Should DC have done a TOTAL REBOOT with DCnU?

[Fate's Faith]

"Harvey Dent, such a good guy. I hope nothing bad ever happens to him."

OMG! What happened to Harvey?!

[Nayrman]

I would've preferred a total reboot in a way. Just to give a completely fresh take on everything and not worry so much about every little detail that comes up, as to what actually happened same as the old universe and all that.

[refrax5]

DC did a TOTAL REBOOT with Justice League, Superman, Wonder Woman, etc. and SOFT reboot of Batman and Green Lantern, but I think DC should have done a TOTAL REBOOT of ENTIRE DCnU and followed characters from ORIGIN on like Robinson is doing with NEW JSA! I do NOT like the 5 YEARS MISSING GAP. What do you think?

The main reason I personally wouldn't care for that is simply because it'd essentially be years of stories setting up the essential and iconic elements. For example, with Green Lantern, we'd have to redo the origin for the umpteenth time, have Sinestro be a good guy for a while, have him become a bad guy, etc. The 5 year gap allows for certain iconic elements to be in place if the writers don't feel like spending their first few years reinterpreting old stories. And really, if you look at something like Batman TAS or Spectacular Spider-Man or most of the other animated shows, they follow the same approach. They start with the characters already established and fill in their backstories as necessary.

And some of the writers have essentially rebooted all the way. But I feel like it's more flexible the way it is. If Lobdell wants to rewrite Superboy from the beginning, he can. On the other hand, if they don't feel like rewriting the entire Geoff Johns run (which essentially was a reboot of the character in the first place), they don't have to.

[MichaelPaytonMZ]

They should have done it with Infinite Crisis. Let Bruce Wayne die instead of the planned death of Dick Grayson. Or better still...be complete teases and don't show exactly who died. Lets the internet rip in half debating which one took the fatal hit. :)

Then relaunch a new continuity after IC was finished. Only 26 titles at first. No Justice League till the end of the first year. The team forms organically over the first year. Don't totally retell every origin at first. Superman is already active. Batman already has begun training Robin. Wonder Woman's existence is public. Aquaman is a bit of a sailor's myth. A few like Hal and Barry are new. (Remember at this time neither Hal or Barry was back in the main DCU.) J'Onn is new to Earth and alone. No JSA on this Earth. The League should be the first team of heroes, but the first true TEAM is the Secret Society. They launch in their own title from the start to oppose the growing tide of heroes. The League's formation should make the world nervous, and the Society would become public (with Lex as the public face) after the League forms and be viewed as the TRUE protectors of humanity by many after the League forms.

The original Earth remains, but we won't see it at all for a good year and a half to two years. Let the Flash find it, to repeat a bit of history. Adult Wally, husband, father of two, meets the new Earth Barry. Nice moment for Wally and for fans.

[[Trigger]]

I think DC should start making a big flow chart that starts from September and how all the characters and events from here on out are connected, this way when they reboot the universe again in 10 years they have an idea of what they can remove :D

[Prisoner 6655321]

A more total reboot could have worked much better if... After Flashpoint or in place of Flashpoint was a bit of a mini (4 issues would do) following the big 3's entrance into the world. After that, a 52 issue weekly book much like 52 with several threads that lead to several more or less disconnected plots in the future. Each issue touches base on a character with a new series starting out the next week (instead of all 52 at once) and had a short "History of the DCNU" type thing covering some aspect of in universe history in the backs. Thinking about it, the soft reboot could have worked better like that but I'm more or less happy.

[Emissary of Justice]

I'd have preferred they gotten rid of Barry Allen and Hal Jordan.

Despite all of Johns' work and good stories on Green Lantern, he don't very little to make Hal Jordan into an interesting person. Yeah, he'll help save the world, but he always just comes off as a jerk to me.

[Bo-Man]

They should have done a total reboot. I love the Batman titles and the Night of Owls storyline which is fine. I don't like how in 5 years you have Dick Grayson, Jason Todd,Tim Drake, and Damien Wayne. Which I know Batman's career predates 5 years, but still, even all of this in lets say even 10 years is pushing it.As much as I like Damien, he should have been put on another earth, with Dick as Batman and Damien as Robin.
What about Wally and Donna? We have Dick, Roy Harper, Kid Flash/Bart and Wonder Girl/ Cassie, but no Wally and Donna??They are just as important to DC history.
This is just my opinion.

[SpideyCzar]

Simple answer yes, DC copped out trying to appease the vocal minority of the old fan base by making it a partial reboot. Should've just started over from scratch, new takes on origins, new villains, introduce fresh concepts, something that was promised with this reboot but that was not done at all.

[Lorendiac]

They should have done it with Infinite Crisis.

Some of us were hoping for that, beginning back around early 2005, when the word had just recently broken that later that year DC would be starting some sort of "sequel to COIE" that was meant to seriously shake up the DCU. But details of the plot and the long-term consequences were utterly unavailable in 2005 (of course), so we speculated and argued endlessly on these boards! (I did my fair share!)

One (mildly) funny thing -- sometime in 2005, I started an online Poll in which I asked a couple of questions. I believe they boiled down to: "Do you think DC SHOULD do a full reboot?" and also "Do you think DC WILL do a full reboot?"

The funny thing was that lots of people answered those two questions differently!

A fair number of the diehard comic book fans taking my poll gave yes-and-no answers that basically meant: "Yes, I think DC should reboot everything at once -- but no, I don't believe they have the guts to try! So we'll just see bits and pieces of the existing continuity get erased or twisted out of shape or whatever, without a clean sweep being made!"

On the other hand, some people answered no-and-yes, which suggested they thought the following: "No, DC doesn't need to throw away all its old continuity in one Universal Reboot -- but I figure they're too dumb to realize that, so they'll probably do it anyway, which will just make things more confusing and irritating than ever for their longtime fans!"

It was interesting to see how little faith many of us had in the concept that DC's policymakers might actually have a clue about whatever it was that they were planning for the DCU's Post-Infinite Crisis era!

P.S. Of course, to be fair, I should point out that some characters did get Real Reboots in the Post-IC era. As some had after COIE, and later after Zero Hour, and sometimes on other occasions. Three years ago I posted a list of all their reboots from 1985 onwards -- The DC Reboots Since COIE. (I've been thinking I ought to update it sometime this year, now that there's been time for the "dust to settle" in the wake of DC's latest Universal Shake-Up of Continuity . . .)

[Bored at 3:00AM]

With a whole multiverse full of Earths to play with, a full reboot wouldn't have been a problem. You could have had Earth-2 be the "DCU Classic" that's been chugging along since 1938 that started with Superman & Batman, the JSA fighting in WW2, followed by the JLA & the original Titans in the 60s, Bruce taking a dip in the Lazarus Pit when he first meets Ra's Al Ghul in '69. Infinity Inc. taking over for the JSA, along with Wally West as the new Flash in the 80s, the Bwa-Ha-Ha JLI, Tim Drake & Kyle Rayner in the 90s, followed by Dick & Damien as the new Batman & Robin in the present and so on...

Make it a big over-sized book with back-up stories and ever-rotating creative teams. You'd never run out of stories to tell in a book like that because you'd have so many characters and so much history to draw on. And I'm sure you could always find some top-tier talent willing to tell stories with them.

Meanwhile, the New 52 DCU would be free to tell new stories without having to worry about trying to pay lip service to characters and continuity they don't need anyways....

[batmanjones]

Yes, they should have.

The universe will get "complicated" again in less than two years.

It already is.

Think of being a new reader (I'm not one) and being told that about 100 old stories are canon and then even trying to go read those stories and finding that nothing makes any sense as the old stories feature (or even rely upon) Green Arrow or Hawkman or the Justice League (with the Atom or Elongated Man or someone) or the JSA being on "New Earth" or whatever.

They've done nothing but cause confusion. They got to have their cake and eat it too but they didn't leave any for the rest of us.

No question it should have been a hard reboot.

[Manga4life]

I'm reading the New 52 books as if they were a total reboot with absolutely NO connection to the original DCU whatsoever and it's working out perfectly fine for me. I'm basically picking up these books and reading them as if these characters have never seen print before and that they're new on the job, it actually is working out nice because many books are telling origin stories a few issues in, while others are starting back when the characters were just getting started (5 years ago). I wouldn't enjoy these books nearly as much as I am not if I didn't go into them this way, I'd just go mad trying to connect the dots to the previous DCU as well as trying to figure out what happened and what never happened when going into the New 52 from the previous runs. Yeah, no thanks.

Whether you pick up these books and read them as a reboot or you choose to connect them to the old DCU, as long as you're having fun reading these books than that's all that matters in the end.

Enjoy.

[batmanjones]

The main reason I personally wouldn't care for that is simply because it'd essentially be years of stories setting up the essential and iconic elements. For example, with Green Lantern, we'd have to redo the origin for the umpteenth time, have Sinestro be a good guy for a while, have him become a bad guy, etc.

No they wouldn't. They could have done what they did with the original reboot, truly starting over and leaving the old history on another earth (as they did in the 1960s with E-2).... an earth that could be visited by the rebooted earth just as E-2 was by E-1.

[Alex L]

I would much have preferred a total reboot, instead of DC saying some things count but others don't and we'll tell you which is which eventually one at a time.