Tim Farnsworth - "It's a bit like the various Dini/Timm animated series insofar as they've pulled the bits and pieces they think are the best bits or will most appeal to a new audience. We might disagree as to the specific bits and pieces, but a new reader should just take it all at face value."

Dini/Timm may have taken the best bits and pieces from the source material, but it was still introduced as if it were new.  Heck, that's what I assumed they were planning to do with the reboot.  Start from the beginning (or close to it) and gradually reintroduce familiar elements in their "most appealing" forms (or the current PTB's assumption of same anyway).   

In this case, all of those old stories are out there available to be read, just "wrong."  If you're going to leave all that in there, what's the point of screwing with the history?  It would be easier to just clean up the various messes around the characters, get them to a "reader friendly" status quo, and then do your big media push.  That way, people can explore the backlist if they're so inclined without all of the contradictions.

As it is, they're basically lying to new readers.  "All #1s!  Start from the beginning!*"

(*May not be actual beginning.")

The DCU timeline has been pretty much hamstrung since the Crisis on Infinite Earths by the inability to reconcile two things: The Golden-Age superheroes are rooted in a specific time (starting in 1938) while what was once the Earth-1 continuity always started about ten years ago.

The JSA can stay magically young as long as people want them to, but by this point you should really have grand-children and great grandchildren of the JSA fighting crime as well, and not simply children, if you're going to treat this as a 'realistic' timeline. If you're not, no problem. But the powers that be have pretty consistently showed that they want things both ways -- a timeline grounded in real-world dates for the appearances of some heroes, and a moving, somewhat elastic timeline for other heroes.

What results isn't fish or fowl -- it's the weird, quasi-adult, fanboyish DCU of today, with a veneer of 'realism' and a core of complete ridiculousness. If I were rebooting the DCU, I'd probably just go back to Earth-One and Earth-Two and Earth-S and Earth-X and Earth-Charlton. One could even simply adjust the old 'Earth-2 and Earth-1 are 20 years out of sync' to 50 or 60 years. Actually, make it 70 years or so and the JSA can fight in WWII and crossover directly with the JLA, if that's the way you want to go.

Or if you want to be plausible within a 'real world' timeline and have all these heroes on one planet, then stagger their appearances so that you can have various heroic ages -- the JSA and the Marvel Family in the 1940's and 50's; the Challengers, Rip Hunter, Cave Carson, the Sea Devils et al. in the post-JSA 50's and early 1960's; the Doom Patrol, Metal Men, Eclipso and others in the 1960's and early 1970's;  the Charlton heroes, say, starting in the 1970's; Infinity Inc. in the 1980's and 1990's; Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman and the other major DCU characters starting 'ten years ago.'

Cheers, Jon

Jonathan Stover wrote: What results isn't fish or fowl -- it's the weird, quasi-adult, fanboyish DCU of today, with a veneer of 'realism' and a core of complete ridiculousness. If I were rebooting the DCU, I'd probably just go back to Earth-One and Earth-Two and Earth-S and Earth-X and Earth-Charlton. One could even simply adjust the old 'Earth-2 and Earth-1 are 20 years out of sync' to 50 or 60 years. Actually, make it 70 years or so and the JSA can fight in WWII and crossover directly with the JLA, if that's the way you want to go.

This is where comic fandom logic falls off the rails for me -- we can suspend disbelief to believe in invulnerability, heat vision, gamma rays, power rings, and Norse gods, but we can't simply stretch the imagination a bit to assume that on Earth-2 WWII happened roughly twenty years ago, regardless of what the date is on our calendar, and just leave it at that. 

Taking that a step further, if we can suspend disbelief and go with the idea that there is a multiverse and multiple earths, why can't we (and the writers and editors and other powers-that-be) simply adopt the concept that time flows differently in different parts of the multiverse.  As a kid, I always kind of just simply assumed this -- it never bothered me about WHEN the JSA was in their prime versus how old they "really" were, and it never bothered me that Nick Fury fought in WWII and Cap was in suspended animation since WWII, yet they were still both roughly the same age.  The "magic" there that made it work was the fact that I was a kid, and I was far more interested in the stories than the pseudo-"mechanics" and timelines and such. 

Sue, Reed, Ben, and Johnny attempted to beat the commies into space roughly 5 years ago and we've had a bunch of presidents since then -- doesn't matter to me, because the fact that they're in New York is a conceit, because it's obviously NOT "our" New York, so it's obviously not "our" earth, so why not assume that the timestream flows a bit differently in the world where Reed and Sue and Johnny and Ben live and accept ALL of the "history" without trying to make it fit into OUR timeline?  Make "Marvel time" and "DC time" a "rubber band" that stretches as needed for the story being told, and quit being a slave to continuity.

The kid in me cringes as the "adults" busy themselves trying to explain something to me that I don't need to have explained.  ENTERTAIN me, please -- no explanation required, especially for the minutia like how the Fan4 met president Kennedy AND president Obama, because IT DOESN'T MATTER, and if you're worrying about reconciling those piddly details then you've obviously lost sight of the goal of telling good stories (and I have no idea if the Fan4 have met Obama -- I quit reading long before he was elected, and I really don't care, but you get my point).

</RANT> (not directed at you, Jonathan, but at the idea that this crap NEEDS an explanation in the first place)

I don't think DC is worried about the folk upset by Secret Six and JSA.

And they shouldn't be, IMO.

For better or worse, they gotta stop making decisions based on the few old timers hanging around, and focus on new readers!

Greg, shouldn't DC be trying to add onto their existing customer base instead of scrapping it and trying for entirely new readers? 

I see it as a no-win situation; appeasing older fans means that potential new readers are intimidated to pick up a confusing book. Scrapping old continuity spits in the face of fans (although a dwindling number) who have supported the books through thick and thin.

I think a partial or gradual line reboot would've been better, but DC needs a big splash for promotion purposes.