Gail Simone answers questions about the New 52

[Dataweaver]

You can also see that in terms of the ending of Brightest Day, which was clearly setting up what was intended to come next. Then New 52 happened, and nearly all of that got jettisoned.

[John Venus]

The Nu52 was just wholly unnecessary. There was nothing in the previous universe that couldn't have been fixed with a line wide relaunch mixed with some continuity patches. What's sad is that the reboot couldn't even fix characters that they are meant to fix like Hawkman and Donna Troy.

[John Venus]

I suspect another reason for the reboot was to make the line more 'adaptation friendly'. The reboot coincided with the success of Avengers 2012 which proved Marvel's success in the shared cinematic universe formula which resulted in Hollywood 'gold rush' where everybody tried to launch their own cinematic universe. The execs wanted to mine these characters for adaptations but they had no real knowledge about them, what made them work or any of that, the Nu52 was Didio trying to streamline characters into easily understandable and adaptable entities. What's funny is that Marvel had already shown how you could do that a decade prior, since part of the reason why they launched the Ultimate Universe was to serve as a story board for how an Avengers movie could look like.

[Primal Slayer]

It was just Didios way of getting rid of half of their popular characters and rebooting it to simpler times where Barbara was Batgirl.

[Dataweaver]

A DC equivalent of an Ultimate Universe would be cool; and with DDC's “archive Earths” notion, I could in principle see N52 being relaunched as such. I have my doubts that it would succeed, mind you; but a lot of where N52 went wrong was that it wasn't a separate Earth; we were told to take all of these changes as the new DCU, rather than as an alternate take on it, which meant that when characters and history were outright deleted, their fans were up in arms in ways that they wouldn't have been if it was “merely” another Earth.

[John Venus]

It was just Didios way of getting rid of half of their popular characters and rebooting it to simpler times where Barbara was Batgirl.

Yep. That was a big part of it. But with Suicide Squad and JLD I felt they were also trying to show how these characters could be adapted on screen and nearly all of the DCEU movie draw heavily from the Nu52.

[John Venus]

A DC equivalent of an Ultimate Universe would be cool; and with DDC's “archive Earths” notion, I could in principle see N52 being relaunched as such. I have my doubts that it would succeed, mind you; but a lot of where N52 went wrong was that it wasn't a separate Earth; we were told to take all of these changes as the new DCU, rather than as an alternate take on it, which meant that when characters and history were outside deleted, their fans were up in arms in ways that they wouldn't have been if it was “merely” another Earth.

I always thought Birthright could have been the start of an 'Ultimate' style universe of the DCU.

The Kingdom Come universe is another for an Earth 2 type world where the heroes have grown old and the new generation took over. I still see people making fanart of Nightstar and Ibn Al Xu'ffasch from that series.

[Dataweaver]

And the Earth One series, if it hadn't become a set of vanity projects with an incredibly sparse production rate, could also have become a DC Ultimate Universe.

[John Venus]

I think only Wonder Woman: Earth One could make that formatting work. Although it felt more like 'All Star Wonder Woman' than an Earth One book. The rest of them felt like they would have worked better as ongoings.

[Dataweaver]

Exactly. And had they been ongoings, that would have been an Ultimate Universe.

[superduperman]

Earth One WAS supposed to be their Ultimates line but it was so sporadic that it didn't quite work out. To some degree the creators were given TOO much creative freedom. They were all supposed to be on the same Earth. But the GL book kind of threw that out. And the WW books made that official. For all intents and purposes their "map of the multiverse" is meaningless now.

[Dataweaver]

In some ways, the opposite of the problem that N52 had; in other ways, exactly the same problem.

[Primal Slayer]

This has always been DCs problem. They throw caution to the wind and have never have a clear goal or endgame. Truly building up a new world through OGNs wouldve been fun. They have this Multiverse/Omniverse that is fairly useless and just an excuse to do whatever and call it a day.

[superduperman]

I think it's obvious what this trending means: THAT DC IS TOTALLY BRINGING BACK THE NEW 52!!!! IT'S OFFICIALLY CONFIRMED THAT THE NEW 52 WILL BECOME OFFICIAL CONTINUITY AGAIN!!!! and there's no other way to interpret this!

[Dataweaver]

Considering that the bulk of the people responsible for it got canned, I highly doubt it's making a comeback. Though again, if we were to get an Earth 52 imprint (i.e., the New 52 as a separate Earth), I'd be willing to check it out. Judging it in its own merits, and not as the DCU — and handled by the current crop of writers and editors instead of the ones that made a mess of it — it might be interesting.

Also, you have an interesting definition of “officially confirmed”.