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

[mathew101281]

What do they accomplish other than piss people off and confuse people? They don't really simplify thinks all that much, in fact with a lot of characters it makes them more convoluted.

The rock-solid characters like Batman and Superman can survive pretty much anything, so they would be fine reboot or not. Thus, I fail to see how reboots benefit them any. Minor characters, on the other hand, can and alot of times are, seriously wrecked by reboots. I really hate when a character is humming along just fine or is actually peaking in popularity, and all of a sudden they decide to reboot, and the character comes back a shadow of his of herself. A few characters are actually enhanced by the fresh continuity, but to me it seems like they are far outnumbered by the characters that come out of the reboot damaged in someway.

[HandofPrometheus]

Crisis on Infinite Earths wasn't pointless to me because most of DC's most iconic stories, interpretations and influences came from the post-crisis era IMO. However, New 52 yes. So many stories and new characters were quickly swept under the rug and were honestly very forgettable.

I also agree with minor characters being gutted from reboots. Some characters still haven't been seen since the New 52 or only had like two appearances and never appeared again.

[Holt]

COIE was eventually undone (at least so far as the Multiverse coming back) but some truly iconic stories came out of it and some of the updated origins like Year One or Perez's Wonder Woman are considered definitive.

New 52 was much more of a wash. It clearly didn't expand the readership in the way they were hoping for and ironically made the continuity more confusing in certain ways.

[Jadeb]

Not pointless — ultimately harmful. Ushered in an age where comics are more concerned about continuity and cataclysmic events than good monthly storytelling.

[Bored at 3:00AM]

The point of these big continuity revamps and reboots is to get attention and bring in new readers. In that respect, both Crisis and the New 52 succeeded. Unfortunately, they both failed to address the secondary reason for these events, which was to simplify continuity for new readers.

It's easy in retrospect to understand where these two reboots screwed up, they shouldn't have tried to contradict so many of the major events that had become pillars of the shared history that shaped these characters. DC didn't need to have Byrne erase Superman's entire history for his revamp to work. He just needed to tweak all the stuff that need updating, ignore the stuff that didn't and move on with telling new exciting stories. Erasing Superboy and Supergirl and completely rewriting Krypton was unnecessary. 90% of the stories Byrne and Wolfman did could have worked just as well with the broad strokes of the old continuity. The same goes for Perez's Wonder Woman. There was nothing that Perez did that needed those early stories to be taking place in the present, just as there was no reason to do it with Hawkworld. Relocating the JSA to the same Earth as the modern heroes also didn't need to be a problem. Simply have the JSA remember their old lives on Earth-2 (along with their Superman, Batman & Wonder Woman), but understand that they are anomalies in time.

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.

[Menacer]

I realize I'm in the minority but I love many of the books from new 52 and love Supermans death in the final days of superman and how the Earth 2 books lead into Convergence and the " original " Superman, Lois and Jon are plucked from one universe, placed in another and eventually leads into Reborn and the merging of New 52 and the pre-flashpoint verse to create the soft rebooted Rebirth Universe.

Yes the stories are complex, detailed ans span volume upon volume of books to tell a wild story.. yah its convoluted... i guess. But these are the stories I love.

If you want a nice short 12 issue mini or something then go buy that. If you want multiverse expanding and warping stories then stick with the main continuity which has been putting the multiverse-- in parallel since 1985...

Events, soft reboots, hard reboots for me are very exciting and fun, some playout and deliver huge change other dont... but the story and the journey is fun, so exactly whether or not xyz changes this or that character as advertised doesnt matter to much...

Ultimately I've only collected for about 4 years heavily. Since 2016. About 5 to 10 tpbs per month. So 300 books and I can't get enough.

Im not jaded or burnt out like many, i dont mind and even enjoy confusing, ambiguous stories... I dont need simple stories. Again go read a mini if thats what you like.

Who knows tho maybe once ive read for 15 or 20 years like many vets here... well maybe I'll be jaded too...

For now I'm enjoying things

[The no face guy]

What do they accomplish other than piss people off and confuse people? They don't really simplify thinks all that much, in fact with a lot of characters it makes them more convoluted.

The rock-solid characters like Batman and Superman can survive pretty much anything, so they would be fine reboot or not. Thus, I fail to see how reboots benefit them any. Minor characters, on the other hand, can and alot of times are, seriously wrecked by reboots. I really hate when a character is humming along just fine or is actually peaking in popularity, and all of a sudden they decide to reboot, and the character comes back a shadow of his of herself. A few characters are actually enhanced by the fresh continuity, but to me it seems like they are far outnumbered by the characters that come out of the reboot damaged in someway.

I completely agree with your sentiment, the big three are for the most part untouchable, but the secondary and minor characters we love are often negatively affected by reboots or cataclysmic DC events.

Unfortunately at the end of the day comic books are about making money, and it's big events like Crisis, or reboots that tend to generate high sales, and because every new generation of comic fans want their own big Crisis storyline, you can probably be guaranteed they will continue, so long as DC and Marvel are still in business.

[married guy]

As a jaded older reader, I now avoid all events or crossovers like the plague.
I have been burned too many times.

Genesis
Day of Judgement
War of the Gods
Countdown
Metal
No Justice
Event Leviathan
Doomsday Clock

Ultimately, none of them amounted to anything, indeed a couple didn't even offer an ending!!! That's the WORST trend of the event books - they simply give half a story which leads into the next big craptacular series.
What I ask is, if you're going to give me a big 'event' mini series - give me a complete story that actually justifies it's telling with a beginning, a middle and an end.
Not too much to ask is it??

[Sergard]

I started reading comics because of New52. I don't think I would have given comics even a chance without this kind of fresh starting point.
And looking back at the post-crisis history, I can say without a doubt that there would have been nothing to hold my interest. All the characters I like nowadays were either in a very bad place back then or didn't even exist. Not everything about New52 is bad, and not everything about post- or pre-crisis was good.

[Digifiend]

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.

I kind of agree there. New 52 (which would obviously be called something else, let's say DC Prime, due to the reality being called Prime Earth) should've been like the Ultimate Universe (and be named accordingly). A dozen titles showing new origins, while the majority of the old line continues. The books I have in mind are Superman, Batman, Teen Titans, Justice League, Wonder Woman, Green Lantern, Aquaman, Flash, Batgirl, Superboy, Shazam, and Earth-2. They'd be pretty much as happened in New 52 (for the first couple of years anyway, before old stuff started getting reintroduced such as the extended bat family) with a couple of exceptions - for example, Batgirl wouldn't need an implant to walk, because she was never crippled, Killing Joke never happened. Green Lantern is the one book that would not be what happened in New 52, that would instead be the New Earth GL story, and DC Prime Green Lantern would reboot one of them (the reason for this is that GL never really rebooted in New 52).

There'd be a big contrast in some books. DC Prime Batgirl would be Babs, New Earth Batgirl would still be Stephanie Brown. DC Prime Green Lantern would be one hero's origin, New Earth GL would feature the Corps. Teen Titans and Justice League would use different lineups in the two universes. Robin would be Dick Grayson in Prime (Tim would still exist, but as Red Robin, meaning New 52 TT is unaffected), but Damian Wayne in the old continuity.

[Jim Kelly]

I feel like the management at D.C. took advantage of the Crisis event and its aftermath to push out certain editors, writers and artists and bring in new ones. The hand wave to continuity was part of that, since the new people didn't need to know anything about the characters or their histories and could just make up new stuff as they pleased.

What I had loved about a lot of comics--from both D.C. and Marvel--was the way that a new creative team could take an existing story and extrapolate something new from it. But you have to have a familiarity with and love for the established work to do that. Once the newbies don't need to do the homework--origins, costumes, characters don't matter.

[Adekis]

In the famous "interminable ramble" that preceded his "Twilight of the Superheroes" pitch, Alan Moore himself did say that the likes of Crisis type line-wide crossovers would risk the eventual “greater acts of debasement in order to attract reader attention, more deaths to appease the arena crowd element of the fan marketplace, eventually degenerating into a geek show,” which is... pretty much what happened.

He also warned that the concept of reboots might lead to “the sensation that the stories they are currently reading are of less significance or moment because, after all, at some point ten years in the future some comic book omnipotent, be it an editor or the Spectre, can go back in time and erase the whole slate, ready to start again,” and that seems pretty on the nose too.

Now of course in the likes of Doomsday Clock, Geoff Johns seems to think the endless onslaught of reboots is inevitable, and that we're all better off just accepting it and going with it, and while I can't say I like that much, I also don't see much reason to think he's actually wrong about that inevitability.

[godisawesome]

It depends on what objectives you’re looking at.

As an immediate boost to sales and as an attempt to create a good starting point for new readers to jump onto if they wish, I’d say both COIE and New 52 were successes. That is, however, a short term objective, and requires much more work overall to guarantee long term investment by a new reader from that starting point on, and as numerous readers can tell you, there’s no guarantee that a book produced with new continuity will hold onto new readers better than a book with old continuity (see: the Superman books.)

If you’re goal was to de-clutter and streamline the entire franchise so that anyone could easily summarize everything and so that there were no “redundancies”... both are failures, but that objective in an of itself is flawed, and was never really held to even by editorial either. “Clutter” is the stuff people use to create long term investment, and inevitably you’ll have someone who wants to expand franchises with new creations, which will inevitably had some “redundancy” if viewed in a banal and broad fashion. And in the same way that COIE trying to eliminate other Kryptonians led to first a glut of pseudo-Kryptonians before collapsing back into real Kryptonians returning, the New 52’s horror at multiple Titans teams and legacy characters eventually collapsed into letting them return as well... and COIE marked the birth of Wally West as a continuity-heavy premise for the Flash, and the New 52 not only kept the Green Lanterns, but tried to expand them even more.

And if your goal was to create a more beneficial and useful canvas on which creators could work towards higher quality stories... both are only viewable in specific details for an honest evaluation, and on a holistic level have their success more dependent on personnel and good fortune than on the “reboot” concept.:

-Batman, for instance, benefitted from *some* reboot aspects of COIE... but they were applied rather sparingly for the most part, with Jason Todd being the biggest instance of outright rebooting, and everything else being more of a “retelling” instead of a reboot. The delineation between Pre-Crisis and Post-Crisis was more useful in illuminating areas where you could seek old things to repackage. The New 52 was closer to harmful than good... but that’s primarily because of the impact it had on the family around him, where less clambake writers and editors tried to fix what wasn’t broke about the Bat-Family.
-Flash and Green Lantern mostly use the COIE point as just a demarcation for new creative teams and focus - the retellings they had there are similar to Batman’s and both wound up being none-the-worse for wear. The New 52, meanwhile, somewhat shot-up the Flash into greater inconsistency on an already inconsistent book, and sparked a generation war, while Green Lantern again slipped through without much changes.
-Superman and Wonder Woman are arguably unique cases: the COIE stuff was a benefit in terms of the creative teams around that time having success... but suffered some long term aftershocks from old concepts people wanted back, and both were frankly already in a cycle of rebooting even before the New 52 came around.


In general... I think the more egregious and overwrought a reboot is, particularly if it all happens at once, the less useful and fertile it is for later long term investment. The “sweet spot,” so to speak, is to have a “relaunch” point friendly to new readers, but not unnecessarily antagonistic to old ones, and to allow for *some* changes to continuity if a trusted creative team has a plan...but to not require continuity changes either.

There is a,ways room for a little housekeeping, always some room for a reimagining, and always room for relaunches to attract new readers... but you don’t have to clean out the entire house, reimagining everything immediately, and sometimes new readers are better attracted strategically in a piecemeal manner rather than in a massive wave of repackaged ideas.

[krazijoe]

I don't think a lot of people gave the New 52 a chance. And I don't think DC did enough hashing out of history not telling good stories.

[scary harpy]

What do they accomplish other than piss people off and confuse people? They don't really simplify thinks all that much, in fact with a lot of characters it makes them more convoluted.

The rock-solid characters like Batman and Superman can survive pretty much anything, so they would be fine reboot or not. Thus, I fail to see how reboots benefit them any. Minor characters, on the other hand, can and alot of times are, seriously wrecked by reboots. I really hate when a character is humming along just fine or is actually peaking in popularity, and all of a sudden they decide to reboot, and the character comes back a shadow of his of herself. A few characters are actually enhanced by the fresh continuity, but to me it seems like they are far outnumbered by the characters that come out of the reboot damaged in someway.

I completely agree with your sentiment, the big three are for the most part untouchable, but the secondary and minor characters we love are often negatively affected by reboots or cataclysmic DC events.

Unfortunately at the end of the day comic books are about making money, and it's big events like Crisis, or reboots that tend to generate high sales, and because every new generation of comic fans want their own big Crisis storyline, you can probably be guaranteed they will continue, so long as DC and Marvel are still in business.

Agreed. (But the sales don't last...)

As a jaded older reader, I now avoid all events or crossovers like the plague.
I have been burned too many times.

Genesis
Day of Judgement
War of the Gods
Countdown
Metal
No Justice
Event Leviathan
Doomsday Clock

Ultimately, none of them amounted to anything, indeed a couple didn't even offer an ending!!! That's the WORST trend of the event books - they simply give half a story which leads into the next big craptacular series.
What I ask is, if you're going to give me a big 'event' mini series - give me a complete story that actually justifies it's telling with a beginning, a middle and an end.
Not too much to ask is it??

Agreed!

I kind of agree there. New 52 (which would obviously be called something else, let's say DC Prime, due to the reality being called Prime Earth) should've been like the Ultimate Universe (and be named accordingly). A dozen titles showing new origins, while the majority of the old line continues. The books I have in mind are Superman, Batman, Teen Titans, Justice League, Wonder Woman, Green Lantern, Aquaman, Flash, Batgirl, Superboy, Shazam, and Earth-2. They'd be pretty much as happened in New 52 (for the first couple of years anyway, before old stuff started getting reintroduced such as the extended bat family) with a couple of exceptions - for example, Batgirl wouldn't need an implant to walk, because she was never crippled, Killing Joke never happened. Green Lantern is the one book that would not be what happened in New 52, that would instead be the New Earth GL story, and DC Prime Green Lantern would reboot one of them (the reason for this is that GL never really rebooted in New 52).

There'd be a big contrast in some books. DC Prime Batgirl would be Babs, New Earth Batgirl would still be Stephanie Brown. DC Prime Green Lantern would be one hero's origin, New Earth GL would feature the Corps. Teen Titans and Justice League would use different lineups in the two universes. Robin would be Dick Grayson in Prime (Tim would still exist, but as Red Robin, meaning New 52 TT is unaffected), but Damian Wayne in the old continuity.

What should have been.

In the famous "interminable ramble" that preceded his "Twilight of the Superheroes" pitch, Alan Moore himself did say that the likes of Crisis type line-wide crossovers would risk the eventual “greater acts of debasement in order to attract reader attention, more deaths to appease the arena crowd element of the fan marketplace, eventually degenerating into a geek show,” which is... pretty much what happened.

He also warned that the concept of reboots might lead to “the sensation that the stories they are currently reading are of less significance or moment because, after all, at some point ten years in the future some comic book omnipotent, be it an editor or the Spectre, can go back in time and erase the whole slate, ready to start again,” and that seems pretty on the nose too.

Now of course in the likes of Doomsday Clock, Geoff Johns seems to think the endless onslaught of reboots is inevitable, and that we're all better off just accepting it and going with it, and while I can't say I like that much, I also don't see much reason to think he's actually wrong about that inevitability.

Moore was right...and now so is Johns.

The point of these big continuity revamps and reboots is to get attention and bring in new readers. In that respect, both Crisis and the New 52 succeeded. Unfortunately, they both failed to address the secondary reason for these events, which was to simplify continuity for new readers.

It's easy in retrospect to understand where these two reboots screwed up, they shouldn't have tried to contradict so many of the major events that had become pillars of the shared history that shaped these characters. DC didn't need to have Byrne erase Superman's entire history for his revamp to work. He just needed to tweak all the stuff that need updating, ignore the stuff that didn't and move on with telling new exciting stories. Erasing Superboy and Supergirl and completely rewriting Krypton was unnecessary. 90% of the stories Byrne and Wolfman did could have worked just as well with the broad strokes of the old continuity. The same goes for Perez's Wonder Woman. There was nothing that Perez did that needed those early stories to be taking place in the present, just as there was no reason to do it with Hawkworld. Relocating the JSA to the same Earth as the modern heroes also didn't need to be a problem. Simply have the JSA remember their old lives on Earth-2 (along with their Superman, Batman & Wonder Woman), but understand that they are anomalies in time.

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.

wow. Great Post. So sad to think of what could have been.