Okay, time to post about the subject that finally convinced me to start a blog: DC's decision to reboot all their titles back to #1. I'm not one of those folks on the DCMB that's screaming "I'm gonna quit, you guys suck!" or whatever, but I am a little taken aback that they're smacking the reset button with very little preamble. Yeah, I know, it's just a "soft reboot", they're not erasing everything. I'll believe that when the new stuff hits in September. Right now, I feel like I'm sneaking alongside a wall, and around the corner there's all this clamor going on that I can't quite make out and I'm not sure if I want to. Yep, this fangirl is beginning to wonder if she should cut her losses and run the other way.
I should be used to these sort of shakeups, since they've been going on literally as long as I've been reading comics. Like I said before, I got my first taste in 1984, which is when Crisis On Infinite Earths hit. For a full year, DC slowly tore down then rebuilt their whole universe. Funny thing is, out of that entire stack of comics my dad gave me, very few contained references to Crisis (I somehow managed to acquire no issues of that historic 12-part miniseries), so all I knew was that, somewhere off-panel, something very big was happening. It wasn't until 5 years later, when I became a regular reader, that I learned what "pre-Crisis" meant, and that most of my grounding in comics came from there. I had to re-learn some things (Supergirl and Superboy never existed?), and a few post-Crisis changes were a bit too drastic for me (What the heck happened to the Legion of Super-Heroes?!? Timber Wolf's a big furry monster!), but for the most part, I managed well enough. Batman was still Batman, Jason Todd was still a jerk (I didn't get to vote for his death, but I didn't exactly cry over it either), and Swamp Thing was still pretty darn cool for a guy made out of algae.
As years went on, I dug into quarter boxes and got all 12 parts of COIE (yep, quarter boxes...seeing as how there was no trade edition back then, I got real lucky), as well as all the issues of Who's Who, including the updates and the looseleaf version. I absorbed the stuff real easy, learning the differences between pre- and post-Crisis so I could flip between eras without getting lost. I still use those books as reference when certain things come up, like what were the circumstances behind Barry Allen killing Reverse-Flash (yes, I actually looked that item up last week). By the time Zero Hour rolled around in '94, I knew what to expect: things are going to change, be ready for it. I agreed with many of the tweaks, especially since it gave me a version of the LSH that I quickly grew to love, but like Crisis, we all knew it was coming, it was right there in the storylines. Even with Infinite Crisis ten years later, we had warning, and we got to watch it unfold. Didn't think that all of DC's decisions this time around were the proper ones, but they carried it off decently enough.
Unfortunately, this is also when I began to lose faith in the DCU in general. Just before the "One Year Later" jump, I found myself enjoying my regular titles less and less. Green Lantern came through it fine, Jonah Hex was completely unaffected (one of the perks of living in the past!), but Batman and all the other Gothamites? It became of downward spiral of storylines that I just didn't give a darn about. Nightwing became the first casualty for me, and I dropped his title with little hesitation. Then they announced that Bruce Wayne was going to die, and that both the Robin and Birds of Prey titles were getting cancelled, and I didn't flinch. "Thanks for making the decision for me," I said. "I just needed a good excuse to let them go." You know how strange it was to go into the shop those first couple of months and not have a Bat-title waiting in the pull box for me? I'd been living in Gotham City for twenty years, so you'd think it'd be a hard adjustment, but it wasn't. I will admit, I bought the first dozen issues or so of Batgirl when they re-launched it with Stephanie Brown under the cowl, but it never caught on with me, and I just recently took those issues out of the longbox and tossed them into the sell bag for the next con, along with all the OYL Nightwing issues. God, I used to be hardcore for the Bat, and now I look at the newer stuff and just shrug.
I got a bolster of hope after Blackest Night/Brightest Day came out. I was enjoying the new BoP title, thanks to Gail Simone writing them again (my disappointment with the previous version didn't begin until after she left), Green Lantern was still moving along at a good pace, and Jonah Hex had just passed fifty issues (Fifty! We were all afraid it wouldn't last twelve!). Then the bombshell comes: "Hey, you know that Flashpoint miniseries you've been ignoring? Well, guess what? We using it as an excuse to reboot! All those titles we just started up after Brightest Day...GONE! All the anticipation over Batman and Superman closing in on the 1,000-issue mark...GONE! No time to adjust, no time to wrap up storylines, we're just gonna throw all the readers into the deep end of the pool, and if you can't swim...oh well, we wanted to bring in new readers anyways!"
So here I am, sneaking alongside a wall, and around the corner there's all this clamor going on that I can't quite make out and I'm not sure if I want to. Do I stay or do I go? All I know is that my husband keeps whispering "Excelsior!" whenever I talk with him about this. I'm not ready to fully expatriate, though (I have been buying Captain America for a few years and enjoying the heck out of it, but that's as far into Marvel territory as I've gone with my own pulls recently). I want to stay in the DCU to some degree, I'm just not sure which section of it I'll be living in.
That's the subject of my next post: The lay of the land in DCNu as can be seen in the solicits, and what corners of it look inviting. It'll also be my first attempt at putting up pictures on this blog-thingy. Fingers crossed!
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