The New 52

I don't care about kid's shows anymore, and I know I haven't updated this in forever, but I don't care, I am just going to jump right back into it, and talk about the nerdiest thing possible: comic books. 

Isn't it funny that when some of the biggest movies of all time now are comic book movies, yet try telling someone that you actually read comic books and pay attention to the reaction you get.  It will range somewhere between "I would never have sex with you" and "How have you ever had sex?"  But I digress. 

DC Comics, home of Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman, recently relaunched their entire universe after their big crossover event, Flashpoint.  In Flashpoint, The Flash somehow rearranged time so that the Barry Allen (the Silver Age Flash) never received his powers, Bruce Wayne was killed instead of his parents, thus making his father become Batman, and Wonder Woman and Aquaman are sworn enemies who have destroyed half the planet in a war between Atlanteans and Amazons.  This is a very basic overview, but eventually, The Flash sets everything back the way it should be.  OR DOES HE??!!

Over all, I liked reading Flashpoint.  It wasn't too overly convoluted, and I was actually interested in every aspect of the story.  It tried to incorporate all of the DCU heavy hitters, and a lot of the second tier characters, while at the same time telling a pretty concise story.  DC has done this multiple times now, and I thought that this was by far the best continuity reboot.  I didn't feel like I had to read every comic they had published for the last ten years in order to understand what was going on, which was a common problem with past reboots like Infinity Crisis and Final Crisis. 

After Flashpoint, the entire universe just rebooted.  It seems like almost everything is pretty much what we are familiar with, but with little differences that are slowly being revealed.  Some of the series have been good (Detective Comics, Wonder Woman), some have been bad (Batwing...really?) and some have been fucking amazing (Grant Morrison's Action comics has been my favorite, with Jeff Lemire's Animal Man being a close second).  Individually, a few of these stories have been the best comics I have read in 15 years, but when you remove that individuality is when things start to bother me.

My problem is that I feel like I am being forced to read every issue, of every comic, every week.  That is 52 comics a month.  At the average price of $2.99 that's roughly $155 a month!  And price aside, how much time is a normal person supposed to leave open for reading, especially comic book reading?  I know the argument is just "Read what you want" and for the most part, that is true, but DC is making it really hard.  I said before that Animal Man has been one of my favorite relaunches so far, but at the end of the first story arch, they make it clear that they are going to do a Swamp thing crossover.  That's fine, and Swamp thing is okay, but the relaunch title is one that would for sure fall by the wayside if I didn't want to keep up with the story.  Not only that, but they are doing a major crossover event this summer.  The continuity reboot is less than ten months old and there is a crossover already?  I thought that is why we "wanted" new continuity so that we didn't have to read every single issue that was published every week.

This is all very stupid shit to bitch about, I know, and for the most part, I have liked what I have been reading.  My main complaint is that DC is making it seem like that this is what we have been waiting for all along.  We wanted this simpler universe where we weren't bogged down with a bunch of past continuity and jump right in.  Marvel did this in the late 90's early 2000's with an entirely different Universe while keeping their current one going.  The Ultimate Universe took characters like Spider-Man and the X-Men and just started fresh.  It worked great, until it got too bogged down in it's own continuity.  I think there are only two or three Ultimate titles being published today.  It seems like this will happen very quickly with The New 52 and we will be right back to where we started. 

If I put half as much energy thinking about important stuff that I do thinking about pointless bullshit, I would be a very successful person.