5 Ways To Revitalize DC Comics
How to avoid the New 52 from becoming the New Coke of comics.
The comics community is turning its attention toward DC Comics new publishing initiative #Rebirth.
Coming just five years after a line-wide reboot in the form of 2011s New 52, people seem to be divided on whether this is happening too soon or not soon enough.
Either way, whether youre a fan of the past few years of DCs output or not, its clear that sales have declined. It seems that Co-publishers Dan DiDio and Jim Lee along with Chief Creative Officer Geoff Johns are tacitly admitting that, just maybe, the New 52 wasnt quite the best decision the company has ever made.
Just a few months after it started, we heard rumors about a difficult editorial staff making decisions on the fly and requesting huge changes on already approved material. In retrospect, things like the question about whether or not Superman had died in this continuity (raised as early as Swamp Thing number ONE) or if there had ever been a previous Teen Titans team (this resulted in dialogue from early issues being altered when collected in trade paperback) illustrate how little planning and communication was going on at the time.
To a cynical observer, it looked like DC had planned a Flash-centric event called Flashpoint, involving the Reverse Flash changing Barry Allens past, resulting in an alternate timeline, and chose to take advantage of it and shoehorn in a universal reboot. That certain titles like Grant Morrisons Batman and Johns Green Lantern were left almost entirely untouched by the continuity changes (except for those horrible costume updates) shows that DC was trying to have its cake and eat it, too.
Now comes the rebirth, deliberately titled to invoke Johns Green Lantern: Rebirth and Flash: Rebirth, two stories that kind of reset their respective characters books, creating a new status quo that acknowledges what came before and drawing a map for stories going forward. The goal is to gain back new readers by re-introducing elements from the Pre-Flashpoint universe while retaining enough New 52 details to prevent losing readers gained in the past five years.
Its a tall order. Johns is pretty much the figurehead for #Rebirth while DiDio and Lee, whose faces were front and center for the New 52 launch, are more toward the sidelines. Even though Johns is a great writer, much of his work has a sort of fan-fiction quality to it (in fact, the entire New 52 can be read as such - less what if? and more wouldnt it be cool if?) and he often seems overly focused on forcing the DC universe into looking like it did when he was young.
The problem is, being too regressive at this point might end up bringing back all the things that inspired DC to roll out the New 52 in the first place. Unless, of course, the New 52 is DCs New Coke in which case everythings going according to plan.
If thats not the case, here are some suggestions for DC if its rebirth isnt as effective as they hope.