DC to REBOOT???
- Thread starter Professor Zoom
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He's probably not expecting to fade away quickly, meaning that there's time yet to do a great deal. He seems like the sort who has a plan. And what appears most lucrative from the outside is not always so.
About thirty years ago a friend of mine was the ghostwriter on a kind of medieval fantasy novel that was to launch a series - the credited writer was at that time a very big name. Well, turns out that Big Name Writer had signed the contract a couple of years before his run of best sellers (which were themselves not his idea, BTW, but developed and sold to the publisher by an agent/packager guy) and when time came for his approval of the manuscript he suddenly wasn't sure that my friend shouldn't appear as the author of record.
I naively thought this was great - why shouldn't the guy who was doing the real work get the credit? The ghostwriter patiently explained to me how many fewer copies would be published and how much less he stood to earn in royalties if his name appeared on the cover rather than the well-known writer's.
About thirty years ago a friend of mine was the ghostwriter on a kind of medieval fantasy novel that was to launch a series - the credited writer was at that time a very big name. Well, turns out that Big Name Writer had signed the contract a couple of years before his run of best sellers (which were themselves not his idea, BTW, but developed and sold to the publisher by an agent/packager guy) and when time came for his approval of the manuscript he suddenly wasn't sure that my friend shouldn't appear as the author of record.
I naively thought this was great - why shouldn't the guy who was doing the real work get the credit? The ghostwriter patiently explained to me how many fewer copies would be published and how much less he stood to earn in royalties if his name appeared on the cover rather than the well-known writer's.
Sure I'm not expecting him to chuck it all in - but most of the big creators have at least side project which they own. Bendis sells comparative amounts to Johns and he says that he makes far more off Powers than his marvel work. It's a bit odd with Johns also been a suit maybe that's the constraint?
It may well be. We don't know much about what his deals are, or what he hopes to be doing in a few years. It's possible - I don't know how likely, but possible - that he's more interested in moving into the Hollywood end of things at Warners rather than staying where he is (if that's the case, I'd expect that his goal was set back at least some by his involvement in the Green Lantern movie).
It's probably a little unfair that I don't cut Johns the same slack I do, say, Morrison (indeed, I started disliking their output at about the same time), but the reason is probably that I've never really seen anything but well-honed conventionality out of him. Does Geoff Johns have an Invisibles in him? I dunno. He's thirty-seven. You'd think it'd have come out by now.
I'm just not really struck by his creativity. I mean, consider his greatest world-building exercise: the skittle corps are an interesting extrapolation, but that's all they are, extrapolation. More than that, they provide an ideal character generator. You don't have to think too much to invent a new Star Sapphire, you know? You throw for tits, you throw for ass, you throw for spike heel length, and you call it a day.
That said, there's not anything intrinsically wrong with just filling out an established universe in a work-for-hire arrangement. Chris Claremont did it for decades and made arguably the most important superhero books there ever were that aren't named Action, Fantastic Four, or Watchmen.
I'm not going to knock someone for making a living but honestly as I get older, I'm less and less interested in the corporate stuff and more interested in what someone can come up with on their own - but that's just my own bias nothing of meaning.
I'm strangely the opposite. I've gravitated far more toward corporate superheroes and somewhat away from lit-comics.
I blame Jason Lutes for bringing the suck in Berlin volume 2. (Please finish volume 3 soon, Mr. Lutes! Your pictures are still beautiful even if your second act collapsed in on itself!)
As for creator-owned superhero work, I'm not entirely certain that the "best" concepts for superheroes aren't already monopolized by the big two. They even own Miracleman now.
Of course, that's defeatist talk. It's true I haven't tried Mark Waid's little universe, the one with the dumb name. I probably should, though, as Mark Waid's the fucking man.
I blame Jason Lutes for bringing the suck in Berlin volume 2. (Please finish volume 3 soon, Mr. Lutes! Your pictures are still beautiful even if your second act collapsed in on itself!)
As for creator-owned superhero work, I'm not entirely certain that the "best" concepts for superheroes aren't already monopolized by the big two. They even own Miracleman now.
Of course, that's defeatist talk. It's true I haven't tried Mark Waid's little universe, the one with the dumb name. I probably should, though, as Mark Waid's the fucking man.
I won't be getting the entire 52. I did post earlier in the thread what I was interested in but now I'm just planning on sticking with Action Comics and the Bat-Family books. I might pick up Justice League Dark and Justice League International and maybe Wonder Woman as well.
Yes, the relaunch is DC's way of attracting new readers. Pretty much the sole basis for this whole initiative (from what I've understood of DiDio and Lee's ramblings) is gaining new readers and making the characters more "accessible".
When I saw the 52 for 52 sale on one of the websites and I considered it for half a second, but then I more or less decided completely against it. First of all, I know there are at least half I won't be interested in at all, so it would more or less be a waste of money in some regard.
Right now, I'm getting Action Comics, Aquaman, Animal Man, Justice League Dark, Swamp Thing, Batman, Legion, Legion Lost, and Stormwatch. I'm hoping that I can drop some of them, so I can pick up some new series' when they start up later and maybe some minis and if the Bat titles have a crossover, I'd be interested in that.
It was obviously intended as a comment on how teenaged boys think, not on how one should actually view a female character.
The main reason seems to be to draw visibility that DC is going live with online e-reader copies at the same time as the book hits the newsstand.
Everything else, ala the "new", is more or less window dressing cause like Brand New Day in 18 issues they are going to try and make you forget the hype of all this "new" and start tying into the old. Either on accident or intentional cause the interesting stuff for these characters is tied to what's come before.
As I sais upthread, if they hadn't taken the only DC book that I was buying pre-"reboot" off of the schedule, then I might have picked up a few. But they did so I'm not. 
Maybe he just, y'know, likes writing for the DC characters.
Playing Devil's Advocate, the last time a Kryptonian landed on Earth and was found by Clark, prior to Chris, was Supergirl. Wonder Woman staged an ambush to bring her to Themyscira to train her. If I recall, Batman was in on it, but it was Wonder Woman who drew Superman's ire over the whole thing.
While, yes, it probably is a sexist comment, it could possibly also be a throwback to Loeb's Supergirl arc in Superman/Batman. Loeb and Johns are studio mates and probably had that in the back of his head while writing "Last Son."
I forgot to add that I'll be getting both Legion books as well.
Wow, I didn't realize I was going to start up this kind of a debate with the WW I thing, I just posted that because I thought the Batman comment was funny. I'll be honest though, I wasn't even sure exactly what Supes was saying with the WW comment though. But after seeing what some of you guys have said, I think it was probably more about Chris's behavior than Diana's.
It certainly fits with the "fanboy living out his dream" thing he seems to have going for him. I can't tell if it's an act or if it's real (I've never met him in person), in but interviews with him, he always comes off as just someone who grew up loving comics, specifically DC and relishing the chance to play with their toys, so to speak.
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