They say that God’s pinky is an EF5 tornado. It’s got the power to wipe away a whole city from the map. Yesterday DC Comics announced that this fall they’ll be resetting everything back to #1’s and rewriting the entire “DC Universe”. This I regard as an EF10. God isn’t satisfied with just scrubbing Keystone City off the map, he’s going after every bit that is DC.
So what does this mean? Could be good, could be bad. Nobody knows. Not even the writers know. The artists are in the dark as well. I suppose WB knows, and DC management certainly must know. Here we take a little tangent, and we hope that none of this is an emergent error! It would be something completely comic if someone misheard someone else at a WB/DC meeting and what was a lighthearted dalliance is now company direction! That it could be this way is absurd, but when a comic book company makes a 180 like this one, can you really discount any possibility?
That’s another part of it. It’s gotta be a marvelous thing sitting at the head of DC and watching everyone spinning in tight little circles as fast as they can coming up with possibilities and suppositions and blurting them out on Twitter. I’ve often thought that it would make for awesome marketing cleverness to seed a rich and passionate social network with something mind-boggling and then listening to what people are hoping for, what they are afraid of, and looking at all the outliers as the news causes certain tightly wound fans to figuratively explode all over the place. I’ve also thought about a wholly emergent marketing campaign. The company has no idea what the end-game is, nobody does. The company shocks the fans, the fans then blaze feedback to the company and the company follows a path laid out by the fans. Nobody is leading at all, there is nobody at the helm, it’s two groups dancing without anyone leading. I’ve always thought that could be exceptionally cool or utter disaster. I’m sure “Marketing” and “Business Types” have already modeled that and discovered Captain Trips at the end of it, so, whatever.
Getting back to DC and this EF10 storm that just hit it. One thing I can say is dumping history can be massively liberating. Many years ago I had my car and all it’s contents stolen in Chicago. Whoosh, gone, just like that. It left me with an odd feeling afterwards, I had lost everything, but there was a certain sense of cleanliness left over. That out of a massively unpleasant experience a nugget of pure liberation could spring out of it is marvelous to me. This could be a similar liberating thing for DC Comics. By hacking 75 years of history into kindling and setting it all on fire gives them the chance to tell new stories and free the characters from their pasts.
Who needs liberation then, when it comes to characters? Well, dumping the Hawkcritters is a great start, along with the sheer goofiness of “Power Putz” and “Shockingly Buoyant Girl” in the 45th Century! Both of those can just snap-crackle-and-pop to ash. Other characters can get some much-needed historical mopping up. Who needs a good and deep mop-job? Aquaman. The butt of jokes about a rather lame silly power set really needs to be pulled apart and reconfigured. He could shine if they draw on some cojones and fix his story to match.
For those people who bemoan a lost 75 years of history, you can always go back and relive the glory days anytime you want in the back-issues aisles of a con or your own basement. Much of comic book history is self-contained anyways and you knew that everything was malleable when you grabbed your first comic! What’s the difference between Hal Jordan resetting the entirety of existence in Zero Hour compared with this? Instead of Hal Jordan, it’s just Dan DiDio, or Geoff Johns, or since Brightest Day came along and plotzed on us all, why not just peel back the layers and show Alan Moore underneath it all, as it really is? Is what DC is doing now any less upsetting to people than Kyle Rayner, as Ion, re-igniting the Power Battery on Oa and creating a bumper-crop of new tiny-blue-guardians and then pulling a whole Book-of-Genesis-Surprise on us all by creating male and female pint-sized-guardians at the same time, only years later to have someone else write about the Zamarons, who apparently are Shaq-sized? One has to wonder how Sayd feels when she looks at a Zamaron. I’m just saying. The fact that DC changes things, creates bits and eliminates others, retcons with sheer gleeful abandon and treats time like it’s silly putty – something like this isn’t really anything worth getting upset over. They’ve done this in the past, they’ll do it again, because it’s not about some sort of romanticized tradition but just about storytelling. People accept new actors playing roles they love in soap operas all the time, this isn’t anything different from that. The characters change, the history is binned over and over, but you’ll keep on paying because the stories are compelling and frankly, that’s what you’re really paying $2.99 for. You aren’t clinging on to Adam West as Batman, so just let go and enjoy the ride!
I’ll leave you all with a great little aphorism that fits here really well “The more things change, the more they stay the same.” Enjoy.
