Judging DC's New 52 One Year Later

After spending much of the night kicking around possible topics to tackle for tonight’s post, I sat down to read Scott Snyder and Greg Capullo’s Batman #0 (it’s good!) and realized, hell, DC’s New 52 relaunch is exactly a year old this month, so why not finally sit down to address what I think about the bold new publishing initiative? Just be warned: various aspects of the New 52 bugged me the minute the news of the relaunch broke, and those areas of concern have only widened and become more apparent in the twelve months since the first issues hit the stands. In short, I am not a fan of the New 52, so this post will hardly read like a celebration of the relaunch.

 For the few of you reading this post who are unfamiliar with The New 52, what follows is a brief history:

With sales languishing and Marvel dominating the market share, DC decided a drastic change was needed in order to breathe new life into their publishing line. Not merely content with their decision to finally make available and distribute their new comics digitally on the day and date of release after years of ignoring digital distribution altogether, DC also made the bold move of rebooting their entire fictional universe, starting each of their series off with a fresh #1 issue and new stories that were completely free of the sort of convoluted continuity and back-stories that have long kept so many new readers from diving into DC superhero comics for the first time.

Keep in mind that convoluted continuity had plagued DC for years stemming from the fact that their individual superhero characters weren’t originally created with an eye towards existing in the same universe, thus creating a whole mess of problems and inconsistencies when DC publishers and editors decided that, like the Marvel Universe (which was created and designed as a shared universe by a handful of creators all working closely together), they too wanted their characters to co-exist in the same world with a logical and coherent history. This was easier said than done, and the years 1986 to 2011 were all marked by various attempts to streamline or in some cases reboot their continuity with events like Crisis on Infinite Earths, Zero Hour, Infinite Crisis and Final Crisis, all of which succeeded in further convoluting continuity problems as much as they solved them. Thus, the New 52 would serve as the fresh slate that was so desperately needed in order to make their comics accessible to mainstream audiences.

Which brings me to my first gripe with the New 52, which is probably the relaunch’s biggest and most fatale flaw: despite DC claiming they intended to simplify their fictional universe’s convoluted history, they managed to accomplish the exact opposite by cherry-picking which past stories were to remain canonical and which were to be wiped away, all on the fly while never once clearly alerting readers which of those old stories and developments were still in play. Did Tim Drake, Batman’s third sidekick, ever operate under the Robin moniker? If Cyborg served as a founding member of the Justice League, did the legendary and in many instances character-defining moments in Marv Wolfman and George Perez’ New Teen Titans run ever occur in the new timeline? Did Stephanie Brown ever serve as Batgirl? How the hell do Jack Kirby’s New Gods and Final Crisis fit into all this? These are just four of countless confusing questions longtime fans have found themselves wondering while reading DC’s New 52 comics, and to say it’s confusing and distracting to see any of these areas of confusion pop up in a comic you’re reading is an understatement. It pulls you right out of the damn story.

What makes matters even more confusing is the sense that DC doesn’t seem to know the answers to many of these confusing continuity questions, which has made the ad-hoc, on-the-fly nature of the whole relaunch pretty damn obvious to anyone paying even the least bit of attention. DC is clearly making up the rules of continuity as they go, which in the past has always been a recipe for disaster and by all indications is leading to more of the same. Considering the relaunch was meant to clarify matters of continuity and make both the history and interconnectedness of the DC Universe more coherent to readers, there sure as hell is a lot of lingering confusion hovering over all of these comics. In other words, it’s painfully apparent that none of this was all that thought-out beforehand.

All of this would be a lot more tolerable if the comics themselves were as a whole more readable, well-crafted and entertaining as the DC line was before the big reboot, and I can’t say that they are. Whether it’s due in part to those lingering matters of confusion, the fact that writers and artists have been very publicly hamstrung by editorial decrees and in some cases yanked off their books all together, or the reality that the creators hired to recreate the DC Universe were the same ones who helped craft the very stories that needed rebooting in the first place, the New 52 comics hardly read like the breaths of fresh air they were marketed as. With very few exceptions, the comics don’t even seem charged by the sort of energy and excitement one would expect from a writer suddenly free from the constraints of back-story, and that’s probably because they’re not. If anything, I imagine trying to write stories in a fictional universe whose rules and history are being constructed after the fact and on the fly is every bit as daunting as having to work with 75 years of established continuity.

Appropriately enough, the poster child for the New 52’s myriad problems is also its flagship title, Justice League, written by Chief Creative Officer Geoff Johns and drawn by Co-Publisher Jim Lee, two of the biggest superstar names in the comics industry with a laundry list of blockbuster hits to their respective resumes. A Justice League title, created by Johns and Lee starring the DC’s most iconic superhero characters seemed like a cant-miss formula for success when it was first announced. And it’s a fucking mess.

Having just reread the first twelve issues of Johns and Lee’s Justice League for the second time, I can honestly say that I am baffled by just how poorly the series is constructed. For a series intended to tie together the various characters and threads of the new DC Universe into one tapestry, the core characters are written with strikingly different voices and personalities than they are in their own solo books. As a whole, the series reads similarly to what I imagine it would look like to watch Johns bang Justice League action figures together in a sandbox. The personality conflicts, which constitute 95 percent of the book’s severely lacking dramatic stakes, are all forced and artificial. The two villain’s to appear in the book so far (and remember, a good villain is pretty damn crucial to a good superhero story) come across as afterthoughts. What’s perhaps most baffling aspect is that Lee’s art, once the very pinnacle of superhero comic artwork and visual storytelling, is nowhere near the quality of his past work. Whether it’s due to the grind of balancing monthly deadlines with his publisher duties or if he’s lost a step since his time drawing Batman: Hush, Superman: For Tomorrow and All-Star Batman and Robin, Lee’s artistic presence on Justice League definitely isn’t picking up the slack for Johns’ lackluster story like it once would have.

There are some bright points in the new publishing line. Scott Snyder and Greg Capullo’s Batman remains an absolutely stellar read, but that seems to have way more to do with the two creators being at the top of their form than any sort of freedom or inspiration created by the relaunch. Snyder’s Swamp Thing is also damn good, as is Brian Azzarello’s Wonder Woman, Peter Tomasi’s Batman and Robin and the work being done by Jeff Lemire on books like Justice League Dark and Frankenstein: Agent of S.H.A.D.E. Johns and Ivan Reis’ Aquaman is a good if ham-fisted attempt at revitalizing the long-languishing character. Dan Didio and Keith Giffen’s OMAC was a blast, if only because Giffen was clearly having fun going bonkers with the book’s visuals. Grant Morrison’s Action Comics started off with a bang, but even he, the master of continuity wrangling, seems to have buckled under the constraints of working in this ad-hoc universe. Keep in mind that I read the first two issues of every one of DC’s 52 new series as well as a good chunk of the first trade collections sent to me by DC, and these are really the only books that I feel inclined to mention in any positive light. And don’t even get me started on DC’s Free Comic Book Day special issue, which purported to set-up the line’s first big crossover event and is a downright unreadable mess. If this book is an indication, things are only going to get worse in the Justice League book and the New 52 Universe as a whole before they get better.

To be fair, I think it’s worth following the above takedown of the New 52 by admitting that the relaunch may not have been designed to please me or fans like me. Sales are up across the board for DC, which does in part suggest that they’ve captured some of the new or former readers the publisher so coveted. Kudos to them. Just make no mistake – DC’s bread is still buttered largely by me and my fellow longtime comics readers, and they’d best think long and hard about getting their house, continuity and overall quality of storytelling in order if they want to keep getting our hard-earned money. But I guess, if all else fails, they can always reboot the whole fucking thing over again and think things through a little bit more beforehand.