How The New 52 Broke DC Comics

The Crisis To End All Crises - How And Why DC Rebooted Its Universe

DC The New 52
DC Comics

To put the New 52 into further context, back in 2011, DC was lagging behind main competitor Marvel in terms of overall market share. There were occasional months where the Distinguished Competition was able to outperform the House of Ideas - such as in 2009/10, with books like Blackest Night - but for the most part, Marvel retained a share of the market that was far greater than DC's own, averaging 38.23% and 43.35% of the dollar market share and unit market share compared to DC's 30.39% and 34.00% in 2010, according to Diamond, a year before DC's reboot would drop.

Previous years paint a similar picture, with Marvel retaining the top spot and DC coming in behind in a not-too-distant second, but always with a big enough gap to never really trouble their biggest rivals. It was with this in mind that DC editorial, headed up then by Dan DiDio, Geoff Johns and Jim Lee, resolved to try something drastic.

The idea was that DC needed to appeal to new readers if it was ever going to close the distance on Marvel, and to do that, changes had to be made. DC's characters were frequently criticised for being everything Marvel's heroes weren't, and although any DC reader will tell you that's a spectacular error to make, it's a perception that's persisted all the same, along with other such takes as "Superman isn't relatable", and "Aquaman talks to fish."

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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.