2015 "Crisis" Event to begin with "Love Letter" to DC fans

[AlexanderLuthor]

This along with Multiversity should establish the the old versions of the hero's are still out there on few of these New 52 Earths. There is no need to reboot just show that these characters from both Pre Crisis and Pre Flashpoint still exist and can be revisited from time to time.

I think that would solve so many problems with fans not being happy. Everyone wins.

Exactly. It seems like this thread is just a rehash of 10 before it. DC is NOT doing another full reboot for a long time and I would say that the Multiverse makes it likely they never do another one again. It seems the idea is completely driven by people who are still pissed about the New 52 and want to say I told you so. Sales are up, the New 52 is a success and DC is doing much better than they were in 2010-11. They are constantly referencing pre-52 stories recently as having happened in the 5 year gap, so a lot of the old universe has come back even if things happened differently

[scary harpy]

Exactly. It seems like this thread is just a rehash of 10 before it. DC is NOT doing another full reboot for a long time and I would say that the Multiverse makes it likely they never do another one again. It seems the idea is completely driven by people who are still pissed about the New 52 and want to say I told you so. Sales are up, the New 52 is a success and DC is doing much better than they were in 2010-11. They are constantly referencing pre-52 stories recently as having happened in the 5 year gap, so a lot of the old universe has come back even if things happened differently

Maybe not a reboot but why not a refresh in 2015 the anniversary OF COIE? In just a few years, they have accumulated some junk. Why not lose it?

By the way, I like the new 52. I'd like a newer 52 in 2015.

[FlashEarthOne]

Exactly. It seems like this thread is just a rehash of 10 before it. DC is NOT doing another full reboot for a long time and I would say that the Multiverse makes it likely they never do another one again. It seems the idea is completely driven by people who are still pissed about the New 52 and want to say I told you so. Sales are up, the New 52 is a success and DC is doing much better than they were in 2010-11. They are constantly referencing pre-52 stories recently as having happened in the 5 year gap, so a lot of the old universe has come back even if things happened differently

Hard to argue against that...

[Cmbmool]

No, and they won't do another line-wide reboot for awhile. It's just too exhausting on the creative staff.

What you CAN expect to see soon is a blurring of the lines, though. Fortunately, DC has been doing that since the start of the New 52, which is what they've already done many times after a Crisis event. There's never been a line that said "This is old, this is new". It's always a blurred reality with remains of old stories mixed into new ones. The New 52 is only new because the name says it is.

If DC would have kept all the old designs and just transplanted them into these new stories, people would just be considering this another Post-Crisis continuity shakeup and not a "new continuity", which it is not. No one called it a 'reboot' when Zero Hour shortened Batman's history back to 10 years, from 15. No one called Infinite Crisis a reboot when it changed Batman's origin with Joe Chill or made Wonder Woman a founding member of the Justice League, removing Black Canary.

A reboot would have been completely wiping all histories and starting every story at Year One. DC would never do that to the entire line, which is why they call the New 52 a title relaunch and correct people who call it a reboot in interviews.

The big difference going into 2015 is that DC now knows what worked and what didn't work. Histories will be laid bare and ideas that didn't work will be traded out in favor of better ones. There will be less of DC shoving new continuity down our throats after we say we didn't like it. Johns is especially going to be treading over old water.

One big example of this is Martian Manhunter. When the New 52 started, he was a League antagonist and a frightening member of Stormwatch. When Johns saw how ugly it was, he changed it. Note how the stories have given no reason for J'onn's past animosity for the League, nor have they shown what resolved it. J'onn is simply a member of the larger Justice League family, with a good relationship to the others, without any suggestion it was ever anything different. The recent DOOMED story with Superman actually treats J'onn as a close friend of Superman's, which feels right for the character. Johns even created a work-around that makes J'onn a founding member, although no longer fully active with the 'charter members'. He fought Starro, he fought Despero in the Chess game, and he was a member of the group when David Graves named them the Justice League.

The difference between the Zero Hour and Infinitie Crisis changes and the changes Flashpoint and COIE created, was that in the former, it was replacing/correcting what came before while in the later it was given the entire world a reborn status.

Also just HOW IS IT That the Martian Manhunter is seen as a "Friendly" in the New 52 given his antagonist style against his former Justice League founding members ?

I'm still upset that Johns change things and didn't even hinted at what happen to them in the New 52. I mean what would happen IF SOME CHARACTERS RECALLED THE FORMER PRE-NEW 52 WORLD ?

[Tenzel Kim]

By the way, if they really desire to change something in New52, they will already know by March 2015. And the plans will be already set in motion. It is frankly impossible that the "band-aid" miniseries will "decide" something crucial.

I agree that it won't decide anything so crucial. However, if those books show extremely strong sales then we might see more of the pre-New 52 elements creep back into the DC Universe. I highly doubt we'll see another reboot anytime soon either, but just as we saw post-COIE they did start to sneak in more and more elements from the pre-COIE universe as time went on.

Personally, I have to admit I haven't been too impressed with the New 52 reboot. I believe DC went about it in the wrong way and that it is very likely that originally a much smaller reboot had been planned, which is why we saw a lot of last minute changes in the beginning. They had a plan of doing a reboot of some sort but at the last minute it was decided that it wasn't big enough. A bit more prep time and I actually believe they could have ended up with a product that was much better than what we got. And I'm not saying that it has all been bad. As with any era in DC history there has been good and bad.

When I first heard of the reboot and remembered Didio's comments about getting back to the core of the characters or the icon or however it was he phrased it, I actually think he was on to something if he wanted to do a large scale reboot. Take each character and see what it is that made him or her popular. Not just in comics but in other media as well. Instead of giving us the Teen Titans book we got I would have expected they took some cues from the Young Justice cartoon and incorporated them into the reboot. That they took some cues from the upcoming Arrow tv-series and incorporated them. I don't believe Arrow had aired yet at that point so they didn't know it it would be a success so tying the comic too closely might have been a gamble, but so was what they did and I'm surprised they thought that was an improvement over what we had before. And they could have held that book off a bit to see how Arrow did.

DC did bring in a lot of new readers at the beginning of the New 52 but aside from the Batman books we've seen a lot of those readers dropping the books again. Yes, sales are still above what they had before the reboot but considering how many new readers they had at the very beginning I don't think they see what they have now as quite the success they had hoped for.

And speaking of sales, yes, the sales ARE still better but I don't think the numbers are that easily comparable. At least not if you want to make it into a discussion about which universe sold best. The whole publication plan is a lot different now than what it was before the reboot. They managed to increase the sales on the Batman books by quite a bit and because of that we've seen an upswing in Batman-related books. We've seen a major upswing in the number of variant covers offered on the book, the number of events haven't really gone down and at least in the beginning they were much faster to cancel and replace low selling books than they were prior to the reboot.

It is hard to say what the pre-reboot sales would have looked like had they used the same publishing strategies they are using now and had simply made a "Marvel NOW-style" relaunch of the books instead of an actual reboot. Despite the fact that there have been changes books like Aquaman which is doing quite well doesn't seem like it got there because it was vastly different from the direction Johns was taking the character in Brightest Day. Swamp Thing, while it did go in a different direction and did end up rebooting a bit, also pretty much followed up upon what had been set up in Brightest Day. So were these books successful because they had been "rebooted" or simply because they got a lot of exposure because of the the whole New 52 campaign? Had DC done a relaunch instead of a reboot and given it as much media coverage would we have seen a much different result than what we got? The first couple of months probably couldn't have been achieved with a mere relaunch but I'm not so sure we'd be in a much different place two-three year in.

As a long-time DC fan from before COIE I too mourned the loss of the Multiverse, but personally I'd still argue there was a big difference between what they did back then and what they did with the New 52 reboot. Yes, we lost the Multiverse but for the most part DC tried to incorporate as much as they could from those alternate Earths into the new combined universe. It tried to be inclusive and tried to make those old stories matter and be a part of the new DC Universe in some way. Instead of pushing the old characters aside they made them part of the overall history. Sure, we didn't get to see much of the JSA for quite a while after the Crisis but their legacy had become an important element in the new DC Universe fabric. With the New 52 we didn't get the same sense of inclusion and I think that's what really ticked off a lot of older readers. They didn't feel like they got a proper send-off for "their" characters and the long history of the DC Universe was no longer of any importance.

Personally I was a bit sad that once they had decided to reboot they didn't go all-in. That they didn't reboot the Batman and Green Lantern franchises as well. Sure they were some of their best sellers pre-reboot, but Batman has "always" been one of their best sellers and I don't think it would really have made much of a difference to the success of the Batman books had they gone full reboot. They could still start five years into the new continuity and start filling in the void as they went along. There was really no need to reference pre-reboot storylines. Just go with the core of the Batman character and move ahead. Refrain from referencing pre-reboot stories and simply move on telling new ones instead. Green Lantern had a lot of world-building going on before the reboot and I understand why they wouldn't want to see that go. But did they need to? Did they need to reference pre-reboot storylines to have the Red Lanterns appear? Or could they simply have decided that they were part of the new package they wanted to sell us. Simply have the Red Lanterns etc. be there from the beginning and move from there.

DC should have learned from the problems they ran into post-COIE and avoided them this time around, but unfortunately by not doing a full reboot on all books they end up having to deal with some of the same problems they had to deal with post-COIE. The fact that they have made the books cross-referencing each other even more is not necessarily a good thing either, as it only help bringing continuity-problems to the forefront for those of us who care about such things. While it helps making the shared universe feel shared too much of it can easily result in giving you more continuity problems than "needed". With the New 52 we got something much like what we saw during the Countdown series where a lot of books were referenced in the first half of the series and if you sat down to actually look at the continuity of the books being referenced you'd soon find it just didn't add up. The same goes for the New 52. However, just as with Countdown it does give the illusion that everything fits to the casual reader and as long as the problems don't become too big or too apparent then there's no real need to worry. But having some books closely reference pre-reboot universe stories is not the best way of keeping the problems at bay.

Anyway, I don't believe DC is about to reboot again anytime soon. If anything we might see some pre-reboot elements creep back in but it will be something that happens slowly and not in one big stroke. If they find some characters or books that don't perform as well as they expect they might be more inclined to let creators bring back elements from the pre-reboot universe. Hopefully they will do so without actually referencing the old stories and simply let them slowly blend in. Actually it seems to me that the new Johns/Romita Jr. Superman is doing just that. We get some of the elements back that a lot of people felt were missing from the new Superman books. It seems to me that this is a more classic take on Superman than what we've gotten under Lobdell for instance.