Opinion: The DC New 52 Disaster!

September’s much-hyped DC New 52 reboot was enough to intrigue me - as a lapsed mainstream comics reader - to take another dip in the (admittedly shallow) superhero pool. If you read any of my reviews, you’ll know that my feelings were mixed, but it was enough to get me purchasing comics again and there were quite a number of series that I decided to persevere with, including all four Batman books, both Superman books, Wonder Woman, Animal Man, Swamp Thing, Justice League (both regular and Dark), Deathstroke, Flash, Aquaman and guilty pleasure Catwoman.

The future of DC. And you think I'M blowing things out of proportion!

Now, a mere five months later, I’m ready to drop everything. Which of DC’s recent decisions have left me feeling  alienated enough to quit mainstream comics a second time? Join me after the jump and we’ll duke it out!

But first some history...

IIt was back in the early nineties comics boom that I began to purchase mainstream comics, a relatively short-lived obsession that lasted roughly a year from 1993 to 1994. I was seduced by artist Jim Lee’s relaunch of X-Men, and then read Wolverine, X-Force, X-Factor, many Batman collections, and sporadic issues/collections/crossovers of Ghost Rider, Captain America and Superman. Then, when many of the “hot” artists started jumping ship to found Image comics I dabbled briefly in Wildcats, Spawn and even Youngblood - never satisfied enough to continue beyond a couple of issues.

What drove me away back then as an impressionable 17 - 18 year-old? It was a number of accumulative problems that seem to eternally plague the mainstream comics industry.

Firstly, there was a lack of consistency. Just as an admired writer and artist team found their feet they often left the book without warning and the quality dipped. Characters were wildly inconsistent between the various titles they appeared in. Liking Wolverine in the X-Men didn’t always mean that he was equally interesting in his own title. There were endless crossovers were stories were dragged out over various titles and became incomprehensible clusterfucks of shoe-horned continuity, often crushing any momentum that the individual series once had. There were missed deadlines at Image, or weird fill-in issues at Marvel. And let’s be honest, many of the books were just plain terrible soap operas with juvenile characters and dialogue. There comes a point for every young reader where you question if you’re continuing to buy due to misplaced loyalty for the character/title or if you’re genuinely enjoying the content.

And now, back in 2012, only five months after DC’s attempt to lure lost readers back into the flock, it feels like 1994 all over again.

Action Comics, with its fledgling, dickish, retro Superman was an immediate stand out for me back at issue one, but has been increasingly muddied ever since. The latest issue ditches the continuity and creative team entirely and gives us two shorter fill-in stories which amount to little more than a rehash of the origin and a character piece with Ma and Pa Kent. I appreciate that if you’re a super fan then that might be enough for you, but also appreciate that you’re most likely in the minority. The issue was a roadblock for me, offering very little entertainment or engagement and it certainly didn’t justify its cost.

We have so many avenues of entertainment on offer to us right now - more than ever before - and many at very little cost, and I just don’t understand how comics such as these can hold their own in this arena. It’s an absolute waste for the five minutes of flat “entertainment a book like this can offer me. I just don’t need it, and see no need in purchasing it beyond aforementioned misplaced loyalty, or the obsessive compulsive need to fill in the missing numbers before issue seven when (I believe) the original creative team will return and the story will continue. Actually I’d rather the book just ran late - I can personally wait two months for a better issue with the original team - I kind of resent the idea of just churning something out so that people still buy monthly.

Similarly, the last issue of Detective Comics was incredibly truncated (to the point where I’m flipping backwards to see if that was it) and again we get a back-up story to fill the gap, which strays further away from all of the interesting questions that the main story has raised (and, it should be noted, does not involve Batman).

We’re also starting to be bombarded with needless crossovers. I enjoy the more tense, thoughtful, adult nature of Animal Man, and even Swamp Thing (to an extent - it too is kind of going off the rails for me) but I don’t need to see the two books shoe-horned into their upcoming crossover. Worse still is Frankenstein Agent of Shade (which I enjoy) being thrown together with OMAC. I get that DC wants to generate more interest in each book, but what this is going to do is just push me away from both books. I don’t want a gimmick, I just want a good story.

How excited are you to read the outcome of this battle?

DC has recently announced six cancellations for later this year. None of them are books that I was reading or particularly interested in, but their cancellation is causing a ripple effect that will be felt across other titles. I’m quite enjoying Deathstroke, in spite of myself, but guys, I’m not going to purchase the book with new writer and artist Rob Liefeld. In fact, I’m not going to purchase it again at all. You’ve killed that one for me. Everything is shifting around long before its found its feet and I’m not engaged enough to follow.

And then finally we get back to the biggest reason of all. The majority of the books just still aren’t that good. Maybe that’s more a reflection on me, and my age, and my expectations, but I’d be an idiot to keep paying for something that elicits little more than a “meh” for the five or so minutes that I spend with it. I do enjoy Batman and Robin, and I think Wonder Woman has been interesting and consistent, and my guiltiest pleasure is still the exploitative silliness of Catwoman, but DC has clearly proved that any of this can change in an instant. There’s no unified vision here, and that doesn’t compel me to be a part of it.

Because you know what, DC? This all happens because you make too many assumptions. You just assume that I know or care about character X or Y but you don’t give me any reason to. You haven’t laid the foundations. I have no stake in whether Superhero A can beat up Villain B and couldn’t give a crap either way to be honest. So its a fatal assumption to assume that I’m already so invested in all this that I’ll continue to buy regardless of whether you change creative team, truncate the story or crossover with some random character that I’ve barely even heard of. You haven’t earned that yet. And if you’re a fan, you can defend all this with, “Well that’s just comics, that’s the business that’s how it’s always been” and I don’t disagree, but it also means that I’m not going to support it. Nor are many other people by the looks of it. And I think it’s genuinely sad that collecting comics is becoming about as popular as collecting bottle-caps.

It takes just five months to go from an optimistic fresh start to the same old bullshit. I think that’s a missed opportunity.


(And be sure to join us in the comments section for some differing opinions and a chance to hash it all out).