8 Terrible Comic Book Events Marvel And DC Wish You'd Forget

4. The New 52

DC The New 52
DC Comics

Whilst not technically an event per se, the New 52 was steeped in controversy, to say the very least.

A major reset/reboot/whatever of mainstream DC continuity, the initiative depicted a world where heroes had only really been around for five or so years. A hard reboot would've been fine if DC had actually followed through with things, and created a diverse library for people to jump onto, but they didn't, and readers were forced to navigate a hodgepodge of continuity that used certain things from the pre-reboot continuity but then ignored other things entirely.

Things didn't really make much sense, and, although the initiative was certainly commercially successful, it was a massive departure for the old guard among DC's audience. The New 52 did away with a lot of the universe's history, and, while there were certainly critical successes contained within the relaunch, none of them owed their success to the reboot, which only seemed to disrupt the creative flow of many of the writers having to navigate the transition between pre and post-Flashpoint continuities.

Rebirth, thankfully, has found the perfect balance between the new and old continuities, having restored many of the legacies and characters that went missing during 2011's creative relaunch.

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WhatCulture's very own resident movie guy, Ewan has been working in the content creation biz for over 10 years now, having started as a freelance contributor to WhatCulture Gaming all the way back in 2015. After graduating with a First-Class Honours in History from Northumbria University in 2017 (where he won a prize for a totally killer dissertation on the Watergate years), Ewan took on the role of Comics Editor at WhatCulture and quickly developed WhatCulture Comics into one of the biggest superhero-focused channels on YouTube. He followed this with a brief hiatus at Screen Rant in 2021, where he worked across the Gaming and Film sections as a writer and editor, before returning to WhatCulture as a Senior Content Producer / Presenter in 2023. He started his own podcast, We Love Dad Movies, in 2022, and has contributed several written pieces to the Eisner-nominated comics website Shelfdust as well. In his current role, Ewan incorporates his love of cinema, comic books, and history into written pieces and video essays for WhatCulture's Film & TV channel, as well as WhatCulture Gaming and WhatCulture Horror, with a particular focus on nineties-era Dad Movies, old school Westerns, and Golden Age Hollywood Noir. John Carpenter is his fave, and he thinks Batman Beyond should never have been cancelled. If that's your vibe, you'll probably like his stuff.