What's up with DC editorial regarding WW? Is another reboot on the horizon?

[WonderLight789]

Are editors still going to get in the way in every run, and be the rock that prevents Diana and her wordl from having a clear direction and character development?

Are they going to reboot all over again? I just can't understand why DC can't allow Diana to settle. Feels like her runs nowadays are just going through the motion. Not enough of her personality and goals are shown. Not enough of her emotions are shown. Her powers don't get to shine in big ways either. Too much sword and shield. The same problem is there for her villains, who rarely get treated with respect.

Is there any hope that the future of this book can be better? Or are we stuck in mediocre and soft reboot runs for all eternity? Share your opinion and if you can, please give me some hope.

[Gaius]

Honestly, this is how I feel about the general direction of most DC books at the moment outside of a handful, though yeah it feels particularly noticeable with Wonder Woman since Rucka left and in light of the success of the movie.

[Largo161]

I don’t even keep up with DC’s plans but I think it’s safe to say another reboot is on the horizon. Another reboot is always on the horizon. It’s the business model these days. Goose comic book sales every couple of years with a new status quo and a bunch of new number ones.

[Vordan]

I feel like they wouldn’t kick Orlando off if they didn’t plan on Tamaki being the next long term writer, but given she’s been brought on to do some movie synergy I don’t know if she’ll last beyond whatever DC has planned after Death Metal and Endless Winter.

[Tzigone]

I don’t even keep up with DC’s plans but I think it’s safe to say another reboot is on the horizon. Another reboot is always on the horizon. It’s the business model these days. Goose comic book sales every couple of years with a new status quo and a bunch of new number ones.

Absolutely true. It's the case for so many titles. I have mixed feelings about it. I like continuity, you have to understand. From the time I started reading comics in the mid 1990s until One More Day, I read only Marvel, because Marvel didn't reboot universes, and I'd head about Crisis. After One More Day, I quit reading Marvel. When I first got into DC a few years ago, I decided to stick only to pre-52 stuff because at least I'd know going in it was going to be erased, and not get attached to a new version and get it swiped out from under me. Was a failure on both accounts - got quite attached to both pre and post COI versions of certain characters* and ended up looking at some post-Rebirth stuff, too. But as much as I love a long history of continuity, there are two things that I have to admit. The first is that #1s, relaunches, resets, sell. The second is that I think continuity is such a mess right now that I don't know if anything can be done to successfully get it on track without at least some soft reboots.

I think the reboots and resets are going to end up driving me away from really caring about new comics, though. I'm not even sure it's a bad thing for DC. Devoted niche fanbases who love continuity really probably won't make as much money as broad, shallow audience of casual readers. The trick will be in capturing that segment. The totally-out-of-continuity OGNs will probably be better at it than the floppies. But I can't say I care about most of those**, because the characters often have so very little in common with the characters I loved. But then again, for casual and especially ever-changing audiences (as they once had in the old days), that's less of a concern. Don't know if the companies will pull it off. I'm really only interested in an academic sense - after all, if they aren't writing the stories I want to read, it doesn't really matter much to me in an emotional sense if the comics/characters keep getting published.



* Still avoiding pre-COIE Bea da Costa and Jason Todd for worry of getting attached to radically different versions, though.

** I do tend to like the idea of period pieces. Of Clark in the 1930s or Diana in the 1940s and that sort of thing. Of taking old norms and using a more modern storytelling method on them. Unfortunately, I'm often not fond of the "twist" everyone wants to add. I get why the twist is needed - too derivative, otherwise. But I guess derivative is what I'm looking for in a period piece - a story that would fit in the golden age continuity, but told in a modern way.

[Largo161]

Absolutely true. It's the case for so many titles. I have mixed feelings about it. I like continuity, you have to understand. From the time I started reading comics in the mid 1990s until One More Day, I read only Marvel, because Marvel didn't reboot universes, and I'd head about Crisis. After One More Day, I quit reading Marvel. When I first got into DC a few years ago, I decided to stick only to pre-52 stuff because at least I'd know going in it was going to be erased, and not get attached to a new version and get it swiped out from under me. Was a failure on both accounts - got quite attached to both pre and post COI versions of certain characters* and ended up looking at some post-Rebirth stuff, too. But as much as I love a long history of continuity, there are two things that I have to admit. The first is that #1s, relaunches, resets, sell. The second is that I think continuity is such a mess right now that I don't know if anything can be done to successfully get it on track without at least some soft reboots.

I don’t have mixed feelings about it. I think it sucks—in terms of the resulting quality of stories. These decades old properties are always going to have messy continuity. There is no way to satisfactorily explain why the characters don’t age in real time. They need to stop using these inescapable factors as an excuse for the constant resetting. But they won’t.

What’s really egregious is when they try to start with a clean slate, but then decide they want to re-incorporate things they have erased— only this time they’re going to “make it all make sense.”

[Sacred Knight]

Chances of a reboot are slim to none. Death Metal is supposed to try and "fix" continuity. The way they make it sound is that they want to take what they got now and try to make sense of it. Which they'll surely fail at as they always do when they tackle such endeavors. I don't know if that means she'll stay as the first superhero and tied to the JSA, that's up in the air considering it was originally a 5G idea and 5G is mostly dead. It can easily stay or go at this juncture. But they won't go the clean slate route again. Even though at this rate, I think they'd actually be better off doing it. I have no trust that they'll be able to make sense out of the trash heap that is current continuity.

[Pinsir]

I can't read another Wonder Woman origin story again, I've read so many and most have been produced in the past decade. It's so tedious...

[Mel Dyer]

If the WW comic had its own editors, there wouldn't be a need for all these bloody reboots and revisions. The part-time eds, presently assigned to WW - the Superman eds - manage or control Wonder-continuity, by forbidding new writers to give the comic a regular cast, permanent city and other important story elements to keep up with.

This comic needs some full-time, committed editing...not another reboot.

And Purple Rottweilers. Wonder Dog.

[DisneyBoy]

....wait.....so the 5G concept is dead? I thought they were just about to roll it out...it happened already..?

[kjn]

If the WW comic had its own editors, there wouldn't be a need for all these bloody reboots and revisions. The part-time eds, presently assigned to WW - the Superman eds - manage or control Wonder-continuity, by forbidding new writers to give the comic a regular cast, permanent city and other important story elements to keep up with.

This comic needs some full-time, committed editing...not another reboot.

Editors usually work on several titles or books. Always have, always will.

I don't care if the editor of Wonder Woman also edits Superman or Batman or Uncle Scrooge or Archie or Real Erotic Adventures, as long as they do a good job as editors.

[Vordan]

....wait.....so the 5G concept is dead? I thought they were just about to roll it out...it happened already..?

Rumors are that it may be relegated to an imprint, but it won’t be the mainline anymore with Didio gone.

[Tzigone]

I don’t have mixed feelings about it. I think it sucks—in terms of the resulting quality of stories. These decades old properties are always going to have messy continuity. There is no way to satisfactorily explain why the characters don’t age in real time. They need to stop using these inescapable factors as an excuse for the constant resetting. But they won’t.

I have no problem with characters not aging real-time. Timeslide is fine, and easily understood by fans. Works much better for those who's origins are not so pegged to specific real-world events, I admit. I'm not talking about the issues that arise from it being decades old. I'm talking about the ones that arise from 2011 and onwards. It's been a complete mess. They can't decide what they want in continuity or not. And they Rebirth dragged on way too long (with continuity in flux and us getting different stories of how old characters were or what did or didn't happen in the past). The when it was supposed to be resolved, nothing was resolved and it's still a mess where we don't know what did and didn't happen. Then they decided on 5G -deeply disliked the setup, but they started putting it in the world, only to pull back and stop after it was partially done, leaving continuity even more of a mess.

I mean, the issues are older than that. Even if the direct post-COIE time doesn't count, in the mid-2000s, they started bringing back more pre-COIE stuff even if it contradicted more recent post-COIE stuff. And Donna, like a couple others, kept getting rewritten history even before that. But it really kicked up around Rebirth time, at latest. And I like Rebirth better than pre-Rebirth 52. But the execution has been an absolute mess. There seems to have been no framework setup for what did and didn't happen, no willingness to keep writers using the same version of history. Once decisions were made (many I admittedly think were bad), they weren't adhered to.

[Dr. Poison]

I don't think we'll get a reboot but I do think DC will relaunch most, if not all, of it's main universe titles after Death Metal is over with a spotlight on the "fixed continuity".

[Ascended]

....wait.....so the 5G concept is dead? I thought they were just about to roll it out...it happened already..?

Honestly? Nobody knows for sure. 5G was the plan under Didio, and it involved a long timeline starting in the late 30's or early 40's and stretching out into the 21st century. There's mountains of rumor but damn little that we know for a fact, beyond Diana being the first hero and the JSA existing alongside her. Didio showed off a WiP timeline at a con a while back and you can make out some details of it, though it was still a WiP, not final product.

We *know* that AT&T supported the plan, at least in the broad strokes, because they saw adaptation potential in it. We *know* that some creators disagreed with the idea. And we know that since Didio has left, the original 5G plans, whatever they were, have been changed. We don't know what was changed or how big the changes are. Current rumor says 5G will be a imprint, like a Batman Beyond near-future type thing, but that's just rumor. The only 5G things we know for fact is that Diana was the first hero, and Jay Garrick was around in WWII, and we only know this because WW and Flash 750 released before Didio got fired and the pandemic hit.

As for a reboot....we're getting one. That's been the endgame since 2016 and the start of Rebirth; continuity/history is broken, the heroes will have to fix it. Whether you want to call that a reboot or just a large scale retcon or whatever, the end result will be that continuity will be different than it is now, and supposedly Metal 2 is the book that will do this. As far as what continuity will look like.....Snyder (or someone) has called it an Anti-Crisis, where reality gets fixed instead of broken apart, and creators have talked about a "everything counts" approach. So if I had to guess, that extended timeline is still in play, with Diana as the first hero and the JSA following her, though I suspect the details will have changed greatly from Didio's plan and the odds of all the major heroes being replaced (another common 5G rumor) won't happen, at least in most cases.

What all that means for Diana.....who the hell knows? We've got a new publisher, Diana is getting that movie sequel.....it's clear that Didio and 5G intended on making Diana a bigger deal and I think Lee would be foolish to drop that effort but we really haven't seen what DC will look like under Lee yet; we're still living in Didio's DC Comics. But if I had to place a bet, I'd put money on Diana getting better treatment going forward. And one would assume that improved consistency will be a part of that.

I would be.....cautiously optimistic about DC post-Metal 2. Very, very cautious....but optimistic. I think we have a legit opportunity here to see real improvements, but whether those actually happen or not? Time will tell.