1) The announcement that the marriage of Superman and Lois Lane “never happened” as a result of the relaunch. Noooo, it’s not a reboot at all.
2) Every time you think Fox News can’t sink any lower into the realm of partisanship and inaccuracy, they surprise you. Fox News host Eric Bolling, on the Glenn Beck replacement show “The Five,” declared–in denying that George W. Bush was a relentless fear-monger–declared, “America was certainly safe between 2000 and 2008. I don’t remember any attacks on America soil during that period of time.” Best of all, no one else in the panel bothered to mention 9/11.
PAD
• 
Fox News desperate spinning of the Rupert Murdoch scandal is also gloriously amusing to behold.
Yet, pathetically predictable.
Of course it’s not a reboot. Superman will be wearing armor, have red glowing eyes and be drawn by George Perez. Superboy Prime is back!
Maybe the “Mission accomplished” was meant to be retroactive and it’s taken this long for the time stream to catch up to the correction? Has anyone thought to check and see if the buildings are back up?
Oh, they’ve been wanting to reset the Superman and Lois to 0 for ages, because writers want to play with that ridiculous love triangle. It’s not my favorite tactic, because I’d rather not have the silly love triangle again. However, at least they went ahead and did it rather than continuing and writing the marriage badly just because they didn’t want to write it at all.
At least the love triangle was *something*. Lois has been a fairly useless character for years. They’ve never had a good idea for what she adds to the stories since she found out that Clark is Superman.
.
In the original stories, she was an antagonist. In addition to the love triangle, she was constantly trying prove that Clark and Superman were the same person. That seems like it would be easy, but he would always use tricks like a Superman robot to make it look like Clark and Superman were in the same place at the same time. She was also a better reporter than Clark, but Superman would cheat by using his super speed to get the story submitted before she could even get back to the Daily Planet.
.
Lois really used to be one of the best characters in comics, someone who was an antagonist without being a bad guy. Nothing they’ve done with her since then has come close to being that interesting. I’ve thought for awhile that the characters would be better off without the marriage.
You see, I just don’t get the old-school Superman. Or the old-school Lois. I’ve tried reading both Golden and Silver Age Superman and it kind of mystifies me. Particularly the dynamic between those two. And I usually like older comics. Sure, it can be fun once in a while. Like that one episode of Batman: The Brave and the Bold. I wouldn’t want to read it regularly, though.
Now, Barry Allen and Iris West. That’s a relationship you can always get behind.
Well, even though I think the old Lois/Superman dynamic was very good and definitely better than the recent dynamic, I can see why they changed things. Her trying to prove the Superman is Clark was one of those things that starts seeming stupid after awhile. That was fine in the time when the audience was 8 year olds who stopped reading and were replaced by other kids every 5 years. Modern readers would have more problems with it.
.
Still, I think the professionally rivalry between Lois and Clark the cheater would work well today. It just needs to be written in a modern style.
Gee, I sure hope Superman gets to use super-ventriloquism to prove to Lois that he and Clark are two different people!
Chalk me up as another person who never understood what made that “Triangle” tick. Struck me as more of a toxic relationship and we were better off without that meme.
So Superman and Lois Lane are getting an annulment? Ah, Catholic humor…
I don’t think either Clark or Lois were raised in that tradition, but I could’ve lived with an annulment plotline.
(And if any comics franchise could’ve come out of a divorce plotline with stronger sales than it started with, Spider-Man would be my prime candidate.)
Maybe the big red “S” stands for “Single.”
.
PAD
Will Mephisto be involved?
Zing!
Actually, Mary, I’ve been thinking… why did Peter just run from the blog so fast? And did you notice the color drain from his face? 🙂 I’ve been thinking.. that maybe Marvel should use this as an opportunity to undo “One More (Story rammed down the reader’s throats because the E-I-C doesn’t think a ‘loser’ should be married to a very attractive woman) Day. ” I mean not right this “moment in time,” but definitely soon, cause that could make those fans who drifted to DC drift back
I think he just did the same kiss he did in Superman 2.
What did you expect? Conservatives have been re-writing American history shamelessly for some time now. Vietnam was a necessary and glorious war America should’ve fight to the bitter end. Senator McCarthy and HUAC were not really bad guys, but misunderstood patriotic heroes. FDR was a lousy President whose economic policies caused the Depression instead of ending it.
.
What’s next? Nixon was the heroic victim of a conspiracy plotted by two sleazy reporters?
Don’t forget the Founding Fathers who fought tirelessly to end slavery (except for the parts where they wrote it into the Constitution and owned slaves themselves), and Paul Revere’s ride to warn, not the colonial rebels, but the British…
And let’s not forget little 9 year old John Quincy Adams’ many great contributions to the Revolutionary cause.
As well as ignoring the Founding Father’s real thoughts on religion, political parties, and so on.
I love seeing that Bolling just goes for it and everybody else just sits there with that stupid deer-caught-in-the-headlights look plastered on their idotic faces. You can practically smell the wood burning as each of them wonders if they should say something, of if they just wait another couple of minutes and it will all be over. Of course it will never be over. That same clip will be played and replayed thousands of times and they’ll all look just as stupid each time.
.
Unless Fox News has been re-booted of course and none of it ever happened.
I think the claim that DCnu is not a reboot is based on not rebooting everything. GL and Batman retain their continuity. It’s just everything else that’s up for grabs.
Sooooo, what? this means we’ll have 9 years of screwed-up, inconsistent continuity, again? Before Dan Jurgens fixes things for awhile, again?
.
Yeah, that just does not work for me either. They’re only “rebooting” some of a shared universe while not rebooting other parts of it? It’s a shared universe. The characters know each other and have interacted with each other. Their personal lives have had an impact on their histories and adventures.
.
And how would that partial reboot work? What, Batman occasional sarcastically asks Supes how the wife is doing and smirks at the confused look he gets? Green Lantern tries to discuss the good old days of the JLA that other characters don’t remember?
.
It’s a reboot. It’s a universe-wide reboot. The simple fact that some characters basic continuity is more or less intact doesn’t change that because their new history still has to acknowledge the new histories of the other characters. Anyone at DC claiming that this is anything other than a complete reboot for DC is full of it.
As opposed to the other 70 years of rock-solid DC continuity?
.
The thing with the older eras of DC continuity is that it didn’t matter as much. You could explain that something was Earth-2 or something when someone asked and it might actually be a workable answer. Plus, there really wasn’t that big of an outcry to explain every second of every character’s life and how it interacted with everyone else’s over the prior 30, 40 or 50 years of the character’s existence. Somewhere along the way, the “we have to explain everything” mantra got way out of hand.
.
That brought us to Crisis. Crisis was a good story and it could have worked. The problem was that the aftermath wasn’t well planned by the DC higher ups and no one really knew what had been changed outside of the big changes. Then that screw up was compounded by the fact that DC decided to make additional changes based on the Crisis event several years after the series had ended. I was a reader of both Justice League and the new Atom series that DC had put out after Crisis. Both books had Hawkman in them. Suddenly, Hawkman disappears and word comes out that Hawkman is getting a brand new origin, a brand new mini and the new Hawkman looks nothing like what we had seen a few months earlier and is now “new” to the DCU. And Hawkman wasn’t alone in the too-long-after-the-fact Crisis reworkings.
.
And all of that has led to, what, three or four other “Crisis” styled events? And each one of those has basically been undone by poor after the fact planning.
.
At this point, DC should just leave it the hëll alone, knock of the universe wide “Everything Is Going To Change!” events for the rest of the decade and focus on telling good stories where the point of the work is to tell good stories and not fix/change/explain/reboot/define/redefine every dámņëd thing in the universe’s continuity.
“And how would that partial reboot work? What, Batman occasional sarcastically asks Supes how the wife is doing and smirks at the confused look he gets? Green Lantern tries to discuss the good old days of the JLA that other characters don’t remember?”
.
Yes, but how often has Superman’s marriage to Lois Lane affected anything in the Batman books? Maybe never?
.
A partial reboot is just that. Obviously Batman doesn’t remember Clark being married, or Green Lantern remember a JLA history that the others don’t. It doesn’t change anything in their respective series.
.
“It’s a reboot. It’s a universe-wide reboot. The simple fact that some characters basic continuity is more or less intact doesn’t change that because their new history still has to acknowledge the new histories of the other characters. Anyone at DC claiming that this is anything other than a complete reboot for DC is full of it.”
.
I’m not sure I understand you. Are you complaining that it’s a partial reboot, or claiming it’s a complete reboot? Because it’s clearly not a complete reboot. That would imply that every character’s story is being restarted from the beginning, which is not the case.
That is why I think they should either reboot everything or let well enough alone.
.
“I’m not sure I understand you. Are you complaining that it’s a partial reboot, or claiming it’s a complete reboot?”
.
I’m saying it’s a complete reboot.
.
“Because it’s clearly not a complete reboot. That would imply that every character’s story is being restarted from the beginning, which is not the case.”
.
But they are rebooting every character by the fact that they’re fully rebooting most of the others. If you change Superman and aspects of his history, you do in fact change aspects of the histories of every other major character in the DCU. It may be nothing more than minor tweaks here and there in some cases, but the simple fact is that parts of certain character’s histories are now different or no longer exist.
.
I know that the most common idea of a reboot is starting over with a new issue/movie/TV show where we do a new origin story, but you can reboot a character without doing that. In the case of Batman, they seemed to like where he was at and didn’t want to greatly alter him, but as a major part of the DCU he is getting his history changed. If his history has been changed and things that happened no longer happened or happened in very different ways, he’s still getting rebooted to a degree.
“he’s still getting rebooted to a degree.”
.
To a degree, yes. Therefore it can’t be a COMPLETE reboot. But I think this is just an issue of semantics.
.
Here’s another thought, though: Peter Parker’s marriage was erased from continuity, so he therefore received a partial reboot. But nobody claims that the Fantastic Four or the X-Men were rebooted just because the histories of these characters now have to acknowledge this change in Spider-Man’s. Because the change in continuity was explained in-story with the whole Mephisto thing, just like the changes in the DCU are being explained by Flashpoint.
.
It’s a different situation though, Robert. With Spider-Man, they didn’t reboot him from zero and they didn’t claim that the entire world was now different. They deleted his marriage from his history by way of a deal with a dark power. Yes, it therefore had to change the way other characters remembered him and their interactions with him, but it didn’t fundamentally change much else about his general image or the way the rest of the Marvel Universe saw him.
.
DC is rebooting the entire DCU. Even if a character like Batman didn’t change greatly and isn’t being given the full new original and new #1 issue, he’s a part of the DCU and therefore a subject to the reboot.
.
With Spider-Man, you can simply claim that his marriage no longer happened while all of the other aspects of his life remained the same. He still had the same big fights and still interacted with every other hero in the MU more or less as established pre-dark deal. It also didn’t have as big of an impact on other MU characters by the fact that it was a change to Peter Parker’s life and not Spider-Man’s.
.
Batman is in a universe that is being changed from the ground up (yet again.) Multiple major characters and groups that were a part of his past are being rebooted and in some cases radically changed. Multiple events and relationships that make up Batman’s most current established history are now different or no longer there at all.
.
Marvel screwed around with Peter Parker’s life. DC is stating that it’s rebooting the DCU. That being the case, every character is getting rebooted. No character is going without changes in this and no character will be walking around remembering the way things were last year.
It’s a reboot. It’s a universe-wide reboot. The simple fact that some characters basic continuity is more or less intact doesn’t change that because their new history still has to acknowledge the new histories of the other characters. Anyone at DC claiming that this is anything other than a complete reboot for DC is full of it.
Jerry, you’re exactly right. (When the discussion is about comics you’re much more likely to hear that from me).
This is a bad idea for many reasons. The dissolution of the marriage, the change in an iconic costume, the continuity problems and the loss of the numbering for Actions Comics and Detective Comics.
I stopped reading Spider-Man when they undid his marriage and I feel that will be my decision here also.
Well, then the first Crisis was not a reboot either, because only some characters were totally rebooted that time too.
Wait, they’re not rebooting two characters? Two characters fairly central to the entire DCU?
.
I smell another Crisis-level mess coming…
Yeah, color me confused. If Green Lantern is NOT getting rebooted, but the JSA has been rebooted out of existence, how to explain the fact that Hal Jordan was the Spectre for awhile after his death? The Spectre was one of the founding members of the JSA! Wouldn’t that also wipe out any interactions with Alan Scott? And wasn’t Kyle Rayner involved with Alan Scott’s daughter, Jade, of Infinity, Inc.? For that matter, do any of the Infinity, Inc. heroes still exist? Yes, that smell is either another Crisis…or the sound of my brain cells frying.
Bah humbug. Another comic book marriage down the tubes. At least it was done in a way that prevents the character from becoming a widower, a divorce’, a guy who makes deals with demons to save the life of his chronically dying aunt (Spider-Man), a basket case (Scarlet Witch, Green Arrow), or an adulterous widower twice over (Cyclops). It seems like the only couple that’s safe from the “We don’t like our super-heroes married” trend are Reed and Sue Richards, and that’s probably because they’ve spent more time married than not.
I’d have to agree with Adam, though, that the wacky “Clark Kent/Lois Lane/Superman” triangle has been done to point of being one of the biggest jokes in comic book history.
Speaking of jokes, the Republican revisionist history regarding the Bush Administration made me chuckle. 🙂
The only time anyone ever brought anything new to the triangle was when Marv Wolfman said “Hey, what if a woman actually liked Clark Kent!?” and then introduced Cat Grant. But that was about the extent of it.
What is it about the marriages of comics superheroes that inspires absolute loyalty in (many of) the readers and absolute antipathy in (many of) the writers and editors?
Well, the stereotype is that comic book fans like the marriages on account of wish-fulfilment for their own sad love lives. While writers and editors look at the practical side: it removes romantic subplots, and when you have characters that star in 4+ comics per month, you want all the story engines you can get.
The icing on the Bolling cake was at the end of the segment, where they moved on to ‘more important news’ or something similar…
Casey Anthony.
If GL’s continuity isn’t being re-booted, then who blew up Coast City? The Cyborg Justin Bieber?
I’ve heard rumors that since Superman is going to be the “first known superhero” in the DC nUniverse, that the Morrison Action Comics is going to take place before the “present-day” continuity and be a collection of stories of Superman’s early days (like an ongoing version of John Byrne’s “Man of Steel” series), while the George Perez Superman would be “current” stories.
If that’s true, and DC is saying that most of the “big events” happened, then perhaps there was a Lois-Free version of the “Death and Return of Superman”/”Reign of the Supermen” and that Hank Henshaw/Cyborg Superman still exists.
On the other hand, if there isn’t a Cyborg Superman anymore (and I would be the first to dance a merry jig if such turns out to be the case), I think an easy fix would be to say Mongul acted alone… although Cyborg Justin Bieber is definitely the sort of evil I think would be capable of such an act.
Maybe, but then who took over the Manhunters? Who participated in the Sinestro Corps War? Who put the bop in the bop-shoo-bop-shoo-bop?
Hawkman. He hasn’t made sense since the first Crisis anyway, so why not confuse people even more?
.
I’m not sure about the bob-shoo-bop-shoo-bop, but I’m fairly certain Magog put the ram in the rama-lama-ding-dong.
Brian, you just made my day, thank you (though, thanks to you, I had to explain a burst of laughter to my colleagues).
.
Every time you think Fox News can’t sink any lower into the realm of partisanship and inaccuracy, they surprise you. Fox News host Eric Bolling, on the Glenn Beck replacement show “The Five,” declared–in denying that George W. Bush was a relentless fear-monger–declared, “America was certainly safe between 2000 and 2008. I don’t remember any attacks on America soil during that period of time.”
.
.
That’s not even a new claim for a Fox News host. It’s been made before on their network. But, yeah, Bolling certainly is sinking to some new depths from time to time. I guess Fox News learned with Beck that they can only drive crazy so far before it takes them off the cliff, so now they’re going back to their older, safer formula of saying really stupid (but not quite as crazy) things and rewriting history on the fly whenever they think their loyal audience will go for the lie.
What frightens me more than the Republi-cants rewriting history is the number of seemingly intelligent people who lived through these events and should know better that buy into the lie. I know too many people who insist that 9/11 happened during Clinton’s presidency, that W never bailed out any financial institutions or corporations, that Saddam Hussein was the leader of Al Qeada, etc.
It reminds me of a story from a non-fiction book of Heinlein’s (it’s been a while so I forget the title). He and his wife traveled to the USSR in the 50’s. While touring the country, the young lady assigned to them cheerfully stated that the Baltic nations that had been given to Russia after WW2 had been part of the Soviet Union from its very inception. And she KNEW it was true because that’s what she was told by her government.
Scary echoes of George Orwell…
.
When confronted with facts that challenge their cherised views, too many Conservatives simply delete them as soon as possible. It’s a form of siege mentality, defending oneself against a big, bad Liberal world that mocks yours beliefs is more important than honesty.
.
Bush bailing out Wall Street just doesn’t fit with their fake narrative of Conservatives as being against big government. So forget it, delete it, ignore it. Whereas most Liberals would simply shrugg and cynically accept that Liberal politicians betray their principles out of expediency all the time.
A family member told me after Obama was elected that we needed someone like Ronald Reagan to balance the budget. I told him that Reagan never balanced the federal budget and ran up budget deficits. He told me I was wrong and to look it up. I told him as an Economics major in the early 1990s, I spent time studying whether the non-war deficits could be damaging the economy long term. I eventually did look it up again to make sure my memory was correct.
I have to ask him if he still believes Reagan balanced the federal budget.
When confronted with facts that challenge their cherised views, too many Conservatives simply delete them as soon as possible
.
So basically you’re saying Conservatives reboot reality.
.
I love how that ties together.
.
PAD
I assumed that’s why you had posted the items together – because both involved retcons.
I hadn’t thought of the connection until now.
.
I suppose Conservapedia is their preview for how the world will be in September when they reboot reality.
Jerry Chandler said (snipped):
.
“The thing with the older eras of DC continuity is that it didn’t matter as much. You could explain that something was Earth-2 or something when someone asked and it might actually be a workable answer.”
.
Myself, I never had any problem understanding the difference between Earth-1, Earth-2, and so forth. As I understand it, there were only five Earths, Earth-1, Earth-2, Earth-3 (analogs of superheroes as villains), Earth-S (The Marvel Family), and Earth-X (Quality heroes). And that the other Earths interacted with the “mainstream” Earth-1 characters only occasionally (Earth-2 more so than any of the others). I’m not reading DC superhero books right now, but if the 52 Earths currently extant are always interacting with each other, that’s probably even more confusing. Especially to newcomers to DC.
.
Jerry also said, “Crisis was a good story and it could have worked. The problem was that the aftermath wasn’t well planned by the DC higher ups and no one really knew what had been changed outside of the big changes. Then that screw up was compounded by the fact that DC decided to make additional changes based on the Crisis event several years after the series had ended…. Hawkman wasn’t alone in the too-long-after-the-fact Crisis reworkings.”
.
I’ve never read Hawkman, but I recall that one aspect of Zero Hour was to reconcile the various Hawkman versions that had sprung up over the years (I doubt it worked). As to changes taking place after Crisis, I think DC had a reasonable window of the rest of 1986 (and maybe early 1987) to do this. At the time, I imagined that the changes to Superman in Man of Steel and Batman in Year One were the results of a “Crisis shockwave.” Or aftershock. Superman is still the Earth-1 Superman in Crisis #12 because the shockwave hasn’t caught up to him yet.
.
Once you get past 1987, though, it’s hard to make the shockwave theory work. The further away you get from the epicenter, the more the wave dissipates.
.
Jerry said, “And all of that has led to, what, three or four other “Crisis” styled events? And each one of those has basically been undone by poor after the fact planning.
.
At this point, DC should just leave it the hëll alone, knock of the universe wide “Everything Is Going To Change!” events for the rest of the decade and focus on telling good stories where the point of the work is to tell good stories and not fix/change/explain/reboot/define/redefine every dámņëd thing in the universe’s continuity.”
.
That would be logical. Last time I checked, DC doesn’t employ any Vulcans.
.
I agree that these universe-events are over-used; and most of the latter-day Crises were probably unnecessary. I’m not paying any attention to this latest Flash-oriented “mega-event.” Nor have I paid attention to big “events” at Marvel. I suspect that most of them will end up having few lasting effects.
.
I wonder if too many “events” that don’t have any real long-term impact might turn some people away from comics. We’ve probably all gotten burned on a company-wide crossover that proved to be a waste of our money (If I had a time machine, I’d tell myself not to buy Millennium and the various crossover titles); but as they were few and far between, there was time for the bad taste they left to leave us. With what seems an endless number of “events” is there time for the “bad taste” to go away?
.
On another topic, Jerry, since you’re a fellow old-time radio fan, I thought you might be interested in knowing about a police-procedural series called The Lineup.. It starred Bill Johnstone and Wally Maher, and opened with a lineup of suspects in the lineup being interrogated by Maher’s Sgt. Grebb, as Johnstone’s Lt. Guthrie spoke with witnesses in the audience. A witness either would or would not make a positive identification, and investigations into the crime or crimes would spin off from there.
.
Maybe you can tell me how accurate the actual line-up is. I always thought that unless you were getting criminals together to work for Keyser Soze or trying to determine who killed Major Strasser, you didn’t round up the usual suspects; you had one suspect and three or four decoys (though one episode did do it that way). Do lineups consist of X number of suspicious people picked up in a certain area following reports of a crime or the like, or is it one suspect and X number of decoys?
.
Rick
.
To be totally honest with you, I’ve never dealt with a line-up before. In the last ten years, every arrest I’ve ever been involved with involved an on-scene arrest when we arrived, a suspect that was well known to the victim or video evidence.
1) I think what DC is doing is a reboot followed by an instant flash-forward. The timeline changed in a way similar to Star Trek’s JJ-verse. Instead of showing you the beginning they are jumping to a point in the heroes’ careers where the JLA is already established. Some things happen similar to what you read before; some things did not happen at all.
.
The way I see it, the marriage is not being annulled, it just has not happen yet. Superman arrived on earth later in the new timeline so he is younger in “present time” (September 2011) and therefore not married. Even though some events still happen in the new timeline, like Green Lantern’s recent stories, they did not necessarily happen exactly the same way.
.
2) Nothing happened from 2000 to 2008!??? Right…the September 11, 2001 attacks were launched in 1999, they just happened to reach their destination 2 years later.
1) Reboot or relaunch or whatever the goofy claim to be we have a lumberjack, springstein superman that has jacked Kryptos cape, a armored superman, and the JL superman…this almost sounds like a toy line. Now where is that kung fu grip superman.
2) Fox News…a fox is many cultures is known for trickery and a cunning creature. Not sure about the latter but they are definitely full of the other(among other things), which conflicts with the news part. Might as well call it Fox Tabloid News.
I’m still not sure they’re seriously rebooting everything. When I look at Superman’s armored outfit, I have trouble believing they expect that to last. We still occasionally get artists who draw Jimmy Olsen in his outfit from the 40s just because that’s the way they expect him to look. Taking away Superman’s classic outfit can’t possibly stick, especially with this armored version that would look even sillier in a movie than his traditional costume.
.
I’m curious if they’re planning on a back door to undo all of this. They may just run with it for a few years, then undo the more extreme parts, hoping that the fans will rejoice and not complain about the stuff that they don’t change back.
1) At least its an old episode of Superfriends explanation (Time Travel changes things) instead of “its magic” to explain Peter and MJ
2) Fair and balanced where you say whatever you want no matter how without truth.
I’m interested in reading this new Action Comics. I like George Perez better as an artist than Rags Morales, but the Perez series (Superman) has this fail armor/costume. I actually prefer the jeans, t-shirt and cape version over at Action better.
As for the marriage between Lois and Superman being retconned, I see this as a plus. I am one of those fans who like the classic faux love triangle between Clark/Lois/Superman the best.
Maybe it’s just a reboot to the head.
.
PAD
That would explain a lot …
One reason I’m bailing from all in-continuity stuff is that partial reboots invariably lead to stories retelling of old stories to try to reconcile the new continuity to what’s been kept from the old continuity. At this point we have the post-Flashpoint continuity grafted onto the post-Infinite Crisis continuity grafted onto the post-Zero Hour continuity grafted onto the post-Hawkworld continuity grafted onto the post-Crisis continuity grafted onto the old continuity. My head is threatening to explode if I made any attempt to make sense of this, which I invariably would if I were to read the new stuff. I will however, continue to read Fables, which to be sure has Willingham’s continuity grafted onto the old myths, but I can handle that amount of continuity tweaking.
I could say you paint things as worse than they really are, but no, you are absolutely correct.
Hypertime sounds like a better and better idea …
The revived multiverse was a good enough springboard to launch this “rebooted” line of books without messing up anything else already in play, but Hypertime…I can see the temptation.
Batman retain their continuity.
Well sort of, all four male Robins are around, but apparently only Barbra’s been Batgirl? They haven’t really explained what’s going on there.
I think Gail Simone’s staying quiet so that people will pick up the book to see, or on some level she knows this is bad and that any explanation is going to go over badly.
There’s been a couple of times that what Gail has said and what DC press releases have said directly contradict each other.
I like Gail as a writer she’s done some great stuff, but i can’t help feeling that the only reason she’s on Batgirl is because she’s trying to do damage control.
Because on some level DC knew Babs as Batgirl was going to be one of their most controversial moves and that as good as Bryan Q Miller’s work on the the title has been and it’s been awesome. Gail was the best hope they have of reducing the backlash.
Gail’s conversation with Jill Pantozzi on Newsarama made it pretty clear (though she was very diplomatic in saying so) that the return/reversion of Barbara Gordon as Batgirl was going to happen, one way or another. She stated outright that the decision had been made before she was offered the new series. I have every faith in Gail Simone to make an excellent series out of the new status quo for Babs.
However, that is not a status quo that I am at all interested in. I’m not going to rant, rave, or “how dare they” as if the characters are mine and mine alone….but I’m not going to waste my money on something I don’t want to read. Folks can say, “Wait and read the story before you decide!” all they want; sorry, DC, you lost me at “let’s revert Oracle back to just another face in a Batsuit”.
What really underscores the problems is most annoucements showed the covers to Baatgirl#1 direct above Batwoman#1 (or was it the other way around), making it clear you have two similarly garbed heroines running around (both with red hair sticking out of their cowl no less). Certainly the characters have very different personalities but to the new readers that DC is apparently trying to attract, there’s probably going to be a lot of confusion, and I’m sure more than one new reader will mistakenly intermingle their back-stories in their head.
As a comic reader for 20 years but only intermittently for the last 10 of ’em, I’m happy and excited for the reboot/relaunch/whatever. Sometimes I try to get back into things but I usually have no idea what is going on. I try to catch up on Wikipedia but not only am I baffled at all the new developments, I realize how stupid a lot of storylines and character twists there are when it’s written in text.
.
I understand why many readers, followers, and collectors are upset, though, and why they’re nervous. But I’m all in, baby, bring on the new DCU!
.
I do find it amusing that people act like these “52” books or whatever it is will be around for awhile. Half of ’em will probably be cancelled after six issues. I’m looking at you, Hawk and Dove.
I can’t say that there aren’t some people who are nervous about the new DCu, but others are more bored than anything else. Understand that for many readers of DC stuff, aside from all the #1s this is very familiar territory; some of us aren’t so much fearing the change as thinking, “Oh crap, here we go again.” Again, there might be others who are viewing this with trepidation; for me though, it’s more like watching someone who, while playing a video game constantly hits the reset button before the game progresses too far.
The strangest thing about the reboot is that absolutely none of the readers were really asking for it. A few horrendously bad storylines (Cry for justice) were contentious in that many wanted it to never have happened (it was not only a pointless alteration of a by then solidly interesting hero into a less than interesting pathetic wreck, it was also a fairly horrifying treatment of a child-character), but nobody wanted Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman or Green Lantern to be rebooted.
So they rebooted Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman and kind of sort of not really but actually Green Lantern.
And why? Well…probably because of corporate mandates. Not only is the whole thing poorly planned and rushed (writers were given, what, a couple months to wrap up every single plot because they’d all be irrelevant? Yeah, that sounds like long-term planning…not), but the characters being altered are also the ones facing major franchise changes. Wonder Woman was pointlessly rebooted/altered right about when David Kelley was making his Ally MacThemyscira. Batman is getting rebooted now that the Nolan-franchise is ending and WB is preparing for a massive new franchise take. Superman as well. Green Lantern is the least rebooted of the big flagship titles, and his movie was…not a total bomb, but not a major success, either.
Gee, wonder if there’s a connection.
Funny thing is, when Superman got his first major franchise movie…they didn’t reboot the comics. Nor did they do so with Batman (either time). Funny how that goes.
As for Superman being single, it’s fairly clear DC learned nothing of the slowly declining Spider-Man sales, and only see the quick once-over boosts that the controversy spawned. Trouble with fueling a popular comic book with monthly rebootings is that sooner or later, the audience quits reading because of predictable unpredictability. People generally wants the base premise to remain the same as they’re familiar with, and to be honest, the majority of current comics readers are more familiar with the characters DC and Marvel are so eager to alter.
A better alternative for DC would have been to start something akin to Marvel’s Adventures-line, with continuity-free kid-friendly stories for all ages.
Kid-friendly doesn’t sell.
.
Apart from that, I suppose I agree with you, since my interest in Marvel/DC is at an all-time low. Except for the movies.
I agree, Andy, that this is “been here, done that,” but what worries me is how this affects the medium as a whole. There is a shift from print to electronic media going on. Now we see another way to alienate older readers from comics. It almost seems that, like some sitcom tv shows, the best way to take these characters is to reduce them to their base components, create stories that are easily digestible, rinse & repeat. No more worrisome continuity. I hate to think that years of printed media will be discarded, but it is not unheard of. Till they retcon Aquaman’s hook… ummm… anyway, Make Mine PAD.