The Revolving Door of Death

This video hit the internet this weekend, as a sort of side-door promo for "Chronicle", but it's pretty entertaining stuff in its own right.

Now, I've always said it's pretty easy to take any story, book, TV show, movie, or whatever else and talk about it in a reductive, distainful manner.  You can rant about anything, and be accurate (and this rant is, for the most part, accurate), but not actually be honest about what really happened in the story.

I do think this one is pretty accurate and entertaining, and relatively honest.  Let's face it, there's been plenty of craziness over the past however-many-years in comic books.  (Comics, everybody!)  Death of Superman is hardly the craziest story out there. 

But one bit in which this recap is a bit dishonest is the idea that Superman coming back to life killed "death" in comics, and hurt sales in a way which Action Comics never recovered from.  The revolving door of death had always been a common trope in comics.  No one stays dead except Uncle Ben and Thomas & Martha Wayne.  Death is not a permanent condition in that world.  No one was upset that Superman came back; him coming back was pretty much assumed from the get-go.  If anything, they were mad about how it was done, with a bit of handwaving that essentially said he didn't REALLY die, he just went into a "healing coma", while still claiming that he DID really die.  It's classic having-cake-and-eating-it situation.  Superman coming back wasn't earned.  He just woke up when he needed to. 

Is that dramatically interesting?  No, it's lame.  That's what made people mad. 

If anything was killed by the Death of Superman, it was the idea of manufacturing a Collector's Item out of whole cloth.  Tons of people bought the Death of Superman issue and vacuum-sealed it, forgetting that the thing that makes a collector's item worth something is its rarity.  The bubble finally burst on the collector boom of the late 80s and early 90s, and sales of EVERYTHING dropped.  People weren't buying anymore with the hopes that they were squirreling away a fortune to be cashed in 30 years later. 

Still the video is fun, and it reminds one that if you want your stories to matter, then the consequences have to pay off.  Death can't be the same thing as a bit of a nap.

Breaking the glass and hitting the Big Red Button

One of the Big Stories out there this week is how DC Comics is apparently planning a hard reboot of their entire universe, re-launching everything as #1 with 52 different series.

Whenever news like this comes out, I try to approach it with a healthy dose of skeptical optimism.  It could prove really interesting, or it could fail horribly, but I want to believe that it'll prove interesting. 

For me, the most interesting aspect is the fact that they are going all in.  When Marvel did Heroes Reborn or their Ultimate line, they didn't stop publishing their regular universe.  They were both toe-in-the-water experiments, with varying degrees of success.  DC, in some ways, had intended to do exactly this back in 1986 with Crisis of Infinite Earths, giving an in-story reason for a hard reboot.  The problem was there wasn't full commitment to the hard reboot, and there certainly wasn't a cohesive editorial vision behind it.  Here it seems that DC is doing a full jump-out-of-the-plane bold move that could soar or crash, but they aren't hedging their bets.

Now, for me this sort of idea can work a lot better for DC than it would for Marvel, because when you come down to it, DC's characters are more iconic.  The proof comes when you try to parallel the DC characters to Marvel counterparts: the main DC characters tend to embody a iconic Big Idea, and the equivalent on the Marvel side is somewhere in the C-list.  The Flash is super-speed, while Quicksilver is a superfast guy who is more known for being a creepy, possessive anti-hero.  Aquaman is the ocean-based hero, while Submariner is... more known for being a creepy, possessive anti-hero.  (I would argue the only major DC hero that has a solid Marvel counterpart is Green Arrow, who matches Hawkeye, both being definitive bow-wielding heroes in their universes.)

My point being, the DC universe is one where you can boil down the characters to their core, restart them and do something very interesting with them.  That was the core idea behind Marvel's Squadron Supreme and Supreme Power. (And it should be noted, DC has never really successfully done the same sort of treatment with Marvel's characters.)

So can this idea work, and be a huge success?  Absolutely.  Will it?  Hard to say.

I have to admit, I do have a twinge of jealousy towards the writers on these projects.  The opportunity to write these iconic characters, but starting from scratch?  That's potent.  If I had my druthers, do you know who I'd want to take on in that context?  Aquaman.  My big idea there would be to change Atlantis into a far more complicated political landscape-- many nations with loose alliances and straining relations.  Cast Aquaman as the Ned Stark in an underwater Game of Thrones, if you will.  Throw in some environmentalism and intrusions from the surface world, and set the whole thing on a low simmer.  Oh, yeah.  That would be fun to write.