DC Reboot/Relaunch - Good Idea or Earth Poo?

It's been brought up a bit in the Grant Morrison thread, but I think it's going to spark some interesting conversation if given a home.

Personally, I'm not into it, because the rich, messy history of DC has always been one of my favorite parts. I like how people like Morrison were trying to make it all fit together, with the black case book and the like. I like how writers used the mistake of Killing Joke to make Barbara Gordon a more interesting character. I like the long, multi-generational legacies from the JSA days on down.

I saw someone (Gail Simone?) say it is like the Silver Age launch of a new Flash and new Green Lantern, but everything so far is indicating the same character with a new start, not an update on the concepts with new characters.

I didn't know anything about it until it was mentioned in the GM thread. Took a look at some of the news sites and it sounds kind of horrible. But I'm glad they're putting Barbara Gordon back on her feet. xpost

One site called it the Ultimiteization of the DCU -- sounds about right.

I'm not clear on the specifics, and my one attempt to wade through comics sites to find out more didn't work out. Is this like Crisis (kind of)/Ultimate Marvel, where the slate is wiped clean, or like Zero Hour where a few retcons were made but most of what you'd read before was still canon?

I like rich messy histories, but for every Barbara Gordon in a wheelchair there's half a dozen Star Trek novels taking on the task of "explaining" why Klingons looked different in the original series.

Part of me would love to see a clean slate, I just don't have any particular faith in the powers that be at either of the Big Two to do a good job of it. One of the things that comics demonstrate a lot is that there's a difference between an interesting origin story, and an origin that sets up interesting stories.

The good thing about the Elseworlds, and What If, and the pre-Crisis multiverse, is that they're like Turner's frontier for rogue ideas - they're a safety valve for stories where the writer is going "yes but WHAT IF SUPERMAN WAS A MUSKETEER OR RUSSIAN OR SOMETHING?" and "oh man WHAT IF THE FANTASTIC FOUR WERE NINJAS AND DR DOOM WAS A PIRATE AND THE AWESOME ANDROID MADE THAT FUCKING INTERNET FACE!" And they can tell their little story, and it's fine, because there never has to be any follow-through. No one ever has to tell a story that's grounded on that one. It's narrative junk food.

When you're retelling a familiar character's origin, the things that are going to engage you, that are going to make that retelling interesting, aren't necessarily going to be in the service of writers working on that character six months from now, five years, twenty years from now. It'd be one thing if you were going to hire somebody to both reboot the character and stick with the book for the next five years, but that won't happen.

hadn't heard anything about this until a few days ago and I dunno it just seems stupid, surprised Morrison is at all interested in it given how he felt about Crisis.

In general I hate continuity and attempts to maintain it. at this point the Big Two are only enamored of it because they realize it gives them a huge financial reason/marketing angle to re-do everything every 10 years. oh look Superman's dead? yawn. but wait there was an INFINITE crisis? yawn. who cares.

would be funny (also commercial suicide) if one of the Big Two just decided to kill off ALL their characters and totally start over with completely different characters/series tho lol

tbh I loved Marvel's 2099 line, esp. X-Men 2099, because they just wiped the slate clean for a lot of the titles and said "how could you do the concept given THIS setting"

Good idea, will be terrible execution.

Not too happy about Stephanie Brown's tenure as Batgirl ending so soon.

And Finch's "Dark Knight" book going back to No.1 after just two issues is a little silly.

RT

@Pezdro
We live in a world where DC will give Scott Lobdell 3 books but ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!

Considering how poor their current line of comics is, I just don't think DC has the talent to pull it off and none of the companies have the editorial tightness to hold things right. When they did the same thing back in the 80s, they had a huge pool of new fresh talent both from across the pond and from the American indie comic companies to tap to make it work along with pinching some key people from Marvel at the right time.

They are starting 52 new titles - seems like it could be setup for a DC implosion.

They're publishing 52 #1s, there's no indication that they're starting 52 ongoing titles.

i do believe somewhere they said none of them were miniseries

given that this seems to be a dan didio brainwave, looks bad

When they did the same thing back in the 80s, they had a huge pool of new fresh talent both from across the pond and from the American indie comic companies to tap to make it work along with pinching some key people from Marvel at the right time.

So very true--hadn't thought of this. If we were going to get the new Grant Morrisons and Peter Milligans out of this, wa-hey, but instead we're getting multiple JT Krull (sp??) comics

I guess one problem is that since the 80s, superhero comics have become more marginal and insular. Back then, there were plenty of writers/artists who'd grown up with Silver Age superhero comics, and who were keen to leave their mark on the genre, especially since books like Swamp Thing, Watchmen or DKR had widened the spectrum of what you could do with superhero comics, and at the same time widened their audience too. But nowadays, there's a smaller number of young writers/artists who've grown up with superheroes, the main audience for superhero comics seems to be adults who've read them for 20+ years, and the main driving force behind seems to be nostalgia rather than innovation/expansion. So it's not surprising if young, talented artists and writers rather put their energies into other types of comics than superheroes.

There is a minor talent infusion going on, but it's nowhere near the scale that DC will need to keep something like this rolling. Particularly when the truth of it is that this is a lottta lotta franchise maintenance and I'm not sure there's five stories that demand to be told in the whole lot of these relaunches. The return to 90s aesthetic as evidenced by the particularly terrifying TEEN TITANS and HAWK AND DOVE relaunch convinced me that this was a great boardroom pitch that wasn't thought through.

But a Simon Bisley DEATHSTROKE book? I'd probably buy that. (Too bad he's jut doing a cover. For the first issue. Maybe some others.)

Love that Biz keeps randomly* doing chunks of Hellblazer issues every couple of months. Especially because the regular artists are so horrible, it feels like justification for my inertia in not dropping the series out of half-interest in where Milligan's going, and not rly having any other monthly books on my order.

*ok, sometimes when there's a 70s scene

Milligan doing Shade again is one of the few things I'm looking forward to.

I bought #1, it is ...well, I'm not buying #2

Not the Flashpoint thing, which looked horrible in the store, but it's a Geoff Johns spin-off so I expect nothing - he's getting Shade as a relaunch too.

Yeah but the Flashpoint thing is setting the tone for that - it's continuity-mired blah with the Ditko Shade, rather than the Milligan one per se, as leader of a Forgotten Heroes group or some such, I read it last night and can't even remember. Fair enough that the artist got bored and wandered off halfway through too.

Really? Ugh. That sucks. As I said, I just flipped through it.

I kinda hate Ditko Shade.

Milligan Shade was in his Hellblazer run though! But vanished mid-storyline it seemed, perhaps due to this impending Didio nonsense as per Swamp Thing.

I fell off the Hellblazer bandwagon almost twenty years ago. Worth reading this latest Milligan run?

I feel like this is just an excuse to publish more fucking origin stories, because they're the only good stories DC has any more.

Has mainstream DC published a good story not written by Grant Morrison in the past three years -- apart from maybe Batwoman and that Jimmy Olsen thingummy?

I mean, there was a period around 2008 when even Geoff Johns was writing fun comics, but that seems to be over now.

Because I'm a feeble masochist I've just downloaded 12 Flashpoint spin-offs to read and report back on.

Please do! I'm avoiding Flashpoint like the Geoff Johns plague it is.

As far as decent DC stories, I liked Paul Cornell's Lex storyline in Action Comics, and some of Gail Simone's Secret Six. But the core titles - Superman, JLA, Titans, Green Lantern, Flash, non-GM Batman - all crap as far as I can tell. I tried that Snyder Detective for a bit but it was really lame. Can't believe he's the great new hope for the DCU.

Yeah, I was going to mention both the Lex storyline and Secret Six. On the other hand, I feel like this phenomenon - that the titles on the fringe of the mainstream setting, the spandrels, are more interesting than the main event - has always been true of DC, or at least since I was a kid thirty years ago. So I don't see it as a description of their current condition so much as just part of what it means to be DC Comics.

Having wandered off from comics nearly completely for a decade, then coming back due to writers like Morrison and company, I'm kind of amazed by part of the current writing landscape.

Scott Lobdell and Fabian Nicieza were among the writers who made me * leave * comics when I bought mostly Marvel books in the 90s. Now they've set up shop at DC?

The Superman titles were actually pretty good a couple years back when they reverted to the old-school 'Triangle' numbering system. But that came to a screeching halt, thanks to our mang Straczynski.

This is a fine idea for DC. Which I say only because Batman Inc., the Green Lantern titles (though possibly for not much longer) and Cornell's Action are the only mainstream titles of theirs I'm picking up at this point. I got slowly chased away from everything else they were doing by ever-increasing unreadability, a lack of fun, shitty art, confounding continuity knots, and a general "why do you feel so uncompelled to make me give a shit?" factor across the board. When I saw that this Flashpoint mess involved a dozen Elseworlds-ish minis written mostly by people I've never heard of, I felt like I made the right choice. It's a sinking ship, and they need someone to plug the leak quickly. Resetting the clock ain't gonna do the trick.

Oh, and DC? If this plan of yours causes Xombi to get prematurely cancelled a second time, we're gonna have words.

(And not to stray too far off topic, but...why would you start publishing a Xombi ongoing without a trade or something that gave readers a point of reference for an obscure character that hasn't been around for 15 years? Ugh, DC. Ugh.)

I know ppl hate Nicieza but I loved his Psi-Force back in the day and I also loved his X-Force

plus, he is partially responsible for Deadpool, who has turned into a fantastic character

You realize you just went from This is a fine idea for DC to Resetting the clock ain't gonna do the trick. in the same paragraph, right?

I'm not saying Lobdell and Nicieza are bad across the board, just that their decent ideas are kind of buried under a lot of soap opera drama that's way sub-Peter David level and some embarrassingly-paced action.

This is a fine idea for DC because I largely don't give two shits about DC, is the implication there, you see.

Ah, I see. I thought maybe you were hoping it'd make a few more series palatable!

Nicieza's Thunderbolts (at least the stretch of it I read) was some of the most unreadable garbage I have ever encountered in mainstream comics. Which is really saying something.

My perspective is that all I'm really paying attention to is stuff by a few token writers (Morrison, sometimes Milligan on Hellblazer and such) and that their larger plans seem to be screwing up the Batman Inc. plot outline and messing with throwing a few Vertigo characters into mainstream continuity.

xxpost

Well, I'd be all right with that (my pocketbook, slightly less so). I just don't hold out much hope for that being the case. DC's tendency of late has been to pull stunts like this renumbering nonsense rather than trying to double down on the quality. Whereas the mean level of quality at Marvel has never been higher (especially when you factor in the ungodly number of books they're putting out in a month).

not sure I ever read Nicieza's Thunderbolts tbh

having a difficult time believing it was worse than Jeph Loeb tho

Other good, maybe great, DC titles are Jonah Hex and Zatanna.

Oh god, Jeph Loeb, why did I think "Hey, people seem to like this Batman thing he did, I guess I'll read it!"

Then again, at least it wasn't his work on Ultimates

"the mean level of quality at Marvel" isn't higher than between 1965-1977, imho, though a friend of mine said to me that quesada was the best marvel editor-in-chief since roy thomas, and i agreed w him on that

they should just let Neal Adams helm this whole thing imho

Loeb maintains a consistently low level of quality. Eye-rollingly awful at all times. But I will still give him the smallest amount of credit for being able to tell something resembling a coherent story, however bland and stupid that story may be. I (tried to) read three or four of Nicieza's Thunderbolts trades, and I have no idea what the hell was going on most of the time. It had something in common with the "throw shit at the wall and see what sticks" style of storytelling employed by little kids, changing the narrative up almost panel-by-panel at times, except that it was boring and bad and not even a little bit fun.

Ha ha. I knew someone would call me on that, Ward, which is why I threw in the qualifier about the number of titles they're currently putting out. No question about the quality of the period you mention, but it's gotta be tough maintaining high standards when you're publishing 50 books in a month.

Yeah, Loeb's work reminds me of what would happen if you did a rough plot outline and then wrote as little dialogue and exposition as possible.

Nicieza kind of... comes up with an idea or two and then the characters do random things for an issue or two and then either the situation resolves or something is revealed.

I gotta admit... I loved what I read of Nicieza's Thunderbolts run, couldn't believe he wrote it. Some of his Cable and Deadpool stuff was great too.

I fell off the Hellblazer bandwagon almost twenty years ago. Worth reading this latest Milligan run?
― EZ Snappin, Friday, 10 June 2011 01:28 (9 hours ago)

If you can get it from a library, sure. If it was drawn well, I’d say ABSOLUTELY!, but the clunkiness of the art I would expect make it a pain and exhausting to try and read all two years worth or whatever. I started out just buying an issue now and then, eventually put it on my order bcz I like knowing there’ll be something for me every time I go to the comic shop and there are approx 0 non-Big 3 or licensed floppies available through Diamond these days, and then whenever I think “jeez this isn’t really giving me five bucks entertainment each month” he’ll go “but look, a multipart story with Shade in it,” or “hey, have a full issue of punk-era grottiness painted by Bisley” and I’m like “aw go on then.”

Has mainstream DC published a good story not written by Grant Morrison in the past three years -- apart from maybe Batwoman and that Jimmy Olsen thingummy?
― Chuck_Tatum, Friday, 10 June 2011 05:27 (5 hours ago)

Ha ha not really, and I’ve bought a bunch out of the reason above. Bought the Giffen Doom Patrol for the Giffen/DeMatteis/Maguire Metal Men backup, but the main book was pants. Bought the Giffen/DeMatteis Booster Gold and the first two issues were really good, but went nowhere p fast and they got dumped to make room for crossovers and reboots. Cornell’s Action was great fun for a few issues, but then every issue became a crossover with something I hadn’t read and couldn’t follow, and then they dropped the Jimmy Olsen backup and asked me to buy the first 2/3 of it again to read the end, so I dropped both. Half-enjoyed Cornell’s Knight & Squire, but seems to have been axed four issues into a six-issue miniseries.

(Wednesday Comics was in the last three years, just, maybe? Was it not a response to Kramer’s #7? There was a predictable mix of great, bearable and rubbish stuff in that, but it was huge fun as a publishing project regardless.)

(But my usual policy is just to buy whatever Morrison does for Marvel/DC and ignore anything else that’s not an auteur creator I like playing around with corp toys, so my answer is always going to be “ha ha not really”)

I don't have any baggage tied to the X-men that went down after I quit comics the first time, but I think Fabian Nicieza's Cable & Deadpool is one of the more fun self-contained Marvel/DC super hero series I have read since returning. You don't need to know bupkus going in and even when it kind of references the Marvel U, it does so in a fun way. Why? Probably because it just did what it did and you didn't need to read the f-ing X-men or whatever to enjoy the comics, which is why so many of the big character comics just suck.

Outside the bonkers Morrison Batman run, the only consistently good DC comic I read was The Secret Six. The few issues I read of the Lex Luthor Action were pretty good, but I missed a couple issues and never went back. Some of the other Batman stuff was OK, but it is pretty spotty. That Batwoman story was really good, but heck that finished up a while back now.

I'm reading more Marvel by comparison now and some are OK some are infuriating and some just seem the same, but mostly as I get 'em cheaper via mail subscription. I guess they don't suck as much at 2 bucks or less an issue.

I do think they are running into walls what can be done with many of these characters. Half of the big story lines, even the good ones, from DC or Marvel are about some big character dying or being replaced or a new version. What is wild is that even some of the good recent super hero comics will have parts that are just borderline idiotic or something I really really hate, which kind of sours me on them a bit.

and remember, at the time DIAMOND didn't even carry Omaha, bcz Geppi was personally opposed to it!

so

Gd is short for goddamn, which many conservative xtian types equate with taking the lord's name in vain... Can't break the commandments.
Lotsa people i grew up with thought "goddamn" was as offensive as "cunt"

A lot still do. Can't wait to see how DC and GM respond to this. (I'm still in my first cup of coffee, haven't looked at the comics news sites yet today.)

so can we talk spoilers re new action comics yet? SPOILERmaybe: so Superman is no longer invincible, just really really strong? and is the suggestion that he's getting stronger (i think they mentioned that when he first came to the city he wasn't quite as strong as he is now)? presumably bc the longer he's under our sun the more powerful he gets, tho this would suggest that his powers only recently developed so i wonder if he has the same baby crashed to earth backstory or if he's a more recent transplant.

I can only wonder what said retailer would have thought regarding these pages that are in a MARVEL ESSENTIALS book that's probably on his shelves: http://highway-62.com/wp/?p=1593

there is NO WAY superman has the time to say "gd" and the forethought to censor himself
i would bet good money morrison is TOTALLY unaware that this trope even exists.

He's Superman, of course he has the time and inclination to self-censor. WELCOME TO COMICS.

did superman make a habit of texting jimmy before the reboot? that just seems so much worse.
superman don't text!

Jury's out on ACTION. Kinda like it. Kinda don't. Tough to put my finger on. Much of the frisson seems to come from the space between what we expect the character to be and who they are on the page. Not sure if that's enough, but will give it a while. Luthor read a lot like how Alan Moore played him in SWAMP THING, at least that's how it came across to me. Not sure if that'll change with time or not.

Looks like the Comic Conspiracy guy has caved, though he's not really explicit about it and is still wrapping it all up in "I JUST WANT YOU ALL TO KNOW I'M A CHRISTIAN!!!"

The main thing I'm taking away from the DC reboot is that it's really boring reading a bunch of first issues. (Action in particular left me cold, but I seem to be the only person who didn't like All-Star Superman, so maybe I just don't like Grant Morrison Superman stories.) Not disappointed by Animal Man yet, though.

I seem to be the only person who didn't like All-Star Superman,

You could be! I've never seen another dissenting view.

Me either! I didn't think it was BAD per se - it's Morrison - I just didn't like it enough to keep reading it.

That Green Arrow cover is like those cupcakes that look like hot dogs. I know that it isn't an Image comic, but my eyes think I'm lying to them.

When does the George Lopez version of Superman start?

right after Modern Family... NEXT!

Should have posted this here instead of aldo's thread --

Is it too spoilery to talk about the Flashpoint Mystery Woman?

I already mentioned her upthread. I've no idea what she, or the sequence she appeared in were supposed to signify. Like I said above, my hunch is that she was only added to the story as a backdoor, so there's an easy way to reverse the reboot if DC wants to do so.

She's made a tiny appearance in all, or almost all, of the #1's so far.

Yay, a giant crossover!

So far I've read Action Comics, Batgirl, Detective Comics, Justice League, and Green Arrow (I also looked thru Hawk + Dove to gawk at ridiculous Liefeld artistry). I've got Static Shock, OMAC, and Swamp Thing still to read but I'm getting bored of all this nonsense. Is anyone enjoying any of this?

http://i53.tinypic.com/2yyyqmc.png

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xzORu1dqEE0

Bits of it are good. Not nearly enough though.

have spent the last hour searching internet for the panel from an 80s issue of Checkmate where they sing "Life During Wartime". It's out there. I've seen it recently.

that's awesome

I got:

action comics
animal man
batgirl
batwing
justice league international
men of war
stormwatch
swamp thing

Swamp thing and Animal Man exceeded expectations. Men of War I got on a whim and ended up liking a lot too. JLI and Batgirl were adequate, I'll stick with them. Action Comics was fine but I think I'll trade-wait. Stormwatch was incomprehensible, I got it because I like Paul Cornell but I never read Stormwatch before. I have pretty low standards but I tend to not enjoy galactic-scale books as much as street-level stories. Batwing I kinda liked, I could see it getting better or getting worse just as easily (this is a terrible review, eh) but I don't know if I personally can handle that level of realism.

FRANKENSTEIN is perfectly fine as a straight-up rip of HELLBOY/BPRD, but why wouldn't you just read HELLBOY/BPRD?

Resurrection Man's off to a good start, but I loved the original so I'm easy to please here.

Stormwatch was straight-up garbage with one good idea torpedoed by a bunch of incoherent, incompatible ones. The tone of most of the returning characters was completely off, especially Jenny Quantum and Jack Hawksmoor, and the new characters are all hot garbage compared to Swift and The Doctor, not to mention all of the non-Authority Stormwatch characters (Fahrenheit, Flint, Battalion, Hellstrike, Winter, Fuji, Synergy). The whole thing is a fucking mess that I have absolutely zero interest in reading; this is the first time I've felt this way about Stormwatch/Authority characters since I first started reading with Ellis's original Stormwatch run (and they've gone through some ROUGH patches in the intervening years).

I leafed through Suicide Squad and, even though I had no idea who half the characters were, it seemed intriguing. I might go back and get it.

Static Shock was stale and boring, basically playing up all of the Spider-Man parallels at the expense of the stuff that actually makes Virgil an interesting, distinct character, plus most of those gaps were filled with AWFUL nonsense wholly out of character for Hardware. I'd planned on picking this up because of my love for the old Milestone line but it seems really unlikely.

Justice League came across better actually reading it than it did leafing through but I don't know if I have the patience to wait around for Cyborg to show up as Cyborg.

Grifter was genuinely entertaining! I never really cared too much about the WildC.A.T.S. characters in comparison to Stormwatch/Authority and Gen13 but this does a good job of showing why Grifter became so popular, plus the mystery of what happened to him and the randomness of the attacks against him are genuinely engaging. This is the only title I'm currently planning on continuing to follow.

I was going to investigate Justice League Dark but, after the wholesale failure of Stormwatch #1 I'm not going near anything Cornell writes unless by accident.

I thought Justice League Dark is going to be written by Peter Milligan?

Just about to post that as well.

Oh is it? lol nevermind then

What's the other thing Cornell is going to write? I want to publicly announce I'm going to avoid it and then huffily cross my arms.

He's writing that DEMON KNIGHTS (?) thingy - it came out yesterday, I think. I'm avoiding it because nothing with the words "demon" or "knight" near each other can ever be good. It's a fact.

Tales From The Crypt - Demon Knight was good, though! Granted it wasn't a comic book.

Somebody page when DC launches a Bordello of Blood series.

Funky is completely OTM about FRANKENSTEIN, unfortunately. It's not working anything new in that vein when it could be. Too fast a read as well.

FRANKENSTEIN would have been awesome if Frank had shot Fishwoman in the face when she introduced herself:

"Is one such as I not proof enough against perverting Nature, rendering it a mere plaything of men?!"

By the way, merging Wildstorm into the DC universe is the stupidest idea ever.

honestly, I think the main reason Grifter worked for me was because there was practically zero indication that it was occurring in the main DC universe

I kind of liked that character previously and the comic made absolutely no sense, having read past stuff.

+1 to Funky's comment.

ha, all I really know about Grifter is that he's a sharpshooter from Team 7, so I didn't have much of a foundation to contradict

I guess the worst thing about FRANKENSTEIN was that it felt completely by the numbers and boring. A book like that shouldn't be boring. It should be insane.

I liked the Wildcats 3.0 stuff Joe Casey did and the Brubaker Sleeper issues that he was in. x-post

It looks a little like they are merging some of his origin story with Voodoo's; I am assuming that the ppl hunting him are possessed by Daemonites.

though it would have been funnier if they'd stolen the "exotic dancer" portion rather than the "can sense Daemonites" portion

I guess the worst thing about FRANKENSTEIN was that it felt completely by the numbers and boring. A book like that shouldn't be boring. It should be insane.

I enjoyed the art, but yer dead-on. "Here's your team of monster pals" seems far too obvious and cutesy.

If you stuck with the same premise but changed things up a bit, it could be slightly more interesting: you could begin in media res - Frankenstein fighting fighting fighting a million monsters or so in a small town, all madness and adrenaline, with all the expo being done by the occasional intercut to Father Time and SHADE, and then end ("We're sending in reinforcements, Frank!") with the intro of The Monster Squad; we'll climax w/ a final two pages of Frank shooting Abe Fishlady, just to show that WE DO THINGS DIFFERENT HERE IN THE NU-DCU or something, whatever, it's still neat.

It'd be a better read, I think.

And that's why I don't write comics.

I probably lean too far towards linear storytelling, but even I recognize that there's times to break that and GET IN THE ACTION RIGHT NOW. First issues are a good place to break that rule (though I almost never do it myself.)