Did reboots like Crisis, and New 52 ultimately prove to be pointless?

[superduperman]

Financially, they saved the company. DC was on the verge of insolvency around 1985. Past that? Yeah, kinda. If their purpose was to organize continuity, then, yes, they failed. If their purpose was to keep the company in business for another decade, then they succeeded. I have no idea what their financial state was circa 2010. But obviously they were under some kind of scrutiny to do such a Hail Mary play. I firmly believe DC would not be here today without COIE. Now, were there steps they could have taken to prevent something like COIE? Sure, but they were about a decade too late. Creatively, it created more problems than it solved but that's more to do with poor planning than the actual idea. Same thing with New 52.

[Sacred Knight]

As superduperman said, they all rescued the company at their points of implementation. In that regard they were not pointless. Creatively? New 52 has rather proved pointless as they've shoved it all under the rug, some appropriately, some disappointingly. The original post-Crisis changes however, that's very much still a thing as even today its ideas are largely perpetuated. For some characters this is a good thing, for others, most glaringly Superman, its a bad thing.

[iron chimp]

Financially, they saved the company. DC was on the verge of insolvency around 1985. Past that? Yeah, kinda. If their purpose was to organize continuity, then, yes, they failed. If their purpose was to keep the company in business for another decade, then they succeeded. I have no idea what their financial state was circa 2010. But obviously they were under some kind of scrutiny to do such a Hail Mary play. I firmly believe DC would not be here today without COIE. Now, were there steps they could have taken to prevent something like COIE? Sure, but they were about a decade too late. Creatively, it created more problems than it solved but that's more to do with poor planning than the actual idea. Same thing with New 52.

They had virtually the same market share in 2010 as they did in 2012. They only managed to sell 200k copies of action comics 1. For context walking dead 100 sold over 300k the next year.

Nu52 was a complete bust.

[noisebloom]

Maybe it would be helpful to compare how Marvel handles it continuity? From what I understand, they've taken more of a laissez faire approach to continuity (I haven't read enough Marvel to really comment further).

I like that the reboots provide a fresh jumping-on point for new readers, but if any of those new readers actually want to understand how the new stuff ties into the old, the complexity and ugliness of the DC universe starts to rear its head. Having read DC comics for many years, I often myself going through the "Wait, was this before event X happened? Did Y exist?" Rebirth is kind of confusing to me, because some of the runs concern more of the old continuity and some of the runs just continue with the New 52 stuff.

[DrNewGod]

...As for the New 52, they should have just set that entire line on a newly created Earth while keeping a handful of titles around featuring the old Pre-Flashpoint continuity like Action Comics, Detective Comics and a revived All Star Comics. This would have allowed older fans to keep following the versions they'd imprinted upon while also giving new and old reader the opportunity to embrace the new versions free of any expectations that they be like their older selves.

Yes. Exactly correct. But for reasons I've never been able to understand, DC has almost always shot itself in the foot when trying to organize where its line should go. Its great successes from the Silver Age on were almost all accidents involving second-banana properties (including 1969's revamp of Batman).

Maybe it would be helpful to compare how Marvel handles it continuity? From what I understand, they've taken more of a laissez faire approach to continuity (I haven't read enough Marvel to really comment further).

I like that the reboots provide a fresh jumping-on point for new readers, but if any of those new readers actually want to understand how the new stuff ties into the old, the complexity and ugliness of the DC universe starts to rear its head. Having read DC comics for many years, I often myself going through the "Wait, was this before event X happened? Did Y exist?" Rebirth is kind of confusing to me, because some of the runs concern more of the old continuity and some of the runs just continue with the New 52 stuff.

IMO, starting with Roy Thomas in the late 1960s/early 1970s, Marvel's been pretty consistent with its continuity, but they're also willing to ignore or pave over problematic stuff from the past (i.e. Reed Richards having briefly served with Nick Fury in WWII, and in what exact country it was that Tony Stark got his heart injury). The last time I remember them definitely binding their events to specific times was around 1979, when in X-Men, (then-) Marvel Girl made a reference to the year the O5 had tangled with the second generation of Sentinels.

One of the really good things about that approach is that you don't have to be too careful with continuity as a writer in such a case because the gaffs can be ignored later. Another good thing about it is that it gives a writer a rich history to work into their stories. "Ultron Unlimited" made a lot of hay out of Vision's mind being based on Wonder Man's brain patterns, Hank Pym's problems and what those two factors implied about Ultron's nature (of course, that's Busiek, and I doubt you can find a more deeply knowledgeable comics historian working in the medium today).

All that said, DC had a problem Marvel never has, DC has fixed its older properties to a point in time (WWII) without a way of explaining their way around it. Marvel's surviving Golden Age characters are explained away by either functional immortality, or a time-bump forward with an arrival date that's eternally "a few years ago."

[scary harpy]

Financially, they saved the company. DC was on the verge of insolvency around 1985. Past that? Yeah, kinda. If their purpose was to organize continuity, then, yes, they failed. If their purpose was to keep the company in business for another decade, then they succeeded. I have no idea what their financial state was circa 2010. But obviously they were under some kind of scrutiny to do such a Hail Mary play. I firmly believe DC would not be here today without COIE. Now, were there steps they could have taken to prevent something like COIE? Sure, but they were about a decade too late. Creatively, it created more problems than it solved but that's more to do with poor planning than the actual idea. Same thing with New 52.

As superduperman said, they all rescued the company at their points of implementation. In that regard they were not pointless. Creatively? New 52 has rather proved pointless as they've shoved it all under the rug, some appropriately, some disappointingly. The original post-Crisis changes however, that's very much still a thing as even today its ideas are largely perpetuated. For some characters this is a good thing, for others, most glaringly Superman, its a bad thing.

Are they really saving the company?

If they are repeatedly using the same repair for the same problem, I don't think they are solving anything.

[Jim Kelly]

The last time I followed a Marvel book set in the main continuity was in the early 2000s when Kurt Busiek and George Perez were doing THE AVENGERS. I loved how they mined all the Marvel continuity--and there were references listed in the letter column. To me that deep history is what you would read Marvel for--but I understand that continuity has been fuzzied since then.

Kurt tried to do the same thing with POWER COMPANY. That was a challenge, since he had to make it work with both current continuity and pre-Crisis continuity.

I've suggested before that there should be one D.C. universe where all the stories have been told. It would contain the most recognizable version of each character, but it would just exist as a reference point--as a way to contrast stories in other universes with this reference point. If there were any stories about this Earth, they would mainly show the characters on that Earth observing the other continuities and noticing how their counterparts' histories were different from or the same as theirs.

[Timothy Hunter]

I would say that Crisis on Infinite Earths was in retrospect warrented because it absorbed characters from different earths into the main continuity, which in my opinion was the only opt for DC if they didn't want those characters tk fade into obscurity.

If the Charlton characters stayed on Earth C we wouldn't have O'Neill's Question or Blue Beetle in Justice League International. If the Fawcett characters stayed on Earth F we would be deprived of Jerry Ordway's Power of Shazam and Black Adam in Goyer and Johns' JSA.

[Sacred Knight]

Are they really saving the company?

If they are repeatedly using the same repair for the same problem, I don't think they are solving anything.

In the short term its a quick fix. Long term no, its generally not as they fall back into their same habits and things start falling dreadfully low again. Its their default, reluanch/reboot, benefit off the #1's/hype. Its not a good default, as you say they just rinse and repeat without truly fixing anything, but its what they do and it works in the sense of short term gains.

[superduperman]

Are they really saving the company?

If they are repeatedly using the same repair for the same problem, I don't think they are solving anything.

It certainly isn't a long term solution, no. And I don't think it's meant to be. It's designed to keep the lights on one more day. The rest depends on how you go forward. Both COIE and New 52 had their share of screw ups that had to be repaired later. In the case of New 52, some trades even got published with changed dialogue (Batwoman) to align with the new continuity.

[Jim Kelly]

The New 52 seemed to me like a Hail Mary Pass. Didio desperate to save his job. Had they not been so desperate, they could have taken the time to tell a really great crossover event epic that saw the end of everything and the beginning of the New 52.

They had more time with Crisis--a few years in preparation--but it also could have been set up over those years and driven up sales on all their existing titles as the big event approached.

Changing continuity isn't hard. They can do it any time they want--because it's a multiverse and they just need to move to another one when the old one is on its last legs, like Springfield. There was nothing about the old multiverse or the old 52 that stood in the way of that. That was just the excuse--the real thing they were trying to do was get people to buy the comics all at once so there would be some big spike in sales that would look good on a spreadsheet, for the bean counters. Of course, those kinds of injections of adrenaline don't fix the problem over the long term.

Had they time to think things through, they could have done a lot more to fix the real problems--restructuring their distribution and marketing, finding new revenue streams. Creative changes can only do so much, if your business model is fundamentally flawed.

[DrNewGod]

...I've suggested before that there should be one D.C. universe where all the stories have been told. It would contain the most recognizable version of each character, but it would just exist as a reference point--as a way to contrast stories in other universes with this reference point. If there were any stories about this Earth, they would mainly show the characters on that Earth observing the other continuities and noticing how their counterparts' histories were different from or the same as theirs.

That sounds a lot like the environment Ross and Waid constructed for Kingdom Come's backdrop.

[scary harpy]

The New 52 seemed to me like a Hail Mary Pass. Didio desperate to save his job. Had they not been so desperate, they could have taken the time to tell a really great crossover event epic that saw the end of everything and the beginning of the New 52.

They had more time with Crisis--a few years in preparation--but it also could have been set up over those years and driven up sales on all their existing titles as the big event approached.

Changing continuity isn't hard. They can do it any time they want--because it's a multiverse and they just need to move to another one when the old one is on its last legs, like Springfield. There was nothing about the old multiverse or the old 52 that stood in the way of that. That was just the excuse--the real thing they were trying to do was get people to buy the comics all at once so there would be some big spike in sales that would look good on a spreadsheet, for the bean counters. Of course, those kinds of injections of adrenaline don't fix the problem over the long term.

Had they time to think things through, they could have done a lot more to fix the real problems--restructuring their distribution and marketing, finding new revenue streams. Creative changes can only do so much, if your business model is fundamentally flawed.

They have had time to think this through...since about 1986.

This is not the first time they hit the 'refresh' button. They've had plenty of time to learn from their mistakes.

As far as I can tell, they simply choose not to learn.

[Dr. Ellingham]

The point of these big continuity revamps and reboots is to get attention and bring in new readers.

Exactly. Comic fans think the continuity, and how it's presented and maintained, is all important.

But more important is staying in business. Which is what most of these moves are about.

[Dr. Ellingham]

I would say that Crisis on Infinite Earths was in retrospect warrented because it absorbed characters from different earths into the main continuity, which in my opinion was the only opt for DC if they didn't want those characters tk fade into obscurity.

The end justifies the means? Hardly.

DC had successful series set in multiple realities prior to Crisis. By the early 1980s the JSA was popular enough to have a comic again. And a spinoff comic as well. Both set on Earth 2. The Legion was DC's second-best selling comic, set in a future continuity far removed, yet tied to, the pre-Crisis Superman and his contemporaries.

All that success was actually sabotaged by Crisis and its changes. And so - we will never know how big the JSA, Infinity Inc or the Legion might have been in the 80s or 90s - because DC had to junk the actual DC universe to chase Marvel, with one of the underlying - incorrect - assumptions being that multiple realities and versions of characters was "bad".

Whoops.