Re: Superman's New Haircut
 

Wonder Woman's 70s bush.

Re: Superman's New Haircut
 

I always thought Supergirl's 80's curly hair was a mistake and then they added that headband to it.-screwy-

Re: Superman's New Haircut
 

@mrhan

I remember seeing his first issue of Marvel's Conan comic book with him as the artist, and then seeing his artwork from later in his career, on the same character, in Savage Sword of Conan magazine. Big difference.

About Supergirl's 80s look, I actually kind of like it for some reason. The headband looks stupid, but I kind of like the stylized S connected to the cape.

About Superman's mullet, that's one of the reasons I stopped buying the Superman comics after he returned. Probably a stupid reason but oh well.

Re: Superman's New Haircut
 

I loved Supergirl's 80s look. The curls were perfect. Looked great to me :shrug:

I started reading Superman regularly about 3 years before Crisis and stopped just after the Death of Superman. That story was wretched.

Re: Superman's New Haircut
 

From my collection ...

http://i10.photobucket.com/albums/a1...psxh6pxwyg.jpg

http://i10.photobucket.com/albums/a1...psef3fb118.gif

Re: Superman's New Haircut
 

Superman's mullet drove me to drop his books at the time.

Re: Superman's New Haircut
 

He looks like Super Macho Man from Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!! :lol:

Re: Superman's New Haircut
 

Does Superman do the pec dance too?

http://i.imgur.com/hJp17uO.gif

Re: Superman's New Haircut
 

Holy shit he does.

Re: Superman's New Haircut
 

I actually know the new writer. His son and and my boy are classmates in elementary school. I never talked to him about comics, though.

Re: Superman's New Haircut
 

Batman revealed:

http://www.bleedingcool.com/2015/04/...mics-revealed/

Sure why not. It's only comics.

Re: Superman's New Haircut
 

Here is a scan of the comic page they are talking about in that article:

Re: Superman's New Haircut
 

So Gordon isn't old in the new 52? I honestly hadn't seen him in the stuff I encountered.

Re: Superman's New Haircut
 

So Guy Gardner is Commissioner Gordon in the Nu52? :confused:

Re: Superman's New Haircut
 

New 52 Gordon looks like Gary Oldman's Gordon (who in turn looked like Gordon from Miller's Year One).


:lol:

Yeah, the shaved mohawk looks stupid. Not sure why they went there. Gordon didn't have a shaved head in earlier New 52 stories.

Re: Superman's New Haircut
 

The New 52 is over according to DC. Who knows what kind of universe or continuity this is post-Convergence.

Re: Superman's New Haircut
 

It's still the "New 52" continuity. They just aren't calling it the "New 52" anymore since it's 4 years old now. (And they also gave up on the concept of keeping 52 ongoing titles.)

Re: Superman's New Haircut
 

I haven't exactly been following DC but wasn't the new 52 started with the concept that pretty much nothing beforehand 'counted'? And isn't this Convergence the first real time they've mixed in the old stuff?

Re: Superman's New Haircut
 

I am only reading a few New 52 titles, but for the most part it was a complete reboot with a few exceptions. The Grant Morrison run on Batman and the Geoff Johns run on Green Lantern are still canon in the New 52. Everything else pre-Flashpoint is pretty much non-canon now.

Re: Superman's New Haircut
 

Well, big chunks of Morrison's Batman run and Johns' Lantern run are still canon. DC has gone back and "tweaked" portions here and there to match up with the idea that only 6 years have passed since Superman first showed up.

Yeah. Convergence is the first time that any pre-Flashpoint continuity is being acknowledged.

Re: Superman's New Haircut
 

Ugh. What a fucking headache. Just cancel everything and keep DCE publishing to a series of unrelated, non-continuity-bound stories that are just good, period.

Re: Superman's New Haircut
 

I have days where I'd be all for that, but on the other hand I can sometimes be a massive appreciator of complex continuity and callbacks to characters created in the 50s or some such.

Re: Superman's New Haircut
 

I have a 70s Justice League of America issue where they called back to a (then unknown) origin that was set in the 1950s. I also use to love when Reed Richards and Ben Grimm served during WWII.

Re: Superman's New Haircut
 

I'm glad I stopped reading comic books in the late 70's.

Re: Superman's New Haircut
 

Pre-Crisis DC was never hard to understand. If I could get it at 8, there was nothing to worry about. But oh well...

Re: Superman's New Haircut
 

Well, to be fair, there wasn't much continuity to speak of in those days. Most comics were standalone, one-and-done. Titles rarely crossed over or affected each other. It wasn't until the mid 80s when continuity really started to matter with crossovers and longer storyarcs and such.

I was a kid in the 80s and that was the heyday of my comic reading, and I was rarely confused. I think many people overestimate how confusing comics are. After all, this is a medium mostly meant for kids. If kids can understand it, then adults surely can as well. It's also far far easier to get into comics nowadays due to the internet and being able to look up anything on wikipedia or google. Back when I was a kid there was no internet, so if I wanted some backstory on something I had to track down back issues manually. The internet has made things so much easier.

Re: Superman's New Haircut
 

That's assuming someone has enough interest in comics to look all that stuff up. For one, synopses are rarely as satisfying as actually reading the comic, so you risk people being turned off by how ridiculous continuity really is when written out in long form. Two, if I have to do a ton of research to just understand this pamphlet I bought for 4.99, why bother? At some point, continuity became a hook to reward longtime comic book readers, and then became this overwhelming hassle as they had to justify every thing that happened in every comic ever fitting together.

I'll admit, I was really upset when I finally did some reading on convergence and all the talk was it was a placeholder so that DC could move offices.

Re: Superman's New Haircut
 

Continuity is a double edged sword.

Personally, I love continuity. Even in things like TV, I highly highly prefer serialized TV shows over episodic TV shows. I just love ongoing stories where everything matters.

However, I do agree that continuity over a long period of time gets to be a mess. When comic stories written in 1960 are still canon today, it is going to get very messy. There is absolutely no way you can condense thousands and thousands of comics written over a 50 year time period into a "10 year sliding time scale" like Marvel uses. It just isn't going to work.

Yet continuity is important. Standalone stories can get messy too without having at least some continuity. For example, if Peter and Gwen are dating in one story and then in the next story it is Peter and MJ with no explanation as to what happened to Gwen, then that is bad and just as confusing.

Re: Superman's New Haircut
 

Oh there was plenty of continuity, pre-Crisis. Books were mostly contained to their family of titles, but there still were crossovers, multi-parters across titles, etc. Books like New Teen Titans and Batman & The Outsiders did an amazing two-parter across books. Of course 30 years later it's all blown way out of hand, but back then you could have continuity without becoming enslaved to it. Most of the time, though, it was fast and loose. That way you could have something as ridiculous as JLI alongside the grittier Green Arrow: The Longbow Hunters. I miss that kind of variety.
Independent publishers used to produce these amazing comics indexes that summarized runs on major titles. I remember I had them for New Teen Titans, Legion, and I think even Crisis on Infinite Earths. They were amazing resources back then.

Re: Superman's New Haircut
 

I think the Marvel way works reasonably well; while you're reading new comics, you keep in mind that all the previous stuff happened, but in a sort of vague way the older it is.

Re: Superman's New Haircut
 

Apropos of nothing, but this took me back; I found the covers to those Teen Titan index books from the mid 80s. Quick Google search and here they are! Man I haven't seen these covers in 30 years...

Re: Superman's New Haircut
 

I always wondered if DC really licensed that out to them. I used to love reading who's who and the marvel guidebooks, although like I said some of those entries were really convoluted. Heck I used to buy those rpg resource guides as well.

Re: Superman's New Haircut
 

Anyone confused by Pre-Crisis continuity and that actively read DC comics was mostly brain-dead. I think DC wanted to pare down their universe and have one timeline like Marvel had at the time, killing off excess characters. I never bought the idea it was confusing. That was always a very lame excuse used by DC.

Supposedly there will be monthly books after Convergence that aren't set in the current 52 continuity.

Re: Superman's New Haircut
 

I loved the Indexes. I was really into Wolfman and Perez' New Teen Titans, but the OCD in me wanted to know the entire history of the Titans and read everything in order. I couldn't afford or even find all of the back issues, so these indexes were the bomb!

Re: Superman's New Haircut
 

DC was very cool with those Official Index books. They were made with DC's approval (after proper licensing fees of course).

Re: Superman's New Haircut
 

They always had those little dialogue boxes for the reader so they can read the issue that is referred to in the story.

Back before Crisis they would just stop writing the characters they weren't using. I was fine with that.

Re: Superman's New Haircut
 

I used to love these http://img3.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb2...e_Vol_2_12.jpg

I could see how strong a character was or what their powers were. They tried to duplicate it several times but this was the best run IMO.

Re: Superman's New Haircut
 

To be fair the Earth 2 stuff was pretty confusing, with Batman being married and having a daughter, and then Infinity Inc. and Young All Stars trying to all fit together somehow; Gardner Fox had done a great job explaining away the golden age heroes as another Earth, but then you had duplicates of the main heroes. After Crisis they allowed some top creators free reign on recreating characters like Superman and Wonder Woman, and actually got some great stories out of it. The problem became when people wanted to introduce the old elements back: the old version of Krypton and Krypto, the old Hawkman, a deaged and then reaged JSA, Hippolyta as the Golden Age WW, eventually leading to the return nobody really wanted by that point, Barry Allen. Don't get me wrong, guys like Geoff Johns and James Robinson did a great job piecing things together with a real love for the characters and history, but they had to do soft reboots every other year (poor Legion).

Re: Superman's New Haircut
 

I think they just wanted to copy the more successful and cohesive Marvel Universe model. The "real" universe was the one that had the modern versions of Superman and Batman so nothing really mattered on Earth Two. Basically the Golden Age of DC had no real bearing on the current events of the modern DCU, unlike the Marvel Universe where one of their flagship characters had history and continuity from the 40s to the present day, which seems more impressive.


I never read DC til the late 80s/early 90s and by that time Earth 1 and 2 were gone. Years later, around the mid 2000s I remember my friend trying to get into superhero comics because of the DC cartoons he grew up on and the new movies coming out but he was a little discouraged by the complicated continuity of DC. Especially Earth 1 and 2. Regular comic readers may have been cool with it, but to newcomers they might be a little intimidated.

I never liked DC's attempts at stressing the shared universe angle.

Re: Superman's New Haircut
 

I still don't understand the confusion...as I stated before, I started in '73 when I was eight and there absolutely was no confusion. All Star came back in '75 and it wasn't confused as to where it fit. The only thing back then that may have confused new and casual readers would probably have been Brave and the Bold. Almost every story Haney wrote was out of continuity. He would randomly write a story about the GA Batman and the next month it would be back to the modern Batman.