For the first time in a long time, I’m excited about DC Comics again.
I don’t know precisely when I stopped being excited about them. If I had to guess, I would say it was around summer 2007. The eight or so months leading up to Infinite Crisis was the absolute height of my DC fervor, when I was reading damn near everything they put out and all of the countdown miniseries. While I was ultimately largely disappointed by that event, I still maintained a high level of enthusiasm during the run of the weekly 52 series. I don’t know what happened after that to make me lose that feeling. I think it may have been Countdown to Final Crisis and the realization that they probably weren’t going to capture lightning in a bottle again the way they did in 2005-’06. Sure, I kept reading and enjoying a lot of DC books, but I didn’t feel the same as I once had. The New 52 relaunch more or less put an end to my overall interest in DC altogether, though I’ve enjoyed a few series here and there, particularly coming out of the DCYou initiative.
I’m fairly certain that the reason I’m excited about DC again now is Wally West. His return in the DC Universe: Rebirth one-shot, even having been spoiled on the internet a few days ahead of time, still packed an emotional punch that I’ve not gotten from a DC book in years. I’ve written before about how much I love Wally West – he’s without a doubt my favorite character in comics – so I’m beyond thrilled to have him back.
But it’s not just Wally’s return that’s got me excited. It’s so many other things that were teased in the Rebirth one-shot. The scene with Atoms Ray Palmer and Ryan Choi was enough to get me to pick up and tear through the first six issues of Choi’s All-New Atom series from ‘06. The scene between Jaime Reyes and Ted Kord piqued my interest in the forthcoming book that those two will be starring in. I’ve gone back and picked up the “Final Days of Superman” storyline so I can get current on what’s going on with the Man of Steel (I haven’t read the Superman: Rebirth one-shot yet so no spoilers), and I’m tempted to check out the “Darkseid War” storyline from Justice League once that’s all collected. Plus, thanks specifically to Wally West, I’ve gone back and picked up the Titans Hunt miniseries in preparation for the forthcoming Titans Rebirth series, a book in which Wally looks to feature prominently. This is especially sweet for me as the Titans have long been a favorite team of mine, and I’m excited that there’s a new series about them that I actually want to read.
This is more DC comics than I’ve read since before The New 52 began, and I’m so very pleased by this. I’ve always been more of a DC fan than a Marvel fan, though I’ve regularly read books from both publishers and many others. For the last few years Marvel’s titles have been speaking to me a bit more; books like Daredevil, Bendis’s X-Men titles, Captain Marvel, and more off-the-wall series like Unbeatable Squirrel Girl and Howard the Duck are all things that I’ve enjoyed a great deal. It feels like Marvel’s a bit more willing to experiment, which is something I really appreciate. That’s part of why I liked the DCYou initiative so much, too; DC was trying something different for once, and it was really refreshing. It’s a shame that most of that seems to be being wiped away as part of Rebirth.
Even in spite of that, I can’t help but be excited. Reading DC Universe: Rebirth felt like coming home. It was a warm hug after years of a cold shoulder. Whatever it was about Geoff Johns’s writing that had come to annoy me so much in recent years (basically ever since he left The Flash before Infinite Crisis) completely vanished. I think the subject matter helped me with that, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it helped him as well, seeing as Wally West was among the first major characters that he wrote for DC.
There’s something bittersweet to me about Rebirth, though. In the initial press release announcing Rebirth, Dan DiDio said something that’s been nagging at the back of my brain. He said, “[…] we also believe in the direct market and the core comics fan.” The Rebirth initiative is about appealing to DC’s base. It’s about returning to the things that people used to love about DC Comics. Which is great, I want to love DC Comics, and if the preceding 800 words weren’t enough of an indication, it worked.
But what are we losing as a result of Rebirth? We’re losing the aforementioned experimentation of DCYou, a move that led to some truly great books like Prez, Bizarro, and Black Canary. I’m extremely thankful that Gotham Academy is sticking around (is that the only survivor of DCYou?), and the forthcoming Super-Sons series could be really different, but for the most part it looks like DC’s moving away from series like that in favor of more ‘dependable’ titles, which is probably a reason that they’ve made so many of those books twice-monthly releases. It makes sense from a business perspective to go with the confirmed money-makers, but at the same time it makes me a little sad.
In his great book on Batman and nerd culture, The Caped Crusade, Glen Weldon writes about the “Great Inward Turn” that the comics industry took in the early 1970s. For Batman, as Weldon describes it, it meant moving 180 degrees from the Adam West TV series and returning the character to his roots as a lone creature of the night; for the industry, it meant the beginning of catering to the hard-core comic fans who were frequenting the new specialty shops that were popping up at the time. In either respect, it was a move away from bringing in new fans in favor of cultivating the existing ones.
The Rebirth initiative feels very much like another inward turn. The New 52 was an attempt to both bring in new readers and bring back those who had lapsed; instead, it alienated a large part of the existing fan base by invalidating or outright erasing what they knew and loved, and after initial sales jumps the line eventually leveled off or even dipped below pre-New 52 levels. DCYou was an attempt to cater to a different audience altogether that faltered due to a combination of low order numbers and DC ultimately bailing on it almost immediately. Rebirth, on the other hand, is trying to bring back those “core comics fan[s],” perhaps the ones they alienated with The New 52, while also being new-reader-friendly with intro one-shots and all-new #1s.
As mentioned before, if my reaction to the one-shot is any indication, it worked on this reader, at least in the short-term. The question now is whether it will sustain in the long run. Time, as always, will tell.