DC comics has recently announced their plans in August to reboot 52 of their titles. Doing this, they are re-numbering them all to 1, and re starting the continuities of the books even giving some characters (unannounced yet who) revised origins. The reason the continuity is out of hand, and new readers need a jumping on point.
And the fanboys are freaking out.
"What where all of the crises, countdowns, 42s, 52s, and zero hours for then!" they say.
Well, the comic companies have gotten rather touchy about continuity lately. And have been trying to find new and interesting ways to give the legendary "new reader" a place to jump on. And this is just DC's new way of doing it.
What Do I think? well it pretty much is a "meh", I am pissed that it looks like Supergirl, my favorite DC comic is being canned, but really with DC it doesn't matter. Because this has all happened before. DC comics has been into re setting their continuities for years, hell they used to have a whole bunch of continuities going on at once, and if anything, the persistence of this is making continuity less and less important to the casual reader. It's already started if fact, if I where to ask you what are some of the greatest books by DC? you'd probably list... Dark Knight Returns, and All Star Superman in your top ten. And y'know what these are out of continuity books, in fact their better because of this. We won't even mention the countless film, radio, and television versions of the same characters. As I mentioned in an earlier post mainstream comics needs to get away from this enslavement by continuity, so this can be a good thing. Because all that should matter is that the stories are good.
Of course what of the fan boys? Fanboys like continuity because as well as the fiction itself we err they like to make lists of things, and when the books get rebooted all the work was for naught, for naught!!! err sorry. The same goes for re numbering. But really these things don't matter, because above all else it's the stories and characters that lure all of us, casual reader and fanboy alike. And the fact that DC has a chance of putting story first again is also good, and I won't worry about those fanboys as soon as they realize they can start another list and compare it to the old list they'll be pleased as punch.
And what of the ever elusive "new reader", I think that all comic companies are fretting way to much over this creature. We all where new readers at one point of time and if your under 50 years old you started with a book with a rich continuity already but because we liked something in the book we kept reading even though we didn't know everything that was going on. And not to get to deep into a "when I was your age" rant it was a lot harder then, or more fairly it's easier now, the new comic reader has two great tools, the trade paperback and wikipedia. The new reader can now pick up virtually any recent relatively self contained storyline, and many classic ones at their local bookshop and if they need to fill in any blanks look up the stuff on Wikipedia, and trust me as a recovering fanboy I can tell you their mostly correct. It's been said in many places around the blogosphere, if you want to find a good starting point on a comic go to a shop, Comic or otherwise, find a book that appeals to you read it, if you need to find out more fire up the wiki, if not just enjoy it. You are now a comic reader.
It'll be interesting to see what becomes of this experiment that DC is doing. It can be great, they can back pedal in six months, or it can be the beginning of a brand new era. As long as the stories good nothing else should matter.
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