Is it just me, or does it seem like the DC Universe has gotten kind of...small?

Ever since the closing pages of Dark Nights: Metal, writer Scott Snyder and his frequent co-writer James Tynion IV have been telling a very big story in the pages of the miniseries No Justice and the ongoing Justice League, which is already on issue #31 or so, thanks to the twice-monthly publishing schedule.

The story—and it has essentially been just one story—has encompassed all of existence, stretching as far back as before the beginning of time, and involving an entire multiverse of multiverses. Part of Jack Kirby's Source Wall broke, unmooring the local multiverse, and releasing Perpetua, a mother of the god-like Monitor, Anti-Monitor and World Forger (the last of whom is a new addition to DC's cosmology).

We're told that in the creation before this creation, Perpetua has made another reality, but her sons rebelled against her and made this existence instead. Now Lex Luthor and his Legion of Doom have taken up fighting for Perpetua and the forces of the abstract concept of doom, warring against the Justice League who, of course, are fighting for the abstract concept of justice. During the course of their battles, the DC Universe seems to be in a slow-boiling process of being remade once again, presumably ultimately undoing the last grand remaking, 2011's Flashpoint, which gave us the current New 52 version of the shared DC Universe setting (which, of course, encompasses not just a single universe, but a multiverse...or multiverses).

The Justice League itself isn't too terribly big at the moment. The core team consists of 9-13 characters, depending on whether or not you want to count Jarro and very recent additions like The World Forger, The Monitor and Shane (that's Martian Manhunter and Hawkgirl's son from a now non-existent future). There are also two ancillary teams, the ones that star in Justice League Odyssey and Justice League Dark; the former never appear in the pages of Justice League, the latter fill up crowd scenes and appear in the backgrounds in the Hall of Justice.

As the now years-long storyline reaches what appears to be a climax in the current "Justice/Doom War" story arc, much has been made of the Justice League recruiting "everyone," an entire army consisting of every available hero. Meanwhile, Luthor has been doing the same with the villains, part of the "Year of The Villain" storyline/branding event in which a newly reborn Luthor approaches various villains with transformative gifts that make them more powerful than ever.

The above page is the sixth page from Justice League #30, by Snyder, Tynion and artist Jorge Jimenez. After Starman has briefed the assembled heroes on what is going to happen in the upcoming Legion/League war—the League is all killed, but not as brutally as one might expect from a modern DC comic—the core League gives the assembled heroes a kinda sorta pep talk about their plan to stave off their seemingly fated defeat.

Here's the thing though. For an image of all of DC's superheroes assembled as a sort of Justice army, the page seemed kind of...small to me.

Part of that might be because Snyder and Tynion have already revealed this particular beat to readers a few times. They Tynion-written portion of DC's Year of The Villain Special #1 featured a two-page spread in which Francs Manapul draws pretty  much the exact same group of heroes, and Justice League #26 featured a sequence in which Hawkgirl and Mera walked around the Hall, checking in on these recruits as they prepped for the war.

But there just don't seem to be very many superheroes here. There are some members of Justice League Dark (Zatanna, Man-Bat, Swamp Thing and his beard), some Teen Titans (Robin, Red Arrow, Kid Flash), some non-teen Titans (Donna Troy, Kyle Rayner, Raven, Beast Boy, Steel, Miss Martian), The Terriffics (Mister Terrific, Plastic Man, Metamorpho and Phantom Girl), a random handful of various heroes appearing in comics throughout the current DC line (Batgirl, Supergirl, Captain Marvel "Shazam," Hawkman, Black Lightning, Jericho) and another, smaller handful of book-less characters (Firestorm, Animal Man, Ted Kord, Simon Baz, Guy Gardner) and that's it. All together, that's only between 25-30 supeheroes one can identify in the image, plus a bunch of indistinguishable blobs in the background and, remember, another nine or ten heroes off-panel on a sort of stage giving a presentation.

As someone who can just barely hold a pencil, I certainly am in no position to blame Jiminez for not filling the page with more heroes, and getting everyone in the latest edition of those encyclopedias of characters DC publishes into that panel, but I was really struck by how small it made the DC Universe of the moment seem.

I mean, I'm pretty sure you could get 30 superheroes if you took all the active members of the teams during the early '90s, when there were three Leagues with their own titles (America, Europe/International and Task Force). Or had they used the "everyone who was ever a Leaguer" rubric of the reserves evidenced in Mark Millar's JLA #27 from 1997. Hell, I bet if Batman called up all of his sidekicks, allies and affiliated teams—The Outsiders, Birds of Prey and Batman, Inc/The Club of Heroes—he alone could have filled that room to bursting.

Now, I know there are a lot more DC heroes out there, and that they're probably not available to appear in this story for their own story reasons. Noticeably absent, for example, is supposedly active Justice Leaguer Cyborg, and his entire Odyssey team (presumably because they are off in space doing space stuff; they haven't appeared in the series since the earliest issues). That's probably why Hal Jordan and Adam Strange and a few others aren't there, as well. Tim Drake and the Young Justice team are all MIA, probably because they're still out-of-universe doing whatever they're doing in the pages of Young Justice. I haven't read Heroes In Crisis yet, but I assume if Ted Kord is elbowing Guy Gardner instead of Booster Gold, that means he's dead-ish, or at least lost in time? Same with The Flash Wally West...?

But where are The Metal Men? Or the rest of The Shazam Family? What of all those Dark Matter/New Age of Heroes heroes...did none of them stick around after ignominious cancellation of their titles? Is it notable that Arsenal isn't there, or that Nightwing or Batwoman or Huntress aren't? Does Red Tornado exist anymore, and/or is he currently alive? Elongated Man? Fire and Ice? Hawk and Dove? Blue Devil? The other Steel, John Henry Irons? Vibe? Frankenstein? O.M.A.C.? Any Doctor Fates around anymore? No more Power Girls? Are we totally done with Wildstorm characters existing in the DCU, even Midnighter and Apollo? What about new characters introduced in the wake of Flashpoint, like Skitter and Bunker and Talon and those guys with weird names in Stormwatch...?

The longer I lingered on this image, the more I realized that the DCU got awfully small after Flashpoint. Not only did it wipe out the JSA and their fellow Golden Agers, and the various future heroes (although both the JSA and Legion of Super-Heroes are on their way back, of course; the former appearing on the last page of this very issue), but the reboot lead to the de-creation of huge swathes of heroes and other characters, many of whom would of course be recreated, but even many of those exist in weird liminal states, where they seem to have been re-rebooted or re-recreated since their initial New 52 reintroductions (like Black Lightning, for example) and others I know have appeared in some form, but lost track of.

And then, of course, there are heroes I know DC has reintroduced in new forms since The New 52 effort and the other branding exercises that followed it, but those characters apparently failed to catch on...and failed so badly they apparently can't even fill in crowd scenes like this (I'm thinking here of the new Ragman, or The Ray, or The Human Bomb or National Comics' Rose and Thorn, Eternity, Madame X and Looker;  I'm sure there are more).

Honestly, I'd have trouble filling a room with DC superheroes that I know have both been re-introduced since Flashpoint and haven't been killed or otherwise jettisoned from usage in an event story like this. Of course, this could very likely be just me, as I am not following the Wednesday by Wednesday exploits of DC's stables of heroes as closely as I used to, and therefore I've lost track of pretty much all of the heroes not appearing in Justice League or the Batman titles.

So maybe the DC Universe hasn't gotten small, it just feels small to me. I don't know; I'd be interested in hearing the opinions of others on the matter.

A few pages later in the very same issue, we see an echo of this page, when Luthor gestures towards his newly recruited Legion of Doom, consisting of about 25 villains, only about 15 of whom I can name...although these are mostly redesigned, presumably because of the gifts they accepted from Luthor.

The Legion has been awfully small since the start of the series, originally consisting of just six villains, the archenemies of each of the "Big Seven" Leaguers, minus Martian Manhunter. They've since lost two and gained one, so the League has always outnumbered the Legion (The original Legion, the one from Challenge of The Super-Friends, boasted 13 members; the most appropriate number for a group of villains).

They too seems like a rather small number of bad guys, especially when contrasted with the all-the-bad-guys-teamed-up premise of Forever Evil, but that image didn't make me reflect upon the possible contraction of the DC Universe in quite the same way, as for almost every successful superhero, there are always going to be dozens of bad guys. I mean, you could fill up a splash page with Green Lantern, Aquaman or Wonder Woman villains, let alone Batman, The Flash and Superman, who boast incredibly large rogues galleries.

Green Lantern #50 and The New 52 paradox

Writer Robert Venditti had an appropriately big moment for the 50th issue of the Green Lantern title, which he inherited from Geoff Johns after the latter left the title and the franchise in 2013. With the New 52 universe set to end, or at least be "reborn" in just two more issues as part of a still somewhat mysterious branding initiative the publisher has dubbed "Rebirth," this over-sized anniversary issue also functions as the beginning of the book's climax and conclusion.

That big moment? The pre-Flashpoint, pre-New 52 version of Parallax Hal Jordan, plucked from the time-stream in the midst of Zero Hour by Brainiac for eventual usage in Convergence, coming face-to-face with post-Flashpoint, New 52 Green Lantern Hal Jordan. That sentence, you'll have noticed, includes references to three inter-company crossovers and a branding initiative, spanning some 21 years.

Rebirth-style Parallax, in Green Lantern #50

It is therefore demonstrative of the core problem of The New 52 reboot, a built-in tension, a set of cross-purposes that makes the current DC Universe not only unstable, but often infuriating to read. The publisher schizophrenically wanted to streamline their decades-long, confusing and perhaps alienating continuity in order to start fresh, telling brand-new stories featuring new versions of their characters...while continuing to reference old characters and old plotlines, lazily resting drama on completely un-earned allusions to that continuity they were supposedly excising.

The result? Comics that kinda sorta look like they started over, but read like even more confusing (and perhaps even more alienating) than the set of stories they were meant to replace. These were comics primed to annoy, frustrate and alienate long-time readers, while doing the same to any new readers brought in by the prospects of brand-new #1 issues, which promised a fresh start but were actuality just a continuation of a serial story being told month in and month out since 1986 or so.

Convergence #8

The plot of this issue is that the Zero Hour-era Parallax, who was one of a handful of characters–including The Flash Barry Allen, post-Crisis Superman and Lois Lane and Supergirl–to return to the events of Crisis On Infinite Earths (1985-1986) at the end of Convergence (2015) and somehow alter the outcome of COIE so as to reboot the current, 52-Earth DC Multiverse and end up in the post-Flashpoint combined Earth-0, has finally returned to Earth. He makes for Coast City, the annihilation of which drove him mad enough to kill off the Green Lantern Corps, Sinestro and The Guardians and to absorb the energy of the Central Power Battery, making him unfathomably powerful (During Geoff Johns' retcon of these events in 2005's Green Lantern: Rebirth, this was because Jordan's despair and fear made him susceptible to possession by the alien avatar of fear, Parallax).

Seeing Coast City whole again, he is ecstatic...until he's confronted by The New 52 Hal Jordan, who is currently wearing a long, green trench coat (for reasons) and fighting not with a Green Lantern ring, but with an experimental power gauntlet with the power of a dozen GL rings (again, for reasons).

Jordan doesn't seem to recognize Parallax at first, and, being Hal Jordan, starts throwing punches. Naturally, both being Hals, they fight senselessly for a while.

Only after the two, who both profess to want to protect Coast City and its inhabitants, including their loved ones, endanger the city and their loved ones by fighting for 17 pages, does the New 52 Hal try talking to post-Crisis Hal.

The Hal Jordans talk continuity.

New 52 Hal, who threw the first punch (well, it was a light construct of a sledgehammer, actually) tells post-Crisis Hal that he knows exactly what he went through, because he went through it to–His Coast City was destroyed while he was away, he was infected with a sickness that nearly drove him insane forever too.

But...did it...?

One of the many (many, many) particularly irritating thing about the half-measure of a reboot of The New 52 was the editors'–and sometimes the writers', and the characters'–insistence that this particular story still happened, or that particular story still happened, but because of all of the other evident changes, readers know that those stories couldn't have happened, or, if they did in ways that were radically different than the previously published versions we've read (thus creating a "secret" continuity unknown to anyone).

Post-Crisis, pre-Flashpoint Hal Jordan flashes back to the events of "Reign of The Supermen"

Unfortunately for Green Lantern readers, this particular issue is built on stories that have supposedly un-happened. The destruction of Coast City happened during "The Reign of The Supermen" storyline in the Superman books(1993), following the death of Superman in the early 1990s. That story apparently still "happened," but, in The New 52, it would have had to happen without Supergirl (The Matrix Version), without Superboy (the Cadmus clone), Steel, The Cyborg Superman, Lex Luthor II (actually Lex Luthor I in a clone body, impersonating his own son) and it would have likely had to happen to with a different form of Doomsday, and with a Lois Lane who wasn't married to Superman/Clark Kent. That's...pretty much the entire story, really.

It's possible the events that followed in Green Lantern could have happened more-or-less the same, but what about when we get to Zero Hour? And Parallax was revealed to be an avatar of cosmic fear in Green Lantern: Rebirth, rather than just a goofy name the crazy Hal Jordan chose for himself when he became a cosmic supervillain, and Rebirth was chockfull of elements bounced out of canon, from the relatively minor (Guy Gardner being a Vuldarian) to the integral (Hal Jordan being The Spectre).

And Hal Jordan became The Spectre in Day of Judgment (1999), the main antagonists of which were Neron and Asmodel, introduced in Underworld Unleashed (1995) and JLA (1997), two more books that the New 52 would erased from continuity. And the Spectre Force being unmoored from its traditional host was kind of a big element of Day of Judgmemt, which happened at the end of The Spectre (1992-1998)...and Jordan only bonded with him because Jordan was, at the time, dead, having died in the pages of Parallax: Emeral Night (1996), a tie-in to the Final Night crossover/event series. Of course, this version of Parallax Hal Jordan never died, as he was pulled out of the timeline before the events of Final Night, but New 52 Jordan would have still had to have been The Spectre in order to have stopped being Parallax, right?

That is a lot of comics to ask readers to rewrite in their heads during the course of a 40-page comic, almost half of which is a fight scene. And even if a reader has to rewrite only portions of it–say we assume that, in The New 52's secret continuity, Final Night never happened, meaning that Day of Vengeance never had to happen, meaning that Rebirth happened differently, and so all a reader has to rewrite is "Reign of The Supermen," "Emerald Twilight" and Rebirth, well, that's still three storylines from as far back as almost 25 years, just to get to this climax.

And if a story is premised on at least a passing familiarity with stories that are almost 25 years old, well, what was the point of The New 52's continuity brush-clearing reboot again...?

Lois Lane in The New 52-iverse

I've been thinking about Lois Lane more than usual lately, particularly in light of DC's announced but not yet detailed "Rebirth" initiative. It's not unreasonable to think that "Rebirth" will be more than just a marketing initiative, and will, in fact include some in-story way to bring an official close to the New 52 DC Universe, which launched in September of 2011.

The launch of the New 52 was a reboot of DC Universe continuity that lead to what was, in practice, a sort of half-assed line-wide equivalent of Marvel's millennial Ultimate line (That is, a reboot that re-designed the characters and started over with them...only, in DC's case, they didn't start from scratch, but introduced readers to the new universe en medias res, a few imaginary years into a largely "secret" continuity that would only gradually be revealed).

For the Superman books–mainly Action Comics, which re-re-re-re-retold Superman's origin, and Superman, set in the present–among the many big changes of the reboot was that of Superman's relationship with Lois Lane. Their marriage was dissolved, and, in fact, it never happened. These younger, less experienced versions of the characters weren't married, they weren't engaged, they weren't even dating, they didn't share in Superman's secret identity and there didn't even seem to be any chemistry, let alone romance, between the two.

As someone who is resistant to change in general, especially in comics where supposed fixes are often applied to things that aren't broken, I didn't really like the idea of Superman and Lois being de-married in a cosmic reboot. I liked them as full and equal partners, and thought their marriage actually contributed to making Superman distinct from so many of his super-peers (I also liked the fact that his parents were alive and he had a nice, healthy relationship with them; in The New 52, they were both dead).

There seemed to be two basic arguments for an unmarried Superman and Lois, however, one of which I find much more compelling than the other.

The first is the same that then-Editor-in-Chief Joe Quesada used in trying to justify the in-story reboot of Spider-Man Peter Parker and Mary Jane Watson's marriage in the pages of Amazing Spider-Man, that somehow having married characters limits the story options and ages them in the mind of the readers. I wasn't convinced, particularly since, at the time, Marvel had a younger, unmarried version of Spider-Man specifically designed to be distinct from the "real" Spider-Man in their long-running, actually rather great Ultimate Spider-Man.

But I could see where Quesada was coming from, sort of. Peter Parker was first introduced as a teenager, and original readers watched him attend high school and college and grow up over the issues and years. Even more so than most of the first generation of Marvel Comics characters, he was meant to be a character that was an awful lot like the young readers, who were only a radioactive spider-bite away from being a Spider-Man themselves.

Superman was never intended to be that sort of character. He was a more aspirational and inspirational character; the ways in which young readers could see themselves in him were a combination of wish fulfillment and metaphor. Superman was a grown-up whose stories were meant to be read by children; he was a dad-like figure from the start (The idea of superheroes a reader could relate to wouldn't really come along for a few decades after he smashed that green car and made that poor guy on the cover of Action Comics #1 grab the sides of his head in shock).

If marriage to Lois "aged" Superman, it did so only by a few years, maybe. And anyway, who cares? (Especially in the 21st century, when most Superman are adults themselves and, I'd guess, many of them are much, much older than Superman himself, whether he's meant to be 25, 30 or 39.)

The other, more compelling argument for un-marrying Superman and Lois is that it would restore the peculiar love triangle that was at the core of the very first Superman comics, the idea that Lois Lane loved Superman but despised Clark Kent, and that Clark/Superman loved Lois, but he wanted her to love him as Clark, not Superman.

That, and how the secret identity played into their complicated relationship, may not actually be fundamental to Superman comics (certainly plenty of stories of the modern age worked just fine after Lois discovered Clark's secret, and after they were married; and the argument could be made that doing away with the love triangle and the secret identity issue made the feature a lot less weird and its gender politics a lot less off-putting to a modern, audience composed of grown-ups), but they were certainly early elements, fuel for decades worth of stories in many different media, and, when The First Couple of Comics finally did tie the knot in 1996, there were certainly objections to the event, on the grounds that it was just too drastic a change (De-marrying Superman and Lois was a feature of the DC ixnay-ed "Superman 2000" proposal by Grant Morrison, Mark Waid, Mark Millar and Tom Peyer).

So I find it interesting that, now that we're looking at what could very well be the end of the New 52 continuity–the choice of the word "Rebirth" calls to mind Geoff Johns' Green Lantern: Rebirth and The Flash: Rebirth, both of which restored old status quos for those franchises through in-story events and minor retcons–that DC didn't really do anything with an unmarried Lois and Clark in the four years and change of the New 52.

Rather than restoring the Clark/Lois/Superman love triangle, the two were essentially platonic friends and occasional co-workers (Clark spent part of his career working at Daily Planet rival The Daily Star, and part of his career as a blogger). In the New 52, Lois Lane seems to have been Superman's Pal Lois Lane, his other best friend in the field, a sort of second, female Jimmy Olsen.

Wonder Woman fulfilled the role of love interest that Lois once played, as she and Superman were an item for just about three and a half years, first locking lips in August of 2012. If the New 52-iverse is coming to a close of sorts, than that would mean DC spent almost five years with an unmarried Superman, and the decision to decouple him from Lois had nothing to do with restoring what some might see as a core element of the character and concept, but instead so that he could date Wonder Woman.

Review: Earth 2 Vol. 4: The Dark Age

Probably without even intending to do so, DC Comics pulled something of a bait and switch with their Earth 2 title. It originally launched, under its original writer James Robinson, as a sort of rebooted version of the original Earth 2 concept. This Earth would apparently be where all the Golden Age heroes lived, but rather than their stories starting in the 1940s, they would begin in the present. After an issue spent killing off Earth 2's Superman, Wonder Woman and Batman, the focus for much of Robinson's run was on new versions of other Golden Agers with no analogues on Earth-New 52: Green Lantern Alan Scott, Flash Jay Garrick, The Atom Al Pratt, Hawkgirl, Dr. Fate and so on.

Near the end of Robinson's run, which comprised the first three collections, and with the start of new writer Tom Taylor's run, collected herein, there doesn't seem to be any real logical, organizing principle anymore.

A Red Tornado is introduced, and while she's a she as the original Golden Age Red Tornado was, she's also an android, like the Earth-1 Red Tornado*...and she has Lois Lane's consciousness in her. Jimmy Olsen is introduced, and he's a metahuman on this Earth. Red Arrow Roy Harper (a character from Earth-1/New Earth) is introduced, as is an Aquawoman. Finally—in this issue at least—the dead Earth-2 Superman returns, now a slave of Apokolips (shades of John Francis Moore and Kieron Dwyer's 1998 Superman: The Dark Side), Earth-2 Batman gets a rather unlikely successor (unless you've previously read Flashpoint) and Superman's successor appears but isn't yet properly introduced.

It's basically an Elseworlds series that crisscrosses in and out of New 52 continuity—Power Girl, Huntress and Mr. Terrific have all traveled between the two Earths—but one with no unifying theme...which sort of defeats the purpose of Elseworlds-like stories.

This fourth volume collects four issues of the monthly and the second annual, which accounts for two stories, both by Taylor. The monthly issues chronicle the Evil Superman and his army of Parademons' attack on Earth, with Superman just wrecking the heroes and the forces of the World Army. Meanwhile, in the bowels of of a World Army facility, a mysterious—and mysteriously powerful—new Batman is gathering allies for a showdown with Superman, including the new characters (well, new versions of old characters that are new to this series) mentioned above.

As for the story of the annual, that's the secret origin of Earth 2's Batman II**, presented as a story he's telling his new allies during a momentary lull in the battle against the Apokolyptian Superman.

The artwork is something of a mess, reflecting the disintegrating focus of the series. The original art team of Nicola Scott and Trevor Scott handle the first two issues by themselves. With the third, a second art team joins them. With the fourth, a third art team joins the second art team, and the Scotts are no-shows. The annual is penciled by by Robson Rocha, who was half of the just-mentioned second art team. None of the artists are particularly bad, but they don't mesh together too well, as in it's quite obvious when an art team changes, and it gives the book a rushed, confused visual look. I suppose it doesn't help that the book consists mainly of very unpleasant, alternate versions of the already fairly unpleasant New 52 characters doing extremely unpleasant things to one another.


*I know, I know. But it's so complicated, I'm just going to stick with the fact that in post-Crisis continuity, the android Red Tornado is a native of DC's only Earth, which was Earth 1 with some grafts from a handful of other Earths. Red Tornado spent most of his time on Earth 1, back when there was an Earth 1, anyway. For more on stupid Red Tornado and his dumb origin and stupid continuity, I'll refer you to Wikipedia.


**Of possible interest to some is the fact that, when the annual was originally printed, Batman II tells his new allies that he gets his enhanced strength from a drug called Miralco that lasts about an hour, which he stole from Rex Mason. Rex Mason is the secret identity of Metamorpho, not the Golden Age Hourman, who is Rex Tyler. In the collection, the mistake has been fixed, so that now Batman II says he stole the drug from Rex Tyler. It was apparently a typo all along then, and not an intentional decision to change the inventor of the Miralco drug on New 52 Earth 2.

A few link-inspired thoughts about the state of DC Comics/The DC Universe.

I haven't been doing much in the way of link-blogging here of late, and when I do see something elsewhere that I think could deserves some extra attention, I generally just post a link on my twitter account now.

I did read a big, excellent essay the other day though, one that was big enough and excellent enough that I wanted to link to it here. If you haven't already, and you care even a little bit about superhero comics (and the industry that revolves around them), I would strongly urge you to check out Tim O'Neil's monster 4,000-word post about DC Comics' current crossover storyline, "Trinity War."

O'Neil discusses the state of DC in 2013 versus that of DC in the late '90s, and compares and contrasts them with the state of Marvel comics during the same time periods. He compares the first half of "Trinity War" to the just-completed Age of Ultron, and Geoff Johns' crossover-writing skills to those of Brian Michael Bendis. He compares the religious and mythological cosmology of the two fictional, shared-universe settings. And I think he does so not only at great length, but with great insight and pretty damn great writing. It's about as thorough and solid a post on these subjects as one could hope to read.

O'Neil highlights the rather recent "Trinity War" tie-in issue Constantine #5 (which I covered here), and notes that The New 52 DC Universe has been structured into one that both John Constantine, the chain-smoking occultist character created in the mid-1980s by Alan Moore and Steve Bissette who starred in an incredibly long-running monthly series that spent most of its 15 years of existence being published through DC's mature readers Vertigo imprint, and Captain Marvel, an extremely inspired Superman knock-off created in 1940 by C.C. Beck and Bill Parker to star in superhero comics aimed at children, can now co-star in the same stories.

But in order to make that possible, DC had to subtract the edge off of the Constantine character and add edges to the Captain Marvel character, so that the two meet in the middle, sans much of what makes them interesting characters in the first place (The image at the top of this post, in case you're wondering, is from that book; that's Constatntine imbued with the powers of Shazam, ripping the head off of a demon using the strength of Hercules).

O'Neil notes that the original DC Universe was sort of grandfathered together, when later editors and writers tried to make a bunch of characters and concepts never meant to be together (Captain Marvel, for example, was created by a rival publisher of DC's, that the latter rather forcefully acquired, and was thus never really intended to have adventures in the same version of the United States that holds a Metropolis and a Gotham), one of the things I've always found most charming and challenging (in a good way) about the DC Universe, and, incidentally, one of the things that the New 52 reboot explicitly did away with. He cites an old crossover story from the James Robinson and company Starman book and the Jerry Ordway Power of Shazam book, in which two extremely different characters from two extremely different books met, and their differences provided a spark to the story, whereas now there is little to no real difference between most of the books in DC's line; tonally and visually, there's so little difference between Constantine and the "Shazam" back-ups in Justice League, that there's very little friction between the characters (and what is there is what we readers who know the characters' history bring with us to the encounter).

In discussing the late '90s DC Comics, O'Neil rattles off a list of books DC was publishing simultaneously, including Lobo, The Spectre and Impulse, noting that they were all set in the same universe, but were extremely different books in terms of their tone, point-of-view and even, to some extent, genre. Sure, they weren't as different as, say, Saga, Optic Nerve and All-New X-Men are from one another, but you had a violent, dark comedy; a serious, dark, supernatural storyline that meditated on religion and was only an F-word and a topless scene away from being a Vertigo book; and a light-hearted, all-ages superhero book that could veer between sitcom and straight comedy, depending on the writer. Yet Batman and Superman could appear in all of 'em (and all the other books O'Neil mentioned in that paragraph), and all of those characters could cameo in Bloodlines or have a Final Night tie-in issue or whatever.

Having Constantine in the DC Universe is hardly a big deal, despite the border erected between Vertigo and the DCU a while back. Constantine got his start in the pre-Vertigo Swamp Thing, a book that guest-starred Jack Kirby's Demon and Superman and Batman and Lex Luthor and The Justice League and so on. The characters could move from book to book, but the books themselves were very, very different, so that when Justice Leaguers showed up in, say, The Sandman or the Grant Morrison-written Doom Patrol or Alan Moore and company's Swamp Thing, it was exciting precisely because those books were so different in tone and visual identity from Justice League of America or JLI the the Super or Bat books of the time.

Anyway, give O'Neil's piece a read. It strikes me as a pretty good diagnosis of what, exactly, is wrong about much of the DCU line at the moment (aside from poor costume design and the counter-productive continuity reboot, which are the thorns that continue to stick in my eyes when I read these books) and, therefore, offers an implied prescription for fixing the line, should many (or any) DC Comics executives give the piece a read.

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I've already seen this linked to several places, but I first heard about it from the guys at Robot 6, so here's their post on it: Artist Ilias Kyriazis and writer Scott Lobdell put together an awesome pitch for a new Doom Patrol comic book that never went anywhere, and shared the basic concept, make-up of the cast and some fully-realized character designs.

While it's hard to judge a non-existent comic book by its pitch, and, based on what I've read lately, I would be very wary of a "Written by Scott Lobdell" credit on a comic book, I have to say that the book both sounds and (especially) looks awesome.

The book probably wouldn't be possible in the New 52, would it?

Of the characters starring in it, I think the only one that has been introduced so far is Changeling, who went by "Beast Boy" and was red. Maybe Bizarro exists too (I know he's featured in September's Forever Evil series/event, but I'm not sure if he's been introduced in the Superman books over the course of the last two years or not). I suppose a version of Tefe may be in the Swamp Thing series too, but I haven't been reading it, and, even if there is a version in the book, it can't be that version.

I don't think this series would work as a New 52 one, anyway, as if you divorce those characters from their histories (Particularly Changeling/Beast Boy, Robot Man and, in her usage here, Platinum), it wouldn't be all that interesting. If just introduced cold, the characters have no personalities or histories; there's no conflicts or shared experience between Robot Man and Changeling; there's no legacy of the Doom Patrol to live up to or live down; Robot Man, Changeling and Platinum would all lack a history of strained relationships with the various teams they've been on over the years.

I sure wish they wouldn't have rebooted continuity though, and simply did something closer to Marvel Now!: New series with new #1s by various creators. This woulda made a fine addition to a DC Now! line, I assume.

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In his link to the same post, Tom Spurgeon wrote, "people always love unsold pitches," and he's right.

I remember me and about 90% of the comics Internet were super-excited about that Wonder Woman-as-a-young-princess-on-Paradise Island pitch Tintin Pantoja made public a few years ago. Or hey, remeber Ben Caldwell's Wonder Woman pitch? Lois Lane, Girl Reporter? Renae de Liz's Amethyst?

Even the biggest names in super-comics occasionally have awesome-sounding pitches that go nowhere, like, for example, Mark Waid and Mike Wieringo's pitch for a new Aquaman series (that's a Ringo sketch of Aquaman above, although not one connected with the official pitch), or the now rather infamous proposal by Grant Morrison, Mark Waid, Tom Peyer and a pre-Ultimates Mark Millar to revamp DC's Superman line, with each of the four writers taking over one of the four Superman titles that were then on the stands?

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It occurs to me that I've seen so many blog posts from creators along the lines of "Hey, here's this totally awesome, all-ages comic that we pitched DC, but they passed on" extant, and enough interest in many of those projects (particularly the rejected Wonder Woman ones), that DC could quite easily commission a miniseries or trade paperback collecting "imaginary stories" based on all of these pitches. Like, maybe Lobdell and Kyriazis won't get to do an ongoing Doom Patrol based on their pitch, but it would be cool if DC let them do a 20-page story with those characters as part of a Rejected Proposals Cavalcade trade or something.

I think there's probably also potential for a book on the subject, from a third-party publisher (i.e. not DC Comics, but, like, a real publisher of real books), if there was someone with the interest and sorts of connections in the comics industry and the time to work on things, like, interviewing Mark Waid at length or securing original sketching from Mike Wieringo's family and tracking down a lot of these artists and asking to republish their work.

Just imagine a big art-filled, prose, non-fiction book containing the sketches and general proposals like any of the above and interviews with the creators involved about the process of pitching, dealing with rejection and what they did next, focusing on fairly radical re-workings from folks at Dean Trippe's level of the comics industry totem pole of popularity to things like Paul Pope's rejected Kamandi and Ross Campbell's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles pitch to Dark Horse (That's an early Campbell drawing of Donatello above, by the way) to more famous comics-that-never-were by top industry talent, like Alan Moore's Twilight of the Super-Heroes (was that it, or was it just Twilight, and my memory is just adding ...of the Super-Heroes to distinguish it from those vampire/werewolf books and movies) and Alex Ross's proposed Kingdom Come prequel series The Kingdom and the aforementioned Morrison, Waid and company Super-reboot?

A collection of proposals might be a little on the dull side, but a collection of interviews about those proposals, and using them as a sort of history of the mainstream comics industry, through the roads it didn't take or refused to take? Filled with sketches and art from so many incredible artists? That would be a hell of a book to read.

Someone should really get on that.

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As for the Paul Pope Kamandi proposal, if you're unfamiliar with that, I'd suggest you check out this disheartening, depressing quote from Pope about pitching a Kamandi series with Brian Azzarello that was shot down.

In the quote, Pope refers to a meeting with "the head of DC Comics." I'm not sure who that is, but whoever they are, I sure hope they are no longer the head of DC Comics, because I can't imagine someone in a position of power at a comics company getting a pitch for anything from Paul Pope, who I personally believe is one of the most talented comics artists working today and whose style is someone unique in that it seems to be the sort that appeals to readers whether they're coming at comics through the gateway of American superheroes, European comics or manga, and who gave DC the successful evergreen Batman: Year 100 (and some great Vertigo stuf), and Brian Azzarello, who not only gave DC a whole library of popular evergreen trades in 100 Bullets and the original graphic novel The Joker, but has gone on to improve and sustain the sales of Wonder Woman (of all things) and even consented to doing some of the company's dirtiest work, like Watchmen spin-offs.

If you're a DC comics executive and Paul Pope and Brian Azzarello say they want to do an original graphic novel about kicking your ass, but, in order to do so effectively, they first need to kick your ass for research, I believe it is your duty to respond, "Certainly, gentlemen; I just ask that you not hit me in the teeth or eyes, and, should I lose consciousness, please stop delivering blows until I can be revived."

The saddest part isn't that there exists a DC comics executive who didn't do a cartwheel and should "Callooh Callay!" when he heard Paul fucking Pope wanted to do a cover version of some Jack fucking Kirby for them, but that the executive (reportedly) responded by saying, "We don't publish comics for kids. We publish comics for 45-year-olds."

Which, okay, yes, if you look at what DC publishes, that seems fairly accurate (Actually, I think they publish comics for 20-45 year old males, to be more specific). But yeesh, to say it out loud, to a guy whose work seems perfectly positioned to bring in newer readers?

There is a difference between "comics for kids" and "all-ages" comics, of course, and, for a good example of "all-ages" stories featuring DC Comics characters, DC comics executives could just look at, let's see, every single cartoon based on their characters created in the past 25 years or so. Almost every single one of them, even the ones that skew younger, like Teen Titans, have been of the sort that have been smart, stylish and well-made enough that adults could enjoy them, and they contained nothing so harsh that kids shouldn't be allowed to watch 'em.

The fact that the only multi-media cues The New 52 seemed to take came from Batman: Arkham Asylum and ...City (the video games) instead of any of those many, many cartoons continues to kinda sorta blow my mind.

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By the way, this is a joke from Batman: The Brave and the Bold, the Batman series that seems targeted toward the youngest viewers, but which also is full of characters and Easter Egg references that only DC's extremely old or extremely invested fans would get.

"All-ages" doesn't mean you can't also insert extremely dirty jokes, you just have to be smart and clever about it.

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That same DC executive followed up with, "If you want to do comics for kids, you can do Scooby-Doo," according to Pope.

Please take a moment to pause with me and imagine a Paul Pope Scooby-Doo graphic novel.

Awesome, huh?

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Of course, if DC really believed they were publishing comics for 45-year-olds, then why don't they just go ahead and make their line for mature readers, so we can have swearing and nudity and adult concepts, instead of their weird NC-17 ultraviolence and gore, but PG-13 attitude towards nudity, sex and language...?

And maybe the stories could be a little more adult, and deal with emotional content beyond the difference between justice and vengeance...? More existential, mid-life crisis stuff, less guys with laser-rings blowing holes in one another's heads.

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So it looks like long-time comics-makers Evan Dorkin and Sarah Dyer were involved in the creation of a DC Nation short featuring The Metal Men, DC's animation-ready heroes who were previously prominently featured in several episodes of Batman: The Brave and The Bold.

I haven't seen much more than clips of any of the DC Nation shorts (no TV, you see), but, like those I have seen on YouTube, it seems pretty kid friendly.

I haven't seen The Metal Men or Plastic Man show up in The New 52 yet (beyond a cameo one-panel appearance by Plas in Justice League International #1), so I guess we can't do a 1-to-1 comparison between the DC Nation cartoon versions (seen by a lot of eyeballs all over the world) and the New 52 versions (which would be seen by, I don't know, between 20,000-100,000 sets of eyeballs, maybe).

But the Batgirl of The New 52 is a heavily armored vigilante who fights serial killers like her own brother and the gross-looking new version of The Ventriloquist. The first installment of the "Amethyst" feature in the first issue of Sword of Sorcery (which was canceled within eight months of its debut), featured a couple of high school boys threatening to rape a schoolmate. The only issue of the new Animal Man I've read so far was last week's annual, in which the character is drinking heavily and trying to cope with the death of his son (Hey, remember when Grant Morrison killed A-Man's family and brought them back to life in his meta-commentary on superhero comics that ended with a rebuke of such things as killing off a character's family as needlessly dark, the writer restoring them all to life? Twenty-three years ago?)

Compare these to the DC Nation Batgirl in Super Best Friends Forever, or the Amethyst and Animal Man of those shorts. Sure, those are all all-ages and played for laughs, but there's gotta be a happy medium between all-ages cartoons and grown-ups only comics, right?

It just doesn't make a whole lot of sense to have a cartoon show called Young Justice on the air, featuring a team composed of characters like this that look like this...

...and then publishing comics like this...

...or this...

instead.

...does it...?

Hey, should DC have waited until June of 2013 to launch The New 52...?

I think it's pretty clear that they should have waited at least a few more months than they did, so they could at least get all their ducks in a row regarding consistent creative teams, some form of cohesive, behind-the-scenes Bible for the New 52 DC Universe (which character exist, which don't, what continuity was pitched, what was kept, etc) and at least a rudimentary continuity, so as not to have stories tripping over one another and writers retconning one another's work within the first year of this new supposedly streamlined and easier-to-follow new universe.

I've had three occasions in the last few months, however, to wonder if it might have served the publisher better to wait until now to do it, or at least within the last few months.

First, we have Grant Morrison's years-long Batman epic, currently un-folding in a second volume of Batman, Inc wrapping up, and while it's been pretty excellent (during all those years on the writing side; the art's been more up and down). Morrison's take was peculiar in that it assumed everything that ever happened in any Batman comic really "happened" in DC canon/continuity/history, even if in some somewhat altered form. It doesn't really mesh with the New 52's five-year timeline at all, nor do some of the core aspects of his mega-story (Batman conceiving a 10-year-old several years into his career as Batman, that son becoming Robin, a multi-national independent security force of vigilantes inspired by Batman working closely with Bruce Wayne, even little things like Robin Tim Drake becoming Red Robin).

It probably would have been better to reboot Batman continuity after Morrison's run ended, rather than a few years before, forcing bizarre alterations to the cast and some exceptionally goofy trade numbering. I'm pretty sure at least some of the other Bat-books could have been just fine if given another year or two before the reboot (For example, we still woulda had Scott Snyder-written Batman comics, they would have just kept appearing in Detective Comics instead of a rebooted new Batman series).

Second, we had Geoff Johns' run on Green Lantern ending recently, which occasioned the complete reshuffling of all of the Green Lantern creative teams. The same applies here; wouldn't it have been better to reboot Green Lantern continuity after Johns and company's run on the Green Lantern titles, allowing for a more pure reading experience of that epic and allowing DC editorial and the newer creative teams to have an actual clean break with Green Lantern continuity, being better able to pick and choose what aspects of Johns' run they wanted to include? (As is, Green Lantern continuity, like Batman continuity, apparently still "counts" everything, except for the many instances in which the events of the continuity must be different, leading to a worst-of-both-worlds kind of thing where new readers are still bombarded to references to older stories, but they can't consult older comics, because those events aren't accurate anymore either).

And thirdly, this week Scott Snyder and Jim Lee's Superman Unchained launched, which probably woulda made for a fine Superman #1 or Action Comics #1, particularly given the creative chaos that has engulfed both of those titles in the less-than-two years they've been around. As is, the book has become the de facto flagship of the five-book Superman line (six, if you wanna count Adventures of Superman along with Superman, Action Comics, Supergirl and Superboy).

It's a really tricky thing to try and armchair quarterbacck this far into the New 52—I'm not sure, for example, how the old DCU might have limped along for two more years with just the Batman and Green Lantern franchises kicking ass (Putting Geoff Johns on JLA immediately after Brightest Day in the old continuity and/or spinning he and Ivan Reis' Aquaman out of that tile woulda worked just fine though; I'm sure the JLI promised at the end of Justice League: Generation Lost woulda been just as well received as The New 52 Justice League International in the long run; and I would have loved to read two more years worth of Paul Cornell Superman stories after reading his "Black Ring" arc in Action Comics, as I'm sure plenty of others might have). And then there's the Jim Lee factor. He was a major selling point of the Justice League #1 that lead the New 52 reboot, and he's a major selling point of the new Superman Unchained book, and I doubt they coulda had him draw both arcs simultaneously.

Anyway, less than two years into The New 52, it seems like DC's got some really big, almost tectonic things shifting for them, and it seems a shame these shifts were taken into account when the decision to reboot the whole superhero line was made.

Let's talk at far too great length about Suicide Squad #1 (2011), and what its characters look like

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