DC Reboots Universe 292
An anonymous reader writes "Bob Wayne, Senior Vice President of Sales at DC Comics, has written to comic book retailers saying: 'Many of you have heard rumors that DC Comics has been working on a big publishing initiative for later this year. This is indeed an historic time for us as, come this September, we are relaunching the entire DC Universe line of comic books with all new first issues. 52 of them to be exact.' In addition, some characters are going to be younger, some may be missing, relationships are being changed, and Grant Morrison will pen a new Superman title."
Old fans (Score:5, Insightful)
Sounds like a good way to alienate old fans. "What, you mean the decades of backstory I've been following is now entirely irrelevant?" I suppose it could help bring in new fans, by lowering the barrier to entry. But I don't see this offsetting the disillusioned older fans.
If you're going to reboot a universe, do it like Doctor Who did it, and not like Star Trek. Respect the decades of canon, and you have a built in fan base. Change the authors, the visual style, whatever, just don't mess with canon.
Oh, look... (Score:5, Insightful)
The Fox guarding the Henhouse (Score:4, Insightful)
The people in charge of this reboot... Dan Didio, Jim Lee, Geoff Johns... are some of the prime people responsible for screwing DC up over the past decade. So now they're going to hand the repair job to the same people that helped muck up the works? Sometimes I think Warner Brothers wants to kill DC off.
And some of the costume redesigns... radically changing Superman's outfight without the red tights and adding a military style collar? His costume has only been popular for 70 years, but hey, what does everyone else know.
Here's my first prediction for the "new" DC universe.... the reboot won't stop DC's habit of pushing a major "event" series every year, with so many tie-ins that you can't keep up (or afford to buy all the $3-plus issues). And the marketing for it will be the same crap we've heard ever since Crisis On Infinite Earths... "THIS is the event that changes EVERYTHING"... until the next event, that is.
Maybe now is a great time to quit collecting and just walk away.
not just a reboot, also a new distribution model (Score:5, Insightful)
Another part of this announcement, which is probably more significant than the reboot itself, is that DC will be releasing these new comics simultaneously, both at bricks-and-longbox retailers, but also on apps for the iPad, Android, etc. That is where DC is hoping to gain new readers for this rebooted universe, by finally reaching the younger crowd where they live (rather than expecting them to find the local equivalent of the Android's Dungeon), and maybe bringing back some of the many older geeks who've drifted away but find the idea of a new-and-different DCU interesting enough to take a look.
I don't know if this will work for DC (unlike the Comic Book Guy types out there, I'm not going to prejudge the books before they've been published), and trying to survive in this Brave New World of digital publishing while competing with cooler-looking video games and movies is going to be an up-hill battle. But I think it's a smart move to make, because the alternative was the eventual heat-death of the DC Universe as aging fans of dead-tree pamphlets about characters with decades of continuity dragging along behind them, slowly faded away.
Comics as myth (Score:5, Insightful)
If you're going to reboot a universe, do it like Doctor Who did it, and not like Star Trek. Respect the decades of canon, and you have a built in fan base. Change the authors, the visual style, whatever, just don't mess with canon.
Canon is the problem. Canon cruft, if you will. For instance, the hopelessly tangled canon behind Barry Allen was the main reason they killed him off in Crisis on Infinite Earths.
Now, admitting that I've been following DC off and on for more than 50 years (yup), my opinion may not be remotely related to marketability but here it is:
Comics are mythology. Mythology has no continuity. The details change from year to year and audience to audience so as to address the cultural needs of the time and place. You can always make up new stories in the mythos. If anything is constant, it's character: Zeus is the perpetual playboy who can't keep it zipped, Hera is the jealous wife who can't do anything about hubby so she takes it out on the tootsies and bastards, Hermes is a trickster, etc.
Were I in charge (and we can all be thankful I'm not), the DC Universe would be much more like the perennial movie versions in that each cycle exists as a snapshot in time. To the extent that there is continuity, it ages rapidly -- the details of anything more than a year old are vague, and anything more than three years old might as well have never happened.