Is the DCU headed for a hard reboot post FC?

Nah. But DC are playing an odd game of brinkmanship with Batman - we're going to replace Bruce Wayne, yes we are, YES WE ARE, look we've put Neil Gaiman on a 2-part last Batman story, WE ARE GOING TO REPLACE HIM, for gods sake why wont you BELIEVE us, film? what film?

If you mean hard reboot in the sense that all of the superheroes are going to lose their powers and that the DC books will essentially become straight-up soap operas, then yes.

Haha "Geoff Jones would be hamstrung" hardly a reason to vote against!

Tom the film is still at or around Batman Year one territory, it doesn't need there to have been three Robins!

BATtle for the Cowl?

If you've actually been reading Geoff Johns' work over the past few years, you'd know that pretty much everything he's done has been in the interest of streamlining continuity and reworking/reinventing DC's characters. So, uh, rebooting would be good for him, not the opposite. He's DC's top character/continuity surgeon -- the stories aren't ABOUT continuity, they're about finding what's interesting and meaningful in the characters and foregrounding that.

If you want to complain about a guy who is hung up on old continuity and is writing about it, you need look no further than Grant Morrison. Let's be real, okay?

Anyway, I strongly doubt they have any desire to undo the good recent developments in the DCU. I think the post-Final Crisis DCU will be different, but mainly for Batman.

Re: Lying in the Gutters -- no Batman RIP spoilers on ILC plz! (Unless clearly signposted.)

(Johns is) DC's top character/continuity surgeon -- the stories aren't ABOUT continuity, they're about finding what's interesting and meaningful in the characters and foregrounding that.

If you want to complain about a guy who is hung up on old continuity and is writing about it, you need look no further than Grant Morrison. Let's be real, okay?

Yeah, I'm thinking you have this monuMENTALly bassackwards, MP.

srsly, how many pages in GL: Rebirth did Johns spend finding what's interesting and meaningful about Hal Jordan's 90s sidewalls?

JOHNS = my strawman, DON'T TAKE THAT AWAY FROM ME

With the obvious exception of JSA, I think Johns is actually pretty clever at making stuff accessible to non-continuity types, but that's partially because his stories are so boneheadedly simple (not that there's anything wrong with that, some of the time).

It seems that working with other writers (booster gold, 52) has done him quite a load of good. And I am actually quite enjoying his Action, and most of Booster Gold.
But really, and I say this as someone with considerable emotional investment in the character (whether that means it's worth more or less), his Green Lantern bores the tits off me.

I don't think they are heading to a complete reboot right now, but I do think they should do a 'Nu-New Earth/New Universe' kind of thing at some point.

If I was DC, I'd get a couple of the big gun writers and do a 52 style story starting a new universe from scratch in a weekly series and if it caught on then spin a couple of titles out of that. I'd play it out more like the Batman movies in that it is more regular humans doing extra ordinary things and have few people with actual super powers, Superman being one of the few exceptions. I'd have that there was a few masked heroes during the 30s and the war, most of which without powers except a couple like maybe 'Green Lantern' who disappeared.

I'd play a Watchman type angle that masked heroes pretty much faded out UNTIL now and have the new series start with the beginning of Batman and Superman, then add in a few of the classic heroes and villains one by one over the 52 issue series. But being that, I'd keep the amount of masked characters way down, so there are just not hundreds upon hundreds of characters.

Okay, let's get this straight:

In Action Comics, Geoff Johns is reinventing Brainiac, reworking Superman's supporting cast at the Daily Planet, and introducing "New Krypton."

In Green Lantern, he's cut away the dross of several decades of lame-ass Green Lantern comics and built a modern version of the whole Green Lantern mythology. He is currently re-writing the origin of Hal Jordan, Sinestro, et al, largely from scratch. He has introduced an entire spectrum of Lantern Corps, a blindingly obvious and great idea that somehow never existed in the franchise before.

Also, it's kinda ridiculous to bring up Rebirth -- that miniseries is continuity surgery, plain and simple. It's fixing the problems of previous comics, and somehow making it all work and make sense so that the series could finally go to a better place.

Meanwhile over in Batman, Grant Morrison is writing a dense, nearly incomprehensible story that only begins to make sense if you've read all the same bizarre old Batman comics from 30-50 years ago. Over in Final Crisis, he's writing a story that's basically just another long Grant-riff on his deep love of Jack Kirby. I mean, I love those Kirby riffs, but let's be really really real about this, okay?

"Blindingly obvious and great"?????

Green Lantern: book about space cops who draw their powers from a cosmic energy source. These are tough guys, the character was created in the Right Stuff era, so they need to be fearless and have lots of willpower.

By saying "oh there's a spectrum of different corps and it is the emotional spectrum" (this second clause is the dealbreaker for me) you're shifting the focus away from the entire space cop setup and towards willpower as an abstract concept. Johns is telling his story with panache but the extra emotional corps are, in the long run, dreadful extra baggage which changes one of the neatest sci-fi concepts in comics irreversibly.

Keep it real Matt!

Perpetua totally OTM. To put it in other terms; I hadn't read Superman since I was 13, and now I read Action every issue. I had NEVER read Green Lantern (despite trying to start it every other year like clockwork before giving up) and now I'm obsessed.

Well, Green Lantern has the space cop thing in full force, but it also has swarms of aliens with different energy rings flying around in space in a big battle. It's just fun and it looks good, and the emotional spectrum gives the writers an opportunity to contrast the virtues of will vs. the emotional centers/mindsets of the other rings.

Yeah, it is very Silver Age. What's so bad about that? It's better than the relentless borecore of Bendis' Avengers, I'll tell you that.

Oh god no more -core, for the love of English.

I'll admit that maybe part of why I've taken to Geoff Johns has to do with how much I've come to kinda hate what Marvel has been doing over the past few years. The Bendisification of the entire line, etc.

It's kinda nice to read comics that aren't trying so hard to be SERIOUS, and things actually happen in individual issues rather than just hitting the same talking point in issue after issue after issue across dozens of titles. It's starting to feel like Marvel Comics are actually written by literal Marvel zombies.

It's kinda nice to read comics that aren't trying so hard to be SERIOUS

Wait so is "Geoff Johns" some sort of pseudonym that writers use to submit unJohnslike work now, or did GJ finally get over his unavoidable and stultifying po-facery?

I think it's more that other people raised the bar.

And I guess there's a distinction between po-faced and serious too. There's a difference between having a really intense game with your action figures where your Darth Vader and your Magneto fight and it's the COOLEST THING EVER, and insisting that your action figure fight is a representation of the five stages of grief.

(The tendency Geoff Johns will have NO TRUCK WITH is the "action figures are a bit dumb anyway and let's face it most people used to make Boba Fett fight our pet hamster and draw on him with a marker pen" one)

I really don't think you need to have read anything about Zur-En-Arrh in order to understand it's place in the story IE as a sign that Bruce is pretty damn crazy.

odds on a trade where they reprint all the old comics being referenced?

i think it is nice that the internet exists so i can google 'zur en arrh' and find someone has scanned it in so i can check the reference. i do not know if i would feel more annoyed at that comic if i could not do that.

i do not think morrison's use of that reference, in two panels of that comic, really has anything to do with 'continuity' as the term is generally understood.

In the specific case of Zur En Arrh, the phrase had been turning up in graffiti in the comic since GM's very first issue, so it was a case of "OK, you can google this now or you can google it when it becomes a plot feature - it's up to you".

I think he's being a little cheeky to just assume the internet will do some of his work for him, but he's also being realistic: critics of the comic who pretend the imagined readership live in a cloud castle where Wikipedia and search engines have no sway are slightly disingenuous.

odds on a trade where they reprint all the old comics being referenced?

Pretty high. DiDio mentioned at one of the SDCC panels (can't remember which offhand) that they're working on something along those lines. Especially in light of another announcement, to the effect that they'd be changing (or possibly adding to, it's kind of unclear) the Archives series with themed books to go along with current projects, starting with a companion to Monster Society of Evil.

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I've thought about this and I think DC might end up having it both ways. I think it is possible that out of Final Crisis they are going to play up the 52 worlds angle and start a nu-new earth yet keep around the current DC continuity. This 'nu-new' earth being one that might mirror a bit more like the movie version of Batman and they would use to tie into whatever they end up developing for movies.

In a way how things are going is sad to me in a way, as it would be nice to have the DC universe back to the classic characters all at the same time. Just as they get Barry Allen back as the Flash and have reformed both Hal Jordan/Green Lantern and resurrected Ollie a few years back, they are going to get rid of the Bruce Wayne/Batman and have bumped off the Martian Manhunter.

I know that Alex Ross is kind of radioactive around these parts from some comments, but I really liked that Justice mini-series which played off the classic version of the Justice League of America. After reading that series, it occurred to me that is what DC should have it setup like again. Not to say you cannot make interesting comics with the revamped versions of the characters, but they are not the iconic versions, which considering how people love stuff like The New Frontier, I think having the JLA be the classic team is the way to go. With the big changes to Batman however, this seems to be something that is sadly not going to happen coming out of Final Crisis.

Grant's JLA had them being v iconic, revamped or not, and that seemed to work out for most people. Ie. good point, I mean.

I'd like to see some Ambush Bug, thank you. Maybe a softcover collection of the two 6part miniseries and the few odd specials? Yeah? I even make some nerdy online petition to start the ball rolling

I've seen mention of a possible Showcase Presents...