fujishig

Is this a new distribution method, or are they still using comicology (or their branded app) and changing this to day and date? This is a huge deal, but unfortunately it's very bad for comic book stores. I'm assuming they're not going to discount the titles online, which would be good for us but really really bad for the LCS.

You could see this coming, though. Both big companies are coming out with tpbs that nobody really is clamoring for and at least this is a way for this stuff to still be available but not be languishing on bookshelves or underordered and canceled.

madcougar

I for one can't imagine buying digital comic books. There's something about actually having a physical thing in my hand when reading. I'm not that old either, but I would definitely count myself as a collector.

kgrogers1979

It's been rumored for a long time, but it is now going to happen.

Barbara Gordon is Batgirl again.

Yep. Who cares about 20+ years of character development as Oracle? Let's just throw it all out the window. I guess DC must really hate Cassandra Cain they way they keep shitting all over her and won't let her come back.

Also a Nightwing #1 is solicited. I guess Dick is going back to being Nightwing, so he won't be de-aged to Robin again like I had feared. I do wonder if Damian will still be around or if Tim will go back to being Robin.

I was hoping that the Batverse would be relatively untouched by all this Flashpoint reboot nonsense, but no such luck apparently.

kgrogers1979

You must not have been around in the 90s. Long-term readers left in massive droves after all the crap the companies pulled back then. The industry nearly crashed in the late 90s, and Marvel almost ended up bankrupt. The industry today is a shell of its former self because the vast majority of those readers have never come back. There are FAR less readers today than there was in the heyday of the 80s and early 90s.

Personally, I was one such person that got fed up with all the 90s crap and left. I did come back to DC in the early 2000s, but I have never forgiven Marvel. Marvel pissed me off to no end. I considered Aunt May's death in Amazing Spider-man #400 to be one of the best comic stories of all time. When they retconned it into being some genetic actress bullshit, that was the straw that the broke the camel's back for me and I quit reading. I refuse to ever buy another Marvel comic again. To me, Marvel ended when Onslaught killed everyone.

PhantomStranger

My feelings on Marvel are similar. Marvel had a fun universe, but they have shown repeatedly over the years they do not care about the characters or even the fans at all anymore. Which is what has stopped me from picking any of their recent trades up.

I still think this is DC's way to get their regular readers to buy into an Ultimate line, because regular DC readers have always preferred the heavy continuity. What I think we'll see is the return of the "regular" DC universe once DC thinks this new lineup can survive on its own.

stingermck

Babs back as Batgirl has been a long time coming. Theres just too much tech and magic in DCU to let her sit in a chair. BUT I love the current title with Steph. I wonder what will happen with her.

I really think this is going to play out like Heroes Reborn. Do it for awhile, then revert back. Theres just too much going on in Green Lantern and Batman these days.

kgrogers1979

I have just been reading rumors that supposedly Clark and Lois will no longer be married and will in fact have never been romantically involved. Superman and Wonder Woman will apparently be together after the reboot.

Wow, rumors of this reboot just keep getting worse and worse. If that is true, then DC is basically repeating Spider-man: One More Day.

Giantrobo

If true about WW and Supes I'm actually cool with that.

kgrogers1979

I hope that is all it is, that the heroes just get stuck in the Flashpoint dimension for a year or so and then return to New Earth. There are supposedly going to be 52 rebooted titles, and 52 is the magic number for DC's multiverse, so there is a good chance that is all this "reboot" actually will be.

Laertes

I hope you are right, and that's what I thought when I heard the news. Exactly what you said: 52 titles, that can't be a coincidence, etc. But doesn't the corporation look dumb(er) if they revert to the old timeline once this is established? They seem to be all in on this. Even if this is, say Earth-34 or something, doesn't it look like failure to bring back the old time line?

I was a kid when "Crisis on Infinite Earths" came out, but man, now I know how the old fans must have felt then.

At least I have a world of trades I haven't explored yet (Morrison's Batman stuff, for instance) and I'll probably mine those for the foreseeable future.

slop101

Are the digital comics going to cost the same as the floppies? If so, fuck 'em, since there's NO reason they should; no paper, no ink, no distribution/delivery, no middleman, etc... Sure, there's bandwidth and the set up for going digital, but that's front-loaded and a fraction of what it cost them to distribute print media.

Preterite

Hell, yeah.

I've always considered myself a "DC guy". But after 40+ years of reading comics, I'm about done. I'm only buying three DC monthlies - Simone's Birds of Prey and Secret Six and Levitz' Legion. Take those writers off those books and I'm gone. I'll come back when they put those writers back on in a year.

The thing is, if this was a complete and total break from the past like the "Earth-One" roll-out was in the 1950's, I would be 100% behind the project. But DC is going to half-ass it just as they did after COIE. They are going to try and "start fresh" while still clinging to the history and continuity of their top-selling characters. The result is going to be the same convoluted mess we saw in the late 80's and 90's.

Hokeyboy

to same day digital downloads. Fuck the Direct Market. That's what killed the industry in the first place.

fujishig

This is now the fourth thing from DC that I thought would never be reverted in my lifetime. Bringing back Supergirl as Superman's cousin, bringing back Jason Todd, bringing back Barry Allen, and now bringing back the original Batgirl. They have teased this sooo many times, including the latest Death of Oracle storyline, but it takes a company-wide reboot to do it. AT this point, she's been Oracle about as long or longer than she ever was Batgirl, and she's been a much more important character to boot.

edited to add: I guess bringing back the Multiverse and crapping all over the intent of Crisis would be a fifth.


I thought about this yesterday... as much as I loved Man of Steel and later, Robinson's Golden Age and his and Johns' JSA, I wonder how all the older fans felt when something like integrating Earth 2 into Earth 1's history came about. I was a fan pre-Crisis, but I was just a kid, so the only thing that really affected me was the Legion, and I grew to accept the Superboy conundrum and the Giffen alternate telling. But when they completely rebooted the Legion not once but twice...

Or the Direct Market was the thing that let the industry keep going in the first place. There are good LCS and bad LCS, and they clearly serve a niche market, but I doubt that they held comics back from being mainstream. Day and date cheaper downloads of comics would destroy the Direct Market... I know there are many fans who want and need their physical copies, but if even a small fraction of the existing fanbase goes digital and nobody new takes their place, that's enough to fold most of the smaller stores and some of the larger ones. I'm really, really curious if anyone went in to get their comics this week and had a discussion with the store owners about their take on this. I'd be scared. And not just because I'd have to figure out how to order 52 #1 issues in a month, though that would be part of it (figuring out the 52 #2 issues is probably much harder anyway).

flansered

I thought it was high prices and the inability to pick up a single issue and easily figure out what was going on. Cheaper prices and more standalone/non-company wide events might help bring people back.

kgrogers1979

Babs was Batgirl from 1966-1988 and Oracle from 1989-2011. 22 years in both cases.


Agreed.

$3-$4 for a single comic book is ridiculous. If I hadn't first started reading decades ago, there is absolute no way I would jump in now at those prices.

Events aren't bad as long as they aren't overdone. When you just have event after event after event, it just becomes a gimmick. The worse problem in my opinion is having so many books devoted to one character. Like right now for instance there are like a dozen monthly books for just Batman alone. That is overkill. Less is more. Having a couple high quality books is better than having a dozen mediocre ones. People aren't likely to buy a dozen books just to keep up with one character. There is a reason that most of these side-books keep getting canceled while the main Batman book and Detective remain.

And DC thinks that having 52 new #1 issues is going to bring in new readers? What are they thinking? That is at least $150 a month if you want to follow everything. Absolutely no way is a person likely to jump on that unless they have already been devoted to comics for years and years.

Also not being able to buy comics anywhere except a comic specialty store prevents people from buying. I remember as a kid how every place ranging from the grocery store to the drug store to even the barber shop had a spinner rack full of comic books. They need to bring back the spinner racks and get the comics more widely available.

Trevor

I thought it was the speculators and alternate cover schemes of the early 90s.

But on topic, FCBD has me interested in comics again, and I may give this reboot a try. I wonder if any online store will have a deal bundle on all fifty-two #1s?

fujishig

This has always been what people have been clamoring for. When I first went to college, I didn't have a car and the nearest LCS was pretty crappy... and I bought stuff off the spinner rack in a Waldens. It was always hit or miss whether they'd have an issue or whether they'd be in decent shape, but I bought them to read anyway.

I don't think the Direct Market is to blame for losing that, though. True, comic companies started catering to the Direct Market, but remember that all those spinner rack titles are returnable (well, I assume that like magazines they just return the covers and pulp the rest). Comic companies don't like that. Also, while Archie apparently got a sweetheart deal that they're legacied into to get into all those grocery store checkout lines, it is supposedly very, very expensive to get other product there (and those digests I bought from there as a kid introduced me to a lot of silver age stuff).

On the bright side, I've seen numerous people mention that Barnes and Noble had complete racks of DC comics up at their local stores (perhaps as a tie in to this recent announcement). If that's true, that's great!

kgrogers1979

Some of the new titles are announced.

http://dcu.blog.dccomics.com/2011/06...e-new-justice/

Justice League #1
Wonder Woman #1
Aquaman #1
The Flash #1
The Fury of Firestorm #1
The Savage Hawkman #1
Green Arrow #1
Justice League International #1
Mister Terrific #1
Captain Atom #1
DC Universe Presents #1

fujishig

Azarello on Wonder Woman seems like an odd choice. Manapul on Flash as writer also seems odd, I don't think I've ever seen a writing credit from him before, is this his first? JLI at least shows that they're not changing everyone's costume. I love Firestorm, but I'm not sure how I feel about Firestorm red and Firestorm yellow, though there's one of the first de-agings right there with Ronnie.

LorenzoL

I just recently got back into reading comics again after being away for almost 15 years. I have been enjoying the Batman family of books so I'm disappointed about this "reboot". I really hope they don't mess it up.

Superman07

I was never really big into collecting comics. I trade some baseball cards and got Superman 500 so that brought me into the fold. I went back and read up on the Death story line and then started collecting through the Return series with the various incarnations. I picked up a few other titles along the way, but nothing major. Since then I have gone back and purchased a good handful of the DC archives and some TPB, but I don't much buy any of those either. In fact, I have a friend that is really into the TPB scene, so mostly I can just borrow from him what he recommends.

That said, I see this as a colossal mistake by DC. It could prove to be beneficial, but I can't help but feel like they're throwing the baby out with the bath water. However, are they not fully moving everything over? I can't believe they'd throw out 900 issues of Actions comics with it positioned as the longest running comic, especially when it's relatively so close to 1000.

madcougar

Were you born in 1979? I only ask because I've been collecting comics in some way, shape or form since at least 1979. It wasn't the comic book companies that killed the market in the 1990s, it was the speculators. They were the ones who bought multiple copies of whatever crap the companies shovled our way. They were the ones who created the bubble, which eventually burst and left the field in ruins.

I've read more than one piece that says the AVERAGE comic book reader only collects for about six or seven years. This is one of the reasons that we see so much crap rehashed by comic book companies. This is the reason we have a "relaunch" every 10 years or so in the DC Universe I would bet.

The 80s saw Crisis. The 90s saw Zero Hour. The 00s saw so much crap I couldn't keep up. This year we get this.

I would bet serious money that people who have been collecting for as long as I have (30 years casually, 20 seriously) are few and far between. The comic book companies don't cater to me. They cater to the newer reader.

Hokeyboy

The Direct Market gradually took comics out of the common newsstands, spinner racks, grocery stores, and supermarkets, and ghetto'ed them to dingy, stanky stores populated by twitchy nerds. Young kids stopped buying them, depriving the industry of new readers, and as the average reader age grew higher and higher, the industry chose to cater to a dwindling customer base chiefly comprised of recalcitrant man-children.

If a comic sells 70,000+ copies these days, it's considered a mega-blockbuster. That would have been grounds for cancellation not too long ago. If these properties are to continue and thrive, they NEED to adapt. Marvel did an AMAZING thing reinvigorating their properties in the movies; repositioning their characters like X-Men, Spider-Man, Thor, Iron Man, Hulk (good and badly) FF (badly), Daredevil (badly), Ghost Rider (yikes!) to a new generation. Their brand awareness has NEVER been better. DC has been hobbled by Warner's inability to properly launch any character that doesn't have Nolan attached to it (yet... I have VERY high hopes for GL), but they've been extremely successful leveraging television and DTV animation.

The Direct Market is dead. An entirely useless thing. Catering to a dwindling population of 70 thousand readers or so is like willingly and blindly playing second viola on the Titanic.

Preterite

Most of the costume changes seem like unnecessary fiddling. But I do like the move of Mr. Terrific's slogan from (outdated) motorcycle jacket to (soon to be outdated) tattoo.