The New 52 and Previous DC 'Reboots'

[Chris Lang]

On the Manic Expression site, I've posted a blog entry about the 'New 52' reboot, bringing up DC's previous attempts at reboots. In short, I say that as far as reboots in a shared universe go, it's either all or nothing.

Here's one quote from it...

Even though I no longer read DC's new material, I am still sad to see all these characters go. Many of them were favorites of mine, and I sympathise greatly with their fans and fans of other characters who are now no longer part of DC's official continuity and probably will not be seen again in officially-sanctioned books (or, if they are, they will be so greatly changed they might as well be different characters).

This, however, leads one to the following questions: Why did DC reboot their whole universe? Couldn't they have only rebooted some of their series while still keeping those who weren't dead horses and still had good story potential in the previous continuity?

To answer the first question: DC wanted to attract new readers without them having to worry about decades of convoluted backstories.

And to answer the second: DC tried that before, and it just didn't work.

The full blog, and my explanation as to WHY DC's prior reboots within a shared universe didn't work, can be found here:

Why It Just Doesn't Work: Only Rebooting Some Series In A Shared Universe.

[Nitz the Bloody]

On the one hand, I get what you're saying about how a shared universe meant for monthly publication across multiple series can't work if some parts are retconned and others aren't. On the other hand, I think the only way it becomes a problem is if the comics themselves call attention to it. The better New 52 series like Action Comics and Wonder Woman stick to their own stories, with elements from the rest of the shared universe used as needed. Others, like the Green Lantern books and the Batgirl thing, draw on the old books but call attention to what counts and what doesn't (so Barbara was indeed shot in the Killing Joke, right down to flashbacks of the Joker in his cheesy tourist outfit, but her time as Oracle is effectively culled from the backstory?).

I think the larger problem arises when the need to fit everything together becomes more important than the stories themselves. As Walt Simonson (IIRC) put it, continuity is a great servant but a terrible master.

[Captain Midnight]

The problem is that DC's new 52 is it was great for sales & bringing in new fans but it did a number on the established fans that had favorite characters in current books. In Crisis of Infinite Earths DC killed the redundant characters and really only killed two mainstream characters (Supergirl & Flash) the JSA went into limbo and other characters origin's were done different. Now DC integrated characters and just made characters fade out of exisitence,with no death or any kind of closure.