![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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!"
