The DC Comics Reboot

Big news in the comic book world yesterday when DC Comics announced it was "relaunching" its seventy-five year-old comic book universe this fall.  As Alan Sepinwall points out, it remains unclear at this point whether this is a numerical reboot—picking up Action Comics number 900 can be a bit imposing— or whether this wipes the slate clean of decades of story continuity.  Either way, this entire experiment does little to encourage me to get back into collecting comic books.

Like any teenage artist with geek tendencies, I had a comic book phase.  Whether it was girls and a social life or not, I eventually gave up the habit.  However, part of this the result of realizing that effectively following a super hero comic book series is an incredibly time-intensive hobby.  Character cross-overs!  Shared continuity across a universe of comic books.  It's exhausting.  Furthermore, the notion that the characters I had started following as a child would likely outlive me gave me a real sense of mortality at fifteen.

According to Dan DiDio, DC co-publisher, this initiative is "a chance to start, not at the beginning, but at a point where our characters are younger and the stories are being told for today's audience."  Considering the anachronistic backgrounds of many of DC's classic golden age characters, a periodic update is a good idea.  That's why the Superman that once fought for "truth, justice, and the American way" is becoming an international citizen of sorts in this month's Action Comics, although ostensibly this update will be wiped away this fall, as well.

It is more than apparent that despite the proliferation of comic book characters on the big screen, that the comic book industry itself is in sorry shape.  The likely aim of this initiative is to allow casual readers to pick up a version of Batman that comes closer to the Dark Knight seen in theaters, instead of the mess of multiple Robins, Oracle, Huntress, and mobsters and nutjobs that populate the current comic.  However, the problem with rebooting Batman for modern readers it that it effectively discards the investment longtime readers have made with the existing character and his story.

The summer comic hero popcorn flick is roughly analogous to the television procedural: a big bad is presented, a conflict is faced, and everything is wrapped up before the closing credits.  However, comic books themselves are a profoundly serialized reading experience.  The dilemma is that they present a serialized experience without end.

Wiping the slate clean lets you start over with a few new wrinkles—in Marvel land, Spider-Man went from being bitten from a radioactive spider to a genetically altered one—but the fresh start rarely sticks.

After creating multiple universes worth of Supermans, DC itself tried to simplify fifty years of history in the 1980s in Crisis on Infinite Earths.  By 2005, DC had fully rebuilt its multiverse.

The very thing which makes comic books such a compelling (and time-intensive) hobby is the potential complexity of the story-telling.  Creators constantly want to reintroduce "dead" characters and brings back parallel universes.  To make matters worse (or more fun), comic book creative teams get juggled around, and year-to-year reading of an average series make for a very diverse reading experience.

Unable to keep up with it all, I eventually boxed all my comic books up and relegated them to a closet.  I've subsequently picked up a trade paperback here and there, happy to get a reading experience with a beginning, middle, and end.  Perhaps periodic reboots of these characters are a necessary evil—the price paid for the continuing relevancy of a character like Superman—but knowing the next reboot is just around the corner isn't much likely to get me to pick up a new issue, whether a paper copy or digital download.