DC "Rebirth"

[packerbacker180]

So anyone paying attention to this? Anyone care? Personally I'm so far removed now from caring about the modern DC Universe that it won't affect me much. I've walked away from purchasing weekly comics and I feel like myself and my financial status are better for it. DC started it with the New52 and Marvel cut the last tether with Secret Wars. But I am curious to see the JSA, though if it's anything like the last version it won't matter much to me. I gave the New52 over two years of effort, but I've honestly come to loathe 90% of it since I walked away. I hope this gets us back closer to pre-FP DC, but in the end it won't bring me back anyway. I'm done. But I'll watch from the sidelines just to see. Some of the rumors according to CBR...

Every relaunched book in the "Rebirth" might receive a "Rebirth" issue in June ahead of a new #1 issue. It's rumored that biweekly books, possibly including "Batman," will actually release their new #1 in June following the "Rebirth" issue.


While it hasn't been "locked down," rumors suggest that Tom King ("Grayson," "Vision") will take over writing duties on the biweekly "Batman." It's been rumored that current "Batman" writer Scott Snyder will take over "Detective Comics," which is said to remain monthly.


According to an unnamed source, seven titles will be canceled before "Rebirth." The rumor says that "Batman/Superman," "Superman/Wonder Woman," "Grayson," "Starfire," "Black Canary," "Midnighter" and "Doctor Fate" may end before "Rebirth."


Additionally, other sources have claimed that some of those solo heroes will be moved to headline other books -- like Starfire in "Titans," Black Canary in "Birds of Prey" and Grayson returning to "Nightwing."


With the end of "Batman/Superman" and "Superman/Wonder Woman," it's rumored that a new series starring all three heroes, titled "Trinity," will debut sometime after the initial "Rebirth." The biweekly "Trinity" will star Batman, Superman and Wonder Woman.


A number of new books are rumored to launch as part of "Rebirth," including: "The Super Man," "Man of Steel," "New Green Lantern" and "Hal Jordan and the Green Lantern Corps."


Peter Tomasi is rumored to be the new "Superman" writer. The book is mentioned as being bi-monthly as opposed to bi-weekly like "Batman," but considering the dual meaning of "bi-monthly," it's possible that "Superman" will be on an every-other-week schedule like "Batman."


A new "Justice Society of America" book is rumored to arrive as part of "Rebirth," starring what's described as a team of young heroes brought forward in time, where they will fight alongside the JLA.


In addition to a new "Titans," series, it's rumored that there will also be a "Teen Titans" series, which will feature Damian Wayne in the lead as Robin.


Another rumor states that one of the integral ideas of "Rebirth" depends on something in the upcoming "Batman v Superman" film -- but that plot point is still a secret to both the editors and creators working on the new line.

[packerbacker180]

I was reading a book called "Marvel Comics: The Untold Story" a year or two ago, and always remembered this from Tom DeFalco regarding a possible "Big Bang" restart Jim Shooter was proposing around 1980 (years before Crisis, mind you):

"Allegedly the idea behind Shooter's proposed "Big Bang" was this: the Marvel Universe had become much too complicated. the histories of the characters too long and involved for the creation of accessible new stories. Years later, Tom DeFalco remembered the pitch. "There'll be something in the sky that will indicate things are changing. And then there will be the Big Bang, and then we're gonna come out with new versions of pre-existing characters.

"We said, 'Why would you do this?'
"Shooter said, 'A lot of stuff we're producing today really isn't of the high quality we want it to be.'
"We said, 'Yeah, but we're gonna be using the same people! It's not like we can do a big bang for our creative staff.' At that point we had twenty years of continuity, so we'd start fresh--but in four or five years it would be just as complicated anyway. You'd have to be constantly rebooting everything. Why bother?""

......

Why bother? Money. Really that's it. Get the extra influx from selling all those new 1s, then when sales dip again...reboot! Crisis! Panic in the Skies!

Crisis on Infinite Earths 1985-1986. Zero Hour 1994. Flashpoint/New52 2011. Rebirth 2016.

Pretty prescient by DeFalco.

Personally, I've always despised the idea that too much complicated backstory made comics inaccessible. When I was a kid I loved the idea that there was all this preexisting history to discover and explore. And I didn't even have Wikipedia and multitudes of trades, encyclopedias, omnibuses, and whatnot. All I had was Who's Who, the Official Handbooks, and whatever back issues I could afford to get my hands on. And I ate it up. But I guess now it's just a symptom of our society that not as many people care about the details they just want the 'Now'.

Those who do not learn from history....

Will be interesting to see where Marvel and DC are in 5-6 years. Heck, nowadays, maybe sooner.

Go get you new #1s everyone. Or don't. Who cares anymore?

[Ken Davis]

I'm following the news about REBIRTH from sites like Bleeding Cool and CBR etc.....and I'm wary of it. Notably one of the things regarding it is that all pitches currently on the table are canned/binned..........and CANNOT be resubmitted. That has apparently upset quite a few of the creative folks, so much so that there was a story about a LOT of freelancers calling up Marvel to ask if there were slots open.
That is not good.
I don't like what I read about from Marvel and DC---that is to say the news on their comics. I read only a tiny handful of their books--maybe 3 or 4 titles, and nothing in the past several years has stood out.
That is to say since before Nu52. That is almost, what........5-6 years now? THAT is a LONG time to run **** stories, and in what are supposed to be head-liner books. The constant restarting of concepts and titles says one thing: desperation to gain new readers because the old readership is steadily dwindling.

IDW is gaining more and more of my buying dollar, because they cagily field not only good concept books, but they package them in finite digestible runs. Plus they address older Marvel and DC stuff in more prestigious formats that Marvel and DC just don't want to address.

Years back, when I was assisting Todd McFarlane for a year, we had a conversation about the event crossovers and restarted books........this was after Secret Wars 1 &2, and Legends and such, and before all the Zero Hours and Heroes Reborn ****. I said to Todd that if they really want to make a change, just take the names of the books, and the characters and NOTHING ELSE, and build from there. Take nothing else as far as continuity or relationships go.........just the names. So build a all-new visualized " Cyclops", or "Phoenix" or "Wolverine"--re-imagine them all from scratch, from the ground up. Just the book name and the code-names.......everything else would be new. Todd rather liked that idea because it let everything be free-form and fresh again, BUT the problem with it was the readers.
Readers are so entrenched into characters that unless you just derive from existing character, rather than invent all-new characters from the names, they won't accept them BECAUSE THEY DON'T KNOW THEM.
"Fresh and familiar" are almost contradictory terms, but that is what readers SAY they want, but what they really want is more familiar...because it is what they know. So we get Ultimate universe and Nu52 stuff.........and we get that because it's safe.

And it's "safe" because they can back-pedal from it at any time, they can reverse it because no matter where they go with these books, they are ALWAYS anchored in a prior continuity. And the thing is that readers know this and as a result there's a "brand confusion" going on not because of what the publishers are doing, but because of what they are HEARING from readers. No-one likes the changes, everyone wants things to revert back to the "original characters" etc... and yet publishers also hear that readers are bored with the old stories and want something new.

How does one appease that kind of fickleness??? I don't know, but the last decade in comics has shown it seems to be a largely fruitless pursuit.

[Doctor Fate]

I'm more disappointed in this and I'm waiting until September to see whether I want to get on this - right now I'm in a wait and see proposition ... I'm very leery about the rebirth thing.

[packerbacker180]

No, I don't think people really want drastic changes. People want familiarity. Personally speaking, when the New52 came I did give it two years but felt no emotional attachment to the characters I'd previously been invested in. Earth-2? Yuck. Teen Titans? Ugh.

And when they talk about bringing in new readers, does that really work? When I was a kid my dad could give $5 and I could come home with almost a dozen books. You'd have to give a kid $40 nowadays, and a lot of the books are unsuitable anyway. Even a really good writer will only sell a lesser known character for so long, and for every Scott Snyder there's ten Scott Lobdells. So rebooting/launching/birthing constantly isn't going to work if 75% of the books are subpar out the gate. DC tried brining Wildstorm characters in with the New52. Characters that were previously pretty popular. And those books were godawful right out of the gate. Did those books fail because people didn't want to read about Grifter or because nobody wanted to read a thinly veiled poorly written ripoff of They Live!?

In the end the market kind of prices out a lot of choices so people will always gravitate to the big name character and then big name writers. Batman. Spider-man. X-men. So long as those books are decent there's only going to be so many people interested in Secret Six or Grayson.

Maybe these companies just flood the market. Maybe 52 issues is way too many to expect too many titles to sell for long. I don't know the financials.

Of course, Marvels solution seems to be to just put 'Avengers' in every title now.

[Ken Davis]

I'd say just tell good stories with familiar characters.
Want a great example from the past??

Teen Titans. Marv Wolfman and George Perez took a teen-sidekick book from the late 60's, that had been dead for years.......relaunched it in the 80's with a couple of new characters and upgraded some of the original roster. And they told stories that belonged to the Titans.

And it did gang-buster sales, mostly on account of the stories told. The tact was different then, though.......because the stories told were more personal, to both Marv and George, and not done by committee, like they are today. DC editorial just let these guys run with the book and the sales supported that decision with no regrets.
They left the book on their high-note when the editorial sea-change started meddling because the book was such a big money-maker, like X-men was for Marvel.
After Byrne and Claremont's run on X-men, Marvel started slowly dictating to the X-books. It took years for the direct influence to play up, but one could see that no-one was allowed to much with the gold calf TOO much. By the time Jim Lee and Mark Silvestri were drawing the book, X-men was definitely clearly a committee book, not just a core creative team.

And that means everything story-wise is second-guessed. Nothing is told off-the-cuff, and so everything is primmed and prepared carefully with oversight along the way.

And it is deadly dull stuff. Comics now are so much "entertainment product" that there's really not a whole lot of entertainment to them anymore. Unless the writer is very high-profile ( and even the top writers can't fully evade meddling) editorial dictates govern all stories. This is apparent reading the comics today.........ANY comic--from Richey Rich on up to Avengers or JLA.

Y'know what comics used to like in this regard?? Licensed titles........like GIJOE or Star Wars etc. Where everything would have to go through an approvals process before publication. But now the approvals process is INTERNAL--it's the publishers own properties!!! And creative talent have long notoriously been heard to HATE licensed books BECAUSE of said approval requisites.
It showed in a lot of those books, and I think it shows now, across the board with all publishers.
REBIRTH smacks of exactly this kind of thing.....someone's "bright idea" to try and boost sales and lagging interest, but feeding on the existing demographic and snare older readers back to titles that lost them.
I don't know if what is coming will work.

[packerbacker180]

Well, nowadays you can't take real chances with the big titles and if they do everyone knows it won't really last and things will go back to status quo.

But the main problem is there just aren't enough good writers around. Geoff Johns GL run was great. He left and the book slowly plummeted back into mediocre. You can relaunch/reboot as much as you like, but if you don't have the quality of writing what good will it do beyond the immediate sales influx?

How many 30- or 20-somethings go see Avengers in theatre and say, "you know, I should start collecting comics'?' But at the same time they won't meddle too much with status quo because Steve Rogers has to be Cap by the time the next film is out. Heck, Deadpool is an Avenger right now. That's mind-blowing. But then again, since Wolverine is, I guess why not?

So comics has just become a 'big event' wash-rinse-repeat cycle. And if you find something popular, stretch the hell out of it. Wolverine is cool? Let's put him on every Marvel team. Avengers are hot. Let's put Avengers in 75% of our books titles. And it does suck. And no amount of rebooting big events can fix that way of thinking. One of the best parts of Secret Wars was that it felt like it organically grew out of Hickmans FF ad Avengers runs. And it didn't focus on Wolverine, the Avengers, or even Spider-man, but the forefathers of the Marvel U. Reed and Doom. And you know what? It was damn good even though it really centered around those characters Marvel isn't giving the big spotlight to right now do to Fox having the FF rights, Marvels first family. The Richards family. Doom. Namor. T'Challa. Molecule Man. Those were the characters garnering the spotlight. It didn't feel like something they just had to do because they needed the next summer event. But sadly, must big events are just popcorn movies that don't have much lasting affect. So I don't think the answer is to try and fix it again with yet another forced big event.

I always think of an old Simpsons episode where everyone is in search of a cat burglars big treasure. They track it to someplace and the whole town digs a giant, deep hole to find this treasure. Eventually they realize there is no treasure, and someone looks up and asks how are they going to get out of this hole, to which Homer replies, "We'll dig our way out."

Is it any coincidence that if you gave Homer a mustache he'd look an awful lot like Dan DiDio?

[Ken Davis]

Comics used to have 10 times the readership they have to day.....that is 25 years ago or so.
That means there's been a steady 90% drop in readership since about 1990. There's a host of reasons for that, but it is apparent ( at least to me) that comics as a product aren't really sustainable for the long term. They've got to be subsidized by something else, and that means they have to tie into something else to get a large audience.

Now........I didn't say GROW a large audience, because there really isn't any growth in readership now....instead, there's what appear to be tides. Growth is stagnant. Slightly more readers are leaving comics as a purchase than are buying into to them, or they are limiting their comics purchases and buying ancillary products related to comics, like toys.
That is what I mean about "tides", in that interest washes from one shore to the other and the problem remains in the product itself.
A LOT of the ancillary product is aimed at nostalgia........but not all. A chunk is contemporary-sourced, be it from video games, and such. But most of it is using older characters aimed at readers that have been reading ( or aware of comics) for more than about 25 years.
So they know what demographics are buying the stuff.

Secret Wars is a good example of this kind of thing because they did use characters like the FF. I just finished the series, and it felt very organic, despite some of its weirder turns. One of the better event titles they've done to date.
This is what I like about Marvel--their internal mythology is so rich that they have characters and power-sets that can address the story points they need. Molecule Man is the ideal resolution to this story because he's obscure enough for the modern reader, but still "there" enough for the older ones.
I like One More Day for the same reason, because using Mephisto was the same mechanics........he's already there and his use in the story is natural and organic.

One of the editorial judgement calls about.......what 10 years ago now was that the Avengers is Marvel's premier team. The whole roster should be head-liners..........CURRENT head-liners. So they added Spider-man and Wolverine to the book.
After a one second "WTF", I got it. The initial knee-jerk response is that they don't belong....and there have been reasons why...............but then they DO belong. Because dropping them into the Avengers roster is the fannish thing that we readers have ALWAYS done in our imagination, but the books.........until that time........had never done. And like anything, there's story reasons that make it work, so simple dictates that this is how it is going to be.........and it does work.
And we go from there.
I think, for me, it harkens back to the greatest comicbook of my life, the penultimate comic, the most mind-blowing thing EVER DONE ( your mileage may vary) and that is..........Superman vs the Amazing Spider-man.
It's the thing that can't happen, shouldn't happen..........could NEVER happen.
But it did.
Just that match-up set me, as a young comics fan, on my literal ear. The rules became that there are NO rules.
That was just fine by me because it said that imagination ruled the day. Sure, some internal logic applied as the under-structure to such things, but that comic really set the tone for me in how I think of comics. The original Secret Wars was predicated on the same philosophy: "wouldn't it be cool if....."

I'm just frustrated we don't get to see a lot of that kind of thinking anymore.

[Doctor Fate]

I'm going to be awfully busy this year and I decided to stop buying DC Comics for awhile. I'm going to wait until 2017 to decide then.

[Idiot Savant]

Good choice Doc!