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seriousficSo, imagine the season premiere of Fringe rolls around, you tune in, and suddenly find yourself watching a show about Peter Bishop and Olivia Dunham... cake decorators. No mad science, no alternate dimensions, just them decorating cakes. It's a very good show about cake decorating, because cake decorations are surprisingly dramatic, but you find yourself asking what happened to the other Peter and Olivia. How did things work out with the two universes? What's up with Lincoln Lee? How will they crowbar in William Bell when Leonard Nimoy has been a disembodied voice ever since a tragic accident on the set of the Star Trek reboot?
That's kind of what the DC comics reboot/not-a-reboot is doing, and I really don't see how it's better than a clean break, and a lot of ways that it's worse. Clearly, DC wants customers to be able to watch a Superman movie, decide to read the comic book, and go "Oh, a few trade paperbacks, I'll pick the first one up and see if I like it and if I do I can just start following the series on my iPads." But they also want to have it both ways, so they can go "Oh no, it's Parasite!" on the last page of a comic. And that's what they're doing, even though these new customers will be going "Parasite who?" since he was never introduced to them. So now instead of continuity being less muddled, which is the point of a reboot, it's more muddled, since everything is equally in/out of continuity until someone decides to include it/contradict it.
The much bigger problem is that the old readers are going "Wait, so all those comics I read no longer count?" When your marketing strategy for a decade has been "Read this big important event to see what happens next in the DC universe," and then that what happens next in the DC universe is that the last ten things that happened in the DC universe never happened, that's bad. See also: Brand New Day. Again, this is where an actual reboot would come in handy. You could put out a bunch of one-shots ending that story, so it wasn't that those comics never happened, but that they were part of a story that's now coming to a close. I gotta think it's more satisfying for Bilbo to see Smaug die and get the treasure, then tell a new story with Frodo and the Ring, than to suddenly say that Bilbo never got out of Mirkwood and now we're going to hear about him going to the Lonely Mountain via a different route.
And I gotta think those endings would be pretty easy to write. You make a Teen Titans one, Cassie and Kon end up together, so and so ends up leading the team, Beast Boy dies heroically. Sense of closure, now we can move on to new stories being told with shiny new characters. This would be especially useful in cleaning the slate and setting out things properly, instead of retconning and retconning again. You could just go "No, Catwoman wasn't a prostitute, here's who she is" and "No, Huntress wasn't raped, here's her story."
It's like you've got an old car that runs pretty well. Maybe one of the windows doesn't roll down, but it's still a fun drive. Of course, a new car is always nice... but instead of getting a new car, DC is just putting a new coat of paint on the old one. And people liked it the old color. So now instead of an old car with a good paintjob or a new car that runs fine, you've got a gaudy paintjob so your car doesn't even look cool.
Really, I think the biggest problem is that Geoff Johns et al are writing for Geoff Johns et al. And I don't mean just sheer fanwanking. I mean that if you asked Geoff Johns what a new reader looked like, he would say "Geoff Johns with more hair" (in so many words). Just a white guy, straight, maybe he was into Star Trek or Star Wars but now he's giving comics a shot. The idea of a comics fan who's a woman or black or a nerd who grew up with Digimon instead of Robert Heinlein is just something that doesn't occur to him and his friends. This is something that it looks like even Gail Simone is falling victim too. When they hear "Hey, Cassandra Cain is popular, we should write Cassandra Cain stories," they go "Nuh-uh, Barbara Gordon is Batgirl, have some Barbara Gordon stories!" Their idea of writing for young readers is writing for themselves when they were young readers. In effect, they're not so much responding to popularity as trying to dictate what's popular. "Look, you little assholes, Barry Allen is the real Flash! You're gonna read about him and like it!"
That's kind of what the DC comics reboot/not-a-reboot is doing, and I really don't see how it's better than a clean break, and a lot of ways that it's worse. Clearly, DC wants customers to be able to watch a Superman movie, decide to read the comic book, and go "Oh, a few trade paperbacks, I'll pick the first one up and see if I like it and if I do I can just start following the series on my iPads." But they also want to have it both ways, so they can go "Oh no, it's Parasite!" on the last page of a comic. And that's what they're doing, even though these new customers will be going "Parasite who?" since he was never introduced to them. So now instead of continuity being less muddled, which is the point of a reboot, it's more muddled, since everything is equally in/out of continuity until someone decides to include it/contradict it.
The much bigger problem is that the old readers are going "Wait, so all those comics I read no longer count?" When your marketing strategy for a decade has been "Read this big important event to see what happens next in the DC universe," and then that what happens next in the DC universe is that the last ten things that happened in the DC universe never happened, that's bad. See also: Brand New Day. Again, this is where an actual reboot would come in handy. You could put out a bunch of one-shots ending that story, so it wasn't that those comics never happened, but that they were part of a story that's now coming to a close. I gotta think it's more satisfying for Bilbo to see Smaug die and get the treasure, then tell a new story with Frodo and the Ring, than to suddenly say that Bilbo never got out of Mirkwood and now we're going to hear about him going to the Lonely Mountain via a different route.
And I gotta think those endings would be pretty easy to write. You make a Teen Titans one, Cassie and Kon end up together, so and so ends up leading the team, Beast Boy dies heroically. Sense of closure, now we can move on to new stories being told with shiny new characters. This would be especially useful in cleaning the slate and setting out things properly, instead of retconning and retconning again. You could just go "No, Catwoman wasn't a prostitute, here's who she is" and "No, Huntress wasn't raped, here's her story."
It's like you've got an old car that runs pretty well. Maybe one of the windows doesn't roll down, but it's still a fun drive. Of course, a new car is always nice... but instead of getting a new car, DC is just putting a new coat of paint on the old one. And people liked it the old color. So now instead of an old car with a good paintjob or a new car that runs fine, you've got a gaudy paintjob so your car doesn't even look cool.
Really, I think the biggest problem is that Geoff Johns et al are writing for Geoff Johns et al. And I don't mean just sheer fanwanking. I mean that if you asked Geoff Johns what a new reader looked like, he would say "Geoff Johns with more hair" (in so many words). Just a white guy, straight, maybe he was into Star Trek or Star Wars but now he's giving comics a shot. The idea of a comics fan who's a woman or black or a nerd who grew up with Digimon instead of Robert Heinlein is just something that doesn't occur to him and his friends. This is something that it looks like even Gail Simone is falling victim too. When they hear "Hey, Cassandra Cain is popular, we should write Cassandra Cain stories," they go "Nuh-uh, Barbara Gordon is Batgirl, have some Barbara Gordon stories!" Their idea of writing for young readers is writing for themselves when they were young readers. In effect, they're not so much responding to popularity as trying to dictate what's popular. "Look, you little assholes, Barry Allen is the real Flash! You're gonna read about him and like it!"
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no subject
Date: 2011-06-12 12:58 am (UTC)Writers have come up with a good answer to the continuity thing, with the whole "of course your old stories still count, we can't take the books away from you," line they now use failing to realize a big part of disliking changing continuity isn't just changing history, it's changing concepts. A fan of Impulse may stick with Kid Flash hoping some writer may take him back to the kid who didn't think and was so literal minded his thought bubbles were pictures, since there the same guy. But if the new setup says Bart Allen was never that guy then there's no chance of him coming back.
Of course I'm not a fan of stories ending, that's a big part of why I like comics they don't end, but I think that's a big part of the reason for things like reboots these days. Instead of telling the continuing adventures of... more and more writers want to try to tell a complete story.
no subject
Date: 2011-06-12 03:42 am (UTC)On the contrary, based on things like Marvel rebooting Spider-Man's continuity to supposedly make him more accessible to new readers, and then recreating nine out of the 10 things that they themselves said necessitated the retcon because it supposedly made the character inaccessible to new readers, it's more that they want the continuing adventures of so-and-so done from their own chosen (and would-be permanent) status quos, which actually wouldn't be so much of a problem except that Geoff Johns has finally gone down the Dark Side of Joe Quesada, because instead of showing the characters evolving and growing from previous status quos into new ones, they're so chauvinistic on behalf of their own chosen status quos that they don't even want the previous status quos to have EXISTED. Geoff Johns is so hell-bent on forcing Barry Allen as the one, true Flash down our throats that he's making it canon that there were never ANY superheroes before Superman (as explicitly stated by the solicits for Grant Morrison's Action Comics #1, thereby explaining why we're not getting a JSA title out of this reboot), just as Joe Quesada hated the idea of Peter Parker being married so much that he had to have Spider-Man MAKE A DEAL WITH SATAN rather than just getting a simple divorce (which, as even Kevin Smith pointed out, would actually ADD to Peter's supposed personality as a hard-luck everyman, given the 60-percent divorce rate in America). Yes, the COSTUMES are very '90s, but that's the window-dressing that Geoff Johns is using so that he can claim that this is "for the kids" rather than "for the middle-aged nostalgics for the pre-Crisis era," as seen by the fact that his and Grant Morrison's "new" ideas for these characters involve making them YOUNGER, so that the same old stories can be told all over again (Grant Morrison explicitly stated that all he's really doing is a slight modernization of Golden Age Superman in Action Comics).
no subject
Date: 2011-06-12 12:25 pm (UTC)It's more than just the costumes that are 90's. We've got three mercenary books; Blackhawks, Sgt. Rock and the Men of War and Deathstroke. Bird of Prey is now a "covert ops" book. Grifter and Voodoo now have their own books. Stormwatch is back as a secret team. Superboy is a living weapon apparently. Supergirl apparently just flat doesn't like humans(they just don't learn apparently). Teen Titans has an anti-teen heroes conspiracy thing going on. Red Hood and the Outlaws sounds like a 90's style proactive team. There's Suicide Squad back to it's original style which okay was late 80's. OMAC is a killing machine instead of basically a superheroic style soldier. There's Justice League Dark, Frankenstein Agent of S.H.A.D.E., Demon Knights, basically all the mystical books sound like they're going to be slaugther and drak rituals, not people casting spells at each other.
no subject
Date: 2011-06-12 03:48 am (UTC)On that particular score, I don't think that example works, because Barbara Gordon is, in fact, the Batgirl that anybody who doesn't read the current comics would most likely be familiar with, due to cartoons, etc.
no subject
Date: 2011-06-12 04:04 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-06-12 11:16 am (UTC)