Comic Retrospective: Prolog

I got into comics late in my life. Sure, I read indie comics since I was a child and I watched Marvel and DC shows ever since I learned to use the television. I even perused local comic shops frequently. but I never had any interest in the printed medium until I was a late teen. Until then, comics were just jokes about stoned hippies, or poorly drawn scribbles complaining about the government or the X-men save the moon.

(Can this be anymore 90's?)

And that was it. Asking me about comics was like asking me about a wall. It's there. It has a purpose. Some people suck at building walls and some people are experts. Walls can look like anything and can be made to appeal to anyone in particular the person who made the wall wants. Was I interested in walls? No. Did I hate walls? No.

Then, one day I needed to kill a lot of time, so I bothered to check out comics again. I found this guy. He looked like he'd suffered an ambush makeover by Lobo's hair stylist, he dressed like the crow, at some point I think he stole Spawn's cape, and he was badly suffering from 90's snarling constipation.

(Everyone in the 90's had rickets)

I was introduced to something VERY new. There was no long narrative intro, no backtracking, no flashbacks to an origin story, and the fight scenes were barely in the book. It didn't resemble anything like a superhero cartoon or issue.

Michael Morbius woke up to find himself a prisoner of a mad scientist. But this guy resembled a real doctor. There were no delusions of grandeur, not insane laughter, no schemes. The guy likes to study the terminally ill and kept them alive and aware as he studied their conditions and operated on them—not to help them as victims, but to prolong their suffering so he could keep studying them. Did I mention the main audience was children and teenagers?

The story didn't try to hold your hand because you were young and couldn't handle words like 'kill' or 'die' or pretend death wasn't real, and it didn't go for the lowest common denominator. It was meant to be absolutely terrifying psychologically and it did that almost perfectly. The protagonist wasn't someone who tried to save the world, he was just some guy who knew he was in over his head but tried to stop a bad guy because he knew no one else would.

I had never seen that kind of story before and it earned my respect for the medium. This was what it was now. It was like going from Trouble With Tribbles to In the Pale Moonlight. While the first is enjoyable and optimistic and the latter is full of unethicality and amorality, it was an evolution I enjoyed (both for comics and Star Trek). It changed my view of the medium, and especially the genre, from objective to subjective.

The specific character had much less impact than the story and the depth the character gave to it. In doing so, it changed acknowledgment to approval. It changed my thoughts on the medium as a whole from objective to subjective.

However, as much as something literally so small changed my opinion of something vast, I was still young with an inconsistent income and I soon found myself moving to a new house and into high school. Pressure to overachieve in school increased dramatically, social interests veered sharply away from anything defined as pertaining to 'geeks', and my new interest created problems at home.

My parents, though college educated, were mired in the school of thought that things like video games (I had to keep it a secret until I was an adult if I wanted to play at a friends house) and comics made one stupid, violent, and out of college. As much as that notion didn't make sense in the late '90's to anyone who knew a thing about comics, it made less sense that they whole-heartedly approved of indie comics such as Elfquest or humor such as Furry Freak Brothers. Those were graphic novels or silly nostalgia; they didn't count.

Then karma came along and changed everything. While my parents were vocal about voting against it, our neighborhood gained free cable (only 20 new channels or so). They never mentioned a single word of protest though, when it brought our household Batman: the Animated Series. They enjoyed it almost as much as I did. On Leather Wings, followed by Heart of Ice, reminded me of why I had ever wanted to pursue my hidden urge to buy more comics. There was a depth to these characters emotionally. I didn't care if it was a show for kids and the writers very often didn't care about that either (that or they were pure evil and wanted to give children something so good it would ruin all future cartoons). The show, and it's evolution into Batman and Superman, Justice League, and Justice League Unlimited, often gave me a view into the psyche of those characters.

(Sometimes I wish I didn't want to know anything about their psyches)

In the later years of high school I was introduced to manga by a friend and found an interest in the foreign art style as I entered college. As much as I studied the history, culture, and connection that continues this day with American media, manga inspired me more as an idea than as something to continue. Either the stories went on forever (and I ended up preferring the anime most of the time), or I found singular stories that I regarded more as individual pieces than representatives or advertisements for the different form of the medium. While tales like 1001 Nights in Space and Uzumaki tantalizing beyond any other previous mix of graphic art and prose, manga lacked the staying power and pull that American retained over the years.

Now that I was an adult, I had more privacy and leniency. I eventually bought my own Playstation and began doing my best not to keep up with comics, but to find what I knew I was likely to enjoy once comic shops and bookstores carrying trades finally began showing up near me. I checked out the 'landmark' stories of The Dark Knight Returns and Watchmen and...they were okay. I preferred reading Tower of Babel for just plain being enjoyably silly or Identity Crisis for all the wrong reasons.

(Which were pretty much all the parts DC never followed up on)

I was in my mid-twenties when I actually began to take a look back at the superheroes I liked and read their history and stick with a continuity for a whole arc. I learned a lot about the history of characters, the overall differences between Marvel and DC and why I tended to gravitate towards the former, and to stay far away from Frank Miller. Someone should really have warned me about him.

I dabbled all over the medium, especially as digital comics became easier to access without loads of cash. I checked out manga, found Elfquest had returned with all-new stories by the original artists, but I had become a die-hard Marvel fan.

It's not perfect and I read the occasional indie, Image, or DC book, but Marvel is now my rock. A bit eroded, but solid.

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Please Reboot your Reboot-You've got some explaining to do

DC, would you mind explaining something?  Actually, would you mind explaining everything?

DC, you started over.  No one can go back and read anything to clear things up.  You have super heroes with tons of powers, Stormwatch is incredibly surreal and abstract at times, Batman owns some sort of crime fighting worldwide company and has a half dozen sidekicks.

These aren’t things a reader can just jump into and understand, let alone immerse themselves in the story. We need to be eased into a universe where the forces of good and evil span multi-verses, Gorillas have their own invisible city, and naked women behead horse and tentacles rise out of the corpses.

In Wonder woman, the first things a reader sees is the aforementioned horse decapitation and tentacles, some blue bird-man-thing starts yelling at someone we have never seen or heard of before in her underwear, and she’s transported to Wonder Woman’s bedroom and all the woman can remember about the blue-bird-man thing was that his eyes were weird.

What was established in those scenes?  What as accomplished, besides showing off behinds of women?

Are these Greek gods or monsters?  If so, which ones?  Why are they naked?  Why are they blue?  What’s their motivation?  The woman was attacked by horse-like monsters before being teleported, were those the beheaded horses and they mutated, or did they come from somewhere else?  Who is this woman?  Why can’t she have pants?  Why does she mention the eyes of the bird-man when there’s so much else weird about him?

If you hadn’t erased the decades of history, a reader could have picked up a previous Wonder Woman comic and answered these questions and answered these questions.  But there’s nothing to fall back on anymore.  You don’t have that advantage anymore and you need to make up for that now.

It’s time to apologize, DC.  You don’t have to apologize for wanting to change. You don’t have to apologize for how you altered your universe.  What you need to apologize for is rushing everything and leaving your readers behind. Make sense and go slower at first. Just explain what’s going on.  All we need is to know what was changed and how this universe works now.  Show us the details of how Batman Inc works with a simple story.  Explain to us who these monsters are.  Tell us why Dick Grayson became Nightwing when he never joined the Titans.

It doesn’t matter if we’re new readers or loyal fans who have remained throughout all the other changes you’ve made.  We deserve better.  We’re all you got.

Please Reboot your Reboot-Who watches...you

Things to Reboot about the Reboot- Other Media

Marvel is coming out with six movies in three years and there’s a few cartoons coming and going still.  They’re keeping their long and complicated history (even the stuff Mephisto erased).

They aren’t rebooting anything.

While money is obviously involved, it’s more complicated than just that about how much better they’re doing than you.

DC, you started over.  You’re explaining your world to readers.  That’s good.  But comics have evolved not just in writing and art, but giant media studios like yourself are spanning mediums these days. 

Before it’s even out, you failed with the ultimate purpose of these movies with Man of Steel.  With so many issues at stake, you failed at the most important by focusing on all the others.

Many people who have never picked up a comic before can now easily identify each of the avengers. Soon they’ll know characters and comics they’ve never heard of.  Guardians of the Galaxy wasn’t well known outside of people who made it a hobby to know Marvel characters and stories.

The Nolan movies introduced people to Batman.  They gave him and his villains a look, something to remember. 

But now you’ve taken away our Teen Titans and replaced them with immature brats that don’t match the characters in your comics.  You’ve ended Young Justice and didn’t replace it.  All we have now is a Superman that few comic readers will recognize and who looks amazingly generic save for his heavy eyeliner.  Who can point to him and instantly say ‘That’s Clark Kent’ and know his basic backstory?

You put so much effort into your reboot.  Are you just too tired now to put any into telling the public outside of comic stores and conventions about it?

Please Reboot your reboot-No More Titans

Writing is hard.  Managing a universe of hundreds of characters is hard.  Selling a product is hard.  Doing all of this for decades is hard.  I’m not going to argue any of that.

What I will say is that logic and basic common sense aren’t all that hard.  Forgetting those is like forgetting pants—it’s disturbing to everyone around you and you accomplish more if you bother with them in the first place.  While DC can make a lack of pants look normal—Starfire’s confusion about clothing grows with every decade—it has yet to make a lack of common sense and logic work…though it seems to be trying way to hard on that, too.

Sure, there have been numerous science screw ups, faceplamingly bad plots and outfits, and dumb decisions characters have made.  DC’s is responsible for movies like Steel, Batman and Robin, and Catwoman.  But those as least had reasons for why things were the way they were and why people did what they did—maybe not good reasons, but at least they had something to blame.  DC somehow forgot that in all their work to make a reboot.

The Titans used to be an essential and important part of the DC universe.  They had a long history, many members, and just as many crisis to handle as the Justice League and other more ‘adult’ teams.  But now they never happened at all and neither did anything that happened to members while they were in the group

Or that’s how it should be, right?  Even if you didn’t learn to drive in High School, but learned years later, things would be very different if that changed.  You’d know different people. You would have made different decisions as a driver than a pedestrian.

So why did Nightwing become Nightwing without the Titans to influence him to separate himself from Batman? How did he meet Starfire without the Titans recuing her?  How did Cyborg gain the confidence to join the Justice League without the mental and emotional support from the Titans?  He doesn’t get that from his new team.

DC changes its history almost as often as a normal person changes underwear.  I get that.  I got that ten years ago.  Heck, I got that twenty years ago when I barely knew comics.  But when those changes happened, they were explained.  Donna Troy wasn’t rescued by the amazons, but by the titans, and wasn’t rescued by them, but was a magical duplicate of Wonder Woman as a kid, and wasn’t created ever and does not exist.  Those were all different causes and the effect was Donna Troy, Wonder Girl, Troia and nothing.

But we got the cause, not just the effects.  We need the cause to understand the new effects.  We read comics, we can take anything. 

Except nothing at all.

Reboot your Reboot-Green Lantern

Things DC needs to reboot about the reboot

Hal Jordan.

Seriously, whoever is the Green Lantern in The New 52 is not Hal Jordan.  Hal Jordan does not insult people.  He is not a jerk.  He does not exclude people based on lack of powers or similar colors alone.  He is not a clown.

DC, this is a soft reboot.  Your characters are still who they used to be.  Hal Jordan was loving and caring to point of obsession, insanity, self-sacrifice, and even tedium.  This isn’t someone who’d do any of that.  This isn’t someone who’d trade his power ring if keeping it meant giving up the love of his life. This isn't someone so bent on good, people would call him dull.

You have several angry, joking, and laid back Green Lanterns.  You have even more beyond that.  Among hundreds of green lanterns, you intentionally choose on who doesn’t match the intended personality at all.

Your mistake with Hal goes even further. Guy Gardner was the first ‘real’ Green Lantern.  He made fun of people.  He didn’t play well with others. He wouldn’t shut up if he thought he had something to say, and it was rarely nice.  So where’d he go?

It seems Hal’s already begun his genocidal plans as Parallax, but it being far more subtle about it.  Far more subtle than you are about writing him, DC.

Please reboot your reboot: Part 1-Batman

Things that need to be rebooted in DC’s reboot-part 1

Batman.

I’m not saying DC shouldn’t have Batman.  DC without Batman is like McDonalds saying ‘what fries?’

You can easily do a lot of things with Batman.  He can be camp, depressing, an action hero, a ninja… heck he works as a communist, a vampire, and a green lantern in stories. But he doesn’t work if you make no sense.

Batman is in Justice League, Justice League of America, Batman, Batman and Robin, Batman the Dark Knight, Detective Comics, Red Hood and the Outlaws, Batman Incorporated, and will be in Batman/Superman.

Batman also trained four robins.  Plus Batgirl.  This all happened in a span of five years and him in all those teams have been within one.  Somehow, he also has enough time to run a business and be a playboy as Bruce Wayne.

So far, DC’s telling us Batman is extremely clingy, but has ADD when it comes to teams.

And then DC mucks things up worse with the caped crusader.  They gave him Batman Incorporated to run.  Being Batman became a business world wide (that he set up in his free time when not training sidekicks, fighting crime, being in at least five to six teams, running another business, using the batcomputer, and being a playboy).  How does this work?  Doesn't he fight people who hire out thugs with gadgets and costumes?  Does this mean Batman doesn't help poor people?  What are his rates?  It’s a corporation, so does he pay taxes?

For all the jokes Hal makes for Batman having no powers, Batman sure seems to be able to teleport, has better time management skills than the Clock King, probably doesn't need sleep, and can turn others into superheroes within less than a year.