DC to "Reboot Everything"

[UnSub]

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". 

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

[Fordel]

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.

[Lantyssa]

Wait, Starfire is a antihero? 

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.

[Lakov_Sanite]

Pointlessly segmented armor is pointless.

[UnSub]

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

Not anymore.

[HaemishM]

Oh Sweet Monkey Christ. 

[stu]

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, which was cool when I was thirteen but most likely sucks now.

[Merusk]

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

Not anymore.

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

[Sir T]

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

Not anymore.

Oh Sweet Monkey Christ. 

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

[Sir T]

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". 

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

Pink is the new black, yo.

[Lantyssa]

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.

[koro]

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

[HaemishM]

Goddamnit, that looks ridiculous.

[koro]

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

Edit: And according to an interview 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  ), 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?

[Fordel]

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.

[palmer_eldritch]

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

Edit: And according to an interview 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  ), 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?

Is that his real head? The head looks wrong.

[HaemishM]

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.

[Thrawn]

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.

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

Harley Quinn - 

NOT Harley Quinn - 

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.

[Lantyssa]

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.

[RhyssaFireheart]

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

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?

[stu]

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

[Sir T]

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.

[Khaldun]

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?

[HaemishM]

Two Words - Jim Lee.

[Johny Cee]

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?

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.

[Lakov_Sanite]

I am eagerly awaiting the gritty spawn reboot.

[Khaldun]

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?

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'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.

[UnSub]

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.

[Johny Cee]

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 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.

[Margalis]

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.

[UnSub]

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! 

[palmer_eldritch]

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.

[MuffinMan]

Wolverine and the X-Men

Finally, Wolverine gets some more exposure.

[Stewie]

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)

[MuffinMan]

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.

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.