Jim Lee Perfectly Explains Why DC Comics' "Rebirth" is Not A Reboot

[The Nuke]

"The New 52 isn't being scrapped or ignored" Of course it is but they're not doing it all at once. It will be dismantled piecemeal a little at a time until it's just gone. He's hoping that we won't notice it slowing being erased.

Kinda. What will actually disappear is the notion of the NU52 being anything other than an event comic. All the stories happened, but eventually all the pre-52 continuity will be reinstated for the most part.

In other words everything that happened in the Pre-52 DID HAPPEN, and everything in the NU52 DID HAPPEN, and from there DC will move forward to the extend that in the end you really won't look at anything NU52 as not having happened in the Pre-52 continuity.

[The Nuke]

I'm not sure DC themselves have fully decided what this is.

It's obviously still the new 52 universe but elements of the previous continuity is filtering in.

At this point, it's hard to say what it is.

No, Johns knows what it is. Didio and Lee are just bad at phrasing what it is, and they always are. Neither of them have given a clear answer as to how continuity works. They didn't in the NU52 either. Which just pissed fans off even more in trying to figure out what mattered and didn't. And most fans like everything to matter. They want their stories that they read to matter.

I want NO MAN'S LAND to matter when I read it because it had quite a few things happen that defined Batman for years afterwards. The NU52 got rid of that exact version of events. That angers people. Which is one reason why Rebirth happened.

What this is is quite simple.

THE NU52 IS NOW AN EVENT COMIC. Think of any comic of this type where eventually things will be made right. This happens a lot in Marvel comics.

The difference is that DC will still want the NU52 to matter. Thus what has happened is as was said by Johns, the NU52 Universe has been dropped into the Pre-52 Universe.

Look at it like a straight line. From 1986(with in a lot of cases continuity from 1933 onwards being included, to 2011 that was one huge chapter in the DC Universe. Then Dr.M changed reality, took a decade from these people who had gone through 10 years of ****, and remade them like he wanted. Thus the NU52.

All of it still in the same continuity. Year One happened before Dr.M changed reality so that Zero Year Happened. Still happened, and I guess Batman will eventually remember that it happened.

That being said the idea is to eventually mold the Nu52 into the Pre-52 entirely. So at the end you'll just look at it as one long history, and the NU52 and what happened in it being just one part of it.

[Lemurion]

It is a great retcon, but they should stop using these parallel lands and crisis for a while, because it has been exploited to exhaustion in recent years and make sure that the main reality will work.

Alternate realities are tiring. It's pretty much a crutch for comic book creators/writers. They can retcon what doesnt work and change the tones of the characters to today's standards. Or, they can just do a bunch of "shocking" mini-series that overall mean nothing for the universe.

One future has old Batman fighting mutants. Another has Thomas Wayne as Batman fighting Martha Wayne as Joker. Batman Inc is all but a confusing mess now, don't know what "reality" it stands in any more...same goes for Watchmen, whatever reality they pull out of their butts to write that story off. Maybe Silk Spectre is all of a sudden a cellphone-obsessed tween.

It's a reboot, just one that mixes New52 with everything before it.

Call them alternate universes, a multiverse, or what have you - the idea of multiple parallel continuities is integral to DC comics. Even after the biggest mistake they ever made (getting rid of the Multiverse in COIE) they still had Elseworlds and Hypertime to carry the idea. A DCU without parallel worlds isn't a true DCU in my opinion.

[Green Goblin of Sector 2814]

No, Johns knows what it is. Didio and Lee are just bad at phrasing what it is, and they always are. Neither of them have given a clear answer as to how continuity works. They didn't in the NU52 either. Which just pissed fans off even more in trying to figure out what mattered and didn't. And most fans like everything to matter. They want their stories that they read to matter.

I want NO MAN'S LAND to matter when I read it because it had quite a few things happen that defined Batman for years afterwards. The NU52 got rid of that exact version of events. That angers people. Which is one reason why Rebirth happened.

What this is is quite simple.

THE NU52 IS NOW AN EVENT COMIC. Think of any comic of this type where eventually things will be made right. This happens a lot in Marvel comics.

The difference is that DC will still want the NU52 to matter. Thus what has happened is as was said by Johns, the NU52 Universe has been dropped into the Pre-52 Universe.

Look at it like a straight line. From 1986(with in a lot of cases continuity from 1933 onwards being included, to 2011 that was one huge chapter in the DC Universe. Then Dr.M changed reality, took a decade from these people who had gone through 10 years of ****, and remade them like he wanted. Thus the NU52.

All of it still in the same continuity. Year One happened before Dr.M changed reality so that Zero Year Happened. Still happened, and I guess Batman will eventually remember that it happened.

That being said the idea is to eventually mold the Nu52 into the Pre-52 entirely. So at the end you'll just look at it as one long history, and the NU52 and what happened in it being just one part of it.

Exactly! This is what I've been saying and what Jim Lee himself said. He said that they found a way to "drop" the New 52 into the Pre-FP continuity.

[DangitBobby]

The thing is Jim Lee, with Wildstorm, rebooted that continuity into the grave. There was a point where it was just constant reboots every 1-2 years.

DC supposedly lost 2 million dollars the last year or so with new 52 (which honestly sounds worse than it is when you think about how much it costs to actually put out a line of books)

I get the feeling that as soon as sales start to stagnate again DC is going to pull another stunt to get a fast money spike. i can imagine a scenario where Jim is probably booted as Publisher within this decade or early next because DC has become an unsustainable machine as is. They need about 10-20 new hits like Harley Quinn to stay Viable. They can only mine DKR and Watchmen for cash so much.

[Unspeakable Evil]

I'm guessing one of the first books to go will be the one with the Chinese Super-Man. According to the LCS, it's probably the lowest seller of the Rebirth books..and they have already cut their orders drastically. Interesting concept...but why they couldn't just create a brand new Chinese character instead of having him be a a new Superman is beyond me.

Couldn't agree with you more. It feels like lazy writing to just make a different racial origin of an existing superhero rather than give them an original superhero. Frankly, I find it surprising that more people don't find that sort of thing disappointing.

Wouldn't he sell less though?

[Doctor Bifrost]

First of all, there's no strict definition of what a "reboot" is. But one thing we know is that reboot doesn't mean: "we've thrown out every detail from previous stories, and will only use new details from now on." Nobody ever does that. So saying "The New 52 is in continuity - except for the parts we were already retconning within The New 52, the things from The New 52 we will change or just ignore, and the things from The New 52 that several different powerful deus ex machina entities will rewrite for us" doesn't exactly mean "it's not a reboot." Also, how much retconning can you do before it adds up to a reboot?

There are also techniques that have the effect of reboots, even if they're not "technically" reboots. "Oh, everything that happened in that story still happened, but it's been wiped out of everybody's memory, they've been given new memories and all the physical evidence (photos, video, newspapers, computer files) have been changed to match" isn't really much different from "what happened in that story never happened."

(A side note: anybody who could make all-encompassing changes like that could rule the world without breaking a sweat. The idea that, on a slightly lesser level, a spy organization like Spyral, run by human beings with questionable motives, has the technology to rewrite the memories of every human being on Earth - as well as the technology, recently used by Dick Grayson, to rewrite a person's memories just by touching them - seems out of proportion to me. And since it's only being used to "fix" what they did to Dick in Forever Evil, it's really just one more deus ex machina that's being used to do a retcon without calling it a retcon.)

In any case, whether something is a reboot (or "reboot-like") depends on its relationship to pre-existing continuity. When you're sloppy about continuity - "Story Over Continuity!" (as if continuity, which is about creating a fictional setting called the DCU, has nothing to do with the story that takes place within that setting) - it's hard to tell what's a reboot or a retcon or nominally "in continuity."

For example, I really liked the Poison Ivy miniseries. A lot. But there was something odd about it. I know something about Poison Ivy's/Pamela Isley's history, because I read comics. She was (in the latest version) a disgruntled Wayne Industries employee who went bad - very bad. She's been arrested many times. She's been locked up in Arkham Asylum. She is well known - as dangerous criminal and perhaps a murderer - under her own name and as Poison Ivy, to Batman, the police, and other authorities.

And yet she takes a job as a botanical researcher under her own name. And when a colleague is killed and police detectives are called in, they have no idea who she is. And when they look her up on the internet, they still have no idea who she is.

Have they rebooted the character? Or just retconned her? Is this taking place on an alternate Earth? Apparently - according to many fans on this forum - I'm not supposed to ask.

(To me, it just looks like apathetic writing. She could have used another name - you know, take a secret ID like superheroes do, and for an even better reason! - and used her powers and partially plant-like physiology to slightly change her appearance. Then the discovery by detectives that she was, in fact, the infamous Poison Ivy could have been a dramatic moment in the story. But this is apparently "too confusing" for the intended readers, and "they don't care about that stuff anyway." I know a lot of readers who do care about that stuff, but they're former readers.)

So the question of "is it a reboot?" or "is The New 52 still in continuity?" seems kind of moot to me. My opinion: it doesn't exactly feel like a reboot. It feels like a mass of little retcons, and little retcon-like actions done by handwaving, in an attempt to recreate the "Legacy DCU" by shoehorning in erased or ignored events and ultimately acting like they were always there all along. Now, I happen to like Legacy DCU a lot more than I like The New 52 version, so I'm going to see a lot of aspects in the setting that I like and have been missing.

But I'm also interested in the way we get there - that is, the techniques, creativity, and rigor writers use when doing world-building. And this world looks like it's going to be stitched together like Frankenstein's Monster, with the seams always showing, and nobody (readers, writers, editors) ever quite sure what events happened to what characters, and which characters remember how much about it, and when they remembered and why, and....

I don't know. Maybe a reboot would have been a better way to go. But that's just me.

[seismic-2]

I don't care if it's a reboot, a refresh, a revamp, a retcon, a restoration, or a re-visitation. I don't care if it's in continuity or out of continuity. What I do care is whether it's good stories or just more tedium. This will take 2 years? I don't think I'll wait.

[Sacred Knight]

I understand its not a reboot. Understood that from the beginning. Just stop trying to tell me that the New 52 wasn't a reboot either. Of course it was. That you've changed your minds after five years and want to reinject the old continuity in, doesn't make your original idea any less the near total reboot that it was. Its retroactive spin now to say that it wasn't. I wish these guys were real with us on stuff like that for once instead of outright lying. "The New 52, at the time, was a total reboot, outside a few properties. Over time however, we realized we wanted some elements back, so what we decided to do was reintegrate old continuity into the New 52. This wasn't the original plan of course, but we think things evolved ot the point where this became a desired option." Something like that. Truthful and respectful to the intelligence of your readers.

[upgrayedd]

New 52 is DC's equivalent of Marvel's Heroes Reborn. They both happened, still in continuity, but little by little people are going to forget all about it.

[Lee Stone]

New 52 is DC's equivalent of Marvel's Heroes Reborn. They both happened, still in continuity, but little by little people are going to forget all about it.

This.
It was an opportunity to try out new takes on characters, see what was well-received and folding those back into the DCU-proper.

New52 was a "Reboot" when that term would generate sales, and then it wasn't when it was no longer needed.

Rebirth is being treated the same.
If calling it a "Reboot" will get people to buy the comics, DC will call it a "Reboot".
If saying it's "Not a Reboot" will get people to buy the comics, then they'll say it's not.
It really depends on the reader/customer/retailer they're courting.
The majority will win, and in hindsight it will eventually be referred to as either a "Reboot" or "Not a Reboot" based on the readers they maintain after the first few months.

[JLange]

All of the books have been excellent so far. I am getting every title and have been very happy. I hope rebirth succeeds.

[rpi]

Lee totally took this idea from Grant Morrison, who's been speaking and writing about the DC Universe being sentient for at least the past 15 years.

Yes, with the added benefit of Morrison knowing what he's doing.

[PaulAtreides]

Couldn't agree with you more. It feels like lazy writing to just make a different racial origin of an existing superhero rather than give them an original superhero. Frankly, I find it surprising that more people don't find that sort of thing disappointing.

I've read on multiple sites over the past year or so that China only allows 10 American movies to be released to their theaters annually. This leads to the theories that American studios try to pander to China in order to get their movies on that list (due to China becoming a major player in international box office revenues). For example, the upcoming Dr. Strange having a non-Tibetan as the Ancient One (who has been of Tibetan origin in the comics for decades). I just started wondering if there is some similar system in place for comics in China...obviously they would for books (in general), but I never considered it for comics before. It would make sense though, as an emerging market that is switching from a primarily manufacturing economy to a more consumer based one w/ the population base to be a huge revenue stream.

[GigiFusc]

Well, I have to be honest and say that, as someone who has only returned to comics in the last year or so, it's a confusing mess. I can't figure out how one book is linked to another,heck, sometimes I can't see the link between one book to another in the same series!

But that confusion would be irrelevant if the writing was brilliant. I've read pretty much all the Rebirth titles out to date and the writing is very inconsistent. Ranging from good to poor. Interestingly, it has rarely reached 'awesome!!' (yes, that's with two exclamation marks!