Three years ago, Robert and David thought they had left the DCU behind. But, with the advent of REBIRTH, they’ve returned, to see whether or not the promise of the NEW OLD (or perhaps, the OLD NEW) DC, can make them feel at home once more. They’re sharing those thoughts with you. This is Crossing Back.
Last week, we took a look at the implicit and explicit promises of DC Universe Rebirth. With the Rebirth initiative, DC introduces itself once more to the world.
We’re not reviewing these introductions as individual comics. While we certainly can’t resist comment, NerdSpan has individual reviews for all the Rebirth titles, some up and others to come. (We’re happy to be flagged down elsewhere for our qualitative opinion.) Rather, we seek to carry on exploring each issue as it comes out in the spirit of investigating how well these comics contribute to building the an inclusive, interconnected, wondrous DCU we spoke about in last week’s column.
To that end, it’s worth considering the overall structure of Rebirth. Like the post-Flashpoint continuity before it (and like the post-Infinite Crisis continuity before that, and…), Rebirth is neither super-fish nor super-fowl. Rather than starting from a wholly clean slate (ala, CW’s Arrowverse or the DCCU movies have) or carrying on with the entire pre-reboot continuity in the open, DC has chosen to keep some undeclared mix of continuities and canons in play, mixed loosely with the intent of striking alchemy with freewheeling experimentation and front-loading fan favourites.
While deeply challenging for continuity nerds like ourselves, it’s hard to criticise this decision. As discussed last week, the goal of the DC Universe is (as Rebirth declares) to be all-embracing, to find the universe that can truly be said to reflect a broad church. To the extent that the DCU then builds itself on sand, it promises the later firming up of foundations – if not entire basement levels – at some point in the future.
There is a question to be asked, of course, as to how much gap needs to be filled between the commonly understood fundamentals (last son of Krypton, recipient of a power ring from aliens, etc), and the present state of play. It would appear that, like DCU Rebirth itself, the titles which specifically bear the Rebirth masthead are intended to restate these fundamentals in understandable, relatable ways. Though they all, to some extent, tell stories, they are less about critical narrative beats than they are the promises of premises. Like the Star Wars opening crawl, or Galadriel’s ominous voice-over at the start of the Lord of the Rings films, they collectively orient a reader in a world that can be at times confusing, with the fundamentals of who the characters are and what they want. For DC Rebirth’s stated priority focus on character, this is a laudable aim.
The titles we are looking at for this column combine books written explicitly as “Rebirth One-Shots”, with some attention this week to: Batman Rebirth #1, Superman Rebirth #1, Wonder Woman Rebirth #1, Action Comics #957 and Detective Comics #934. All of these comics, you will note, feature DC’s Trinity, in theory the upper echelon of power and narrative relevance in the DC arsenal. (Not THAT DC Arsenal).
It is worth noting, before turning our eyes to the stories, that the very idea of the Trinity is perhaps the single best example of what this column hopes to see – a positive example of a backwards construction. The Trinity is unquestionably a subtle retcon or reprioritisation to which we have all pretty much become accustomed, escalating Wonder Woman to parity and participation with The World’s Finest, the original Batman-Superman team up that ushered in the DCU. The Trinity’s origins and interactions certainly predate our lifetimes (finally, something that doesn’t make us feel old) but – like all the best things in comics – this idea increases the possibilities for storytelling without anything being taken away. The escalation of Wonder Woman serves at once to increase inclusivity – by placing a woman, and a foreigner, in the hallowed top tier of heroism – and connectivity – grandfathering in certain Justice League adventures as archetypal world events, establishing key interpersonal relationships that drive both the characters involved and others.
Rebirth, so far, is differentiating itself from the post-Crisis introduction of “Year Ones” or “Legends”, in the model of Frank Miller’s Batman success, stories that filled implicit gaps by stepping back to fill in deeper characterisation and foundational relationship moments. Rebirth is not backwards-facing, but instead focusing on the present.
Rebirth leaves for now the question of how the new normal will be put together, but from the first run of issues, it is seems fair to say that the approach is for each title to do its own heavy lifting. It should be noted that, as ever with comics, nothing has succeeded like success. Although no book is without its fine-tuning, DC seems to have made specific, if expected, assessments of which books require more changing up than others. Batman, fresh off Scott Snyder’s hugely successful run, remains virtually untouched, whilst Wonder Woman promises some fairly sweeping changes from her most recent iteration, with Superman falling somewhere in between.
Let’s make a start:
Batman
From a continuity perspective, the Caped Crusader was the least compromised by the transition into the New 52. Apart from some needless editorial omissions of fan-favourite characters, Batman Inc carried on uninterrupted before the baton (Bat-on, heh) passed from Morrison’s synthesised Batman-for-everyone to Snyder’s more grounded Seventies horror Batman. Now, on the far side of the New 52, Batman, a creature of fixed purpose but constant reinvention, has absorbed into himself Snyder’s Batman as one more transcended iteration on his path towards Bat-perfection. Batman as a character returns to the wider DCU rejuvenated and, sure, reborn, but much as he ever was – billionaire philanthropist athlete scientist detective vigilante that he is.
New elements – a horror-themed transhuman spin on an old enemy and a whole new sidekick identity to accompany the Batman – are introduced, and are interesting, but the issue itself reads more as a State of the Union speech than a challenge to expectations. That said, on the subject of diversity, it is important that Bruce’s two partners – Lucius Fox and Duke Thomas – are both African-American, and it does not go unremarked that a higher proportion of people of colour appear in Batman: Rebirth (and Detective) than any other issue across our desk. Batman, with his shadow-self as a brutal aristocratic vampire preying on inner city despair and poverty, stands to benefit from this inclusivity.
While Batman may be DC’s ultimate survivor, it is worth noting that his surrounding legacy – the Bat-Family – was decimated in the transition to the New 52. Even putting aside what can only be considered the deliberate mismanagement of characters like Cassandra Cain and Stephanie Brown, the very immutability of Bruce Wayne poses a knotty logistical and thematic problem.
Snyder, who focused significantly on Bruce’s early days in the cowl and who took the narrow view of Batman’s mission (fight crime, in Gotham, for Gotham), only featured the larger Bat-family in fits and starts. In many instances, the creeping Gothic isolationism of his run didn’t wholly lend itself to close, personal relationships. Contemporaneously, Peter Tomasi and Patrick Gleason’s Batman and Robin sought to be the “Bat-Family” title, and featured, for a not insignificant part of its run, Batman’s team-ups and interactions with classic extended Bat-Family members, but it always featured – within the New 52 – as the second string title.
The New 52 saw Dick Grayson, the DC character with perhaps the least sliding timeline and thus a perennial temporal thorn in Bat-writers’ sides, at first sent out of Gotham on a circus-based romp in his Nightwing identity, then pushed into the role of costume-free superspy for Spyral. Both were attempts to give the character a solid foundation in a world unmoored from Batman, but neither meeting with significant commercial success (though Grayson was, in some circles, a noted critical darling). Tim Drake, meanwhile, tumbled from his perch as the heir apparent wunderkind into a limbo without assigned status: definitely existing, but with some doubt cast on his role as Robin, and on his accomplishments and relationships. Whilst Damien Wayne retained centre stage, there was a fundamental disconnect between two of DC’s core premises: Batman raising his son and Batman’s status as an archetypal “twenty-something” hanging out with his bros in the mancave of the twenty-something JLA. DC definitely sought to have its cake and eat it too, creating a jarring stumbling block for consistent characterisation. Batgirl, under the pen of Gail Simone felt isolated from the goings on in the main title and, when attempts were made to bring her own adventures into the main Bat-family fold, dragged in the wake of the horror-show tones that were ill-fitting. When moved along to Burnside, her existence in a tonally distinct subgenre didn’t necessarily click with Batman’s nigh-apocalyptic adventures. The less said about Jason Todd, perhaps the better.
None of this is necessarily anyone’s fault. Scott Snyder turned in excellent work as a strong writer focused on delivering his own story, with the pieces he had to hand. This was both his prerogative, and by all lights (including ours) it was narratively successful decision. Indeed, Snyder’s background as a long-form creator of his own stories with his own characters may have contributed to some significant character decisions: new characters deployed over old ones (like the aforementioned Duke Thomas, Harper Row, and a suite of his own new villains), and important changes to classic characters – a younger, Batman-replacing Jim Gordon, a recurrent holy fool Joker and a dangerously apocalyptic Riddler. These create a rich vein of characters to tap for Snyder’s own story, but coupled with editorial confusion, there is no doubt a distance has grown between Batman and Bat-anyone else in a way that would’ve been unthinkable in the tightly governed Bat-offices of yesteryear.
The Bat-Family, of course, is vast. The problem of “too many Robins for Bruce Wayne to be 25” has been compounded from logistics to bitter factionalism by the treatment of characters like Cassandra Cain and Renee Montoya. In fact, as one of DC’s most storied and long-term characters, it would be difficult to suggest a hard limit on Bat-characters whilst worthy additions are being found and added all the time. So where can we go from here?
For now, the direction seems to be “everyone back in the pool”. Batman: Rebirth #1 takes advantage of the cleared deck to reintroduce a (relatively similar) status quo and hint at future dramas to come, but happily, of all the titles we’ve read so far, Detective makes the most of the luxury of the restored decade, blending together old and new versions of the Bat characters to form a unified team in some very familiar garb. Cassandra Cain, newly rechristened ‘Orphan’, still retains her classic background, and Tim Drake and Stephanie Brown, now Red Robin and Spoiler, make a welcome return, potentially as a once-and-future couple, but certainly as a pair of characters well-beloved by Bat-fans of the immediate past. Detective also adds Clayface to the heroic roster, ostensibly on a redemption arc with Gotham Academy overtones, in his most sympathetic (actor turned pitiable monster) incarnation – a welcome surprise of something new to mix with the return of old favourites. Perhaps most surprising (and welcome) of all is the presentation of Batwoman as Batman’s equal partner in Detective Comics, helping to train and run this squad of extended Gotham heroes. Kate Kane and Bruce Wayne’s relationship is largely unexplored (thanks to his absence in 52, where she debuted, his extended trip through time and the exigencies of the New 52), but it makes for fertile ground. Detective feels like it has new things it wants to say about Kate whilst never resiling from the key components of the character as envisioned by her creators: her military background, her relationship with her father, and her unwillingness to take a subordinate role.
Given the overall strength of the Batman title for the last decade, there was little to “fix” here in terms of the core predicates, but Batman Rebirth promises an exciting new partnership, whilst Detective promises the return of some old favourites into some closer interpersonal bonds. To the extent that the mandate is to mix old and new, it succeeds. We’ll be watching the stories with great interest.
Superman
If the objective of the New 52 is to deliver on the promise “it’s not a reboot, and never was”, a significant obstacle is presented in the Superman run of the New 52 age. Grant Morrison, a writer with something of a reputation for pushing for his own (usually conceptually strong) ideas, appeared to have been lured to the first New 52 run of Action Comics with the promise of redesigning core components of Superman for the 21st century. Sadly, in circumstances where Superman itself began on an editorially confused note, Action threw a further spanner into the works by specifically depicting a young, rebellious Clark at the beginning of his career five years ago. Although Snyder later gave Batman much of the same treatment in the “Zero Year”, this was far later and far less disruptive. More than any other part of the New 52, Morrison’s stories setting out Superman’s first years as a hero hold themselves out as an explicit and irreversible replacement of what came before (be it Birthright or Man of Steel), a problem only compounded when uneven characterisation followed the character across the Superman titles. With the sidelining of Lois Lane, the tension between “classic”, “blogger” and “blue jeans” lifestyles, and simple (and normally unremarkable) changes to Clark’s powers, it was hard to know where anyone stood. Controversy dogged its offices, from the rapid departure of Andy Diggle following his announced run to the many accusations of the Superman offices being an unsafe space. An attempt to debut a depowered, buzz-cut bearing Superman with bloody knuckles found renewed interest in some circles, but circulation dwindled in response to a failure to clearly portray the Man of Tomorrow in a fully realised context.
In tying together the past and present, Superman: Rebirth faces an obvious hurdle… and leaps it in a single bound. While the broader events of the Rebirth initiative make it clear there is something fishy about Action #1’s Clark Kent (apparently never the ‘real’ Superman), the Rebirth issue rejects renunciation in favour of embracing the deceased New 52 Superman as a hero worthy of “classic” Superman’s respect, and perhaps even emulation. The issue focuses on an elegy for the dead younger Superman, following the old Superman and Lana Lang as they complete a vigil, wake and burial. By associating Clark with Lana Lang, the Kents, the Fortress of Solitude and the Superman memorial, the story associates the fallen Clark with the best aspects of Superman’s 75 year history – his heart and his humanity, and the issue contrasts the death of the latest Superman with the original “death” of the big blue boy-scout back in the early ’90s. Indeed, this outpouring of grief and respect provides a clever conceit of what little plot the Rebirth issue has: Our Superman has been dead before, and expects a superhero resurrection like his own. Indeed, the old Batman line “They need to be inspired, and let’s face it, “Superman”, the last time you really inspired anyone… was when you were dead” is turned on its head, made into a mark of connectivity and morality rather than a sign of failure. Tomasi and Gleason use this device to recap a little post-Crisis continuity for those who came in late (a skill writers are going to have to remember if this is going to work), but also provide that context as a broader motivation for the bearded, older Superman to get back in the fight.
In the end, Superman: Rebirth argues, it doesn’t matter where the fallen character came from – in the grand tradition of Superman, he sacrificed to save his adopted world, marking him out as one face to stand alongside the many faces of Superman, from Superboy to Calvin Ellis to Kingdom Come Superman. The Once and Future, now returned to his own land.
It’s a shame, then, that Action, carrying on from where Rebirth left off, struggles a little more with maintaining the necessary high-minded tone. Dan Jurgens has been working with Superman for almost 30 years, and as one of the original creative voices the first time a Superman died (and following sterling work with Lois and Clark in Convergence, whose passionate and deserved reception is doubtless part of the impetus for the original Superman returning to the world), his handle on the character is known to be masterful, when he’s on point. It’s for this reason that some of the speed bumps in the first returned issue of Action are a little disappointing. The older Superman has every reason to be more considered, even more prone to feel like a responsible leader than the already responsibility-heavy incarnation from before Flashpoint. After all, he’s both older than his fellow young buck superheroes (how not, if they remain reduced to their late 20s, and he a father from a parallel universe?), and has foreknowledge of how badly things can really go.
Though there’s an argument that the central conceit – Lex Luthor vowing to carry on Superman’s legacy in his stead – is enough to push Clark to ditch the beard (artistically executed to perfection), put back on the blue tights and classic S-shield (and there is a definite thrill in seeing it), his actions are rushed through so swiftly that it almost feels precipitate. Clark unilaterally determining he will take an incredibly significant public role without consulting his wife felt disrespectful of the close bond that Jurgens ordinarily captures well, whilst a Superman who throws the first punch feels decidedly more aggressive than a man who let Luthor win a Presidential election rather than disrupt the political process, despite what he knew about the bald businessman turned bad bureaucrat.
It may be that in the absence of a more headstrong Superman to contrast with, Clark is “acting out”, or that his decision in this instance is based on a broader emotional upheaval than the issue has had time to let on, but while Superman’s family life is well-realised, and Zircher’s art captures a “classic” feel without looking retro, the characterisation in Action is a little off-putting as either a return to the classic ethos, or as an echo of the younger, brasher Superman.
Wonder Woman
Wonder Woman may not face as obvious a challenge as (a dead) Superman, but she faces perhaps a more insidious one. In Planetary: Batman, Ellis uses the aesthetic and narrative conventions that surround past iterations of Batman to uncover a common centre – a boy of infinite resources, turning his will to prevent such tragedy being visited on any others. In All-Star Superman decades of classic Superman stories are put in a centrifuge and spun to conjure up a primal essence of the character ranging from the old to the new, elegantly summarized in four key panels.
But Wonder Woman has sadly never had the same steady centre around which decades of stories can aggregate and influence. Psychosexual totem, 50’s glamour girl, powerless kung-fu master, Grecian myth, ambassador, superspy, these layers embrace multitudes, but the sometimes explicit pressure to be all things to all women has seen Diana go through semi-constant reinvention and reinterpretation. Wonder Woman was effectively rebooted in 1958, 1968, 1973, 1987, 1991, 1995, 2010 and 2011. Joke all you want about Hawkman, count your Manhunters on your fingers and toes, given her cultural prevalence, the amount of shifts and retoolings Diana has gone through is astonishing. Even within the past five years, there have been several disparate Dianas afoot, from John’s naïve stranger to Azzarello’s reformist survivor to the Finchs’ conflicted girl-queen.
Given the (it’s fair to say) negative critical and fan reaction to the recent turn at the title by Meredith and David Finch, it seems unsurprising that DC has called for a steady, considered approach from devoted creator-fans of the character to right the ship.
The team of Greg Rucka, legendary Wonder Woman writer (and perhaps also legendarily, not the writer of Wonder Woman: Earth One), Nicola Scott (also returning to DC, and with her own popular vision of whom Diana should be) and Liam Sharp have been sought out (along with all-star colourist Laura Martin and a bunch of other cool folks in a list too long to mention), one assumes, explicitly to conjure a holistic and definitive approach to carry DC through to the Wonder Woman movie and beyond.
(Full disclosure, it’s probably worth noting we’re close friends with Greg and have worked with him before and share a country of origin (and occasional beverage) with Wonder Woman artistic collaborator Nicola Scott. We stand by the integrity of our views, of course, but it’s our duty to make you aware of these things.)
As such, Wonder Woman: Rebirth’s marketing promise that the coming stretch will tell a story that will “alter the character forever” is at once necessary, expected and deeply unreliable (based on history, and through no fault of the team’s own). Permanency has been hard for Wonder Woman to come by. Given the morass of preferences and predicates, perhaps no character is more in need of finding that common, definitional core, and such an exercise is necessarily part archaeology, part invention. Who, truly, is Wonder Woman? Where does she come from, what does she stand for?
Wonder Woman: Rebirth isn’t blind or blasé about the challenge – to the contrary, the entire issue poses questions in this regard, rather than explicitly answers them. The issue meditates on Wonder Woman’s portrayal as representative of (and occasionally a spirit or even Goddess of) Truth, with her golden lariat a symbol representative of the guiding light out of any such morass. But where does the truth lie in sometimes significantly contradictory portrayals? And where do you draw the line on what to bring forward from the conflicting histories? Do some aspects, with their own fans to be considered, nonetheless get consigned to oblivion?
Rucka has made much in interviews of the fact that, for all he is excited to return to Wonder Woman, this new run can’t pick up where his own run – ending with the Infinite Crisis a decade ago – left off. He’s spoken of his desire to accommodate elements of the immediately preceding events into Diana’s life, and the trappings are certainly there: the Parisian apartment, the New 52 costume (at least at first), and some references to recent events (a panel from Darkseid: War and the now infamous Superman/Wonder Woman kiss) are presented(and implicitly demoted) to an uncertain parity with earlier interpretations and storylines.
Diana’s narrative voice is clear and unassailed, and her reintroduction is married with deliberate changes to costume and aesthetic. Artistically, this issue is far and away the most impressive of the Trinity Rebirth titles (though, sure, apples and oranges, and horses for courses). Sharp, Martin, Parsons and Matthew Clark conjure up an aesthetic that feels magical without unmooring the character from the broader DCU context, and haunting without ever becoming grim or unpleasant. Indeed, even in an issue that promises a questioning – even a lost Diana – there is still time to show her confidence and her joy, as well as her determination.
As long time Wonder Woman fans, we are immediately intrigued and invested, both with Rucka’s more considered perspective of the character and its on-panel realisation. That being said, of all the Rebirth issues written so far, this one bears the strongest indication of pivoting from inclusion of recent elements to renunciation of those elements. Whilst much is left ambiguous, it seems safe to say that the issue promises at least some repudiation of a number of elements from the New 52. Ares’ helmet, symbolising Diana’s role as god of war, crumples; Olympus, standing for Azzarello’s popular re-re-reinvention of the Greek pantheon, is found empty, fragile and potentially fabricated; and the golden lasso itself tells Diana that a scaffold of lies underpins her recent life. (Hopefully, one can take pretty much as read that the deeply problematic, incredibly dystopian and highly contentious rapist Amazons will be dismissed entire.)
It’s admirable for Rucka, Scott and Sharp to have a clear vision of who Diana should be. Indeed, given Diana’s past treatment, some hard choices will have to be made. But, given the entire premise of Crossing Back, we’ve argued that discarding interpretations wholesale is, at best, a necessary evil and should never be an aspirational goal. Can this new creative team bridge their strong vision with the best and most beloved elements of the last five years of stories? Or the decades of forgotten stories before those?
Azzarello’s Olympians, lavishly and fantastically rendered by Cliff Chiang, were seen as dangerous, potent and elemental, harking back to a primal and archetypal perspective without sacrifice their immanent ability to drive the story. While some argue Diana’s recent romance with Superman implicitly painted her as subordinate to a male lover, in a DCU fraught with erased marriages and rocky relationships, it’s certain that some new fans might have found the relationship of Superman and Wonder Woman to be the Aquaman/Mera or the Green Arrow/Black Canary of their time, a fixed point in an age DC Universe Rebirth #1 explicitly called out as loveless. If every comic is someone’s first comic, that means every vision is someone’s preferred vision, and there will be reasons for that that demand consideration.
The added challenge in Diana’s context, of course, is that damage done to her character (as the foremost female superhero) often has a different, and much more exclusionary, character to creative decisions made in respect of her Trinity peers. It makes a difference if an island run by women is presented as a misandrist horror show, or if Wonder Woman will not openly present herself as a feminist, or if as a person of faith, her relationship with her gods is one of worship or disgust. The treatment of women in comics is notoriously poor, and the ecumenical impulse Crossing Back talks about can’t (and shouldn’t) extend to issues that are more than matters of preference, but as matters of harm.
If young, angry Superman was truly Superman; and if Batman, a creature of fixed purpose but constant reinvention, has absorbed into himself Synder’s Seventies Horror Batman as one more transcended iteration towards Bat-perfection; then what can the creative team offer to fans of Wonder Woman from the past five years as an olive branch that will suggest that the Wonder Woman readers knew for the last five years (or any one of them) had something deserving of their admiration?
Narratively and artistically, this is by far and away the most ambitious of the Trinity Rebirth titles, in everything from suggested story scope, to backgrounds and panel arrangement, to mission statement. And it lives up to that ambition. The promise of telling a new story, entitled “The Lies” seems like an attempt to navigate the choppy waters of Diana’s present, whilst Scott and Rucka finally turn their attention to Wonder Woman’s early days might provide the canon, definitional origin we’ve been waiting for – the Year One we spoke of at the start of the issue. While we suspect we’ll revisit this subject in later columns, there is a lot to be said for the decision to compliment and contrast Liam Sharp’s sword-and-sorcery, highly detailed, art with what we’ve seen so far of Nicola Scott’s fan favourite bold lined, neo-four-coloured style.
It’s clear that this team is ready to tell a bold, lush Wonder Woman story. The additional challenge they may face is to find a lasting peace between the old and the new, and/or where needed, to create a run so definitional as to win over fans from previously preferred incarnations to new ways of thinking, without tacitly endorsing the more problematic elements that ought to properly be discarded. It is a mountain to climb, but with a confident first step, we’ll be following along behind.
Next Time on Crossing Back: The Justice League: Part 1