense to me.

 

I'd say a different direction, since Levitz's Huntress series is about the Helena Bertinella Huntress, not the Helena Wayne Huntress.

I like that they're doing the sensible modification to the Jim Lee costume design, getting rid of the stupid bare belly. But that's a different topic.

My guess is that DC wants to have a Bat-character on the JSA. Since The Huntress is a character name that has historically been associated with the JSA, the current Huntress would be a natural fit for a modern JSA and would fill the Bat-quota.

It's like James Robinson's Justice League; he couldn't use the "big guns," so he used analogue characters -- Mon-El or Supergirl in place of Superman, Donna Troy in place of Wonder Woman.

 

It's called nepotism.

If this was anyone else, Levitz would have been off the book after his lackluster start with Adventure and LOSH.

Levtiz is credited with creating the character of Huntress.

 

In addition to the link saying that he is writing the mini series.

 

I'm glad to see the return of the fuller body suit for Huntress.
Still not a fan of the Jim Lee pointy mask but if it's a trade off to have the midriff covered I'll go with it.

 

USA Today Previews Action Comics #2 and we've another Morrison interview, he talks about Luthor in this one. I can't wait for this.

http://www.usatoday.com/life/comics...series-explores-brash-kid-Superman/50642928/1

 

Yeah, can't wait to get this.

I got a kick out of Morrison's instruction to draw Luthor as a once-heavy, fitness-obsessed kind of guy. He's a character who's mutated physically over the decades of his existence in the comics. Early on he seemed to be older than Supes (in fact, his first pretty-much-forgotten appearance in Superboy was as an adult) and fairly paunchy if not heavy at times. When he was retconned into being a contemporary of Clark's in Smallville that changed. Byrne drew him as a big guy who shaved his head after Lois Lane sarcastically compared his balding appearance to Fred Mertz.

Action is getting all the mainstream media attention - deservedly so - in the Superman relaunch. One can see why DC would want to rearrange the creative team over on Superman after the somewhat lackluster first issue.

 

I liked how in A-SS Luthor was a musclehead. "Feel this. This takes real work!" You'd think the world's smartest human would recognize an inferiority complex but I guess not.

You know, somehow I suspect our social, legislative and judicial reaction to a publicly known alien would not uniformly be "LOL he's not from Earth so we can torture him."