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Wave Blaster


I like writing. It's the thing that drives me. My goal is to reach others through my work and have a nice talk. He/Him.

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Jun
29th
2016

DC Rebirth: From the ashes of The New 52 and DCYou · 10:57pm Jun 29th, 2016

So, the first month of DC's new attempt to not screw things over has come and gone. DC Rebirth, announced as the grand return to form for the editorial with new stories and a new overall style. All of this to give DC not just a sale boost, but also to go back into the stories and characters that make DC iconic. Let's have some history down first.

Around 2010, DC was not doing well with sales. Even after the massive success of the recent Blackest Night, which even today is still relevant, the following Brightest Day arc series with two weekly releases for a year plus a handful of new series pretty much bombed. By the second half of 2011, DC's sales were a mess. So, in a time of what can only be described as blind panic, they released Flashpoint.


Run, Barry! Escape the convoluted writing!

At first, fans were in the dark over what was going to be Flashpoint's influence and aftermath. That until June of the same year, when they dropped the mother of all hype bombs: Flashpoint's time traveling plot was actually going to reset the DCU. All the decades long stories had then two issues to wrap everything up and make way for The New 52 #1's starting brand new stories.


Were are they going? to the horizon, reasons be dammed.

The first months, it went all according to plan. DC literally owned the industry up until issue #6 of The New 52, to the point that Aquaman, of all series topped over every non-DC tittle. Yes, freakin' Aquaman #5 was selling more than Wolverine #300. That means that one of Marvel's flagships, with millions of fans over the globe and celebrating a 300 milestone couldn't beat Aquaman's seventh attempt to have a regular series. The smugness from DC offices could be seen from space.


It's not a retcon. It's not an imaginary tale. It actually happened.

But, despite the hype being an amazing sales booster, it's not a replacement for good stories. This is better exemplified by the infamous Great Comics Crash when the industry almost died due to running on nothing but hype and publicity stunts and the fans not being everlasting idiots. Somehow, DC forgot all of this and made The New 52 work under the same basics of the 90's, which, predictably, but strangely enough slowly, started to collapse.


Pictured: DC at one of its finest moments.

The stories got darker for no reason. The continuity, despite being supposed to be the top priority, was a mess. Editorial meddling went so far that comic book legends like George Pérez and J.H. Williams III outright said "yep, we're in a bomb" and abandoned ship. Pérez even went out of his way to say how creative-crushingly was the experience, pointing out that the editors were telling them what stories to tell instead of letting the writers, you know, write.



When ROB! Liefeld had enough of your crap, that means you crossed all the lines there were to cross.

But hey, it's not like DC was going to just shut down months of planing just becase both readers and creatives agreed all of this was a bad idea and they should reconsider. Nope, instead they went for more market stunts. The first one was to go full Darwinian: Give every series just four months. If a series went for the dive for four months, the plug was pulled and it got cancelled. The second one was in the form of a crossover event: Forever Evil. It was average-good, with tie-ins and one-shots with 3-D covers. It had actual secuencial storytelling, a cohesive continuity with other tittles and didn't run entirely on shock value. So, it worked to some extent, actually boosting the sales of the regular series and stopping a possible crash for the moment.


You know a story reached "crisis" point when the villains are helping to save things. What does that say for DC at the time?

Of course , in a moment of sudden clarity, DC realized they had the key to actually save the The New 52. It was right there, inside the pages of Forever Evil. However, "clarity" is too generous of a word. In a moment of cartoonishly missing all the points, DC's editorial thought it was Forever Evil's extent what made is successful, instead of... you know, quality. Then DC published Future's End, a weekly series that lasted a full year, with a full month's worth of tie-ins at the middle of said year. The story itself was a pointless shaggy dog story with no discernible main characters, a literal mary sue (named Fifty-Sue) and no aftermath or continuity whatsoever. The Crash could be heard across the continent all the way from New York, USA to Santiago, Chile.


Someone at DC thought this was a good idea.

So, after that, someone at DC must have realized that storytelling should sustain certain quality, because after the fallout of Future's End, they did a relaunch. Sure, why not?

The initiative started with Convergence, which was the real saving throw from DC. You see, Convergence was a two-months weekly series based around the idea of making a battle royale out of previous and alternate versions of their characters. However, besides the basic premise, it was also a collection of various two-shots from the POV of said characters. The story was interesting, the characterization were top-form and, most interestingly, creatives and readers got the opportunity to revisit old classic stories, settings and characters for a last "hurrah" before a fitting closure. It was the ultimate homage to an editorial's history.


There's something just beautiful about this image.

So, how did they screwed this one up?

They didn't. After Convergence, DC dropped the "The New 52" tag from their covers and explicitly announced a retooling of the editorial direction. The main idea was to give storytelling full priority over continuity and editorial meddling. It kinda worked to some extent. Sales stopped dropping, a lot of regular and mini-series came out with more variety of styles and even genres (tittles like Prez barely touch the super-hero genre). Mots important, the stories were keeping the quality steady and the readership interested. Almost as if writers were able to do their work without the executive meddling. And it only took DC four years to figure that out.


It came too late.

The problem here is that the damage was already done. Even if they stopped the sales' free fall, it got low enough to be even worse than before Flashpoint and The New 52. I sh!t you not, people, DC ended up digging a deeper hole than the one they were trying to get out. So, in view that the editorial had crossed the "nothing left to do" territory, they finally gave in and decided to go back to the old DCU as many writers, artist, editors, regular readers, casual readers and everyone else has been asking them to do. That's how this month DC published the Rebirth tittles. So join me in the next post (probably tomorrow) to get a look at this reborn DC Universe and see where things are going.

Comments ( 2 )

Woot DC. Go corporate...

4057339
Well, at least it looks like they're learning from their mistakes.

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