I couldn't quite put my finger on why I found myself growingly frustrated with the DC books, sometimes reading a title out of habit, or because I kept feeling like it was going to get good, instead of it simply being good. It seemed intangible, but it seemed a problem that was going on line wide. I just couldn't quite figure out why I was growing increasingly frustrated, and even enjoying the marvel books more.
Then I read Forever Evil # 7.
Now, let me back up for a second. Back in 2011, DC comics announced that they were effectively rebooting their entire universe following an event called Flashpoint. The reasoning for this was the perennial DC belief that their continuity was bogging them down, and holding back fresh story ideas because the current confines and histories of certain characters made reduced the possibilities available. Moreover, DC is perpetually afraid of aging their characters.
So starting in August 2011, the entire DCU rebooted with 52 first issues, and the belief that characters had only been active for 5 years. This arbitrary time frame allowed writers to keep certain events an canon, while others simply never happened. This created problems in establishing exactly how certain events and plotlines happened within such a short time. How did Batman have 4 Robins in 5 years? How long was Barbara Gordon Batgirl before she was shot, and how long had she been Oracle before she was able to walk again? Did things like Knightfall ever happen? How did certain events happen if characters integral to them don't exist in the New 52?
Still, the New 52 did open up possibilities on books like Wonder Woman and Flash, while Batman and Green Lantern virtually ignored the entire reboot. Every few months, the lowest selling books were canceled, and new books were maintained in an attempt to keep 52 titles. And this process allowed titles that hadn't been tried before or in a long time, to have a change to get a following.
Now, there has been a lot of criticism of the New 52, including the fact that very soon DC will have canceled 52 series since launching the new 52 and that some readers feel that their favorite characters (like Wally West) have been ruined by the reboot. There's not a whole lot that can be said about either of these points. The first is a fact of business, and while DC can be criticized for a harsh editorial mandate, they've at least given certain books, like All-Star Western, a chance. The second is really a matter of personal taste and individual connection to a specific version of a character.
Anyway, I've been pretty much behind the New 52 since it happened. It helped that I'm primarily a Batman fan, and not much changed on the Batbooks. It also helped that I got interested in books that hadn't really existed before like Justice League Dark, and the new takes on characters like Wonder Woman and the Flash.
I even bought into last years first big DC event Trinity War, and this is where the problem with DC started to become evident.
The premise of Trinity War was simple, Superman kills Doctor Light. This throws the Justice League, the JLA and the Justice League Dark into conflict which is made worse by the enigmatic character Pandora and her, you guessed it, box. We're lead to believe that if this box can be opened, that perhaps whatever is wrong with Superman can be fixed, and the ills of the world might be removed. Sure, the last part is never gonna happen in comics, but the set up is fun.
Ultimately, we got a terrible bait and switch. When the box is opened, we don't get a fixed Superman, or an end to the ills of the world. We only get...
The Crime Syndicate, the evil Justice League of Earth 3.
Realistically what we got was the demand to buy the next DC event, Forever Evil. Yes, another event series with a slew of tie ins that only tie into the regular titles of the DCU in the most tangental way. Most books ignored the event entirely for the bulk of its run, and only acknowledged that it happened after it was over. Still, if you want to know why Dick Grayson is suddenly presumed to be dead, you have to read Forever Evil.
So, this week, after 6 issues of setup with the Crime Syndicate running the world, the Justice Leagues (except Batman and Catwoman) missing and villains trying to fight back, Forever Evil 7 ties up most of the loose ends (though apparently, like Amazons Attack, several MAJOR plot points happened in tie ins), in the most rushed manner, but also ham-handedly paves the way toward the next DCU event. by revealing that Crime Syndicate fled Earth 3 to escape (SPOILER WARNING) ....
That's right kiddies, after we got done a very pre-Crisis on Infinite Earths story, we get a reveal of the big bad of COIE.
Someone at DC thought this was a shocking reveal.Someone at DC also thought that building last summers event Trinity War into another event, Forever Evil, was a fantastic idea. This brings me to the point of this post, and the reason I think DC comics is headed down a very bad path at the moment.
As I said earlier, the New 52 was built on the premise of "We have awesome new stories to tell, but we're having a hard time telling them because of the continuity that other people built decades ago". That's a fair enough statement, and it's the statement that the classic Crisis on Infinite Earths was built on. Reduce continuity and confusing elements in order to bring in new readers and increase sales.
But here we are 3 years into this grand endeavor and what we're getting from the the company is mega-event after mega-event (a criticism of the pre New 52 DC) that serve as little more than a teaser for the next mega-event. Worse still, these mega-events are just culling 70's and 80's throwbacks. That's not "new" or "fresh", that's just rehashing things we've already seen and enjoyed.
It's
not to say that rebooting a character can't have great results, even if
the reboot was terribly handled. Over at Marvel a ham-handed editorial
mandate forced a very sloppy and harebrained Spider-man reboot. Like the
New 52 there was a huge fan outcry, and like the New 52, fans boycotted
(myself included). Unlike the New 52, the reboot has actually allowed
Spider-man to shift it's focus and actually tell new and fresh stories.
Characters who had been hastily killed off were back, and became vital
pieces of the story being told. They had character growth, and made you
care that they were back.The New 52, for the most part, has just shown itself to be the result of lazy storytelling. Like Spider-man's reboot, the New 52 allegedly stemmed from a conversation about how to un-marry Superman. Unlike Spider-man, this didn't result in taking characters back to their core, while largely preserving storylines people liked. It just allowed the DC brain-trust to strip away stories in order to tell them again.
For
example, for nearly a year now Batman, the book not the character, has
been taken over by telling an extended origin story called Year Zero.
This storyline was fine when it seemed like a diversion for a few
issues, but after showing Bruce decide to be Batman and battle a
reimagined Red Hood, the story continues in order to show Batman's first
encounter with the Riddler who somehow managed to take total control of
Gotham and shunt it back to the stone age through dictatorial rule. I would never deny that Scott Snyder is a fine writer, and his writing on Batman up to Year Zero was fantastic. I'm not even opposed to touching back on Batman's origins just to clearly establish which of the multitude of versions is actually canon this time around. But a year long retelling of his backstory, including a major event which seems to chew up a disproportionate amount of the limited 5 year window the character has existed just seems ridiculous.
DC did a Batman origin reboot with Frank Millers Batman: Year One, and in 4 issues told a story with such intimacy and depth that what was intended as a elseworlds story was made canon through the sheer force of fan love. Moreover, elsewhere in the Batman line, a character from Batman Year One has shown up bearing a reminder of the events of Year One. How can this be if Year One is now replaced with Year Zero?
It feels very much like the editorial top brass at DC is stuck in a mentality of being risk averse. This mentality has lead them to harken back to their greatest successes in an attempt to relive their glory days. This isn't necessarily a new problem, after all when DC's readership started to flag 10 years ago they mirrored Crisis on Infinite Earths with Infinite Crisis (another story which features Superboy, Alexander Luthor and Earth 2 Superman... with a special appearance by the Anti-Monitor). The event was supposed to provide something of a fresh start again, and when it failed to do so, DC launched Final Crisis 2 years later (which was far from the event story DC envisioned, but for my money a much better story than Infinite Crisis).
Moreover, even when DC has maintained an ongoing new series, this fear if commitment to new directions has caused the tone to be wildly inconsistent. Red Hood and the Outlaws is a series that was pitched as watching characters who were the outsiders of the DCU get things done in more roguish ways than the normal heroes would handle. It seemed like perhaps DC's answer to Guardians of the Galaxy, or even things like the A-Team. A bunch of rogues who do the right thing. Instead the book has swerved wildly between being an space book, a supernatural book, and a crime book. The characters have been inconsistent, and the pacing has been sluggish. It's also bounced through 3 writers in 30 issues, each with a drastically different focus.
On a side note, this risk averse mentality is what has long held DC back at the movies while Marvel has built a universe. Similarly, when DC had a creative mind making a DC film, the made that filmmaker the ONLY voice of the DCCU, for better or worse (First Nolan, now Snyder. All while David Goyer drafts scripts) . It seems there is absolutely no fresh input cinematically for DC.
Notwithstanding, this risk averse mentality has begun to make the "fresh" New 52 feel stale after only two years. Worse yet, DC's sales continue to decline based on this strategy. Despite the bump the entire line got from the launch of the New 52, sales have largely returned to normal if not declined. Batman has taken a sales bump since the New 52, but Green Lantern has dropped down by almost half. Similarly in July of 2011, DC has only 16 comics in the top 50 books selling books for the month. This past March DC only had 12.
Fewer people are reading the "new", "fresh" DC comics than were reading the "old" DC comics. Clearly I'm not alone in believeing that, even after giving the New 52 my adamant support, DC comics is lost and has no real concept of how to pull itself out of the slow inevitable decline. Harkening back to the 80's will not help.
This is not helped by DC taking lessons from the 90's by doing lots
of
cross-over stories. Only read Superman/Wonder Woman cause you like
Wonder
Woman? You have to go buy a bunch of Superman books because now the
series is part of the Superman:Doomed crossover. Only like reading
Justice League Dark or Constantine? For 6 months you need to buy both of
those books plus Pandora and Phantom Stranger or you will have no idea
what is going on in those books. It's almost as bad as 90's X-Men where
there were 6 titles, and if you didn't read all of them, you might as
well not read any of them because it was a constant cross-over. If you
don't want to read Superman or Phantom Stranger, you're not going to go
out and buy the other 6 books in order to keep reading Superman/Wonder
Woman or Justice League Dark, you're simply going to stop reading
Superman/Wonder Woman or Justice League Dark.So, what can DC do to fix this downward trend?
Well, in my opinion, they need a hard course correct. They need to focus more on characters and less on events. Part of what has made the Brian Azzarello's Wonder Woman run so great is that is focuses on a group of characters and lets them lead the story. The book has given only passing mentions to the big events of the New 52, but in the meantime, we actually care when a character in Wonder Woman dies. Or when a character reveals a new side. Or when they become something more.
They also need to dump any hard nostalgia for the glory days. If you're dumping your continuity from the 80's, you must also dump the desire to retell those stories. You can't have a fresh start if you're just going to have your current writers give their take on stories that have already been told. Move forward. We don't need more Anti-Monitor or Batman Origin. We need a new character who is more interesting than the Anti-Monitor, and a new Batman story that takes him down a road he's never traveled before.
The core of story isn't in plot, it's in character, and if DC doesn't realize that, I can't help but see them continuing to decline due to editorial mismanagement and reader apathy.
I love Batman, and Wonder Woman and Flash. I don't want to see them disappear or be marginalized. But unless a course correction is taken, I'm not sure how the company will fair in another 15 years or so.
Less nostalgia. New stories. Less time on crossovers and mega-events. More time on character.
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