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John Byrne
Grumpy Old Guy
Joined: 11 May 2005
Posts: 133317
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| Posted: 01 February 2015 at 11:38am | IP Logged | 1
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I wonder how modern readers/fans would react to a Silver Age style "reboot." Keep only the names. Much like what Hollywood has been doing for a while now.
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Jason Schulman
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 08 July 2004
Location: United States
Posts: 2473
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| Posted: 01 February 2015 at 1:54pm | IP Logged | 2
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From what I've read online, much Batman and Green Lantern-related backstory did NOT survive into The New 52. Lots of stuff got cut out. Even Batman: Year One isn't canonical anymore.
I think one of the reasons that DC's Silver Age reboots worked so well is that it had been five years since the Golden Age versions of the Flash, Green Lantern, etc. had made their last appearances. Few people reading superhero comics in 1951 were still reading them in 1956. No kids in the late '50s even knew they were reading new versions of '40s characters.
Obviously, the superhero comics audience is much different now. And I can't imagine Marvel or DC just not publishing any comics at all for even a month, let alone several months, to make a reboot seem more "clean."
I agree with Carmen that the best kind of clean break is a real clean break, with no Flashpoint or Crisis-type series to provide a "bridge." Who needs it? (Except that such series sell, to the degree that any superhero comics sell anymore.)
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Carmen Bernardo
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 08 August 2006
Location: United States
Posts: 3666
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| Posted: 01 February 2015 at 4:13pm | IP Logged | 3
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I think that the bulk of the original target audience for comics has been driven out, or drawn away by other forms of entertainment (like video gaming), so that all that is left are the older fans who seem more into the current themes. As a kid, it wouldn't have been such a shock to see a fresh start for a superhero, or even the Silver Age reboot that JB referred to. For instance, the new Ms. Marvel seemed like one, until you saw her getting shoehorned into the "MarvelNOW!" universe. Unfortunately, there were other factors in her story that reminded me that it was the same crowd ruining the other comics that are directing how her series is being written. Specifically, decompression __ any kid the age I was when I started reading comics will find it very difficult to keep up with her story, and even I had to drop it after the "origin" arc.
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Michael Roberts
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 20 April 2004
Location: United States
Posts: 14857
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| Posted: 01 February 2015 at 4:23pm | IP Logged | 4
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From what I've read online, much Batman and Green Lantern-related
backstory did NOT survive into The New 52. Lots of stuff got cut out.
Even Batman: Year One isn't canonical anymore.
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Batman: Year One was not a recent development. The storylines
that were then current in Batman and Green Lantern were carried over
to New 52, despite not making sense in a rebooted continuity where the
superheroes had only been openly active for five years.
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Joe Zhang
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 16 April 2004
Location: United States
Posts: 12857
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| Posted: 01 February 2015 at 7:42pm | IP Logged | 5
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Yup, for example Morrison's inventions Damien and Batman Inc. made it into the New 52 unscathed. There are still four Robins, one of which is the Red Hood. All the stuff so priceless to Batman lore.
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Joe Zhang
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 16 April 2004
Location: United States
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| Posted: 01 February 2015 at 7:47pm | IP Logged | 6
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And the Green Lantern books made the transition to the New 52 without a hiccup. The membership of the Corp and their roles within the Corp were exactly the same. The rival Corps that Geoff Johns introduced were the same.
Edited by Joe Zhang on 01 February 2015 at 10:51pm
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Eric Jansen
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 27 October 2013
Location: United States
Posts: 2364
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| Posted: 02 February 2015 at 12:22am | IP Logged | 7
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I'm not sure YEAR ONE was EVER canon!
Did they really confirm that Selina was a dominatrix hooker? And was her pimp really supposed to be the Joker? (Was never sure what Miller intended there.)
The moment they printed ALL-STAR BATMAN AND ROBIN #1, it was clear that YEAR ONE and DARK KNIGHT RETURNS (and ALL-STAR) all took place on some sort of "Frank Miller Earth," divorced from the main continuity (whatever it might be any given year).
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Jason Schulman
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 08 July 2004
Location: United States
Posts: 2473
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| Posted: 02 February 2015 at 6:37am | IP Logged | 8
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YEAR ONE was confirmed as canon repeatedly. Her pimp as the Joker? Never heard about that one.
DARK KNIGHT, after INFINITE CRISIS, was said to be on some parallel earth where YEAR ONE also took place.
I prefer to think that ALL-STAR never took place anywhere and in fact was never written or drawn at all.
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John Byrne
Grumpy Old Guy
Joined: 11 May 2005
Posts: 133317
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| Posted: 02 February 2015 at 6:44am | IP Logged | 9
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One if the weird things about DKR/YEAR ONE, for me, was that they happened at the same time I was working on the Superman reboot, and while I was being excoriated in the fan press every time I had so much as a comma out of place, Frank rewrote* page after page of Batman lore without so much as a bleat from the fans. Could it really be possible that Superman fans were that much more intense than Batman fans? Or could it be that, as I have noted before, DKR/YO was a "stealth" reboot, not announced as such as MoS had been?__________ * Often without realizing he was doing so. Peter Sanderson interviewed Frank about the projects, and asked, among other things, why he'd changed Catwoman's origin. Frank said he didn't know she had an origin. He thought he was giving her one for the first time!
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Brandon Scott Berthelot
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 06 May 2006
Location: United States
Posts: 560
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| Posted: 02 February 2015 at 10:07am | IP Logged | 10
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I don't know if Catwomans hooker past was ever brought up after Year
One, but I remember when she got her own series in the nineties
reading an interview in Wizard with one of the creators. I don't
remember if it was the writer or Jim Balent but whoever it was said that
they had discussed it and they did not think it worked, and if they had to
it would be her posing as part of a con.
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Andrew W. Farago
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 19 July 2005
Location: United States
Posts: 4079
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| Posted: 02 February 2015 at 12:30pm | IP Logged | 11
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The original DC Universe came together organically, and even the post-Crisis DCU didn't seem to be too micro-managed (as evidenced by all of the little merged-continuity goofs that were cleaned up bit by bit between 1986 and 1994's Zero Hour). Seeing every superhero start from scratch in the same universe, everyone meeting for the first time all over again, every origin retold with some random change thrown in to make it different...it felt really tedious.
It's just weird to me that the corporate approach to characters is to pretend that they don't have any history at all, since they've come to the bizarre conclusion that knowing Superman was created 80 years ago is the thing that's keeping kids from getting excited about him as a character. Every kid who discovers Batman or Superman or Spider-Man or the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles thinks that those are brand-new, fun characters, made just for them. If they want to do some digging and find out about the history of those characters, great, but there shouldn't be any obligation to do that.
I loved the fact that these characters had all kinds of history that I could learn about, but the existence of that past wasn't any obstacle to me latching onto them.
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Roy Johnson
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 19 May 2013
Location: Canada
Posts: 1323
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| Posted: 02 February 2015 at 1:06pm | IP Logged | 12
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BATTLEWORLD
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Topic Closed)
