Should We New52 Superman Fans Resign Ourselves to SuperDad, and, if so, How?

[BeefBourguignon]

This massive boost to the constant negativity here is surprising to me. Have you not known for over a month now that New 52 Superman was dying and being replaced by pre-Flashpoint Supermn by the time of Rebirth? Why is it shocking now?

[DieHard200904]

Yeah, but Earth-22 was against living in a gritty world, which is why he's a favorite Superman of mine.

[Ascended]

I call it growing out of them. Frankly, if all they need is to obsess over continuity and making convoluted history, then that is where I really don't care much for it.

I call it "shifting to the indies where there is still quality."

Its not that I am growing out of comics (though Im old enough perhaps I should), its that mainstream comics suck now. I find myself reading more Image and Dark Horse every year, and fewer DC and Marvel titles. With Rebirth, I think I might end up just reading Wonder Woman and Harley Quinn because my wife wont give those up without a Finch-level of awful (she's super excited about Rucka's return). The few things I was looking forward to at DC have been completely overshadowed by the pile of crap they're throwing out there (especially in regards to Superman). If I read DC books at all after next week, it'll be through trade waiting, I think.

[adrikito]

This massive boost to the constant negativity here is surprising to me. Have you not known for over a month now that New 52 Superman was dying and being replaced by pre-Flashpoint Supermn by the time of Rebirth? Why is it shocking now?

because it seemed temporary.. not like now.

[DieHard200904]

I call it "shifting to the indies where there is still quality."

Its not that I am growing out of comics (though Im old enough perhaps I should), its that mainstream comics suck now. I find myself reading more Image and Dark Horse every year, and fewer DC and Marvel titles. With Rebirth, I think I might end up just reading Wonder Woman and Harley Quinn because my wife wont give those up without a Finch-level of awful (she's super excited about Rucka's return). The few things I was looking forward to at DC have been completely overshadowed by the pile of crap they're throwing out there (especially in regards to Superman). If I read DC books at all after next week, it'll be through trade waiting, I think.

Oh, I don't think I will totally grow out of them, I might find something to gift to my children and share it. Heck, the character of Supreme by Alan Moore for Image Comics is pretty much the way Superman was during the Bronze/Silver Age. And honestly that passing it down to my kids is a legacy activity for me. I see comic books as something that I enjoy like I enjoy watching some animated flicks, or Legos with the kids, I won't say that no, I am not too old enough to touch it or be entertained by it, but I don't expect it too be too much directed at me, I hope it's also focused on the teens and would not mind passing something down if necessary. Some fanfiction of these characters by some of the posters on these boards is interesting too, sometimes more than the mainstream comics themselves. I just think character focus is a key aspect that the big guys lose for the sake of continuity nitpicking.

[DragonPiece]

This massive boost to the constant negativity here is surprising to me. Have you not known for over a month now that New 52 Superman was dying and being replaced by pre-Flashpoint Supermn by the time of Rebirth? Why is it shocking now?

I would blame the final days of superman comic weekly giving them hope something would change and there would be a plot twist plus them not saying upfront...either way, there are a lot of be who accepted this, but the most vocal people speak the loudest.

[Patrick Gerard]

because it seemed temporary.. not like now.

You know, there were people who said it wasn't temporary then. I was at Wondercon and everywhere from the DC booth to the far corners of the show where the indies were, the word from everybody was, "I don't think this is temporary."

CBR by virtue of how CBR can be with its appreciation threads and maybe a certain degree of conflict aversion tends to create echo chambers. People don't really, well... duke it out here the way they might on Bleedingcool or Reddit or Facebook, even. And Facebook is an echo chamber machine in a lot of ways on politics or fandom. But maybe CBR in an attempt to be kind of a fan mecca tends to reinforce unrealistic positions. I've been around here over ten years and the more conflict averse the place becomes, the more removed I generally see expectations from reality.

Right now, it seems to me like folks who are fans of this change seem especially timid in some of the threads. Nobody's running around crowing about this. I think it's because CBR tends to start from a place of promoting civility and unity with fellow fans and downplaying controversy. I don't think that's the rest of the internet... And I also don't exactly think it's what publishers want, or at least EXPECT.

Books sell when fans are passionate. Maybe anything just shy of the HEAT stuff from Green Lantern in the 90s is what a lot of folks at the publishers WANT. And I think maybe places like CBR unintentionally work contrary to what publishers would like to see by trying to cool those passions and creating safe spaces for every set of views.

And in some ways, I think you can trace that as a story of the comics industry ever since the web got big. On a certain level, look, publishers want to troll for fan fights. You think Mark Millar had Captain America call Iron Man a "pampered punk" because he thought that was a reasonable and defensible evolution of continuity? I don't think so. He did it because he wanted people duking it out on the internet. And when comic sites have a poor handle on moderating that, comic sales increase, year over year. And the more successful the internet fandom is at moderating and policing and creating a culture that avoids those fights, the worse sales get.

This is a medium going back to the 30s, at least, that exists to troll the audience. And if you see all the Super-Dickery Superman covers on the internet, it's never that Superman was a jerk. It's that they sold a ton of books making you think Superman was being a jerk and then if you read the comic, there would be some kind of possibly logical, possibly contrived excuse for why whatever you saw on the cover wasn't a jerk-y thing to do. In short? Trolling. Or you'd have comics with these insane images like Jimmy Olsen marrying a gorilla. Why did they do that? Were they insane? No. They wanted to make YOU feel like you were going nuts just looking at it. Trolling.

And it's this weird little quirk of the internet that forums tend to be organized by well-meaning people who want civility and back fans into separate corners where they don't shout at one another. And where every viewpoint is sacred. Except, you know, I don't think that's what publishers want and so it forces them to work just a little bit harder at stimulating a chaotic response. And even things that seem fairly straightforward can come across as shocking to people who inhabit an "all views are sacred" kind of bubble.

[Patrick Gerard]

Oh, I don't think I will totally grow out of them, I might find something to gift to my children and share it. Heck, the character of Supreme by Alan Moore for Image Comics is pretty much the way Superman was during the Bronze/Silver Age. And honestly that passing it down to my kids is a legacy activity for me. I see comic books as something that I enjoy like I enjoy watching some animated flicks, or Legos with the kids, I won't say that no, I am not too old enough to touch it or be entertained by it, but I don't expect it too be too much directed at me, I hope it's also focused on the teens and would not mind passing something down if necessary. Some fanfiction of these characters by some of the posters on these boards is interesting too, sometimes more than the mainstream comics themselves. I just think character focus is a key aspect that the big guys lose for the sake of continuity nitpicking.

I think a nice thing that could be said about Supreme that I would compare with All-Star Superman and Sandman is that it had a nice sense of each issue being a filling "meal" and satisfying arcs with longterm payoff. I think that, more than specifics, is a big part of how you make a book with close-to-universal appeal.

[A Guy's Name]

I'm guessing the point of this thread is for therapeutic reasons, so I'll vent.
I.... really f*cking hate this. If there was any doubt that DC had no sense of direction, there's not now. I'm not invested in SuperDad.
Never did. I really hope SuperDad's presence/importance in Earth-0 is temporary, with Action #1000 being his last hurrah, his post-Rebirth run being his last run. New-52 Superman being his successor, a real Kal-El, not Chris/Pre-52 Kon/anything else to suggest he's not a real Superman. Nothing to suggest that the 5 bloody years people spent time and money reading him was not real, that we weren't reading and rooting for Superman at all. That none of the runs, good or bad, Morrison's, Pak's, mattered. A waste of potential.
But maybe that's not the case.
I won't stand and read SuperDad. He's the safe version, with safe writers like Jurgens behind him. A stale vanilla SM for company too damn greedy and too damned scared to go anywhere. With much damned incompetence to boot.
DC, as a company, now publishes more stories about stories than actual stories. With Crisis here and Crisis there.
A company that doesn't deserve Superman.

If they go with this direction, I'm with Ascended. Ready to watch it all burn. Along with Marvel I suspect. Watch them choke and drown in their accumulated filth and picked apart by vermin.

[Kuwagaton]

Except there are like 20 regular posters on a given subforum on a single site, Patrick . Sales being down is a pretty hard correlation to make with CBR not letting people run amok. Not that anyone isn't free to frequently express the same sentiments with as much passion for the product as they have. That really doesn't go away unless people are put off by what they're reading enough.

And on topic, even now I say that D.C. has people holding on to the likely return. Passion isn't completely dying all over here. If they are playing a game for sales, it obviously goes beyond just getting people fired up.

[manofsteel1979]

You know, there were people who said it wasn't temporary then. I was at Wondercon and everywhere from the DC booth to the far corners of the show where the indies were, the word from everybody was, "I don't think this is temporary."

CBR by virtue of how CBR can be with its appreciation threads and maybe a certain degree of conflict aversion tends to create echo chambers. People don't really, well... duke it out here the way they might on Bleedingcool or Reddit or Facebook, even. And Facebook is an echo chamber machine in a lot of ways on politics or fandom. But maybe CBR in an attempt to be kind of a fan mecca tends to reinforce unrealistic positions. I've been around here over ten years and the more conflict averse the place becomes, the more removed I generally see expectations from reality.

Right now, it seems to me like folks who are fans of this change seem especially timid in some of the threads. Nobody's running around crowing about this. I think it's because CBR tends to start from a place of promoting civility and unity with fellow fans and downplaying controversy. I don't think that's the rest of the internet... And I also don't exactly think it's what publishers want, or at least EXPECT.

Books sell when fans are passionate. Maybe anything just shy of the HEAT stuff from Green Lantern in the 90s is what a lot of folks at the publishers WANT. And I think maybe places like CBR unintentionally work contrary to what publishers would like to see by trying to cool those passions and creating safe spaces for every set of views.

And in some ways, I think you can trace that as a story of the comics industry ever since the web got big. On a certain level, look, publishers want to troll for fan fights. You think Mark Millar had Captain America call Iron Man a "pampered punk" because he thought that was a reasonable and defensible evolution of continuity? I don't think so. He did it because he wanted people duking it out on the internet. And when comic sites have a poor handle on moderating that, comic sales increase, year over year. And the more successful the internet fandom is at moderating and policing and creating a culture that avoids those fights, the worse sales get.

This is a medium going back to the 30s, at least, that exists to troll the audience. And if you see all the Super-Dickery Superman covers on the internet, it's never that Superman was a jerk. It's that they sold a ton of books making you think Superman was being a jerk and then if you read the comic, there would be some kind of possibly logical, possibly contrived excuse for why whatever you saw on the cover wasn't a jerk-y thing to do. In short? Trolling. Or you'd have comics with these insane images like Jimmy Olsen marrying a gorilla. Why did they do that? Were they insane? No. They wanted to make YOU feel like you were going nuts just looking at it. Trolling.

And it's this weird little quirk of the internet that forums tend to be organized by well-meaning people who want civility and back fans into separate corners where they don't shout at one another. And where every viewpoint is sacred. Except, you know, I don't think that's what publishers want and so it forces them to work just a little bit harder at stimulating a chaotic response. And even things that seem fairly straightforward can come across as shocking to people who inhabit an "all views are sacred" kind of bubble.

I sort of made a similar point in another thread recently.

People dismiss when I say that the whole situation with the Superman/ Wonder woman romance thing and how they treated Lois in the first year or two of the New 52 was done on purpose to create fan controversy. People don't want to believe their long wished for ship being brought into continuity for the purpose of creating "team clois" and " team cliana" factions battling it out on the web to create buzz in fandom and sales. I often said as soon as DC had tired of this and squeezed as much controversy they could out of the situation, they'd find another target and angle. They did then with having Lois outting Clark and then Clark subsequently becoming a douche nozzle. Once they bled that dry, now they are now trolling fandom again with this whole " which Superman is the 'real' one ?"stuff that the rebirth special is teasing us all with now and looks like they dont intend on giving clear answers anytime soon.

The New 52 was one long troll and it looks like Rebirth is following suit, at least for Superman. Its quite sad.

[adrikito]

If they go with this direction, I'm with Ascended. Ready to watch it all burn. Along with Marvel I suspect. Watch them choke and drown in their accumulated filth and picked apart by vermin.

Look this of newsarama review:

DC Rebirth Special is a love letter to DC’s past that will leave current and lapsed fans alike feeling optimistic about the future to come.


A love letter? Optimistic? For anti-new52 fans.. in superman the news fans out..

[DieHard200904]

I'm guessing the point of this thread is for therapeutic reasons, so I'll vent.
I.... really f*cking hate this. If there was any doubt that DC had no sense of direction, there's not now. I'm not invested in SuperDad.
Never did. I really hope SuperDad's presence/importance in Earth-0 is temporary, with Action #1000 being his last hurrah, his post-Rebirth run being his last run. New-52 Superman being his successor, a real Kal-El, not Chris/Pre-52 Kon/anything else to suggest he's not a real Superman. Nothing to suggest that the 5 bloody years people spent time and money reading him was not real, that we weren't reading and rooting for Superman at all. That none of the runs, good or bad, Morrison's, Pak's, mattered. A waste of potential.
But maybe that's not the case.
I won't stand and read SuperDad. He's the safe version, with safe writers like Jurgens behind him. A stale vanilla SM for company too damn greedy and too damned scared to go anywhere. With much damned incompetence to boot.
DC, as a company, now publishes more stories about stories than actual stories. With Crisis here and Crisis there.
A company that doesn't deserve Superman.

If they go with this direction, I'm with Ascended. Ready to watch it all burn. Along with Marvel I suspect. Watch them choke and drown in their accumulated filth and picked apart by vermin.

I know I have brought the trollING issues up here but I can remember how as a 9 year old kid the big arguments I got into as to whether Peter or Ben was the real and original Spider-Man. It wasn't pretty one bit. It got worse when Ben as Spider-Man got killed and his body turned into dust, showing that Ben, who had all those extra gadgets and Web tricks that Peter didn't, turned out to be the Clone and not the original. It got bitter between me and the other fans, and now DC figures pulling a similar trolling session is a good idea. Look, I know that Timm/Dini or even the recent DCAMU don't pull off $#!^ like that. But yeah, DC figured that pulling an identity crisis on who the real Superman is a good idea for reasons I don't know. Just let Superman go fight evil or pull some insane feat, not be as his publisher, Superman's own worst enemy.

As a side note, The Spider-man Clone Saga actually hurt Marvel Comics.

[Prime]

I am mad because if any of this is true, the last 5 years where...nothing. All that money and time invested in a character I love means nothing. Superdad has done all he was going to do, he is safe. With Superman you still had so much to do. Sure, Superdad with a son would have been interesting, 10 years ago, now not so much. Especially how they did it, killing one Superman to replace him with the version that actually was the reason for the reboot. And now he might not even actually be real.

[Ascended]

Well, the last five years weren't nothing if you enjoyed them.

I dont care how badly DC screws up today or tomorrow, I still have Morrison's run and Pak's run and the other issues and stories Ive enjoyed since the reboot. DC cant take those stories away from me no matter what they do.

Comics aren't about the destination, they're about the journey. If there was stuff you liked, then the last five years weren't a waste.

What comes next might be a missed opportunity, a failure to capitalize on obvious improvements or success, or a lot of other things. But that's what comes next, not what already happened. And really, given the level of desperation and short-sighted directions they're pulling out, Im just as glad Nuperman wont be a part of it. He suffered enough already.

If nothing else, think of the money we'll save because DC is driving us away with bad fan fiction and Dr. Manhattan and Superdad.