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DC Reboots Universe
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."
Somehow I see this as being less successful than other reboots (like the Star Trek reboot) since they're essentially hitting the reset button on EVERYTHING. It's like a DC Big Bang.
I guess they can buy themselves some time by just retelling all of the origin stories again just in case readers missed them the first (or second, or third) time around and missed the movie and were under a rock for their entire life. Certainly much easier than simply retiring the characters and thinking up entirely new stories to tell with new characters that aren't weighed down by decades of cruft.
I read the internet for the articles.
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.
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At first, I thought the headline meant that the US Government was going to launch into thermonuclear world war...
I think they will just reboot everything. It will probably fail - and they already know it. But when fails, all the old fans will look at the old timeline with nostalgy, raising the value of the old storyline. Then they will come back to what works and sells. Selling more, of course.
For those of us who don't immediately recognize the reference to comics, after reading the title, we're scratching our heads wondering just how arrogant the US Capitol is.
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.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
Everyone is looking at this and missing the real story. Yesterday's article had the following statement, which will have much greater impact on the industry.
"The publication of JUSTICE LEAGUE #1 will also launch digital day-and-date for all ongoing superhero comic book titles - an industry first."
Digital download, available the same day as the paper copies. Why buy a hard copy when you can read it on your PC /.phone/ tablet / whatever?
http://www.comicbookresources.com/?page=article&id=32563
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.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
1- check ...
2- check
3- in process
4- Never!
5- Regularly, for the last 12 years.
6- check
7- check
8- sorta, I only buy compilations, graphic novels and manga
I know, I know, don't feed the troll and all that...
No sig for the moment.
I have mixed feelings on the ST reboot, but I have to admit destroying Vulcan was pretty ballsy, and Quinto was a good Spock.
A fun thing to do would be, if they know they are doing the final film of the new canon, have them stop the villain of the first film from going back in time, and the last scene is a clip from ST-TOS, the original time line having reasserted itself. :)
Please get Jim Lee to stop redesigning costumes. It's not 1994 anymore. And I'm really sick to death of seeing Wonder Woman drawn as a lesbian cowgirl hooker. Just stop already.
This is going to be a mess of epic proportions.
That's the difference between manga and comics. Mangas, in general, have an ending, so you can write a coeherent and complex story wihout the necessity of adding tons of new characters to keep it running, kill and ressurect the protagonist 15 times, create tens of multiverses or reboot everything at each 10-15 years because everything is so full os contradictions. No only manga, but series like Sandman, Watchmen (and even Calin & Hobbes), have endings too. They only need to reboot because they don't know when to stop.
Uh, no.
Many mangas are ridiculously convoluted, run on way to long, have the typical problems of endless new characters, death/resurrection, time warps and retcons, etc, and spawn endless derivative works, alternate versions (both official and unofficial), sequel, prequels, and sidequels.
Mangas can and usually do have all the problems American comics do. They often have these problems to a much worse degree.
The problem is that the story is never fully written. The story is made up as they go along (sometimes with a basic framework, usually not), and it stretched to fit however many issues they think they can sell. This is why TV shows get worse in later seasons. This is why movie sequels usually suck. The basic form of storytelling is at odds with the basic desire to milk a teat until it's dry.
Pfft, everyone knows 53 is the best number. It's like 42, but it goes to 11.
God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
and this is exactly why I stopped reading/collecting comics long ago. Asimov didn't reboot his universe, he tied it all together rather brilliantly. Heinlein..well, he used a deus ex machina to tie his stories together with all the other pulp universes in existence; not as brilliant, but a good yarn nonetheless.
But," we've got sagging sales what do we do?" " I know....let's 'Reboot the Universe'".. bah..
move along, nothing to see here..
In America today you can murder land for private profit. You can leave the corpse for all to see, and nobody calls the c
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.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
I AM a Trek fan, I own more than half of all of it which puts me somewhere below the latex ears group but well into dork territory among the mundanes, and I liked the reboot but I'm not committing until I get more.
Time travel and continuity have often been a big part of Trek... a little more shouldn't hurt anybody.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
If you like long storylines that actually do have an ending and are (typically) plotted out from beginning to end, go read the Vertigo trade paperbacks. Almost all of them end at either 75 or 100 issues.
100 Bullets
Books of Magic (the 75 issue series)
Sandman
Fables (you can stop at issue 75 and have closure)
etc.
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The problem with the American comic book industry is that it's stuck in the persistent now. That means that history irrelevant. We've got these characters and stories that span decades but no one ever ages. The world changes around them to fit with the times and we're expected to accept that everything just happens in the present. The industry, like American entertainment in general, is afraid to let go. They desperately cling to the same never-ending stories because if they let go they're then forced to come up with something new.
Japanese manga produces and endless amount of crap, but this one area in which they're far superior to American comics. Japanese comics routinely feature a finite storyline. There's a definite beginning and end. Some have a tendency to stretch out a particular storyline to an absurd length, but at least there's the satisfaction that there will eventually be a true conclusion and that major characters could actually die.
However, I wonder if readers are still obsessed with certain characters like I remember growing up. Whenever a character did die it would spark outrage amongst fans. Evidently American readers have as much trouble letting go as do the writers.
So this who DC reboot strikes me as lame. It leaves me with this extremely unsatisfying sense that there will never be any resolution. But then I've stopped reading this sort of thing long go. The superhero archetype has gotten a bit too quaint for my taste. They haven't even done anything to modernize the costumes, instead continuing to stick with tights that looks like they've been painted on. I've always wondered if they go with this look because it's easier than drawing clothing and other accoutrements. I don't have an inherent problem with them theme, but they keep perpetuating tired old ideas. How many superheroes do we need?
Reboot?
'Cos the DC's are not nearly as "Movie Friendly" as the Marvels - I'm guessing...
Except PowerGirl, of course.
She's probably the LEAST "movie friendly" they have. I mean, there's certain laws of physics and human anatomy that would make casting extraordinarily difficult...
Demanding constant attention will only lead to attention.
Comics sold a lot better (millions not tens of thousands) when they were impulse items and you could buy just one of them at random (effectively picking up a series and dropping it at will), than they do now.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
These "back to basics but we're changing everything" reboots are really starting to grind on me...cycles of reboots every few years, and DC tends to do them in the worst way. Marvel leans more toward limited ones like the terrible "Heroes Reborn" or the awesome "Age of Apocalypse"...they seem to be wise enough to test out the reboots on a few titles rather than the whole Marvel Universe at once, and then merge the successful characters/storylines back into Earth-616. DC, on the other hand, will probably be doing "Zero Hour Crisis in Hypertime during Blackest Night in the Multiverse" in 2015.
Geeks like to think that they can ignore politics, you can leave politics alone, but politics won't leave you alone.-rms
Better, yet. cut to a scene of Bob Newhart waking up.
Spelling and Grammar errors have been added to this post for your enjoyment
Supposedly it's 13 relaunches per week over the four weeks of a comic-book month.