f13.net

Source : here (http://www.comicbookresources.com/?page=article&id=32566).


I can't come up with something witty to say here, so I'll just throw in a token  :uhrr:.

I wouldn't be surprised if it starts out as "Here it is the new DC!" and in a couple of months turns into the DC version of Marvel ultimates with the old titles coming back and DC pretending they never intended it to be a true relaunch.

They wouldn't really have much to lose by doing this.  Aside from the Green Lantern and Batman books right now, most of DC's stuff sells like shit.  I'd be kind of annoyed if this throws off Geoff John's Green Lantern run, but whatever.  Continuity fixes like the various Crisis events did little to make the books accessible to new readers., so they might be better off just making this reboot a permanent thing.  Of course none of it will matter for shit if they don't get good creative teams on these books.  I like Johns, but he can't carry the entire line himself.

I give it a year before there is a big event that shakes everything up again. It's the same as it ever was, I've given up on continuity in comics.

I don't really see the point in them catering to the hardcore continuity fans at this point though.  Look at the numbers these comics are doing right now (http://www.icv2.com/articles/news/20090.html).  At this point, do they really need to worry about upsetting the 25,000 people that read Teen Titans by wiping continuity?

Does world of warcraft alone make more money monthly than the entire comic industry? Those numbers seem ridiculously low.

I don't think 'Comics' have made their money from the actual comic books in quite some time.


That 30 dollar tie with superman on it though...  :why_so_serious:





In my ever so humble opinion, they should just give up on continuity all together. Trying to keep together 100 years of contradicting story and power creep is just stupid.


If you have a Flash story, tell your Flash story and call it a day or whatever. Keep true to the theme of each character, but let their stories stand on their own.

The numbers are low.  I don't know how the smaller publishers stay alive, but it's generally understood that DC can only afford to publish so many low selling books because they're owned by Warner Bros. and the loss they take on a lot of their books is made up for in merchandising and Batman movies.  The actual comic book market isn't very healthy at all and is largely propped up by events and crossovers.  That top issue there on the list, Fear Itself #1, is the start of Marvel's current big Event story.

That would make too much sense, and make it too accessible to Joe "I only go in on free comic book day" Average (aka, Me.).  I picked a few up that weekend, leafed through, realized it was even more Soap Opera for geeks than I remembered and decided my kids were better off just reading old compendiums if they want to know anything about superheroes; which they don't.  "Superheroes are Lame." The daughter will read all kinds of Manga, though. vOv

Really, they should just fuck paper books all together, put it all online for free and use the advertising money as the revenue stream. Or let webcomic writers/artists do their own stories and DC just gets a cut.


Would there be wheelbarrows of shitty fanwank work out there? Yes. Would it be different then it is now?  :oh_i_see:

The above reboot is what fanbois are gushing over, but the truly important story is DC going simultaneous release with digital and print on all issues from that relaunch onwards. (http://skattertech.com/2011/06/dc-comics-announces-day-and-date-digital-distribution/)

That's why the reboot is important - DC is making a grab at the digital download crowd. Marvel will probably have to follow suit. In 2 - 3 years max expect most print comic book stores to have either massively changed what they carry or to have disappeared. Especially as the back catalogue titles start getting DD release as well. 

A gutsy move as long as they actually go through with it.  But yeah, a part of me thinks this could happen when they succumb to nerdrage.

Don't be fucking stupid. It won't be a genuine reboot any more than "Crisis on Infinite Earths" was. It's a renumbering, and will shortly resume with the same inbred, stifling continuity porn that condemns most comics to a small group of insiders. The point is not to *reboot* these characters, it's to tell good stories with an *indifference* to continuity. There are plenty of decent runs of long-established titles that do that now, you don't need a reboot, you just need the stones to hire someone who doesn't give a shit whether Superman masturbated on General Zod's face last week and gave birth to a microcivilization of Bukkake Kryptonians.

Were that to happen I'd actually consider buying comics again.. because they'd be rare once more.  Nobody gives a shit about Action Comics #1 for the shitty storyline.  :awesome_for_real:

They just want to release a bunch of #1's and in 10 months, various writers and editors will change jobs and the new continuity will spin off into shit again. 

Comics are a terrible bang for your buck entertainment.  Online is the future.

I just want DC to release the missing trade paperbacks for Books of Magic, is that so hard?

Releasing 52 #1 issues in one month is actually a horrible idea as most comic retailers will tell you.  There is no way they can successfully market even a fraction of those books, and retailers have no idea what to expect from these books so they're in the dark as to how much to order for each one (comic book retailers deal with a razor thin profit margin as it is if I"m not mistaken).  As ballsy a move as this may seem for DC, comic shop owners are the ones who are going to be taking the biggest risks here.  If these books fail, DC is still in more or less the same situation they're in now.

The comic book shop owners are fucked for the future. Monthly comics makes almost no one any money, especially DC. The drive to mostly or all digital comics is going to become too strong in the next few years and those B&M retailers are going to be shit out of luck because speculators killed the back issue market and collectibles of any types are too fluid a market to bank on.

As for DC's reboot, a real, honet-to-god-Ultimates-level reboot is absolutely needed, but I don't know if they'll have the balls to stick with it. It also makes changes like Dick Grayson becoming Batman really fucking silly and wasteful if they just go back to Bruce Wayne as Batman.

Changing the character to Dick Grayson instead of Bruce was silly and wasteful to begin with, so I don't see why they wouldn't continue making decisions in that vein.

At least in terms of selling books and doing something new with the Batman mythos, switching Batman's made sense. To shitcan it a year later really takes all the air out of that balloon.

Comic Shops seem silly to me to begin with. Didn't comic books used to just sit on the magazine rack beside the chocolate bars in grocery stores?

Have you been reading it? It's been pretty fucking awesome.

I dunno. Name me something you like, and I'm guessing it's not the same as it was in the mid-1970s. Like computer games? You may have noticed a few changes. (For example.)

I do not understand the point you are trying to make.


The point I am trying to make is Comics don't need entire stores devoted to them.

Using your logic the only store you need in life is a Super Walmart.

The super walmart could probably sell more comics.  :why_so_serious:


It's just way to narrow a scope for store.

Well, any comic store I've ever been to that was successful had more than just comics.  At least that I've seen, the ones that do best are the ones that also sell various RPGs and board games as well.  The shop I get my comics from has half the store for new and back issues of comics, and the other half crammed with RPGs, board games, and Warhammer.  As best as I can tell, they've been doing great.  I would guess that though the profit on comics themselves is a razor thin margin, it gets geeks into the store to also buy D&D and Magic cards.  To get to most of the comics, you have to walk past at least some of those things on display.  They also sell a lot of TPBs, which I believe is where Marvel and DC make most of their money as well. 

The local store we had here that only sold comics, never did well at all, and I'm pretty sure it's out of business now.  Though a good part of that would be a combination of local demand, and that it was run pretty poorly the last couple years. 

The problem is that the Super Walmart isn't selling them.

What Mazakiel said. Most surviving comics stores today sell a range of SF-and-fantasy merchandise like TV shirts, etc., board games and RPG stuff, books, action figures, you name it. Basically I think the template at a typically smaller scale is Forbidden Planet in London. If you don't like Forbidden Planet as a 'type' of store, you don't like life.

If it wasn't for movies, DC and Marvel would have merged already.  Movies will probably keep them separate for awhile, but eventually somebody is going to get itchy and buy both.

Disney owns Marvel. Warner Bros owns DC. They aren't going to merge any time soon.

DC is shying away quite a bit from calling this a reboot.  Especially when it comes to the stuff that is already successful, like Green Lantern, which seems to be continuing pretty much directly on from the current stories:

So it will probably just end up being all of the books renumbering and another Superman origin.

and that right there is why comics are dead.

I understand the need to 'freshen' up the characters for a modern audience, but when it's done every 3-5 years it gets a  BIT old.

Universe reboots can't be half-assed. This sounds half-assed and has been the problem with every reboot DC has done since Crisis. Either have the guts to start all the way over and keep piling on continuity problems. Ultimates worked because it was a real reboot even if it was a parallel reboot.

The problem with Ultimates is that continuity can build up again quickly and shitty creative teams can fuck things up even further.  Look at shit like Ultimatum.

Which is why comic spanning continuity is silly and stupid and  :dead_horse:

What's especially annoying is that it IS going to fuck with several ongoings where they were actually telling great stories (including the current run of Detective which, yes, features Dick Grayson as Batman). There is no way in hell that they can find 52 books worth of good writers and artists that can tell stories that aren't continuity porn. Another sign of the stupidity of this is that Geoff Johns is clearly going to be one of the primary architects, and he pretty much exemplifies everything that's wrong and limiting about the current inbred state of most superhero comics: he uses gore just to communicate that he's "sophisticated", he is in love with the most inbred continuity elements imaginable, and he compulsively retells and retools the origins of characters every few years since he can't think of any other kind of story to tell.

There are a few interesting books and creative teams coming out of this, but by and large it's a bunch of Do Not Want. Batman himself is looking to be DC's Wolverine: he's the headlining star of four titles (Batman, Batman & Robin, Detective, and Dark Knight; the latter two, maybe three apparently having their own individual continuities, which I'm sure is just fantastic for the new comics fan DC is looking to snare), is a lead character in two major supergroups (both JLA and JLI), and will likely be a major character in more individual books (Nightwing, Batgirl, Batwoman).

There's also a couple of interesting little editorial edicts which drive a lot of the new character designs as well: the first is the removal of all "outside underwear", mainly affecting Superman and Batman and Aquaman and all women are to wear pants (or things approximating pants). The latter has led to some unfortunate costume designs, like Black Canary's hideous green spandex leggings with fishnets over them, but has shifted artist focus upwards, so now anyone who can has a shitload of cleavage.

I got a good chuckle out of Jim Lee's costume redesigns: everyone gets a bit more armoured, except SHOW US YOUR NORKS WONDER WOMAN.

(http://media.comicvine.com/uploads/1/18863/1837236-tumblr_lm33wgou9f1qbujox_super.jpg)

Is that a green energy gatling gun? How far the Green Lanterns have fallen from days of yore.

Wonder Woman's costume looks like shit.  :uhrr:

They felt the need for a movie tie-in where GL does indeed use a green energy machine gun.

I don't follow GL and never have, but even to me that seemed incredibly stupid.  Doesn't his ring do anything his mind can concieve?  Why would a projectile weapon be necessary at all?  Does everything have to originate with the ring or can it be free-floating?  If it can't be free-floating, how the fuck do green-energy bullets work? My mind was boggled.

It looks slightly better on the cover of her solo book where it's someone other than Jim Fucking Lee drawing it, but yeah.

And now that DC is folding the Wildstorm characters into the DCU proper, everyone's got 90's fever again. So we get shit like this for the "new" Teen Titans:

Oh dear fucking God, the return of Scott Lobdell, unnecessary wings and shiney shiney costumes. And what the fuck is Superboy wearing on his back, a taped on Superman symbol?  :argh: :argh:

I think the real problem is whoever drew Wonder Woman herself has only a vague idea of what human anatomy actually looks like.

Heh, I was just ranting about the machine gun last night. Sure, my mind can conceive what a machine gun looks like but I sure as fuck don't know how one works or how to put it together.

I have no idea who any of those characters are supposed to be in the Teen Titans picture.



Also, how is Cyborg chilling out with the rest of the justice league? The iconic super heroes, superman, batman, flash, greenlantern and wonderwoman... then Cyborg!  :why_so_serious:

And


http://www.newsarama.com/comics/DC-Universe-Reboot-Announcement-110531.html



It all seems rather forced and silly to me, but that can be said about the whole reboot thing in general as far as I'm concerned.  When I first heard the news, I was hoping it'd at least get some of the recent Batman stuff thrown out, but apparently that's not the case either. 

haha jim lee still doesn't know how to draw feet

Oh my fucking god, I never noticed that until just now.

Cannot unsee.

That's more or less her costume in the forthcoming TV series...


... where it still looks like shit. (Edit: Forgot to add image tags. Fixed)


But you see, its only taped on the top, so it can still flap like a very small cape. Its a really clever homage to adult Supie. [/management meeting]

Show has been axed before the pilot even aired.

So they're going with the costume of a pilot that will never air?  How do their giant brains not burst from their brilliance?

Oh and the TT looks like a juvenile version of JLA.  And Cyborg's in JLA?  What, did the JLA's HR dept. issue a memo to Superman?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RyGx3m1gPZI

Okay, Teen Titans: I'm guessing Superboy, Donna Troy, Impluse and OMG IS THAT THE RED ROBIN COSTUME???

I don't know who Spider-Gal or TarWoman are.

WW's costume changed last year and now it is being changed again. The idea is to give female characters pants, rather than, "I'm off to fight crime - now where did I put my fishnets and g-string?".

I liked the recent Wonder Woman redesign though.  Shame they're going with that travesty.

Yep, that design was the right side of good.

It sure as hell chased me away.

In almost all the announced books, I see zero streamlining of story and continuity issues. These are even busier, messier books at the conceptual level. The costume redesigns are mostly equally fussy, coming off roughly as "Hey, we thought the visual look of 90s superhero comics was great!"

I think the basic take that I've seen elsewhere that DC has decided to just get it over with and commit suicide, while Marvel is sticking with wasting away and dying slowly, is about right. When the dust settles in about five to ten years, there aren't going to be monthly superhero comic books, basically.

Speaking of slow-fading-away, Marvel's summer event comic is just stunning crap, and from a writer whose work I've otherwise liked a lot (Matt Fraction). Three issues in and it's not clear what's going on, why anyone should care, or anything else. Once again the entire world is getting the shit pounded out of it--how many times is that going to happen? And again, a "death" to make it seem like it has gravitas, with Bucky-Captain America getting killed, which makes three years of interesting storytelling by Ed Brubaker utterly pointless.

Somebody really needs to take away the intellectual property from both publishing houses, shut them down for six months, and come back with a lean, spare set of interesting titles with tight, effective storytelling and no continuity obsessions. Dump 75% of the characters into limbo for now: most of them have no consistent personalities, no interesting storytelling hooks, no unique conceptual ideas behind them. Crowded superhero universes are only interesting if the crowdedness itself becomes a compelling idea of ongoing writing, as in Alan Moore's Top Ten series or Busiek's Astro City.

Well, don't worry, he could have been shot with time bullets.  :woot:

The DC titles are all being announced. 52 titles. I think they've got to have a plan for cancelling half or more of them within five issues. The market is simply not going to support anything like that. Many of the creative teams are quality choices, mind you, but there's no way anybody is buying more than a fraction of those.

Lots of them are very oddball, niche, continuity-driven, titles that will grab no one who is not already a comics reader unless they really open up the creative range so far that creators can do pretty much whatever the fuck they want with little editorial control. Dan Didio is not known for leaving his creators to do whatever they want, so I don't think that's happening.

Evil Beware, we have waffles.  :heart:

Newsarama has compiled descriptions of all the new books here. (http://www.newsarama.com/comics/dc-comics-september-2011-solicitations-110613.html)  There are a few interesting books (Morrison on Action Comics, Milligan doing a supernatural Justice League with John Constantine on the team, a Frankenstein book, and a few others).  And then you've got stuff like Batwing, where the book's description is essentially "here's a black guy wearing a Batman suit, written by Judd Winick".  Or the Stormwatch book, where they shoehorn some characters from the old Stormwatch/Authority into the DCU (where obviously their body counts are going to have to be toned down a bit), and then throw Martian Manhunter on the team.

Wait, Starfire is a antihero?  :why_so_serious:

I actually quite like Supergirls new costume.

[spoiler](http://i.newsarama.com/images/supergirl-cover-1.jpg)[/spolier]

That's quite good actually, especially the cloak.  Not sure what's going on with the boots though...

I like the BlackHawks idea, but I doubt the execution will live up to anything I am envisioning in my brain.

... he's pimped up the Batman outfit.  :oh_i_see:

What I find kinda funny, is all of my Comic Knowledge basically comes from the DCAU and all their spin offs. So the actual 'proper' comic characters are strange and alien to me.

My only exposure to her is the Teen Titans cartoon.  So I'm picturing a naive alien trying to be edgy and failing in new and hilarious ways.

Pointlessly segmented armor is pointless.

I kinda liked that Harley Quinn stayed on the slightly coy side of female costumes.

Not anymore.

(http://i.newsarama.com/images/SuicideSquad_cover_01.jpg)

Oh Sweet Monkey Christ.  :ye_gods:

I always liked the X-Men style of telling alternate future tales. Writers get to go crazy and tell good stories. (Days of Future Past, Morrison's final X-Men arc). Then there was the What If?! comics which could be cool. In one of them , Wolverine became lord of the vampires and Storm was his queen or something. Sometimes, you even end up with wild stuff like this dude (http://www.comicvine.com/charnel/29-8035/), which was cool when I was thirteen but most likely sucks now.

Well of course.  When you're not showing flesh when every other woman is you have to go 180 when they start covering up.   :awesome_for_real:

If possible, it looks even worse full sise.

I'd better slap a NSFW on this for safety...


They also just released the cover of their super villain hero series Red Lanterns

Pink is the new black, yo.

That Harley pick makes me very sad.

As a new character I wouldn't mind (and ignore), but the Harley Quinn I'm familiar with is only interesting as a mostly harmless, zany, but broken individual.

Superman: The Man of Steel and Also Unnecessary Seam Lines and Maybe Some Ugly Boots Too.

Goddamnit, that looks ridiculous.

Should be noted that that is not a real cover, but it is the actual costume design.

Edit: And according to an interview (http://www.bleedingcool.com/2011/06/13/scott-lobdell-talks-teen-titans-to-bleeding-cool/) with Scott Lobdell (who's writing Teen Titans, Superboy, and Red Hood and the Outlaws, because god knows DC is hurting for writers to spare on projects  :uhrr:), Superboy is still a clone of Superman and Lex Luthor, the whole Death of Superman clusterfuck is still canon, and Tim Drake still has a shitload of backstory with his tenure as Robin not being retconned.

And this is supposed to make things simpler for new/returning readers?

The sad part about Harley, is she was a original creation for the original Batman cartoon that spawned all the others. Really what throws me off the most, isn't her stripper outfit (which is still ridiculous mind you), but her sinister smile. Harley isn't supposed to be like that. It's like Lanty said already, it doesn't fit her.


The superman costume doesn't look atrocious to me or anything, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was done that way so the next real life superman movie costume is easier to make or whatever.

Is that his real head? The head looks wrong.

Shit, that interview with Lobdell explained it all. Bob Harras got promoted to DC EIC. Harras is a complete tool, going back to the days when he was in charge of all the X-Men books and he more or less drove Chris Claremont off the books.

Every time I look at that my first thought is "that is NOT Harley Quinn".

Harley Quinn -  :awesome_for_real:

NOT Harley Quinn -  :ye_gods:

Maybe it's just because most of my first Batman exposure came from watching Batman TAS when I was in junior high or so, but for me most of those characaters are the standard I hold everything Batman to.  For instance I have never liked Health Ledgers joker at all because I compare it to the cartoon one, and to me Ledger's was much too dark and evil with almost no "clown" side to him at all.  But then again I'm mostly the same way the the Xmen and Spider-Man cartoons from the 90s so it probably is just an age thing.

Well, Harley was created specifically for the animated series.  And she was wildly popular, so she was added elsewhere.  That is the definitive version.

Ledger's Joker didn't bother me because the Joker has been portrayed a bunch of ways and the Bale Batman has been going for a darker interpretation all along.  Psycho Harley might have fit in with that vision, but I wouldn't have found her a compelling primary character.  And that's the thing about Harley.  She was a secondary character that was compelling enough to become a primary.

A lot of the love of Harley is that she's just trying to have fun, but isn't malicious, and mostly pretty harmless.  She's also protected by a lot of luck that her carelessness doesn't hurt people.  A version of her that gets her kicks as people are hurt wouldn't resonate nearly as well.

It's all high tech and futuristic looking, yo.

And why do they insist on giving Superman panties (or panty lines)?  If they're trying to get away from the underwear on the outside look, why not make it look as if he were wearing actual pants instead of same-colored-underwear-on-the-outside?

Does having big muscles help Superman? Why doesn't he weigh a buck twenty-five?

Because he can also kick the shit out of other kryptonians, apparently.

On Ledger's Joker, I also didn't care for it much. I was expecting something like Brandon Lee's the Crow as the dark joker, I got some guy who was just a nutball with plans that all magically worked because the script said so. Too much Saw in it, i guess.

What I don't get about the visuals is that the 90s is now widely derided by comics fans as visually and narratively a disaster, and the height of the dumb collector's ethos that drove the business into the ground. So DC has decided that the aesthetic path forward is...the 90s?

Two Words - Jim Lee.

What?

The worst excesses of the '90s "dark" stuff is derided, with good reason.  That ignores the fact that it was the welcome change from the '70s and '80s spandex whiny-emo stuff before it became self-parody, and that period helped launch all of the darker and grittier independent brands that moved away from the classic vanilla superhero story.

Also?  Everything looks terrible in 10 or 15 years.  I mean....  Jack Kirby and his bizarre hat fetish? 

The business side of it had as much to do with the '90s bubble and crash of the entire collectibles market (sports memorbilia, cards, etc) as anything else.

I am eagerly awaiting the gritty spawn reboot.

I'm talking: visuals/design elements. Take a look at the relaunch Teen Titans cover and tell me that doesn't look like every dumb 90s visual trope except for "big guns" and "shoulder pads" rolled into one. A lot of the relaunch visuals are like "Image Comics 3.0"--it's like DC's version of the post-Onslaught Marvel books. Design, esp. costume design, was not the big issue for DC books.

The 90s was when the comic industry sold millions of comics each month. Now they are down to the few hundred thousand (at best) so it isn't surprising they are looking back to glory days.

Jim Lee especially - Image was very successful at the height of the boom, so I think he may be trying to recapture the magic.

The early part of the visuals/design elements was a move from the Old School formless and cartoony style, to a more angular and detailed style (look at muscalature, for instance) which was a good (and interesting) change. 


Yah, it eventually devolved into the Giant Guns, Giant Shoulderpads, little heads, and Broad Shoulders nonsense which everyone thought was ridiculous (the wasp-waisted giant boobed women, and use of women in general, bordered on fucking tragic). 

I don't have as many terrible memories of this since the only comics I was really into were Silver Surfer, Punisher, and Spider-Man (pretty much pre-Venom overuse nonsense) while avoiding the X-books which were the most ridiculous... that and I was done with comics in the early '90s.


Like everything else, we move from innovation to growth to prevalence to stagnation/decline.  By the time that the "dark" period was in full swing, the heros from the '60s (the guys with everyday problems) had become awful emo cliches, so the advent of the realist/dark stuff was a welcome change...  and 10 years later it was self-parody.

The 90s had two huge problems:

1. Successful gimmicks to increase sales worked for a time, leading to even more ridiculous gimmicks until the whole thing fell apart.

2. Artists got elevated to a higher plane that writers. Todd McFarlane being given his own Spider-Man book to draw and write is just one example. Then you have Image Comics, etc.

Spider-Man #1 and X-Men #1 are the perfect microcosm of everything wrong with the 90s. Driven almost entirely by the art staff, using characters that were already over-saturated, alternate covers, mediocre stories, aimed at speculators.

As far as the DC reboot goes, I was going to write in the Green Lantern movie thread that a lot of their most iconic characters are just bad source material for movies as they are just old-timey and ridiculous. I'm not a fan of reboots but if you are going to reboot then do it - this soft reboot stuff sounds like a horrible compromise.

The Marvel renumbering scheme ended up being a disaster, and a few years after that gambit the Ultimates line was introduced to address the exact same problem the renumbering was supposed to. To me the best way to deal with out-of-date characters is to subtly update them over time, and the best way to deal with convoluted continuity is to stop referencing it.

Edit: Editor's are the people to blame for continuity messes. Writers come and go all the time and most have their own agenda. It's up to the editors to keep everything straight, set boundaries and provide stewardship for the lines. It seems to me that starting in the 90s writing teams started to turn over much more frequently and editors weren't able to control the ensuing messes.

The other big difference is that the readership used to outgrow comics, so that the next wave of writers didn't have to worry about continuity from a few years previously because it was a whole new audience.

WE SHOWED THEM! WE SHOWED THEM ALL!  :awesome_for_real:

In a similar vein, it winds me up a little that Marvel have decided to cancel the Uncanny X-Men just so they can split it into two new titles. One of them is called Wolverine and the X-Men and the other is called (guess what) Uncanny X-Men. But it's a new Uncanny X-Men book, starting at issue one.

For those who don't know, Uncanny X-Men is the original X-Men book, stretching back to the Stan Lee and Jack Kirby stories of the 60s, although it didn't have "uncanny" in the title then. This is the book that had the Dark Phoenix stories, Days of Future Past and other classic stuff.

Nowadays, there seem to be a dozen different X-Men books, and new ones are announced and canceled all the time. Trying to follow the story is hard. So it was always handy that there was one obvious flagship book to follow if you wanted to. It may not always have been the best of the many X-Men books on the market, but at least you know what it was about and that it would include the most important developments in continuity in some fashion.

Faced with X-Men Legacy, X-Men, Generation Hope, X-Man, X-Factor, Uncanny X-Force, Uncanny X-Men, X-23 and half a dozen more, you could at least be sure that Uncanny X-Men was a safe bet. Now it's just going to be one book among many.

Finally, Wolverine gets some more exposure.

I used to read comics back when I was a teenager (the 80's) and recently got a moto xoom and have been trying to get back into them. Tablets work great for comics!

Anyways I couldn't believe the different version of each. I feel totally lost and was looking for a place to start and have a continuous story line.

Right now I am reading the ultimate x-men and am quite enjoying that but have no idea where to go next, they all just seem to be one big convoluted clusterfuck and I have no idea how anyone would jump in as a complete noob. It just seems like too much work to find and a starting place. Oh and don't even get me started on crossovers......

As I only really read Marvel as a youngster, I wouldn't mind reading some DC titles and any advice on good ones and where to start would be appreciated (or even some good marvel ones as well)

I felt the same way about 7 years ago when I got back into comics. Found that I couldn't read superhero books anymore, at least not the ongoing monthly titles. I've stuck with mainly miniseries and random graphic novels unconnected to continuity.

There's just something about browsing in a comic shop for a couple hours that I can never give up by reading digital comics. Everytime it's like walking right back into my childhood.

I hear DC is launching a couple of #1 titles.  Those are probably a good place to start.

(Seriously, good luck.  No telling what will be good or bad with a relaunch.  Also I never enjoyed DC much, except for the Vertigo line.)

Slight detour, but...


I found a copy of Ultimatum at Half-Price Books a week ago, got around to reading it over the weekend.  If I didn't know better, the creative team for it must have been inspired by X3...   :uhrr:

Yeah, I really liked the idea of the Ultimates universe and the first two runs were good but it really suffered from the fact that the writers seemed to decide they should just retell every big story from the main continuity rather than trying to tell new stories or letting things build slowly. The result was all the stupid stuff from continuity they had started out escaping from coming right back in and also making the whole thing feel really rushed, disjointed and confusing. It's really a shame and frankly one the editorial team probably bear the blame for most of all. I think the books would have benefitted a lot from EiC that put their foot down on retarded stuff happening or even banned too much retelling of famous stories.

The problem with Ultimates is that they were in the end ostensibly to attract new fans but were actually geared towards old fans.

If you aren't familiar with the original then the alternate take isn't interesting just by being alternate - that's the only take you know. Look at someone like Ultimate Captain America - he's a pretty terrible character. The only thing that makes him interesting is that he's so different from regular Captain America, but that's not anything a new fan could pick up on. Instead they just get a dead-end unlikable character.

A lot of the writers saw a lot of chances to play around and wink at old fans - what if we made this good guy a bad guy, or reversed a certain event? So it becomes a greatest hits remix.

The whole concept is kind of a dead end anyway though. In the end it build up it's own continuity and now you have the normal universe, the Ultimate Universe and need a third one now that Ultimate is long in tooth.

Agreed. I enjoyed the Ultimates universe while I read it, even tried to catch them all for a while, but the fact they sped through lore from the 616 universe (The Clone Saga! Legion! Ultron!) meant it was painting by numbers, albeit with a darker pallette.

They did the clone saga? Lol. Hey, why not revisit the single worst idea in the history of marvel comics?

The clone saga is when I stopped reading comics regularly. It was one of the dumbest ideas I had ever seen and spoiled the whole thing for me.

Wikipedia has a recap of the Ultimate version. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clone_Saga#Ultimate_Spider-Man_Clone_Saga)

It still reads like a mess.

Kind of the problem with Ultimates in a nutshell.

Comic book companies try out a scheme to attract new readers every couple years. I was horrified recently to see sales numbers of comics these days - the top title is selling something like 100,000, with most titles sub 60k. IIRC X-Men #1 sold a couple million. So whatever they are doing isn't working.

Comics have so many problems right now - price, distribution model, content. None of these attempts to grab new readers ever address any of those. When I started reading comic books they cost 75 cents. When I stopped they were $2.75 - same length, not any better content. (Nicer paper and coloring process though I suppose)

I think I'm with the people who believe the best course of action is to sell thicker Shonen Jump style books with multiple titles in them. Makes it a lot easier to have one-shots, mini-series, etc, and switch the undercard around without confusing everyone and introducing new #1s all the time. If you want to do something that spans all the X books you can put all the relevant issues in one fat product. More bang for the consumer buck, more durable, easier to stock in stores, etc.

I believe Marvel is about to start doing something like this, but there aren't many (any?) details available and the number of books seems quite large, like 10+ thick books.

They also need to embrace more digital distribution options, with a resultant decrease in the price of each book. Let's face it, $3 for a 32-page comic book is just crazy.

If you are interested in getting back into the X-Men, you could work your way through the major trade paperbacks which tell something like a coherent, continuous story between them.

You'd be missing out a lot of stuff but not anything that really matters when it comes to getting up to speed with the story.

House of M - everything changes for X-Men and mutantkind in general
Messiah Complex - moves the story on from the cliffhanger ending in House of M
Messiah War - you could miss this out but it's surprisingly good
Utopia - I think this one is dissapointing but it does have a major plot event for the X-Men
Second Coming - as the name suggests, relates back to Messiah Complex and Messiah War
Generation Hope - carries on the story from Second Coming

That would be plenty of time (and money) spent and would fill you in on what's going on with the X-Men pretty well. Not everyone likes House of M but I thought it was great, and in any case it launched a plotline which has dominated the X-Men books for the past six years so it's a good place to start. (House of M is kind of a follow-up to Avengers Disassembled but you don't need to read that to get on track with the X-Men).

It sounds like you might have missed some other great X-Men comics - check out the trade paperbacks of Grant Morrison's New X-Men run and Joss Whedon's Astonishing X-Men run. Those books are well worth reading, but if your aim is to get to grips with current continuity then it's the stuff I listed above that will help.

Personally if you wanted to get back into comics I'd say fuck 95% of Marvel's current ongoings (but then I didn't really like House of M and the fact that stories from then have pretty much been based on it bias me a lot. If you enjoy M then you might get on with all the recent stuff) and dive into the Cosmic stuff. Annihilation War is a really great event comic not particularly tied to continuity. It uses quite a number of established Marvel characters but ones that haven't been used all that much in the last decade or so, so you really don't need to be familiar with continuity or back story outside of general knowledge of the universe (like knowing who Galactus and Thanos are). It's also really good, pulpy, space opera and leads off into a couple of ongoings that I really haven't looked at in a year or so. Need to check back into Nova and The Guardians of the Galaxy and see if they're still fun or have devolved into crap.

Nova ended a year or so back with issue #36.  Guardians of the Galaxy ended with #25, which I think also coincided with Thanos Imperative.  I think Abnett and Lanning took a short break from the Marvel Cosmic stuff following their Annihilators mini, and are coming back in September with the Annihilators vs. Avengers mini.  They're also doing a new Resurrection Man comic (a character they created) as part of DC's reboot.

I don't know that any of this will change the ultimate problem: that most comics are written for a teenage boy who is now in his 30's and 40's.

My daughter and her friends read comics,  but they all come from Japan, not the US.  She says she likes the stories and characters better.  It probably helps that they speak to current teens (and girls) rather than trying to keep that older audience by being written & illustrated by old fanbois.

Just a thought.

The House of M and most of the stuff that followed off it was absolute shit. I don't know much about the X-Men stuff that came after, but what I read of it wasn't very good.

There's also just basic stuff like not being able to maintain a schedule. When I was a kid I remember every book came out on time every month. These days you have "monthly" series that come out 3 times a year.

Similar story here, except I browsed a few issues with the Spider-Clone saga in full swing, and some other guy was Spider-man, and decided that I wasn't willing to pay for that. Especially on my income at the time.

After spending 20 years in a wheelchair, it appears the "reboot" will have Barbara Gordon in her old suit again.

Hooray? Seriously having spent so many years totally legitimising a wheelchair bound character who's found her own niche in the universe why would just 'presto, chango!' her back again?

Also I'm too lazy to google it but has Power Girl got a new costume as well? It's just I'm trying to imagine her costume sans cleavage and bare legs and my mind is failing to picture anything.

Power Girl is pretty much gone entirely (much to my girlfriend's chagrin, since it was actually a pretty decently-written book for a good while), killed by low sales and a somewhat convoluted backstory. If she's not, she's "benched" like Cass Cain and Stephanie Brown and will likely not show back up in the books for a good long while.

I'm pretty ambivalent towards Babs becoming Batgirl again, since she was always "my" Batgirl growing up. I'd rather see Stephanie in the role, but I won't complain too much about Babs, since being pretty much the only wheelchair-bound hero in a world where Batman can have his own broken back fixed up and people routinely come back from the dead is a little jarring. Though I suspect DC wasn't expecting the amount of negative heat they've been getting over the decision, especially from disabled people who saw her as an inspiration.

While I was reading up on Green Lantern stuff on the wiki to catch up on lore after the movie, I came across a note that appearently something like 95% of the "heroes come back from the dead" stuff was attributable to some evil superbeing from the DC equivilent of the afterlife demension, who was defeated at the end of the whole "full spectrum lantern corps war".  So after that point, dead heroes should have stayed much more dead.

Last I checked Aunt May (marvel) was still making cakes...

I mean ffs They should just have ended Spiderman when Aunt may on her deathbed told peter that she had known he was Spidey since the beginning and had been playing along for years. Or at least left it there as a great moment in comics. Then suddenly she was brought back to life/never was dead/time bullets yo/something equally stupid that caused me to throw something against the wall. The whole thing was just so daft that I just abandoned the whole thing.

But then Mephesto just waved a magic wand and the last 30 years never happened, so that's ok...

This is great news!  :drill: I might go and try to find a trade of the original series too.

Visual guide to the relaunch (possibly a BW):

(http://cdn.the-gutters.com/comics/ffc176098a2f9848ad9af813a29d2632a3178edb.jpg)

 :heart: Sohmer

Now that is a really sweet comic.  :heart:

Sweet comic that quietly underscores how unsweetly stupid continuity-choked comic storytelling has become.

Was that from The Killing Joke? I have a dim memory of it, but I was never a Batman monthly reader. Just TPs and 1-offs.

Yes.

If you haven't read "The Killing Joke" kill everyone in your way to purchase it.

I concur.

comic books aren't that badass anymore.

I'm glad that my comic reading days were the 1980's. The stuff before it is all sort of derpy and the industry post-Image heyday is fucking-a baby-to-death awful. I've tried several times to get back into comics, especially for a common hobby with my kid, only to be turned off on how fucking retarded they are. Sadly, a couple of the books I did manage to find that I liked got killed by DC's reboot. I really liked the Amanda Connor PG, but the book lost it's appeal fast after she left and the story started skipping because I wasn't going to read the 20 other books they shoehorned her into for whatever storyline was going on. Some shit with evil Max Lord or something. 80's JLA > than the entire current lines of DC and Marvel together.

There was one hope that this would all work out well: that they'd launch a shitload of comics that broke decisively with continuity-choked crap and got great art/writing teams on any concept that they thought was worth doing.

Well, about 50% of the FIFTY-TWO TITLES they're trying to launch have the absolute same utter shit writers and artists that have been sinking their monthly books for years, with no hint of a conceptual twist that will make the character or title more interesting. J.T. Krul, for example, has TWO ongoings in the relaunch. This is the guy who penned a four-issue miniseries with Green Arrow's ex-sidekick that killed off his young daughter and had the sidekick high on heroin fighting muggers in an alleyway with a dead cat that he thought was his daughter. Not played for morbid camp. Every hack that's been killing DC slowly is getting a chance to kill it faster. Sure, there's about 5-10 sort of potentially interesting concepts/teams in the mix, but under a quarter of viable titles doesn't strike me as a good publishing model or even a good way to develop future intellectual property for movies or TV shows.

Warner really needs to just shut DC down for about six months, shit-can everyone, and then hire a few fresh people who are just going to tell good stories with the basic core characters.

So, some very good storylines by good writers are effectively shutting down well before they should. And...for what? I'm one of the manboys that the whole thing is supposedly supposed to make happy. Right, more Geoff Johns continuity porn--old characters in new 90s costumes with some nostalgia hooks and some surplus decapitations and arms-ripped-off. Just as incomprehensible to anyone who hasn't read comics for ages. SHUT THE WHOLE THING THE FUCK DOWN. Now.

The more I hear about this thing the less I understand it. But really I think the fundamental problem is one that many businesses face - if you have culture and personnel problems the only way to fix those is to change those things. Changing the process or content doesn't really matter.

Yeah, it sounds more and more like they're roughly aware of the problems that they've generated for themselves in terms of silly stories and continuity confusion. This attempt to fix it is being run by the same people that  have dragged the industry into these problems though and rather than actually fix them they've shut down everything going on and launched with the stories they want to tell. So the only things surviving this are the very sorts of stories that this is meant to fix. I have no doubt some good writers will do some good runs in spite of this but they've really just made things a bit worse short term and more confusing for anyone looking to get into reading this stuff.

Fuck, frankly I think they need to get out of the monthly ongoings formula. Requiring there be a Superman storyline always on the go is inevitably going to lead to continuity block up and reams of shitty soap opera stuff. Keep the characters and teams licensed and have them available to teams able to submit a good enough pitch for stories they want to write. Allow a bit more freedom in terms of separation and cut back a bit on the shared world stuff. If they really want to do a summer event thing run that separately from Superman or Batman and have side titles for it with a few characters you can justify following in terms of the story. Of course that would require a far more radical restructuring of the industry than even switching to electronic publishing so it's pretty much guaranteed not to happen.

When it comes down to it, I don't think continuity was ever really the problem with comics.  I'm reasonably sure that none of us started reading Batman with Detective Comics #27, or had been reading X-men since the first issue.  In fact I think a lot of the fun was that you'd be reading a comic, and they'd drop in a comment about something that happened previously and "see X-Men #231" or whatever, and it would make you want to track that issue down.  I think the real issues facing comics are price and distribution (we'll see if DC's plan to release digital versions on the same day as the physical copies has any effect on the latter), lack of stand-alone stories, and competition for other forms of entertainment, like video games. 

Time was, you used to be able to pick up issues as an impulse buy in supermarkets, gas stations, 7-11's, bookstores, and any number of other places.  Price Club (now Costco), used to carry 20 and 50 packs of random comics for a reasonable price also.  From there, if they managed to get kids hooked on a couple books, they could get people to subscribe or keep an eye out for the latest issues whenever they were at the store.   Instead of finding ways to keep newsstand distribution alive in the face of declining sales, as a way to maintain a gateway for new readers, the industry shifted almost entirely to the direct market.  Now, unless you're picking up trades at the bookstore or online, you actually have to make the conscious decision to go to a comic book store, assuming you have one nearby, and drop $15-20 on a handful of issues.  Publishers seem to have given up on subscriptions entirely, not that they'd work to well when most new series don't make it past issue 6, comics are constantly getting canceled and rebooted, and every other issue is part of a crossover.

If they can't find a way to get at least some comics out there, readily available at places outside comic ships, and at a price somewhere under $2 an issue, it's not going to matter what's inside the comic, because they're still going to be selling to the same base they currently have.

I was about to post that the idea of "continuity" being a problem is a pretty recent thing, far more recent than comics continuity itself. Some comics do get up their own asses with continuity but that's on the writers and editors. I don't think it's an inherent problem.

I recently signed up for a free month of Marvel Digital comics. I didn't know what to read so I remembered an old issue of Wizard Magazine I had thumbed through talking up the Avengers vs. Ultron. Ultron is cool so I went to read those and they weren't there. Everything before them was there and after I think, just those issues were not there.

Doing a little more poking around there will be runs of some continuous issues, then holes. I kind of suspect those holes are where trade paperbacks, collections, etc cover that territory. So the digital stuff is like "the best of comics that aren't good enough to ever appear in collected form." Plus it's just annoying to see holes, really kills any interest in reading anything.

The more I read about what they'll be doing with this reboot/not reboot, the more it sounds like a giant fucking mess.  Apparently Superman is getting One More Day'd, among other things.  Plus the few DC titles I've bothered to read after the last batch of stupid events seem to be going away.  Between that and Batman Inc. apparently still being around, I guess I won't be getting any DC titles at all. 

Yep. Cutting through the Gordian Knot would have been: "You know what, it doesn't really matter what the baseline of a character is: we're just gonna do ALL our books like All-Star Superman. Next creative team decides what version of the character they like, does some establishing work, and away they go. Guys after them can do what they want too. Fewer books, better quality writers and visual storytelling, creator-driven concepts on the more obscure books".

Instead it's:

"Ok, Superman isn't married to Lois anymore, and when he was a kid he was in the Legion but he wasn't Superboy and he didn't ever wear the red underpants outfit and Metallo wasn't related to a scientist finding the capsule and the Kents are dead now and and and and" as if any of that shit is itself the platform that produces good stories. None of it fucking matters per se: there is no absolute superiority of a Superman who came from a sterile Krypton whose parents are still alive in his adulthood who is not friends with Batman who is married to Lois who gains his powers from the sun who is known throughout the galaxy who made Lex Luthor bald over a Superman who was Superboy when he was a kid who isn't married to Lois who isn't vulnerable to red sun radiation who is best buds with Batman and so on.

But that's what they're spending most of their masturbatory planning doing, fiddling with those dials and settings. Which just perpetuates their problems rather than begins to solve them.

Some other complaints I've heard is that Superman is only about 5 years into his time at Metropolis, while Batman is onto his 4th Robin.

... which he could be, if he uses Robin as a human shield regularly. Probably not the vision of Batman that DC wants either.  :grin:

It sounds like less of a reboot and more "ok everybody pick whatever version of the character you want to write then let's jam them all together!"

New writing teams coming in and doing whatever the hell they want is IMO one of the major reasons comics have declined. So this seems like a step in the complete wrong direction.

I think the best books of the last 20 years have been by writing teams doing smart, independent work on a title. The worst titles are the continuity porn ones that are heavily edited and controlled by the companies, or the continuity porn writers like Dan Jurgens or Geoff Johns who expect everyone to get a thrill out of stories that revisit some obscure Roy Thomas 70s-era story or some such.

Bad stories are bad, of course, whether they're done by guys with little interest in continuity or tons of interest in it. And certain ideas about characters are horrible whatever the expectation about continuity might be: say, JMS deciding that Norman Osborn fucked Gwen Stacy before Peter Parker did.

I was talking more about writers coming in and doing stuff like "well I don't like these two characters so Ima kill them off in the first issue, and replace them with these two dead guys I like. Also I'll this British lady into an asian chick, and take the bones out of this character who is entirely based on being bony!"

I think a good writer should respect what came before them and realize that they are the temporary steward of something bigger than them. That doesn't mean they have dwell in the past but it does mean they shouldn't just listen to their every whim - especially when creative teams change so often.

I'm reminded of an interesting comment by Leonard Nemoy in his autobiography that, in effect, the actor himself is the steward of the continuity of his character. Every episode has a new director and maybe writers, neither of which may have any idea of the way the character has been portrayed in the show before. So it up to the actor to keep the character consistent and impart this knowledge to the director, or the character risks disintegration.

In comics that's impossible as there is no actor to fight for the character. Its not really continuity that is the whole problem in comics. its that the character himself can change radically from writer to writer and artist to artist. If the character is totally schizophrenic, how can the reader form a long term bond with the character? How can you get to know and love the morals and flaws of the character if they are rebooted every 6 issues?

I've also read that Superman won't understand all of his powers yet, and that he will no longer be able to fly.  So basically the Young Justice version of Superboy.  All the Robins are not only still around, but Barbara Gordon will have been paralyzed in the past, and still be dealing with the recovery to some degree. 

Oh, and apparently Aquaman is no longer King of Atlantis, and they're going to play up the fact that nobody likes him in his comic. 


Agreed.  For having a 'fresh start' that all the company is supposedly behind, it seems to be all over the place, and most of it does not sound like anything to keep old fans around or attract new ones.  While there's the group of fans who will buy anything with DC slapped on it, I don't think they're going to have the success they're hoping for or need.  Time will tell though. 

It takes figuring out, "What are the essentials of this character"?

Batman, for example:

a. The basics of the origin are an absolute requirement. You can add things: Frank Miller's image of the pearl necklace, the nature of the performance they were at that night (Zorro, Die Fleidermaus), the specifics of what the young Bruce Wayne did to train as Batman. But you can't violate the core narrative of the origin. The Waynes have to be good people (and thus innocent victims), Bruce has to take his vow, etc.
b. The character has to be non-superpowered. That's key--he has to be the product of obsessive training but basically a human being. He can use technology, but probably has to stop short of Iron Man territory.
c. The costume and concept has to have a kind of slightly nutty theater to it, and Bruce has to be a vigilante who operates outside the system because he doesn't believe the system can be trusted to deliver either protection or justice to the innocent--the "superstitious, cowardly lot" idea is pretty crucial to explaining why Bruce doesn't just become a cop or a lawyer or a politician.
d. Batman doesn't willfully kill. He's not the Punisher or the Shadow. He probably shouldn't use guns either, though everyone loves to point out that he did at the very beginning.
e. He probably has to be at least a bit unhappy, a bit melancholic, a bit obsessive, a bit dark. Though I'm fine with the Brave and Bold Batman too.

Within those rough boundaries, I'm perfectly fine with some really different versions existing, and they don't have to be reconciled or made to relate to one another. In any given version, there might be some really dumb storytelling, and the best thing to do when that happens is to just ignore it, it never happened, rather than try to explain it in-continuity later on. Say, Mike Barr's Batman: Year 2 story that had Batman running around with a gun trying to kill Joe Chill while working with (and then against) a Punisher-style vigilante called the Reaper. The problem is not that this violated earlier canon, it's just that it was a dumb story, badly told. (Compare it to the brilliant early story that introduced Joe Chill and had him gunned down by fellow criminals who were furious that he was the one who'd 'created' Batman.)

So what's bad is when a new team comes in and does something dumb. Dumb is dumb. Making Alfred into a female ninja would be dumb: what's the point of that? The character works. Making Commissioner Gordon into an immortal telepath would be dumb. Revealing that Batman was actually the son of Ra's al-Ghul, dumb. And so on. It's got nothing to do with continuity per se: it's just about quality.

So the most fuck this, not going to read any more, things in comics are pretty continuity-independent, but reboots and sideboots are certainly MORE prone to generating fuck-ugly story elements that actually violate some pretty core essentials about a character. I have no problem with a Spider-Man who NEVER dated Gwen Stacy, that's ok. I freaking hate a Spider-Man who was dating a Gwen Stacy who had fucked Norman Osborn and secretly had twins by him. That's just ugly and stupid and does nothing at all. That belongs in some kind of Warren Ellis "I hate the entire idea of superheroes" quasi-parody, not in an ostensibly 'normal' superhero book.

The problem is that as comics linger on and on and on under the control of basically poor upper management, the publishers become more and more and more desperate to keep their dwindling audiences happy. Which means lots of stupid deaths, lots of pointless reboots, lots of shitty shock-value things like Sue Dibny getting raped by Dr. Light or Arsenal's daughter getting blown up and him freaking out and going back on heroin or whatever. It's a very similar problem to soap operas, really--at some point you run out of stunts and tricks and gimmicks, and it seems to be too difficult to just tell good stories as an alternative.

That is supposed to be the job of the editorial staff.

And the editorial staff is faced with demands to increase shareholder value. Welcome to the machine.

But they aren't doing that. Marvel went bankrupt!

I used to read a Marvel Comics newsgroup than an editor posted in. Long story short the editorial staff (and other departments) was filled with incompetence and maliciousness. Like people would routinely steal back issues from the Marvel library. It sounded like a real mess.

So it sounds like a bunch of comic uber dorks are having a slapfight, then. It doesn't bode well, but i am hopeful that we'll see some more solid work out of Marvel, at very least. I have never been a huge DC reader, but the Flashpoint main story books aren't awful.

Inmates running the Asylum and all that?

That's my thought.  I imagine the comics industry is what the games industry would look like after a few more generations if it didn't require more than the ability to make up stories.

The whole soft reboot thing they're doing feels much more like a jumping off point rather jumping on point. My local shop handed out a four page checklist of the new titles and my eyes just glaze over. The only interesting thing I've noticed so far is that they made Starfire's outfit smaller, though they more than balanced that out by teaming her up with Jason "should've stayed dead' Todd and Roy "cat nunchaku" Harper.

Scans daily posted http://scans-daily.dreamwidth.org/3147946.html?#cutid1 (http://scans-daily.dreamwidth.org/3147946.html?#cutid1) a hilariously sad two pages of nuSuperman. Clark goes to visit Lois but she's shacked up with some guy and then Clark mopes away while eavesdropping on them with his super hearing.

It's a jumping on point to start off DC's digital approach. Direct comics sales are drying up, going back to newsagents finds them stuck with even less shelf space and the real money in comics is in merchandising / movies, not four-colour pages.

As for the state of comics storytelling, it's what you get when characters have to come out, month after month, in soap operas that are written by people raised on those soap operas. The last big comics push came when "new" blood (Image, Valiant, etc) tried to start things from scratch, but that was a long time ago and the industry has just fed on itself ever since.

SlutFire?

Theres "Making he costume smaller" and making armour out of a dishcloth.

But hey at least the metal parts are set up to lift and separate.

What I find hilarious is that she's got shoulderpads on. Sure, that makes sense.

I can buy the costume somewhat, Starfire's people (God this is sounding way overly nerdy already) don't really do clothing so the character has always found them really odd and generally preferred to do without when possible. Pairing the bright and generally happy Starfire with the two morbid killers of the DC universe is frankly the more :uhrr: aspect of that.

Jesus Fucking Christ. I expect Clark Kent to become some kind of cutter, slicing his arm up and down with shards of his baby rocket ship.

EDIT: Also, that Starfire and the ThroatSlicing Brigade cover? Fuck me, that's goddamn awful. WHY IS JASON FUCKING TODD STILL ALIVE? And why is Starfire burning the flesh off a guy's face? GRIMDARK TITANS!!!!!

Wasn't Jason Todd the guy who bit it in Death in the Family?

"The only people who stay dead in comics, are Bucky, Jason Todd, and Uncle Ben."

And Batman and Superman's parents.

I don't follow DC too closely so I have no idea whether or not this is a joke, but I suspect that it as and both sets of parents are alive or at least were again at some point.

Supermans biological parents were dead forever. Pa kent however depending on the writer has either died some point in supermans early career or still very much alive. As far as i know its usually by natural causes.

So far as I know it's not a joke.  The Waynes have never done the zombie thing and Supes' biologicals never escaped the explosion of Krypton.

Silver Age Superman used time travel to visit Krypton so often that Jor-El and Lara were in effect alive, though.

About the only inviolables left are Uncle Ben and the Waynes, because in both cases frequent contact with either even via time travel or some such undercuts the fundamental reason why the character exists. Though in the current DC crossover event, which takes place in an alternate reality (some of which will survive into the 'new' DC Universe) Thomas Wayne is the Batman, Bruce Wayne was killed by the gunman, and Martha Wayne is the Joker.

Bugger

You know if they were in anyway subtle about storytelling they could set this up to actually create some kind of story conflict and draw the reader in. For instance, what if this guy was shown nonchalantly shown getting into his car after a night with Lois, and as he drives off you see Superman following him. And then the next day you hear that the man died in an accident, and Clark comforts Lois. And its left open for a while whether Superman killed him, left before the accident or followed him, saw the accident and let the guy die.

That's the kind of thing you could use to flesh out a character and hint at the dark side of superman and hint at powerful anger lying inside him. And put that question mark over his relationship with Lois. Is he deliberately being rewarded for an evil act and how does this shape Superman's moral development? That's the kind of thing that would draw a reader in.

Which of course will be the reason why it won't be done, I suppose.

Yeah, turing the big blue boy scout into a seriously emotionally impaired individual and deviant.  THAT would go over great.   :oh_i_see:

The stalker implications of listening in on Lois & date are  bad enough as it is.  No need to push it.

Tho I suppose it's to be expected from those socially maladjusted enough to conceive of such a scenario in the first place.

Who, me?  :grin:

I remember him stalking Lois with super hearing in Superman Returns, as well. Must be the new creeper direction they are taking Supes in.

Everybody loved the stalker content in Superman Returns, after all. Why not go with a crowd-pleaser.

Wondering whether a character with as much power as God is going to give into his darker side is only interesting if you're gonna go all the way with it, e.g., Alan Moore's Miracleman.

Are we pretending stalker-type activity is anything new for Superman here?

(http://superdickery.com/images/stories/dick/1296_4_071.jpg)

 :uhrr: :uhrr: :uhrr: :ye_gods: :uhrr: :uhrr: :uhrr:

Earth-2 sees the creation of Owlman when Thomas Wayne Jr sees brother Bruce and mother killed and blamed his father, Thomas Wayne, for letting it happen.

Wanna see how hilariously inept this whole thing is in terms of making everything much "clearer"?

The writers at Comics Alliance interviewed various DC editors at SDCC and here's what they came up with at the end:

"While a lot is unclear as to the exact makeup of the new DC Universe, there are quite a few things we do know. For one thing, the WildStorm characters -- including Midnighter, Apollo, Voodoo, Grifter and the crew -- have been integrated into the DCU's history, seemingly replacing the Justice Society as the reason why Earth hasn't been blown up by forty billion alien dictators before Superman's arrival.

While Stormwatch, by Paul Cornell's admission, has been working underground for decades, the concept of the gaudily-dressed superhero as public figure is relatively new, created in the past five years by Superman. As a result, the "modern" DC Universe as we know it is compressed into that five-year time period, and Executive Editor Eddie Berganza claims to have built a timeline to that effect that we won't see, at least for a while. Batman's career will extend a decent period of time before that as an urban legend in Gotham City, allowing Grant Morrison to continue with his grand Batman story -- and the myriad legacy sidekicks Batman has had -- to keep going undisturbed. Doing this restores Superman's status as the World's First Superhero in the DC Universe, even if he isn't the world's first superhuman.

As for the Justice League itself, apparently Cyborg is a founding member who will, according to Johns, later go on to join the Teen Titans, seemingly keeping the Wolfman/Perez run in continuity. Confirming that, Scott Lobdell stated that his Teen Titans title won't be the first iteration of the team in the DC Universe, but seemingly the first one featuring these characters (Red Robin, Superboy, Wonder Girl, Kid Flash, etc.)

Francis Manapul confirmed on Twitter that Barry Allen still died in the Crisis, which means that that story still takes place; in an interview with, well, me, Grant Morrison stated that Nix Uotan will play a major role in Multiversity, which means that Final Crisis must have occurred in some form. Exactly how these series happened without the existence of the Justice Society is unclear, and Manapul declined to comment on who the Flash was (or if there was one) during Barry's absence, continuing to leave Wally West's status in the new DC Universe completely unknown. And if Wally West never existed, then the Wolfman/Perez New Teen Titans would be totally different, and we're looking at a Mexican Train of falling dominoes we're unlikely to see the results of until a while into the relaunch."

http://www.comicsalliance.com/2011/07/29/new-52-comic-con/

Great, trying to figure out the new continuity gave me a tumor.

I thought the whole women in DC's reboot reaction was very interesting. Out of all those new / revised titles, only three women are working at DC on them directly out of 160 (http://www.bleedingcool.com/2011/06/12/gendercrunching-the-dc-relaunch/).

One fan's reaction to this was to dress up as the now obselete version of Batgirl, get to ComicCon and ask questions on DC panels about female representation (http://io9.com/5826557/how-batgirl-took-on-dc-comics-the-anatomy-of-a-pr-crisis). After several panels of this, it led to DC main guy Dan Didio getting a bit pissed off.


Not a great public look.

Now DC has responded by saying it will defnitely be increasing its female representation. Go Batgirl.  :grin:

What a goddamn clusterfuck.

Either reboot or don't. This half measure pick and choose continuity is just idiotic.

And rebooting 5 years into their new magic continuity? What the fuck? This isn't a DC reboot this is Age of Apocalypse lite.

There's so much conceptual stupid here that it boggles the mind. For example, Midnighter and Apollo of the Authority existing in the same universe as Batman and Superman. It's not just that the first two characters are meta-commentaries on the second two--if you haven't read the comic, they're basically "what if Batman and Superman were gay lovers and also what if the JLA pretty much ran the planet and what if planetary-scale threats were genuinely wide-screen crazy shit rather than some dude in a leotard robbing banks?"  In other words, the whole point of the WildStorm titles is as an alternate universe commentary on standard-issue superheroics. Putting them in the same universe is like saying, "Ok, the characters from Galaxy Quest are now part of the ongoing Star Trek universe and will play a regular part in future movies". It's not even clever mash-up fanfic, it's just straight-up stupid as a premise for continuing storytelling.

So wait, there's no Justice Society whatsoever?

WHAT THE FUCK?

Yeah, it was Stormwatch.

W
T
F

DC's line used to be that they had the characters with a rich mythology because of legacy and historical layering. Now they have, I don't know what.

No wonder their movie development is so haphazard and pointless. Batman's the only one working because an A-list director took an interest in him and decided to largely ignore whatever the company was trying to do with the character. (Not that they've done badly by Batman recently: I actually really love Grant Morrison's Batman Inc., but Jock Snyder's very old-school 'dark' work in Detective has also been fucking great. Both of which are getting fucked with by this stupidity.)

But the entire fabric of the DC Universe is built on the Justice Society. Fuck, the number of legacy heroes are all down to the JSA. Green Lantern, the Flash, Wildcat's mentoring of many of the early JLA, hell, the goddamn Justice League wouldn't exist without the inspiration of the JSA. That's pants on head retarded. It completely removes All-Star Squadron and a whole bunch of great Roy Thomas work from the lexicon.

I'm starting to see this as akin to the end of the dotcom era when a company would announce it was pursuing a promising new direction then go out of business 3 months later.

Pretty much. It just seems fucking insane. I'm sure there will be a few books that are interesting or fun to read but this is the worst of all worlds as a solution to creative and business failure. It doesn't get rid of continuity porn (the way the Ultimates line did for Marvel, for a while), it doesn't let smart creative teams just decide for themselves what would be a fun take on a character (as in the All-Star line), it doesn't offer a clean, fresh take on the characters that uses what it wants and ignores the rest the way that the Dini-Timm DCU cartoons did. DC's editors are saying that continuity still matters a great deal while having no idea what their new continuity is or how to explain all the characters that they own and will no doubt want to use.

And Didio's response to a perfectly predictable challenge about women writers and artists just seals the deal. The guy is really approaching Uwe Boll levels of cluelessness.

Time for this again:
(http://i.imgur.com/13yNE.png)

From Onion AV, a pretty fair description of Flashpoint #5's expositionary justification for the new universe:

"Barry [aka the Flash] runs through time, spending one last moment with his mom before stopping his past self from preventing her murder, and while I appreciate that Johns tried to bring some emotion to the story with Barry and his mother, the entire plotline seemed like an afterthought. When the two Barrys collide on the cosmic treadmill (God, superhero comics really are absurd), a mysterious female pulls him through the speed force to tell him the Vertigo, Wildstorm, and DC timelines must converge to face an impending threat, and then it’s the new universe."

Wasn't one of their other excuses that another version of superman (Superboy prime) punched the edge of his universe causing timequakes through reality that changed and erased stuff.

yep this tops even that in stupid.

They're trying to explain a company-wide reboot of a continuity that they believe is the source of all their sales issues...in terms of the old continuity.

New Justice League #1 is also just total meh. Batman and Green Lantern insulting each other for 22 pages, then Superman with armor pants shows up and is a dick. The end.

The things that make no sense about a "new" continuity are piling up so high so fast. It's supposed to be a world where superheroes first appeared "five years ago". No earlier superheroes at all, no Justice Society, nothing. But when the new books launch, just for two examples, there's going to be Red, Yellow, Blue and so on Lanterns; Dick Grayson is oging to be an adult Nightwing, there's going to be a Batgirl, and Robin will be Damian Wayne, the son of Batman and Talia al'Ghul. Wait, so Batman first appeared "five years ago" as a newly christened vigilante, adopted Dick Grayson several months later, and Dick is somehow now 19 or 20 and on his own? Batgirl, all that, came into being that fast? All the different colored Lanterns were revealed and so on that quickly?

It is a bit of a mess.

There weren't consistent 'rules' or even guidelines for what should be retconned. So Barbara Gordon gets to walk again because "she's the best known Batgirl" but Damien Wayne, not Dick Grayson, is Robin. Plus all that junk about Periwinkle, Apricot and Burgandy Lanterns. And Wildstorm replacing DC's Gold and Silver Age characters.

I feel sorry for some of the project teams working on these titles - it's a mess directed from on high.

It's only a matter of time until some writers start referencing the old continuity and write "clever" stories that incorporate things from before this newest supposed break from continuity, which in the end will just result in doubling down on the problem.

It's like when Marvel renumbered, then some titles would include both the new and the old numbering, some switched back IIRC, and the whole thing was just a complete mess. You can't be half-hearted about this stuff. This smacks of horrible compromise. Why do they need to explain this at all? JUST RESTART.

And ffs more Flash speed force bullshit. If I was editor at DC I would write "FUCK SPEED FORCE" in blood on the wall.

This could have been pretty good if they went like this:

Months 1-8:

Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, Aquaman, Flash, Green Lantern, couple of other 'early' characters (heck, make Cyborg one if you like). Early adventures of the characters. Maybe in issue #8 Batman sees the Graysons killed and adopts Dick. None of them meet each other yet. Work on establishing versions of their respective Rogues' Galleries, their cast of supportings, the mood of their stories. Get writers who will make each of them feel extremely different from each other and yet keep each character stripped down to basics. Ditch all the crud you don't need: there never was or will be a Crazy-Quilt or Bat-Mite, an Egg-Fu, a Fisherman or Quisp, a Comet the Super-Horse or Beppo the Super-Monkey.

Months 9-18:

Introduce some more new characters with their own issue #1. Have the Justice League form and the Big 7 characters meet for the first time. Introduce Kid Flash, Aqualad, Wonder Girl. Maybe in month #18 the Teen Titans form.

Months 18-26:

Now you can begin to introduce bigger "riffs" in a more inhabited superhero universe. Have the Justice League cross over to Earth-2 for their first meeting with the Justice Society. Introduce a "magic" version of the Justice League. Suicide Squad. Mister Terrific and other characters who are inspired by the Big Seven. Populate the continuity slowly, carefully. Concentrate on clean, distinctive takes on each character driven by writers with their own vision.


Instead we're getting 52 books in a matter of months featuring characters who couldn't possibly have evolved simultaneously alongside each other, some of whose basic schticks invoke a complex, convoluted superhero continuity that's been around for decades, not a world where superheroes just appeared and where there are very few.

That's one of the reasons I railed against the exclusion of the Justice Society. If nothing else, their existence can glue most of the continuity holes together - not all, but a good bit of them. This? This is a goddamn cluster fuck that makes no internal logic, not even internal superhero comic logic. 52 titles alone is just a shotgun approach. Maybe they hope people will buy ALL 52 books (at $3 a book, that's almost $200 in a shit economy) for the first month, giving them a short term boost of cash. But even if they did, there's no way all 52 books are going to sell enough to justify their continued existence. If even half break even, I'll be shocked. It's clownshoes in a narrative sense and worse, in a business sense.

They've mentioned now that the JSA is back to being an Earth-2 thing, and I believe they said that James Robinson will be doing a JSA series.

The biggest problems I had with the Justice League #1:

- First and foremost, as the flagship book of the DCnU, they needed to knock this one out of the park and make the case as to how this revamp/reboot/whatever is going to lead to better stories.  Instead they released a book that was merely ok.  I've never really been a huge fan of Darkseid either, so setting him up as the villain of the first arc isn't winning me over.

- This arc also draws attention to the fact that they didn't clear away continuity to make things more accessible for new readers.  Instead, there's a five year block of undocumented continuity which they're already starting to fill in with this book.

- They're still writing for the trade.  Seriously, they couldn't do some single issue stories first, or at the very least, have each issue contain a story that works on its own but also adds up to a larger arc?  JL #1 isn't a very satisfying read on it's own especially for the new customers they're presumably hoping to attract.  The main conflict in this book is Green Lantern fighting a nameless minion of Darkseid, which eventually blows itself up after it accomplishes... something (the issue doesn't really make it clear, and only DC fans will recognize the Mother Box, or know how Darkseid is).  People new to the DCU here won't really get anything out of reading this issue by itself.  How is that going to encourage people to come back for the next issue?

- Personal preference, but I preferred it when these characters had a history with each other prior to forming the League.  Having everyone operate independently, never once interacting with each other prior to forming a group seems a bit off.

The 5-years ago thing is just WTF DID YOU JUST DO, it really is. It means you're going to do this origin story and then what, you're going to go back to the "present" and have these guys constantly talk about "Oh, look it's Starro again, remember when we fought him for the first time three years ago?"   "Oh, yeah, Red Hood, hey Batman, wasn't he your partner Robin for like a year or so after Nightwing but before your illegitimate son that you somehow had grow to being a teenager in between having sex with Talia al'Ghul sometime in the last five years ago and now?"

You're going to have Superman running around in jeans and a T-shirt over in Action Comics, "5 years ago", building up a whole continuity of shit that he did that somehow an in-the-present Superman book is going to have to "remember". So, when Jeans Superman fights the Parasite, Armor Superman can't fight him without saying, "Back when I was Jeans Superman, I remember that you absorbed Lois Lane's breasts for several hours--well, no more of that!"   Every time Armor Superman or the 5-years-later JLA fights someone, they'll always have to keep straight: is this the first time they've fought this guy? Or are we someday going to claim that there's an untold adventure of the Justice League versus the Rainbow Raider and his RGB Death Ray and so this is actually the second time?"

And then I guarantee that sooner or later somebody's going to do the story where someone remembers the oldDCU or that multiple versions of Batman from different continuities team up to fight the MegaJoker or who knows what.

I don't know why anybody is giving them credit for having balls. They are trying to have their cake and eat it too--redo the continuity without really redoing it, keep all the characters that have built up through decades of messy, continuity-laden storytelling. If you're starting clean, there's no way that there should be guys like Red Hood and Arsenal and Batwing and the Red Lanterns and hell, even the Legion of Superheroes, who are notorious for causing continuity headaches galore. Having something like Stormwatch in the same continuity as the rest of this shit is fucking nuts, especially since they're now going to have an Earth-2 for the Justice Society. (Stormwatch makes more sense to me as a "50 years later" from the Justice Society fighting World War 2 than it does as a contemporary of a Justice League.)

Mister Terrific has three solicited issues, with three art teams in three issues. You might as well write "Mister Cancelled" in for his logo. Bunch of the other books have already had the same instability. You've got fucking hacks like JT Krul writing two titles.

It's the gunfight at the OK Corral and the Earps just showed up with squirt pistols and dead cats.

Let's get real, there aren't going to be many if any new readers for these titles. At best they might attract some recently-lapsed readers for a couple of months.

How is this supposed to attract new readers? One of the things about the Marvel Ultimate line was that it was supposed to be in supermarkets / magazine shops etc. I'm not sure how that worked out but it was at least a plan.

If I am a new reader how do I find out that DC is doing this thing and why do I care?

The lead editor everyone hates* is doing (or was doing) a press blitz as this all launched.  NPR was the only station I an interview with, however, so I'd say that was a failure.   He had some convoluted logic as to why the rest of us non-comic-buyers should care and why they were doing it but it sounded half-assed and pathetic so I didn't bother remembering it.  I'm sure those into the comics scene already know it, but yeah, it doesn't make you care if you aren't already into comics.

*I can't be arsed to even look back at his name in this thread.  He was a forgettable interview, even by NPR fluff standards.

In terms of mass-market media I've seen more about the new Spider-Man than this reboot. I can't remember seeing a single thing anywhere about the DC stuff on any general news type site.

/sadf

I fucking HATE Darkseid and the whole New Gods thing. I've seen one instance of him being handled well, and that was an OLD Keith Giffen Legion of Super-Heroes story arc that had a mysterious big bad evil causing all sorts of shit in the 30th century and it ended up being revealed as Darkseid after all the New Gods and Apokolips and shit was destroyed. It was awesome. Everything else with him just makes me ill. He's not an interesting character. He's like the Superman complex on steroids. Final Crisis only increased my revulsion.

Agreed.  Even local rock radio ran for a segment with the Spiderman thing.  Not a word about DC.

In theory, the idea was that making every comic available digitally on the same day as the print version would make it easier for new readers to pick up comics without having to go to comic shop.  In practice, I haven't seen any ads anywhere on the internet that would point any of this out to new readers.  I had to search around a bit to find the shop myself, and while they do have a New 52 tab, anybody who doesn't know that the reboot is being called that will be greeted by a front page with comics based on the animated series, Vertigo books, old DCU books, Wildstorm books, and movie tie-ins all on the same page.

And Justice League #1, did they give it any sort of introductory price to entice new readers?  Nope, it's $4 fucking dollars.

Nobody is going to buy digital comics at the asking price even if it occurred to them to try. $4 for a digital comic is outrageous. I can get digital games and apps for free or 99 cents but a scanned version of something that was going to get made anyway is $4?


Yeah, I just went to the site and the first item is "Superman Adventures (1996 - 2002)." It's actually super confusing, they have a bunch of #1 issues but most (all?) of them are old or unrelated to the relaunch. Judging from that site DC Comics is about comics for kids that came out 10 years ago based on cartoons.

I have to admit my biggest reaction on the previous page was "Darksied AGAIN??? FFS"

granted they probably felt they had to do him again as he was the big bad in the last season of Smallville, but come on. If you want something new create something new. Next we will have some invulnerable guy with crystal spikes growing out of him attacking everything...

(though that's not entirely fair, I liked the Death of Superman story.)

The funny thing is that all those comics based on the various cartoons they've done are better suited to accomplish everything this reboot was supposed to.  They're cheaper (the #1 issues apparently are all available for free as well), more accessible, self-contained, have an all ages appeal, and have animated tie-ins.  These are what they should be promoting.

This is my "Samprimary is the wettest fucking blanket on the subject of comics" quote repost of the year.

I doubt very much the general public cares about a comic reboot, or how one 'reboots' a comic.  But anything race related?  You bet.

I'm convinced more that in the end, DC has only managed to join Marvel in their ability to release issue #1s and #500 milestones of the same comics and will soon have the same incomprehensible mess when it comes to numbering.

It's a big problem that the new direction is being run by the same old suspects.

I'm all for taking characters in new directions, but as was pointed out above, that won't happen - it will be slight variations on existing lore, or maybe the odd gender swap.

And $4 for an online comic is unreal.

WB is still happy to have DC for its sweet, sweet IP that can be mined, but if the comics keep going this way DC will end up with about 5 titles that no-one will read anyway.

A bunch of artists and other folks have been doing covers for "New 52" concepts that DC isn't doing. These aren't anything more than covers and a brief pitch idea, but most of them show smarter conceptual visions than anything that DC is actually publishing in this reboot. They also show what it might mean to genuinely "open up" the company's properties to a much wider range of creative talents, and flush out some of the turds like JT Krul and Judd Winick. In some ways, this is the only approach that makes sense if what DC wants to do is effectively use all the intellectual property it owns. If what they want instead is a tightly imagined, constrained storytelling environment with a much simpler continuity, they should just leave 95% of their characters in the bank vault and really start fresh.

http://dcfifty-too.blogspot.com/

I particularly like:

http://dcfifty-too.blogspot.com/2011/08/kid-eternity-1-by-neal-von-flue.html
http://dcfifty-too.blogspot.com/2011/08/supergirlbatgirl-1-by-mike-maihack.html
http://dcfifty-too.blogspot.com/2011/08/liberty-belle-1-by-joel-priddy.html
http://dcfifty-too.blogspot.com/2011/08/dex-starr-1-by-katie-cook.html

I was thinking about ordering one of the new series, but I couldn't even find a page on the DC website to do so.  Way to make it easy DC!

On a side note, I don't understand the logic behind starting all these series over from #1 with a new continuity, and then still having the flagship Superman and Batman books named Action Comics and Detective Comics.  It's another example of how they're too timid to fully let go of the legacy in order to appeal to new readers.  A kid is going to go into a store looking for Batman comics, not Detective Comics.

Some of those are very cool looking!

--

I think I've said this already, but if DC REALLY wants to join the 'future' of comics or whatever, they should just let *anyone* use their characters to make their own stories. Like anyone can sign up to use a DC property for their take on it for their little webcomic or whatever. So every Mon-Wed-Fri my routine can go Penny-Arcade, Girl Genius and <blahs> Batman comic.


Will there be thousands of shitty, half finished, unreadable pieces of shit? Absolutely! They'll be ignored and forgotten like the current thousands of shitty, half finished and unreadable pieces of shit that litter the internet right now. Or they'll be ignored and forgotten like the current bunch of paper books DC puts out.  :oh_i_see:


Someone will do <superhero> right though, and it will be really good and fresh and we'll all read it with glee, then DC can collect a years worth of strips or whatever and put out a physical book.

I'm just going to invoke rule 34 on this and say DO NOT WANT because that's the majority of the way that concept will get used.

This is different from the current paper books how again?

Because it might be more tasteful... :drillf:

On Comedy Central tonight they had ran a commercial advertising the new JL comic.  Ran during the Daily Show and Colbert I think.

$4 for a digital comic?  No fucking way.  It feels like they are only doing a half-hearted reboot.  I've actually bought a few trade paperbacks lately and that's a great way to read the stories.  No DC though, I mean I got standards.

So I'm going to go through the time and effort here to read through all of this week's New 52 books in alphabetical order, and type up my thoughts here as I'm reading:


Action Comics #1:

Grant Morrison writing, Rags Morales on pencils.  Generally like Morrison so I'm expecting the story to be good at least.  The art on the other hand looks fairly uneven with some panels looking good and others with the characters looking rough and lacking definition.  No time period mentioned anywhere.  Superman is wearing jeans and a t-shirt (with the S on it), rather than the costume he's wearing at the end of the first JLA issue.  I'm assuming this takes place earlier.

This is a decent set-up issue, although Clark Kent is a little Peter Parker-esque in some respects (he has to run from the cops, has apparently had some trouble paying rent).  He works for a paper that is a rival to the one that Lois and Jimmy work at.  He's friends with Jimmy, but Lois distrusts him thinking that he tries to sabotage their stories.  Lex comes across as confident and capable as well as more of a behind the scenes manipulator so far, whose plans apparently actually work.  Good start, although nothing too far removed from Morrison's All Star Superman work.  That's not a bad thing, but it doesn't build a case that these are stories that could only be told due to a reboot.


Animal Man #1:

I've heard nothing but good things about Jeff Lemire's Vertigo comic Sweet Tooth.  Haven't read any of it yet though.  First page of this is a wall of text in the form of a magazine interview with Animal Man, Buddy Baker which I promptly skip over.  Alan Moore gets the benefit of the doubt when he does that sort of thing.  Lemire is not quite there yet.  This is a good start though.  Comes across as a fairly basic setup at first.  Looks like it's going to go for a straight-forward but underused setup with a superhero who is also a good husband and father, but takes a pretty dark and creepy turn at the end.  I've seen Travel Foreman's art before on the Ares mini and Immortal Iron Fist.  It's always been good, but there are some pretty amazing pages in here.  Started out underwhelmed.  Now I want to see where they go with this.


Batgirl #1:

I'd be worried about the "hey she can walk now" stuff if this wasn't written by Gail Simone.  She has a lot of respect for the character and is one of DC's best writers in my opinion.  Killing Joke is directly referenced in this issue and the physical and mental repercussions of that are a big focus of this book.  This appears to be Barbara Gordan's first night back as Batgirl after 3 years of being in the wheelchair.  No mention yet as to why she can use her legs now, but I assume they'll reveal it at some point.  Another good first issue here, although again, this book could have clearly been done in the regular continuity.  In fact I'd bet that Simone had written the proposal for this book before she had even heard about the reboot.


Batwing #1:

Judd Winick on this book.  Liked his work on the Exiles.  He lacks subtlety though anytime he tries to bring up his pet issues in a comic.  Dialogue here feels a little heavy-handed, but setting a book in Africa at least is fairly unique and earns the book a few points in its favor.  As a concept "Batman's African counter-part" doesn't do much to stray from fairly standard Superhero tropes, but at least it does it in an interesting setting I guess.  Don't really have much to say about this one.


Detective Comics #1:

DC apparently didn't want to screw with a winning formula, so they announced the Batman and Green Lantern books wouldn't really be changing, so I won't go in depth here.  If you liked the Batman books before the reboot, I assume you'll like them after.  Tony Daniel has been making a bit of a name for himself lately collaborating with Morrison on Batman.  He's on both writing and pencils here, very much in an Image style.  Not surprising I guess as some of his early work included X-Force and Spawn back in the 90's.  This issue kicks off what appears to be a solid Joker story.  It's also at this point that I realize that none of these books so far have done a self-contained, single issue story.  They're all set-ups for larger arcs.


Hawk and Dove #1:

Rob Liefeld on pencils.  Tempted to just leave it with that, but Liefeld isn't the biggest problem with this book.  At least he doesn't appear to shy away from drawing ankles anymore as they're present on both the cover and in the first pages of the interior art.  Hawk is not a very likable character.  Not sure I'd want to read a book where one-half of the title characters is a raging dickwad.  There's a shit-ton of exposition here, making this book a poster child for what's wrong with this reboot.  It's not new reader friendly in any way, shape, or form.   The old Dove (Don Hall) is mentioned, and the new Dove is hanging around Deadman for part of the book suggesting that this book is following up Brightest Day (which has been mentioned as still being in continuity along with Blackest Night), but the existence and death of the new Hawk, and the death and resurrection of the Hank Hall appear to have been completely erased from continuity.  The worst of both worlds for new reader friendliness and continuity for existing fans.  Front runner for the first of the new line to get canceled.


Getting a little tired here so the second half (Justice League International, Men of War, OMAC, Static Shock, Stormwatch, and Swamp Thing) will come later.  So far Animal Man is my favorite, Action Comics, Detective Comics, and Batgirl are all solid books, Batwing isn't great, but has some novelty, and Hawk and Dove suck ass.  Not a bad ratio of good books vs. shit, but I have a feeling it won't hold up over the coming weeks.

Edit:  Also somehow managed to skip over Green Arrow.

IMO, some of those are awful as well. The kid friendly stuff (that you highlight) I'll leave alone, but Cryonic Man seems as desperate as Animal Man to grab an audience.

(I commented on the Authority though, which was a good team line up for a bunch of head-kickers and actually fit the DC universe without replacing the entire JSA continuity.)

Also: I really liked Judd Winick on "Barry Ween" and "Pedro and Me". So I've never got the hate for him, but then I've never gone looking at it. Man needs to get over his Asian girl fetish though.

A late point: there appears to be no plan for DC on this. If you are going to scrub continuity and start again, you need a solid plan everyone adheres to. That's not the case. So how long before we get "Crisis Countdown on 52 Earths"?

Winick's indie work is fine. But he's awful on standard-issue superhero stuff, just terrible. About as subtle as a gunshot to the head most of the time, has a sniggering nerd-adolescent fixation on sexual innuendo and a cack-handed way of introducing gay characters or HIV-positive characters, and his plotting is simultaneously convoluted and simple-minded in standard superheroic titles. Putting him on a book about an African character is like putting Charles Manson in charge of a day-care center--there is zero chance that he will understand anything about the storytelling possibilities of the setting and thus zero chance of making it a viable book with a viable character. I think it's largely an attempt to innoculate Didio and DC against the charge that they don't care about minority characters. If it makes it to six issues I will be surprised.

The Fifty-Too stuff is of course uneven--it's just artists goofing around. But DC would be in much better shape if they just said, "Ok, fuck continuity now, let's just get a bunch of new blood artists and writers and tell them to go ahead and play in the sandbox."

I did go ahead and read Action and Animal Man, because I like Morrison and Lemire. They're good, I liked some of the elements that Velorath mentioned. Animal Man reinstates what was most appealing about Morrison's take on the character (when Morrison wasn't too busy soapboxing his views on animal rights or doing postmodern metafiction).

Read Batgirl in the store. I love Simone's writing but this is a great case of where this whole reboot is already unravelling as a story-telling platform. Superman's history and personality and look are changed such that nothing that's ever "happened" to the character previously is in play, but Batgirl is still the character who was shot by the Joker, was in a wheelchair, and had been Batgirl previously for some time. This makes sense as a (controversial) story in the old continuity, but not in the new one. It's entirely about servicing the dwindling population of existing readers who can tell you that Oracle was introduced in Suicide Squad, was in Birds of Prey, and so on.

Not interested in the other books this week, wouldn't be in any continuity ever. Hawk and Dove are a failed concept and always have been. Daniel is just sort of meh, not terrible, not good.

You know you're scraping the bottom of the barrel when you have to have a Hawk and Dove book by Liefeld. That screams of "WE NEED 1 MORE BOOK TO MAKE IT TO 52!"

"Man, those were the days when Liefeld broke into comics with that awesome Hawk & Dove mini.  I wish I would relive those."  :why_so_serious:

Get it?  They're "re-booting" his career!  In their big re-boot!

Actually I take it back on not being interested in all of the other books of this week. I got Stormwatch mostly because I love Paul Cornell's writing (haven't read it yet), got Swamp Thing (which is very good). I'll wait and see if anybody thinks Men of War is any good, but I imagine not.

Why is DC obsessed with the number 52. It seems like '52' is their big plan for everything. There are 52 weeks in a year so uh...we should have 52 books, or a book a year, or 104 issues of the new comic "half man" starring a dude that's only a torso.

Is a simple number really a high concept idea to hang your hat on?

It came out of launching a weekly series following the horrible "summer event" series Infinite Crisis. (Which featured a reboot of the continuity courtesy of an alternate-universe Superboy who kept punching reality while locked inside a dimensional bubble.) At first it just seemed like the weekly series, called 52, was called that for the obvious reason but then the big "surprise" of the series was the return of the DC multiverse concept (Earth-1, Earth-2, Earth-3, etc.) with most of the alternate Earths being the stories that had been told through DC's Elseworlds label. There were, ta-da, 52 of them (rather than an infinite number, as in the pre-Crisis on Infinite Earths set-up). Didio and the other DC editors seemed immediately bored by this new set-up, though, so it lasted about a year, if that, and no one really wrote interesting stories that took advantage of this new status quo, maybe because they knew it had no traction. But I dunno, 52 then became some kind of iconic whatever.

DC's company history of thinking about continuity is so very, very weird. The original Crisis wasn't really about a model of making money through a mega-event, it was intended to remove a limitation that DC's editors had weirdly decided was inhibiting their ability to compete with Marvel--what they decided was that the only reason Marvel was doing so well at that point was that it had a very coherent continuity, one version of all the characters, all that. So DC editorial decided that they had to dump Earth-2, Earth-3, etc. because this was too confusing. Without realizing that having a continuity where no one even knew what stories had "really happened" to determine the relationships between characters was a thousand times more confusing. I didn't have any trouble as a kid keeping track of the times that the Flash of Earth-2 and the Flash of Earth-1 had met, and how they were different. Squish them into the same Earth and I have no idea. Did he meet Barry Allen right after Barry became the Flash? Was Barry inspired by Jay Garrick directly? Did the public at large think the two were related? Did Jay Garrick sue Barry for trademark infringement? When did they first work together? and so on. Who knew? Not DC's writers or editors, who changed all that shit about every three seconds.

Ever since then, the company has been trying to shit out this huge problem that it made for itself and not succeeding. Nor have they succeeded this time. The new Batgirl #1 is an especially good example of that. Simone was apparently told to write it as "Batgirl: Year Two", right after Barbara Gordon becomes Batgirl in the new continuity, and then told at the last second to re-write it as "Batgirl: Year Six" and to write in The Killing Joke and to make Barbara have PTSD so she'd still be "disabled" and thus get all the disabled advocates off of Didio's case. They are never going to get themselves out of ridiculous convolution unless they stop that kind of crap hard and permanently.

Ok, let's see how many more I can get through:


Green Arrow #1:

Standard superhero comic.  Somewhat poorly done fight scene as most of the time the villains are just standing there waiting for Green Arrow to attack them.  Also their gimmick is that they put videos of their crime online, and man, people are gonna go crazy if they see a video of them killing a superhero.  It's the lowest possible hanging fruit of being topical.


Justice League International #1:

Let's face it, writing this book is a thankless job unless you're Giffen and DeMatties.  Any other writer is just going to be compared to those two.  Even taking this issue on its own merit though, it fails fairly completely as a first issue.  It succeeds in getting the group together pretty quickly, the opposite of how JLA appears to be doing it, but completely sacrifices getting to know anything about the characters in the process.  Breaking down the character development done in this issue, Guy Gardner thinks Booster Gold is a joke who can't lead a team, but Batman supposedly has faith in him, and the Russian hero doesn't get along with the Chinese hero.  There's also some out of place subplot with protesters outside the Hall of Justice that feels like some attempt at political commentary that doesn't actually have anything to comment on.  This one is a bit of a dud.


Men of War #1:

Alright, something outside of the superhero genre, that's pretty cool.  Oh no, wait... some superpowered character shows up halfway through the book and some stuff happens, and through it all, the main character who we've been told is a bit of a badass doesn't really get a chance to actually do anything.  It's a good example of telling rather than showing, and the end result is that this book has an interesting setup, but absolutely no payoff.  There's also a back up strip that's a bit of a by-the-numbers military story, but it's not bad.


OMAC #1;

This one seems to be done in an old school, almost Silver Age style and it on that level it works.  Giffen apparently is sharing writing and pencil duty with Dan Didio himself.  There's definitely some Kirbyesque style to some of the artwork here, and in particular the design of the OMAC himself.  Not really a deep book but it's fun, and after the last three books, a big step up in quality.  I'm not really sure there's a big market for something like this though, even if it came out in a month where there weren't 50 other #1's clamoring for attention with bigger name characters.


Static Shock #1:

I want to like this book.  Static is a good character, and it would be nice to see this series succeed even after Dwayne McDuffie passed away early this year.  This book is really heavy on dialogue and internal monologue though, and a lot of it is very scientific in nature.  Writer Scott McDaniel has apparently been a pre-med student, a chemistry major, a chemical engineering major, and has worked as an electrical engineer, and it shows in his writing.  I'm not asking him to dumb it down or anything, but the pacing of this book is a bit off.


Ok, just two more to go for this week.  Out of this group, OMAC was the only one that really stood out, and even that one isn't a must read.

Re-read Swamp Thing. It's a very good book but once again, the reboot gets in the way rather than enables. In this case, it's more or less required that the Superman who lands to talk to Alec Holland is the old continuity Superman with most of the knowledge of old continuity Superman. You probably wouldn't see half of what's good in this book without a Ph.D in Swampthingology, even if it doesn't have little editorial footnotes.

Stormwatch. I love Cornell but the exposition is horrible--characters announcing their powers etc. A comic book trope but terrible storytelling. Martian Manhunter comes out and says it: he's a member of the Justice League. But he's not in the "modern lineup" they've announced, and not in the five-years ago line-up that will apparently feature in the next few issues of that title. Two weeks in and the coherency of this whole thing is bleeding out like a gangbanger who got shot in a crossfire.

Today's Shortpacked (http://www.shortpacked.com/category/comic/book-13/04-remedial-adulthood/)

Inspired by this (http://www.comicsalliance.com/2011/09/22/starfire-catwoman-sex-superheroine/).

You don't even need to read the article, which is long and I skipped over parts myself.  The panels themselves are damning enough.  This whole reboot was a terrible idea.

It's a good thing they didn't Rule 34 things, rite?  :why_so_serious:



-edit-

If anyone wasn't familiar with the Teen Titans cartoon Starfire: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nTbNuoQTiGc

Awful. So awful.

HAY Y DONT WIMMINZ LIEK COMIX

Hm. Let's look at it from another perspective.
I'm a heterosexual guy. I like girls. I used to read comics, and I'm into games, sci-fi, fantasy, comic heroes, and boobies. I heave a pretty decent disposable income as well. So I should be all over this, right?

OH WAIT I CAN GET ALL THE PORN I WANT FREE THROUGH THE INTERNET. WITHOUT WHACKING OFF TO PICTURES OF BOOBY COMIC CHARACTERS TRACED OVER RALPH MODEL PHOTOSHOOT IMAGES.


So while I've never heard of Starfire before tonight, and so am somewhat indifferent to the butchering of her character, I'm also their ideal/target market and I don't give two shits about it. If I want to look at porn, there's the internet. If I want to look at more "respectable" sub-porn that I can leave laying around the house, I can go buy a Ralph or a FHM or whatever, and look at photos of actual models in swimsuits on the beach rather than ones drawn in the style of Rob Liefield and painted metallic orange.

So not just Y DONT WIMMINZ LIEK COMIX - WHY R NO1 BUYING COMIX NE MOR?

Except Velorath. Though I can't figure out why he's doing that to himself. Though he seems to have stopped.

Yeah, I stopped subjecting myself to it after the first week of the reboot.

So have they announced the re-reboot event yet?

Egad, that stuff looks like the 90s all over again.

Hey, give DC some credit. They toned down the Starfire stuff from the originally planned transparent bikini ( http://blondthecolorist.deviantart.com/#/d4alvow ). What moar do you wimminz wants?

Starfire has pretty much always been cheesecake. But it looks like with the reboot she has made the full transition to porn star.

Well, as I said, I had the teen titans TV version juxtaposed with the porn star version.

Having said that, they may as well have gone with the semi-transparent bikini. Though there'd be no point in that, so she may as well be naked. All the time. Right?  :drillf:

I've still been looking at a few of the books that interest me. The new Wonder Woman was sort of interesting, and I love Cliff Chiang's art. Scott Snyder writes a great Batman, so that was also interesting.

The freakout over Catwoman #1 was interesting. I don't have a problem with a sexy Catwoman or even one that bangs Batman. They were banging in recent pre-reboot comics. The problem is the weak adolescent writing by, yeah, surprise, Judd Winick. The Red Hood/Starfire shit was way worse in that respect--Catwoman was huh-huh-huh comic-book guy deviantart weak writing, Red Hood wasn't even up to that level. I don't even know quite what they think they're doing making Starfire an amnesiac fuckdoll for two jerkface antiheroes. Christ, if they were going to go there, make her Bonnie to their Clydes, make her a tough bitch who can fry you or fuck you depending on her mood for the day, make her a meaningful fictional archetype rather than something more empty than even a porn movie can offer. 

But the bigger thing, again, is that the whole thing is a managerial fuckup on an epic scale. If I were Didio's boss and I wanted DC Comics to: a) make money from its publications and b) make the intellectual property it has already maintain value and make some new intellectual property with more value, I would be flipping out over this whole thing. The company got a ton of press attention, its best chance to get new readers in, and almost without exception, they decided that the best audiences to pitch to were: a) aging manboys like me, with weird fannish concepts like Frankenstein and the Agents of Shade or Demon Knights and b) 14-year old boys who can jerk off to tumblogs full of tied-up nude women fucking gophers if that's what gets them off--or deviantart pages of Catwoman and Batman doing it until they rub their privates down to bloody nubs.

Kids who aren't looking for expensive pubescent wankfood are shit out of luck. Women are shit out of luck, unless they're the type who want the same expensive wankfood as the oddball 14-year old who doesn't know the Internet exists. People who kind of like the characters and would love a great story with them in it are shit out of luck--even the best new books are continuity-laden.

I think it's pretty clear now that not having any women besides Gail Simone involved in the relaunch was completely by design.

Didn't really have time to comment this morning.  Should be going to be now, but that's the thing that gets me... it's bad porn.  If I want porn, there's an internet full of it.  For free.  If I pay $4 a month for something, it'd be decent writing which is much harder to come by.

It's not that I even find it offensive.  It's just so... juvenile.  And uninteresting.

To add to the pile-on, these are theoretically DC's best attempts at getting readers in. Their best teams on books that are meant to grab the imagination of fans and non-fans alike.

Instead, the fans are unhappy with the weirdly bolted on continuity choices and non-fans are creeped out by all their fears about what comic books are these days being realised. WTG DC.

You know, its not like T&A comics cant work. Stuff like Dark Horse Comics "Empowered" is actually a pretty good comic AND its a  T&A comic as well. You just need to have the right level of respect for the characters and use a little imagination and humour. But basically her character is "I COME FROM THE PLANET SLUT WANNA FUCK BOOM BOOM" They could have just had a rocket launcher installed in a blow up sex doll for all the character this thing has. Some have speculated this is setting her up as some kind of damaged character, but if so its a stupid way to go about it and it startes you off as showing the guys as total assholes as well.

So you are starting off a comic by making the reader dislike every character in your comic. Way to go writers.

Yeah that's probably what I dislike most about these two books is they're just so juvenile.  DC goes through all this hoopla and end up lowering the bar, and they'll fail to attract a single new reader.

The content also overshadows the fact the artwork is just dreadful.  There are pages and pages of blogs that slag Rob Liefeld and his imitators and this stuff hits it almost note for note.  There's even a lack of feet.  Catwoman fares a little better until we get to the splash page and Batman's muscles have muscles.



Slightly old news but I didn't see it earlier in the thread.  Amanda Waller apparently got that stomach procedure...

http://www.comicsalliance.com/2011/09/14/amanda-waller-skinny-thin-reboot/

/facepalm

You are assuming Didio's bosses even care, which they likely don't. They see the press attention and in a few months, they'll see the sales numbers. It's going to have to be a lot worse than the (admittedly shitty) stuff linked on here. They don't CARE if it's manbabies with rubbed-raw Johnson's buying them, so long as they are buying them.

Of course, it doesn't sound like they are buying them, but to the suits, they won't give two shits about the content.

I dont venture in this forum often so sorry for being late to the party. Saw this thread last night and initially got really excited. I read comics when I was younger and I thought, "A complete reboot? Hey here is a chance to get in on the ground floor of some of my old favorites like Batman or such." (ie at this stage Im a potential customer with money to burn.)

Then I kept reading the thread and found out they had created comic porn for 14 year olds.
No thanks. (Now no longer a potential customer.)

DC =  :uhrr: what a god awful waste of a great chance to capture new market share.

DCU:

NO FAT CHICKS

This whole reboot is a terrible idea because wank material is used as...wank material?

It's not even good wank material.  Maybe the material to clean up afterwards.

Again the problem? I can understand starfire and since most of the rage concerning her is that someone made a show called Teen Titans, made her awesome, than discovered comic book teen titans pretty much sucks in comparison. Without the show, she will always be wank material with no interesting prospects except being the "off screen" fuck doll of the main lead. Then there is catwomen who.....hmmm....yeah....even in TAS the fans cried out and said "would she fuck batman already".

If you want a decent a female character A. Make a new fucking character, or B. Use a someone who isn't already closely associated with softcore porn (come on its not that hard) and make a non bleating feminist story for her. Wonder Women when written right is fucking awesome on steroids riding a flaming pony serving you apply pie, when written poorly she makes me want to cut my genitals.

The new Wonder Woman is pretty good.

Catwoman was screwing Batman in pre-reboot comics. But it was fine because Ed Brubaker had done some great work making the character into a much more noir-ish crime-fiction sort of character, with a lot of complexity.

The basic thing is: almost no character can't be written well, and therefore interesting. Good writing can make anything interesting, including explicit sex. But bad writing tends to be more than just bad, it also tends to dissolve into a puddle of stereotypes and pandering. That's this case in spades, and the thing that annoys especially about it is that it shows how poorly managed much of this reboot is in relationship to its promise. Taking a character that a lot of teenagers and young adults last saw in a fun, energetic cartoon, a character who had a very clear and sustainable characterization, and deciding that she's better served as a joyless fuckdoll for two scuzzy antiheroes is offensive first for its idiotic miscalculation of potential audiences. You only go for the smaller audience which will never grow when you're telling a story that you feel committed to as a creator, that has to be told that way. That's not this case in any way.

Still it was a reboot, why they wouldn't use the version the char 1000x more popular than the other is just  :uhrr:  Wasn't the point of the reboot to take the best of the characters and tash the rest?  Pretty damning that DC thinks this is the best part of Starfire.

Hey would this reboot be 400x better if they stuck to the animated universe definitions of characters? Mainly the JLU and TT? Yes. Will DC do that? No. I mean for fuck sake look at what they did to Harley Quin.... The reason they won't is because they are reselling old books to the same comic book fans, it doesn't matter if the potential audience is 30 times bigger, they just want comic book fans. The people most likely to applaud real character development for a character like starfire will bulk at the current prices anyway so DC doesn't want to sell to them.

No, the point of the reboot was to sell 52 different #1's.

What? No varient covers?

That's so 90's.  :why_so_serious:

But seriously, that's the logic of the entirety of American capitalism at this point: get me to next month. What happens after that? Underpants gnomes, who knows.

Ehhh...what? I thought it was totally garbage. I was having trouble digesting the art, but man, grating dialogues, anime sweat drops, there's just so much I can take but Firestar being the 'star' of the show? Kill me now, it's like DeeDee from Dexter turning superhero. It's no wonder they never made Batman cameo in that series, he just wouldn't fit.

as said in the comic above, the cartoon had 2million viewers. Also, it was aimed at a younger audience for which, it succeeded. It doesn't matter if starfire was a minor character, hell harley quinn didn't even exist before the cartoon and she's damn near iconic now.

The problem i DC is not adapting, they are trying to keep a death grip on the old and neglecting to realize it's not the 90's anymore and most of their readers have grown up.  This was the oppurtunity to actually 'reboot' characters, make them more appealing. what better time to make starfire more like the incredibl popular version?  Instead they just sort of went with what they felt was safe, changing only minor things but hey....paper comics will be dead in a decade anyways.

That's really it. Like it or not, the Teen Titans cartoon was an attempt to get kids to watch about and care about those characters by changing up the visual elements and the plotting (though it made use of a significant amount of the Wolfman/Perez Titans, in the end). It worked pretty well.

It's not that the nuDC should all look like that, but the lesson they ought to have learned is that the way out of the trap is by not having all your eggs in one basket. There should be stuff that feels like Go for a variety of moods, visual styles, imagined audiences, characters. Instead almost all of the new 52 books are basically just "Image Comics of the 1990s Redux". If they're not, they're niche-concept books for hardcore comic-book fans, like Demon Knights. (Which I like, mind you.)  About the only thing that had some degree of genuine rethink with an eye to a bigger world was Morrison's Action Comics, and even that isn't particularly daring or inventive in the way it messes around with the concept of Superman. (Nor sustainable: Morrison's rethinking of characters never lasts once he leaves a book.)

TBH they'd have been fucked if they tried to modernize it, too.  Anime is the dominant style among the age range you're talking about targeting and that would just make the hardcore comic nerds rage all the harder.    Not to mention it seems (based on observation of material produced only) that among American comic artists you can't be "serious" if you don't follow the old American paradigms.

Could they have found a middle ground and invented a new art style? Perhaps focused more seriously on some of the slick stuff by the Sci-Fi Manga artists (Of whom I can only think of Ghost in the Shell and Appleseed because I'm only a tangential fan of comics anyway) Of course they could have. They could have also turned away from OMG TITTIEZ too, but hey.. hardcore fans follow their own minds on what people like.  You see it in games you see it in comics and magazines, too and it's always a cluster that ends with "where'd the money go?"

DC could have lost every single reader they currently have and still been ok because the potential market out there is so vast. Look at the people that watch dc cartoons or go to comic movies. The problem is not finding and audience interested in super heroes, the problem Is the image and delivery of those heroes to the audience.

Lolz, its not even the image. Just the delivery. Always been the deliver, we just never had the internet to point that out. DC just wants to sell to people who are willing to pay their price for a comic book. The larger potential audience, which is not a joke there are millions of people who are more than happy to see batman, superman, greenarrow kick mook ass in 2 page glory, ain't interested in buying the books at DC price. That's the problem and always be the problem, because every since 1998 I can go online and download translated versions of scanned comics from japan or anywhere else in the world if I wanted for free, while to read a comic book I had to find a comic book store (good luck) or hope someone ripped the plastic wrapping in the local shoppers. The format isn't dying because Starfire is having sex with RedHood, fuck your 1million+ potential audience would consider :dat fan service the only saving grace of the entire series (here is another kick to the reasons why girls don't read, anime/manga, comics japanese cousin, has probably the most constitently degrading image of women to the point of a 10 page long tv trope page dedicated to the amount of manga where women are just wank material, yet GIRLS LOVE ANIME and not just the "for girly" section of it), its because the medium is expensive in an era when such media is free.

To keep in mind how free this industry is, when manga big wigs got tired of all these free manga rooming the internet they managed to close several sites, this was by the way in a one-two punch of legislation that banned anything deemed "pedophilia", which gave the japanese government working along with the american government, and anyone else wanting to tag along the muscle to demand content removed from sites, but can also come back 2 days later demanding the site be closed for violating intellectual property laws. The manga community was in a fritz and for days manga were super super slow to release (with the normal time being 1 day after the official release in japan). A few months later, almost a year, there are three times as many sites offering two times as many illegially translated manga. The new response by the manga industry? Well zip, while anime is actually agreeing to allow the internet to pick which translators get to work on their stuff for direct to hulu exports. The future sucks.

'


You're reading the wrong manga/anime then, while most of the stuff popular in America on the porn on your hard drive may be degrading, there's quite a lot of female-centric content coming from japan that is just NOT mirrored in the US.

My little pony, fucking my little pony. 

Do you pay attention to this shit, do you know how popular this is now? I don't have numbers but I would not doubt the viewership for a cartoon about ponies, dwarfs DC's entire reader base across all their comics.  You can't just say it's that people don't want to pay the comic price, it's only one factor. 

Now, I'm not saying they need to specifically focus on "girl power" type characters, what I'm saying is that their characters are stagnant, unappealing for the most part and all designed to hit on the 'classic' comic audiences.

Err...wow. Just look at the fall lineup for anime. By cover. Read a shounen. Any shounen. Look up gantz, or what "readers who like gantz also like to read". Oh dear god lolz, yes there are lots of manga that have good sometimes great female characters. But errr the other side of the coin is overwhelming sexist.

As far as an entire market of comics being dedicated to girls, well I kinda mentioned that in my post. But there is a large number of girls who just as well read the shounen, and its funny cause technically you can consider the shouji market bigger than the shounen but considering I'm talking about equivalents, shounen has more in common with regular old superhero comics we are used to in the states, than the volumes after volumes of girly pink stuff, which is why I strictly talking about shouji. And no I don't even out of pure curiosity read shouji or its seinen counterpart (well not on purpose anyway there are some series that I picked up that I figured out were the girly side of the coin, but didn't have the effect of shrinking my penis, those tend to be violent, and pretty damn bloody even by shounen standards...), no more than I would sit down and watch my little pony, I don't have a young daughter so... shounen/seinen for me.

Bloodworthing from the funny pictures thread

(http://i.imgur.com/TyPGH.png)

Kind of missing the point.  They don't need to appeal to women specifically, nor do japanese comics which while they do have a LOT of male-centric content still have  pretty robust female oriented areas.  What DC does need to do is branch out and try to appeal to people other than 40 year old basement dwellers.

And I'm saying that only 40 year old basement dwellers buy comics. The typical non 40 year old basement dweller male main barrier to comics is both the accessibility AND the cost. Comic books aren't even being judged by the content of their pages, because only 40 year old basement dwellers bitch about it and mostly because only 40 year old basement dwellers buy comics. The medium is way too far behind the times not on content (yeah comic books are pretty stupid right now but whatever not the point) but on ways to get kids to read it and monetize on their reading.

DL's got a valid point that one of the biggest comics have at the moment is the delivery. I haven't read a physical, monthly comic in years because tracking them down is a pain in the ass and they cost almost much as a paperback novel. Now the cost issue isn't one where I think they're gouging me but the focus very much has been in improving the quality of the monthly books (high quality images, good glossy paper, etc.) which comes at the cost of it pretty much competing with novels in my "entertainment spending budget". Fuck if I'm going through Play.com or similar then they're competing with DVDs and individual monthly titles simply don't provide enough bang for the buck entertainment wise. That's without even getting into the quality of what they're selling.

I have purchased trade paperbacks but generally they're only worth getting when they're telling self-contatined stories. One of the problems the industry has is they've focused marketing and storytelling so strongly on selling all titles to everyone (fucking event comics) that they can't just release a trade collection of a single title because half the stuff going on is happening in other books. The on-line distribution is simply becoming something they need to do, especially getting the comics into a format they could release on Kindle or similar as that then gets them not only into a market where they can easily deliver but without printing costs hopefully allow them to price at a level where comics become an impulse purchase for people.

As for the quality, not following up on popular interpretations of characters is stupid. Changing those characters into a format utterly opposed to what people have proved they like is fuckstupid. The Starfire thing is taking centre stage because it's also just offensive and puerile writing, which means it isn't just people that like the character that can get annoyed about it. DC comics are suffering because they're focused on creating a single and harmonious world, which means that they 'can't' (read: won't) put out titles in very different styles since having a fun and Teen Titatns style Robin title would be hard to tie into to them having Robin's parents killed and sodomised in front of him by Killer Croc in the latest Grimdark Batman: Event comic title. Of course it would be possible to have different interpretations of characters in different titles as long as you have a talented enough editorial team to ensure that they remain consistent in terms of knowledge and activities. As far as issues go this is probably secondary to the format/cost/accessibility issue in terms of the company's performance. If they were putting out a better product they'd be doing a bit better but they'd still be fucked in terms of getting the numbers they need.

The delivery/cost point is a completely valid one. Same point about why a lot of musicians opposed digital delivery so strongly even IF they were getting paid off by it, because they were used to delivering an album of content with one or two songs worth of effort and getting paid an album-rated price. DC and Marvel's comic-publishing arms can't see what the other users of their IP can see: there are a lot of people who like superheroes in other formats. They just don't like schlepping to a comics store, looking at a rack full of confusing titles while a bunch of ill-smelling manboys elbow them aside, and realizing it's going to cost them $10 to read two comics. Digital doesn't solve that when digital is delivering essentially the same comic book at the ridiculously same price.

Right now the only reason DC and Marvel's parent companies are still agreeing to publishing, in all likelihood, is maintenance of trademark + promotion of IP + marginal profits from selling to the "long tail" of their few remaining readers. DC's management have come to the tragicomic conclusion that the answer to that is to publish comics just like they did in 1995 only with more boobs and grimdarkery, as if the reason they've lost audience since 1995 is undersupply of boobs and grimdarkery. I'm surprised none of the #1s had holographic inserts or glow-in-the-dark covers. (Maybe they did and I didn't notice.)

I honestly think there is a bigger market out there if they'd rethink delivery, fire all the Winicks, Kruls, Didios and other arrested adolescents, and publish a much smaller selection of much smarter and more audience-savvy properties. Make everything you publish something like Morrison's All-Star Superman: something special or Ellis' runs on the Authority or Planetary--thoughtful, fun, artistically distinctive, published in trade format for the first time not years later, something you can get critical or press attention for. Yes, that means a comic book shop that just relies on weekly sales is fucked. They should be anyway--any comic store that hasn't already retooled to be something more like Forbidden Planet (games, toys, SF/fantasy books, comics, etc.) should be out of business by now anyway.

Have y'all seen the graphic novel section at a bookstore?  It's huge, and mostly manga.  But the Japanese stuff is a bargain compared to the American stuff.

Delivery is fine.  Value for what you're paying isn't.

That's true.  When you buy a tankoban for a manga, you're actually getting anywhere from 4-10 chapters of the story.  If it's a weekly series being collected, that averages out to about 18-25ish pages per chapter.  Now it's been a while since I've bought any comics, but I don't remember them being much more than 25-30 pages and those were on a monthly release.  Granted, American comics are a bit more involved since there is coloring involved versus the mostly black-and-white-with-screentones of manga, but still, as Lantyssa said, it seems you're getting more value for the tankoban ($9.99ish) than for an individual comic ($4ish) or a graphic novel ($12+??), even adjusting for the b/w vs. color issue..

I think another "problem" with comics is the dilution of the product.  I used to collect pretty religiously back in the 80s-90s, but the biggest reason I ended up stopping was the constant spreading out of the titles.  It wasn't even the crossovers so much (even though those did annoy me when it involved series I didn't read and didn't care to either) but the number of related titles.  I was mostly a Marvel reader, but the X-Men, Uncanny X-Men, Wolverine, Excalibur, blahblahblah series just got to me, because trying to keep track of which character was in which series this week got old.  I can understand why the companies did it (sell moar comix!) but it got to be a drain after a while and continuity (HA!) was a joke.

Compare this to manga series where backstories are sometimes retconned but for the most part, the character's history remains just that.  I think it's also a difference in the kind of stories being told as well.  Not that manga have deeper storylines (not by a longshot if you've ever read shonen) but there is something about the comic storylines that seem off to me.

Only 40 year old basement dwellers buy comics so they only make comics for 40 year old basement dwellers so only 40 year old basement dwellers buy comics so they only make comics for 40 year old basement dwellers etc.

The smart thing would be to try to break out of the cycle and get some new customers. They can't do that the way they're doing it now.

To do that means changing there delivery (IE price and accessibility). They don't want to do that. Until they change the way the deliver comics to customers, they will always get the same customers who are happy with the delivery system.

I bolded the part I wasn't aware of.   Now it feels even more like a problem you see quite often in webcomics, an unwillingness to work for your market share.  I know I've seen some of you comic readers bitching that the big guys can't keep dates, yet Japan can push out weekly manga?  Really?  Marvel/ DC deserve to fail.

Coloring shouldn't take that much additional time.  They aren't using goddamn ink on board anymore  are they? If they are they're idiots and again, deserve to fail. 

The more I hear about comics the harder I laugh at how mismanaged an industry they are.

Oh yeah, the "Big Three" series - Naruto, Bleach, and One Piece - are all weekly series with the occasional hiatus or break for Golden Week, which is a huge holiday in Japan.  Actually, a good portion of manga series are weekly, with some bi-weekly and then others are monthly.  The monthly series tend to have about 2-3x more pages when they come out than the weekly series do (which makes sense).  For example, when Fullmetal Alchemist was being published monthly, the chapters were about 35-45 pages long and near the end, the mangaka was putting out chapters with 60+ pages. The final chapter was 111 pages long, IIRC.

Mangaka do have assistants to do certain tasks a lot of the time, especially if it's a hugely popular series, but that can't be any different than a comic having a writer, artist, inker (although I think a lot of colorists do this now), and a colorist.  Most mangaka do all the writing and artwork, then have assistants do inks and/or backgrounds or lettering, or something like that. 

Oh, and the distribution model in Japan is much different, with publishers like Weekly Shonen Jump putting out a phone book sized magazine which has dozens of different series all collected in it.  It's not one series-one publication/book like it is here in the US.  Also, I think the weekly publications are more like magazines or even hihger grade newsprint rather than all glossy pages.  Color pages are a huge plus when they do get added to the weekly release, but IIRC those color pages aren't included in color in the tankobans. 

Sadly even after dealing with the big barrier of "Comics are too expensive/too inaccessible to a generation that has access to content, often free content, over the web." your stuck with, "I don't have to read inside to tell you that One month is entirely too long to wait for 16 pages." Hey look we haven't even gotten to "comic books are retarded yet".

Isn't Japan just weird in general in that regard? Like, I mean they still have a magazine/print industry simply because Japan is oddly stubborn on these kind of things?

It's not necessarily stubbornness. A lot of these comics are read while riding on the subway.

Most of asia and to a lesser extent europe has a far greater appreciation for comics and animation. However they are the number 1 source for piracy, with web comics becoming increasingly the defacto format of korean manhwa artist. The Japanese comic industry is just bigger, mostly because of certain bans in place and hollywood and american television pretty much dominats the live action stuff.

I was thinking of another difference between comics and manga tonight - the artist.  By that I mean - a mangaka draws ze's series and that's it.  If something happens to that mangaka, no one comes along and takes over the series, it just ends abruptly.  Or rather, I've not heard of any series taken over by another writer/artist before.  There are the occasional special celebration events where other artists draw a particular series main character(s) as a special gift of sorts, but a series is the creator's baby and they are the only one to handle it.

Contrast that with comics which always seem to be open to interpretation depending on which writer/artist team is working on a series at any one time.  Maybe creative team A writes the series very grimdark while the artist is hyper-realistic.  Creative team B may be more relaxed about what's going on, more humor and the art isn't as detailed.  While in another arc or even book, creative team C merges the humor with the hyper-realism.  Characters get make-overs, costume changes, new villains on a whim, it all depends on what the creative team and/or editors feel like doing that week.

I like the consistency of manga with the mangaka being in charge, but that means ze's the one driving things and the story can be all over the place and prejudices abound.  With comics, it's kind of nice to see writing and art changes because that can keep things fresh, but if there's no sense of internal consistency, it can just end up horrible.

Inability to make dates is a pretty recent phenomenon in comics. Before the mid-90s or so I don't remember slipping dates ever really happening, the worst you would get is a fill-in artist.

I think the only reason so many comics miss dates is simply because they can. In the mid-90s the business became very artist and creator driven rather than property driven, and you had diva artists taking their sweet time doing anything while also dabbling in toys, video games, etc. You had stuff like Battle Chasers and Danger Girl putting out 1 issue in an 18 month span or some crazy shit like that, or Daredevil, a "monthly" series that shipped 5 or so in a year.

There is absolutely no reason that comics should be so often delayed. Writing a 22 page comic book should take virtually no time, and pencilling, while it takes longer, does not take 60 fucking days.

It shouldn't if you actually know what it is you are doing, and have some modicum of skill and project management ability.

I just would've thought they would be using their super advanced cellphones or whatever for that by now.

It's really more a failing of the editorial department delays are typically either because they've got a prima donna writer/artist that has a dozen different projects and the actual comic they're doing is at the back of the pile and the editorial team aren't willing to just pull them for being unable to do the job (frequently because they're doing other stuff for the company and they're a big name and they'd rather talk about how they're on the title than actually pushing the fucking title.) or they get delayed because a few days before the publishing date the editorial team decides that Character X can't be used in this title because they want them for something else and the whole issue has to be redone from scratch or some shit.

The latter can happen quite a lot with smaller name teams because the editors feel entirely entitled to micromanage and tell them exactly what they can and can't do. They go to the other extreme with some big name teams that they like and will at times let them fuck over a lot of other teams because they decide they want to run stories with characters assigned to other titles and then drag out actually finishing arcs so planned stories in other titles have to get pushed back and/or filler stories stuck in.

Really the management of the comics industry is terrible, it's filled with a lot of people that grew up with the industry in the 90's and remember the good old days and desperately want to recapture them. Unfortunately they can't really figure out how to do it and seem to be stuck with trying new ways of doing all the same stuff that's been successful in the past but either can't think of anything new or (more likely) aren't willing to actually do anything revolutionary because it would be too much work/risk. The problem is while they're circling the drain as an industry at the moment they're also keeping afloat and keeping themselves and others employed. The point at which things will get desperate enough that they'll be forced to revolutionise is going to be just after they have enough time/money/audience interest left to actually succeed at it.

If Jim Shooter is to be believed, Marvel in the '70s when he was still getting into the business was an absolute clusterfuck of missed deadlines and late releases. It got better for a while and then went all to shit again. But yeah, slipped dates at the rate we have nowadays is pretty new. How long have we been waiting for that last Ultimates release? Or the end of that Wolverine vs. Hulk stuff?

The only people who truly give a fuck about the artist in American comics are the 40-year-old neckbeards.  Ask anyone not into comics or only tangentially interested who these people are and you'll get blank looks.  I have to go and look them up every time you guys mention a name and I'm geek enough to actually be in this discussion.

Not to mention that the art styles aren't all that different.

Trying to gain a wider audience means hit those damn dates, fuck the prima donnas.  There's always a shit-ton of people with talent willing to get into the market and looking for a break, give it to one of them.   But again this is a problem that will not be resolved because despite saying otherwise the editors and companies are perfectly happy with the status quo.

Print comics should learn something from web comics... people don't care if your stuff is good.  They care that you put it out on time.  (And that it's cheap.)

Western comics were the industry that debated for a long time if graphic novels were a valid way forward while manga undercut their market. The focus of DC and Marvel have been on the 32 / 28 / 24 page comic for so long that the industry can't think past it. There are some exceptions - Wonder Woman comics sell badly but Wonder Woman TPBs and merchandise sells very well - but the very idea of moving away from the print comic and into something different is just a bridge too far.

Comics used to miss dates all the time in the 1970s / 80s, but it meant less when there wasn't an ongoing story and a reprint issue could go out.

I've been reading MightyGodKing's reviews of the DC nu52 to get a view of the titles. Part 1 (http://mightygodking.com/index.php/2011/09/08/brief-thoughts-about-new-dc-1-issues-part-the-first/), Part 2 (http://mightygodking.com/index.php/2011/09/15/brief-thpughts-about-the-new-dc-1s-part-the-second/), Part 3 (http://mightygodking.com/index.php/2011/09/22/brief-thoughts-about-the-new-dc-1s-part-the-third/) and Part 4 (http://mightygodking.com/index.php/2011/09/29/brief-thoughts-about-the-new-dcu-1s-part-the-last/) are here for your enlightenment. One particular idiot moment that popped out for me was:


THAT'S the best you can do on a reboot launch title? Crapify an existing character who has the potential to be interesting? And that's the problem - 90% of the nu52 titles sounded lame and have delivered worse.

Certainly not worth a major relaunch of DCs titles to deliver such mediocrity and a failure that resonate through the industry for a while to come.

That was also the 4th or 5th Batman title to relaunch and by far the weakest. The other Batman issues had much better new #1's.

It looked like "One-Face" is hyped up on Venom, which would be fine if they hadn't already used a similar story in the Arkham Asylum videogame.

Or in fact Knight Fall.

There industry is just as uncomfortable and conservative when it comes to online vs print content. Its the major bane of the Japanese manga industry that is lord behold seeing a decline in people buying manga.

Completely hilarious fanboy defense of the consistent wonderfulness of the new 52 (and yes, it is apparently completely serious) in response to a mostly negative review at Comics Should Be Good:

"Peter Milligan is one of the best writers the comic industry has ever produced, and you give him basically nada for Red Lanterns. Sir, if a cosmic powered cat that vomits blood and is powered by rage is not comic book material for you, then I don’t know what is. "

The price thing is a key, along with quality. In the late 80s and early 90s when I was buying comics with my allowance that I got for helping around the house, I was able to go to the comics shop in the city every week or two and buy anywhere from 1-2 inches of comics - and up to 3 or 4" when I picked up a lay-by (layaway?) And I wasn't exactly rich or super-well off as a kid. Now I'm an adult with more disposable income than ever - especially compared to being a teenager, but the comics prices have risen to be way out of proportion to the time passed.

As mentioned by others, I can buy novels/DVDs/Blu-Rays for close to the price of one comic, and even 360/PS3 games for the price of 2-3 comics. Steam sales? And so forth - the value just isn't there for the price. It's even worse when you compare it to other media. The other media which comics are forced to compete with.

Yea, the last steam sale I got Arkham Asylum for like 5 dollars, I don't think that would actually buy me a Batman Comic anymore would it?

Comixology does have Steam-like discount deals though not often enough. The recent run of Iron Fist (which was good--Brubaker writing) was 99 cents an issue a couple days ago.

Didio and Lee continue to just be face-palmy every time they appear in public to talk about this whole thing. The company's publications have been "thinned" to only the "most iconic and important characters", says Jim Lee.

Right, like Red Hood, Resurrection Man, Grifter, Voodoo, OMAC, the Blackhawks, Batwing, etc.

Most of the visual redesigns were intended, says Didio, to reduce confusion about similar looking characters. Like King Shark looked too much like THE Shark before, and now they're clearly different.. Oh, dear, I bet that really was keeping new readers away. Phew.

How many Batman-clone characters do they have?

Nightwing, Batgirl, Batwing, Red Hood, Robin, Red Robin, Batwoman. I dunno if the other two Batgirls (Cassandra Cain and Stephanie Brown) exist in the reboot. Then there's Grant Morrison's other "global Batmen" that were part of Batman, Inc. but I dunno also if they still exist (Knight and Squire, Gaucho, Man-of-Bats, etc.) Probably if Batwing has made it into the reboot.

The only Batgirl now is Barbara, because having more then one Batgirl would be CONFUSING according to DC.  :why_so_serious:

I'm sure that sooner or later Cain and Brown will show up as some kind of characters, though.

I stuck with very little in week 2 of the reboot out of the very little I started with. Animal Man, Demon Knights, Batwoman, Snyder's Batman, Wonder Woman, Action. About what I was buying before in terms of amounts, so I'm not a loss but not a gain. I'm pretty tentative with Animal Man and even Batwoman, partly because I think they'll read better in trade. Wonder Woman is authentically the most interesting take on the character since Greg Rucka did the book, and has some possible creative legs on it even when the current team moves on. Morrison's Action I like better for the idea of it than the execution. I tried issue #2 of Stormwatch and hated it much more than the first one. There is no way that makes sense as a story happening in the same universe as the other stuff. Read JL #2 in the story: five-years-later Superman appears to be a serious dick, which strikes me as a curious choice for the reboot especially since Morrison is writing him five-years-earlier as a devil-may-care madcap adventurer.  Makes me wonder if Superasshole is connected to the way Snyder is going to do the character in his flick.

I simply refuse to believe that in six months, DC is going to have held on to *any* new readers it might have gained.

Well, I might have been wrong, it appears. So far the New 52 books are apparently selling at least marginally better than pre-relaunch books, and in a few cases, substantially or even massively better. Johns and Lee's Justice League, for example, is a huge sales juggernaut. Only three or four New 52 books are outright sales flops (Savage Hawkman, Men of War) though many aren't really reaching any new audiences beyond the dwindling core of comics-shops regulars. What the relaunch has accomplished at least is to pull that core decisively away from Marvel's books, which are really taking a pounding.

Still, it's only five months later, it'll be interesting to see one year in where things are standing. But Justice League and a few others honestly seem to have pulled in some new readers. And there are books in the New 52 that I genuinely like and that seem authentically new in mood or approach. Azzarello and Chiang's Wonder Woman is a really striking new direction for the character that I think is sustainable--pulls her into Greek mythology in a much darker and more visceral form. Lemire's Swamp Thing and Animal Man are great, moody stuff. Demon Knights has been fun, gutsy, amusing.

I'm not wild about the slow pace of Morrison's Action Comics, but it's still an interesting attempt to channel the energy of the very early Superman comics into the present. Scott Snyder's Batman is fantastic, even better than the work he was doing with the character before the relaunch--he's adding some elements to the Batman mythos that I think will endure. (And I see a really oddball connection developing to the Jonah Hex book, All-Star Western, which is also kind of good.)

Batwoman and Flash have both been artistic showcases. I'm not very wild about the storytelling Williams is doing on Batwoman--the latest issue had a very unpleasant cross-cutting between a lesbian sex scene and Batwoman's female sidekick getting violently beaten to death by a thug that I think would have gotten any other creator lambasted up and down the Internets, but Williams (and Rucka, when he was working with him) has built enough feminist cred to forestall that reaction for now.

Other books remain terrible. I still don't like Justice League at all: it's loud, brash, obvious, kind of unpleasant.

Thanks for the update. I wondered how this was going past the initial backlash.

So Marvel shall reboot in 10,9...

If it's getting more readers, then great.  I have a great local comic store that's been around at least since the late 80's, maybe I should drop by and grab those Grant Morrison Action Comics, been a fan of his since Animal Man.

If this is the way to go, why not do away with continuity altogether.  Doesn't seem to hurt Batman.

I stopped buying comics when my week's pull broke the $75.00 mark and wouldn't give me enough reading material to last a half hour. That was about a decade ago. Of course being able to download them for free as cbr and cbz files the day after they hit the street helps a lot.

Yeah, I'm still big on 'drop continuity, just hire great writers and artists' as a thought. There were in the last few years about five versions of Thor on the stands and they were all pretty great *except* for the 'official in-continuity' title, which has actually been shit, from one mediocre writer (JMS) and one pretty good one (Matt Fraction). The 'in-continuity' event comics of the last four years have blown chunks from both companies.

That said, the new 52 is not a commercial bomb. Nor, I have to confess, is it totally an aesthetic bomb either, because there are some pretty good titles in there that really do represent a nice change in mood. Most of them I'd say 'read 'em in the trade' if you're not taking angry.bob's approach.

Ah, the axe falls: Men of War, Hawk & Dove, Mister Terrific, Blackhawks, OMAC and Static Shock all cancelled at their eighth issues. I have no idea why Savage Hawkman, Voodoo or Red Hood and the Outlaws survived that purge, as they also apparently have very small readerships and no buzz whatsoever. (Well, Red Hood and Voodoo have negative buzz.)

However, I gotta give DC this much: they're not just cancelling them and calling it a day. They're launching a wave of replacement books, several of which look interesting:

Batman, Incorporated. Carries over Morrison's book from before the reboot, slightly altered to fit the new continuity.
Earth 2. The Justice Society returns.
World's Finest. Huntress and Power Girl from Earth 2 are stuck on Earth 1, have misadventures as they try to find a way home. (This makes the decision to reboot "Karen Starr", Power Girl's civilian ID, as a non-superpowered friend-with-benefits for Mister Terrific a genuinely peculiar idea.)
Dial H. This is the big surprise--it's a comic written by CHINA MIEVILLE, that takes the old very kid-friendly concept of a dial that can make you a random superhero and does some rather less kid-friendly things with it.
GI Combat. I have no idea why they're doing another war comic given that Men of War and Blackhawks bombed.
The Ravagers. A spin-off from the not-very-successful Teen Titans reboot. Kind of odd.

Once again, China Mieville.

Certainly seems to have gotten DC favorable coverage again in the MSM. Marvel's editorial staff must be totally stunned at this point about their inability to get traction for their books by comparison. Certainly has something to do with the over-Bendisizing of the company's main projects, and also the degree to which many of their main titles have very visibly tried to soft-reboot characters so that they're more like their movie counterparts.

Marvel doesn't really care about the comics. They are kicking DC's arse with their movies and know it, which has associated merchandising benefits.

I'll look to pick up the first TPB of China Mieville's "Dial H" when it is available, pending the reviews.

Logo Reboot (http://www.superherohype.com/news/articles/169277-dc-entertainment-reveals-new-brand-identity)

(http://dl.dropbox.com/u/111434/dcentertainment012.jpg)

I didn't like it at first glance but it quickly grew on me with the variations they show of the logo.

EDIT: Spelling is hard.

Link to DC's blog post that show the images properly on iOS devices unlike the fucked up page above :oh_i_see:

http://dcu.blog.dccomics.com/2012/01/19/new-brand-identity/

For some reason I keep seeing a condom and a wrapper.

I didn't like it at first as well, but I do like the treatments they do with the C being used as something iconic, like the Green Lantern effect.

The page curl is like some bad 1990s graphics design flashback.

"Hey guys did you know if you do a blend in Photoshop like this you can get a cool 3D page curl effect?" "Wow that's cool, let's use that everywhere!" "Yeah!"

Hey, everybody gets one use of page curl in their design lives. DC just used up theirs.

You curled it, now the resell value is ruined.

The logo looks dumb in a vacuum, but I like how it looks on the actual books.

Their logo should be a DC in a plastic sleeve protector. 

Hm. 5 or 10 years before they revert to the "classic" logo again? With much fanfare.

That new logo just makes me think of the Warhol cover art for The Velvet Underground and Nico album. But not in a good way.

Banana or Penis?

Oh, the number of times I've been asked THAT question...

 :rimshot:

Sales figures for January (http://www.icv2.com/articles/news/22085.html).  DC took all of the top 10 slots, and it has been pointed out that even Aquaman managed to beat out the sales of any Marvel comic for the month.  Sales for DC's New 52 stuff is slowing dropping off though which is part of the reason DC is dropping six tiles in April and launching six new ones in May.

What's weird is that the new titles seem to me to reproduce some of the odd decision-making in the first launch, some of which has indeed turned out to be commercially dubious. Some of the worst performing titles so far are the ones that were given to the usual suspects like JT Krul. Or bizarro retread decisons like hiring Liefeld. But rather than consistently conclude that to get new readers, you get new creators, they're still giving the old unsuccessful hacks more and more chances--even though some of the surprise performers are the ones coming from new talents, or from established people with very fresh takes on the characters or genre.

I thought the oddest one was:


That sounds like the opposite of being new reader friendly when you've got two characters that have typically had convoluted backstories attempting to get back to Earth 2.  But yeah, new books by JT Krul and Howard Mackie seem like horrible ideas as well.  James Robinson has seen better days as well.

Yeah, I get doing the main Earth 2 book to get the Justice Society back in focus. But I had expected that would be something more like The Invaders when Roy Thomas did it--set in a more nostalgic, golden-agey World War 2, or maybe a bit like Robinson's Golden Age, some kind of deconstruction of same. To then hive off Power Girl and the Huntress and put them on "Earth 1", well, it's high-concept fanservice, about 100% the opposite of the alleged reason for doing this whole thing in the first place. If you really want Earth 2, make a place where you tell the stories you can't tell in your "main" universe, the way Marvel has approached their Ultimates line. Only in this case, the more upbeat, kid-friendly kinds of stories. The Justice Society relaunch where Parobeck was the artist was a great example of that approach. That's a lot easier to understand than something that continuity-porns the whole thing up.

Yesterday I went to my old comic book shop that I first shopped in back around '85.  It's still there and the guy is still there.  I bought the first six issues of Action Comics.  Not bad, the reboot is strange, with a 22yr old 'Superman' in blue jeans running around.  I don't much care for Rags Morales art, but enjoyed Andy Kubert on #5 and #6.  Overall I enjoyed the story.

The guy apologized for charging me $24 for six comics but did let me roll 4d6;  I rolled 13 and got a free comic so that was a nice bit of friendly marketing.  The salad days of comics are long gone, so glad he's kept his store open and in the same location for over 30 years.

His name is John and he's getting more of my business.

Sigh. Advance word on the Earth 2 comics is that Earth 2 is going to be darker and more dystopic than the 'mainstream' DCU. This is the Earth 2 that's home to the Justice Society. On Earth 2, the latest statements suggest, Batman, Wonder Woman and Superman will all be "sadder" and will kill when necessary.

Look, I'm sure there's room to do the Justice Lords and for that matter, the Crime Syndicate. But would it kill them to make the Justice Society's world more optimistic and Golden-Agey? What's the point of going all grimdark on the original Justice Society characters when the mainstream DCU is already fairly grimdark?

Wait, the fucking Authority is in the regular DC Universe and they want the Justice Society to be DARKER than that? ... the fuck? :uhrr:

So originally I thought the New 52 was to compete with Marvel's Ultimate universe but now Earth 2 is going Ultimate Ultimate?

Does any of this effect my Young Justice cartoon?


If the answer is no, then I do not give a shit.  :why_so_serious:

Duh, hello, Megan! DC makes decent animated series, while Marvel makes better live action movie. Comic books can just burn for now.

That's sorta what's always baffled/amused me. I've been eating up DC cartoons since Batman The Animated Series, that lead to Batman/Superman that lead to JL that lead to JLU, with a stop over on Teen Titans and Batman Brave and the Bold and now with Young Justice.


Yet I can't give two shits about the actual comics.

(http://i.imgur.com/Ja0gB.png)


hahaha, nailed it

Making the Green Lantern of Earth-2 gay is just... well, silly. First, it's not really that big a goddamn deal anyway. Second, it means his entire continuity up to this point is absolutely null and void, since he's had a son who was gay, and a daughter who was straight, and a wife. They've pretty much killed that continuity altogether. If they really wanted to make it a news splash, they could have done a ton of other characters that would have made more sense. Shit, making Batman gay would have made more sense and been bigger news.

The whole Earth-2 thing is terrible so far anyway. They took a world where the only point of having it is to be an interesting mirror of their main characters via nostalgic invocations of their earliest versions in the comics and updated it so...it's more or less the world their characters, only a bit darker in certain ways. What's the point, other than maintaining some trademarks?

I guess if you really wanted to maintain that Alan Scott was gay all along in the old continuity, you could almost do it. In the actual Golden Age comics, he:

had a weird flirtation with an extremely campy villainness but had no regular girlfriend or squeeze
hung around with a really weird male buddy/friend (Doiby Dickles)

Then in the Silver Age Earth-2 revival he:

had no real love interest, was portrayed as a hard-working media tycoon who somewhat reluctantly served as Green Lantern when necessary (the All-Star book did this particularly)
reconnected with his weird old campy villainness who turned out to have been working as his secretary for years and kind of loving him in silence
found out he had two kids via a marriage to a *different* dual-personality villainness, a marriage that happened after a weird brief romance where the villainess was trying to go straight in a new civilian disguise and had a stalkerrific interest in Green Lantern that she'd been obsessing about while held prisoner by the Amazons on Paradise Island; the villainness went nutso right after they had sex for the first time, burned down the cabin they were staying in and faked her own death
then he remarried his old villainness secretary-stalker who was now a dowdy older lady; he had a magic thing happen and he got all buffed up and young while she stayed old

Yeah, comics everybody! Anyway, there's room in there for "Actually I was teh gay all along" and it might even give him a new connection to his gay son. In the old continuity. But now? This is utterly pointless. They don't get any credit for this. It's really no different than saying, "We created a new character, Token Gay Avenger Man!"

I think they made GL gay because he's a big name who's not going to get another movie anytime soon.

Anyway, Northstar waves hi.  He was teh ghey when teh ghey wasn't hip.

Except they didn't make the current GL gay; they made the original version of Green Lantern gay, but the last time I saw him used that character was called Sentinel (I think). Alan Scott was the "first" GL, but he isn't one of the fan favourites like Hal Jordan.

DC chooses the one character that needs a wiki page to look up for there "bold" new move.

Dark Knight Returns Animated Movie
 (http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=endscreen&v=Y8RpMRBk-Dg&NR=1)

I'd like this.
Peter Weller as Batman.  :ye_gods:

With all the panning of the comic + voice-over in that video I thought it was going to be one of those motion comics. Glad to see that it's actually animated but it needs Kevin Conroy.

Actually it might be the one Batman that shouldn't be voiced by Conroy. Though he did pretty well as Old Man Wayne in Batman Beyond.

Marvel, by the way, is now doing its own slightly less drastic "New 52"--relaunching all of its books as "Marvel Now" with new creative teams and some pretty serious revamps. As with the New 52, I don't think either company really knows how to do books that decisively break with continuity porn fanservice. If they'd care to pay attention, they might note that Brian K. Vaughn's new book "Saga" is selling incredibly well, even though it's about entirely original characters in a completely non-superheroic genre mode and has no continuity porn anywhere.

Saga is rather good.

Granted, I am also digging the Deadpool Kills the Marvel Universe series.

The churn continues over at DC--I think they're really going to regret making 52 the magic number. Should be a big cut of books coming soon, as a few new ones have been announced, including a second Justice League title that looks to me to be effectively a recreation of the old "Detroit" Justice League. (Vibe is being revived! Can't wait to see what *his* grim and gritty persona will be).

Also, Superman and Wonder Woman are officially fucking each other.

Old drama, but I missed it - Liefeld walks out of DC, and takes to Twitter to blame other people (http://www.comicsalliance.com/2012/08/23/rob-liefeld-quits-dc-on-twitter-names-names-and-points-fingers/).

Which I did see was met with a lot of "It's Liefeld", but others have walked away for the same reasons but been more quiet about it.

Must have walked out very slowly, with such tiny feet.

Nah, he dived out of the window, arching his back, while firing two rifles larger than him.

Also, armband.

Rob Liefeld will one day manage to quit books he himself owns and edits and will cite editorial overreach as the reason.

He may not be wrong, but he's Rob Liefeld.

Gail Simone got fired from Batgirl via email a couple days ago. I was reading through a friends few issues of the new 52 stuff.  The earth 2 world's finest was about the only one I really wanted more of.

Why did she get fired?

Creative differences. (http://www.wired.com/geekmom/2012/12/gail-simone-off-batgirl/)

Lots of people appear to be chafing under DC's inability to provide a stable management direction.

Inmates still running the asylum at DC then.  :why_so_serious:

Pretty much. Much as predicted, the books are most dying down to pre-52 sales, they're not developing new intellectual properties worth a damn, there's a lot of creative people more alienated from DC than Marvel right now.

Reading Sean Howe's new history of Marvel, I've realized that the big two have been for most of their history way way way more dysfunctional in corporate terms than I suspected. But I think right now is about at DC is about as messed up as they've ever been.

I hear supergirl is actually pretty darn good.

Is that book worth reading? I saw it on the shelf and it looked okay, but not enough to pick up.

It's good. I mostly learned things about the Shooter era onward that I didn't know--the earlier Lee/Kirby/Ditko stuff has been covered pretty well in other accounts.

Gail Simone's replacement was announced. It's Gail Simone.

Seems the fan reaction to her firing was passionate.