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NuDC = old Wildstorm

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Tim O’Neil explains the real reason for the NuDC:

The post-Flashpoint DC Universe was created as a means of streamlining the company’s staggeringly diverse array of IP into forms more easily amenable to bookstore channels and especially digital distribution services. The goal – successfully achieved so far – has been to make DC resemble something less than an eclectically diverse publishing line and something more along the lines of a streamlined television network.

Given that, its not hard to see that many of the more controversial creative decisions have been made with an eye towards developing a ruthlessly efficient commercial applicability. Hence the explicit T&A books, hence the multiple attempts to ape existing popular Young Adult book franchises (you should be able to spot them yourself with no trouble), hence the multiple attempts to reframe existing properties as potential basic cable drama programming. The goal is to create stories that can be easily packaged and sold by genre to casual readers using digital devices whose size and visual capabilities have now synched up almost completely with the technical demands of displaying comic books.

All that's missing is the knee pouches and spit threads

Though I think he’s got a point, I think it may be too much honour to assume that DC was this calculated about the reboot. The end product is just not good enough. Seen as a whole, the NuDC line is actually not commercial enough, not even half as cleverly exploitative as it could’ve been. There are the various continuity carry-overs Tim mentioned, like the Batman and Green Lantern titles which just continue to do what they would’ve done without the reboot, there are also a couple of titles, like e.g. Static Shock or Resurrection Man where you suspect somebody is using the reboot as an excuse to bring back an old favourite, or to get some offbeat new concept approved (Justice League Dark, Demon Knights), not to mention te series that are basically duplicates of each other (Deathstroke, Grifter or Blackhawks and Men of War). In sort, it’s all a bit of a mess if you want to believe in Tim O’Neil’s hypothese.

Where he is probably right is in the motivation behind the reboot, to make it more easier to stripmine the DC universe for new succesful media properties as motivated by the success Marvel has had in the past decade doing the same to their universe. Ironically, as with the original Crisis on Infinite Earths, published out of a desire to streamline the then existing DC universe to make it easier to lure Marvel readers because people who read the Claremont X-Men would’ve had trouble with the complicated concept of multiple earths, they once again got it arse backwards. Marvel has been succesful with its movies by being smart about picking the best parts of a decades long publishing history for their titles and not worry too much about if they mirror proper continuity. These films then naturally filter back into the original comics, but that’s just a side effect. It’s not necessary, as DC’s own successes with the various animated Batman series have shown.

But the powers that be at DC must’ve thought otherwise and put through this halfbaked revamp, which basically amounted to Wildstormising the DC universe. You got your asshole heroes not that different from the villains, lots and lots of shadowy governmenty conspiracies (who should be tripping over each other so many there are), gratitious sex (well, almost nudity) and “hey kids comics” violence, plots that don’t make no sense, both because they all seem have to start in the damn middle and because they all feature off brand characters who can’t care about yet because we don’t know them. It’s not a new development of course, DC has been moving in this direction for years, but with the reboot it’s become official.

It’s all not very good, not really thought out well and as original as a not very original thing, another dip in the well of failed ideas, but if it makes DC happy. Just don’t expect me to like it.

When America still read comics

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Here are some statistics to make any modern American comics publisher weep with envy. Coming from the transcripts of the 1954 Senate Subcommittee Hearings into Juvenile Delinquency, which under the influence of Wertham and other moral crusaders looked at the evil influence comics supposedly had on the youth of America, this is part of the testimony of Mrs. Helen Meyer, vice president of the Dell Publishing Co:

Dell’s average comic sale is 800,000 copies per issue. Most crime and horror comic sales are under 250,000 copies.

Of the first 25 largest selling magazines on newsstands – this includes Ladies Home Journal, Saturday Evening Post, Life, and so forth ─ 11 titles are Dell comics, with Walt Disney’s Donald Duck the leading newsstand seller. Some of these titles are: “Walt Disney’s Comics”; “Warner Bros. Bugs Bunny”; “Walt Disney’s Mickey Mouse”; “Warner Bros. Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies, Porky Pigs”; “Walter Lantz Woody Woodpecker”; “Margie’s Little Lulu”; “Mom’s Tom and Jerry.”

The newsstand sales range from 950,000 to 1,996,570 on each of the above mentioned titles. I mean newsstands only and I am not including any subscriptions, and we have hundreds of thousands of subscriptions.

With the least amount of titles, or 15 percent of all titles published by the entire industry; Dell can account for a sale of approximately 32 percent, and we don’t publish a crime or horror comic.

[…]

We print approximately 30 million comics a month. We sell over 25 million.

I found this site following a long breadcrumb trail of blogs, which I won’t tire y’all with. The story of how Wertham destroyed comics is well known, if perhaps as much myth as fact by now, but every history I’ve read of this focuses on the artistic impact this had on the American comics scene, with the economic impacts only of secondary importance. So these histories do mention that many publishers folded in the aftermath of the Wertham controversies and adaptation of the Comics Code, but I haven’t yet found any that really goes into detail in the ways comics published itself changed, let alone a history that put this in the wider context of the changes in (magazine) publishing in the fifties. As show above, Dell, at the time America’s biggest comics publisher could expect to sell some 800,000 copies of any given title, but how and how much did Wertham influence these nubmers? Did the comics code really do in so many publishers or was there more going on? How does all this tie in with the collapse of the independent distribution system that also took place at the time, iirc?

Anybody can recommend any good book/website that attempts to answer these sort of questions?

Shary Flenniken talks about Trots and Bonnie

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I came across Trots and Bonnie again a few weeks back through the interview with Shary Flenniken The Comics Journal did years ago. What struck me was the artwork, which looked as if it should’ve been published alongside Windsor McKay’s and George Herriman’s in some early twentieth century newspaper’s Sunday edition. Even in this golden age of comics reprints there are strips that have fallen through the cracks: no commercial interest, difficulties getting the rights together, too obscure, too difficult to get the original sources for the art together etc, or there just isn’t anybody interested and dedicated enough to overcome these things. Trots and Bonnie is one such comic, for which these problems should be relatively easy to overcome. It’s the last great uncollected underground comic.

Earlier this month Shary Flenniken did an interview for Jeff Kay, who’d emailed her a list of questions expecting to at most get a mail back; instead he got a four part Youtube video:

Part one: general introduction:



Part two: Trots and Bonnie



Part three: about the possibility of a reprint collection of Trots and Bonnie and all the technical difficulties into getting it together.



Part four: what Shary is doing now.



Come on Fantagraphics, Drawn and Quarterly, Top Shelf: get us the complete Trots and Bonnie, you know you want to.

Justice League again

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Over at The Comics Journal, Ken Parille dissects Justice League #1, concluding:

That frikking Green Lantern plane

JL#1 still baffles me. Could it really be as bland as I think it is? Could it be that the creators achieved exactly what they wanted? Am I missing something: are the references to Lexcorp and Darksied key in some way?

For me, superhero comics can’t be good when they’re burdened by a need to be an earth-shattering event, taking us back to DAY ONE and starting all over again. Every aspect of this comic works toward attaining the same register: High Intensity. It has little sense of verbal or visual rhythm—there’s no flow and no mystery.

And it has little plot to speak of, other than heroes fighting aliens and bickering. Much of this “plot” revolves around the big reveal of Superman on the last page, a moment Batman and Green Lantern have been anticipating . . . and fearing. When he appears, it’s a major deal for them. But not for me, and I doubt for most readers.

This is a problem. The story may be compelling for the characters living it out, but as a reader who knows exactly where it’s going—having seen hundreds of comics take this worn path—it’s not an event, but a drag.

It’d be like thinking you’re writing a “mysterious stranger” narrative, but you show him on the book’s cover, name him early on, and talk about him a few times, and make him a character that literally every reader knows: America’s most recognizable icon, the Man of Steel.

Now of course, this being a superhero comic being dissed at the Journal, the fanboys out of the woodwork came. Yet there’s something off about the very first comment, which complains about Ken complaining about Green Lantern creating a big green fighter jet for him and Batman to travel around in. See if you can spot what’s off about this and remember, this is the first issue of the first comics in the post-reboot DC universe. Take it away Francisco Silva:

Hal Jordan, the Green Lantern, is a fighter pilot by profession, it makes perfect sense he would make a fighter plane. Actually seeing as his power is to make green light constructs, he actually knows the mechanics of the F-15, therefore being able to make it work. From the moment you don’t get the character, or his motivations, I am pretty sure you are not going to get anything else.

That’s right, how does Francisco know this? Nowhere in Justice League #1 is Green Lantern’s profession mentioned, nor any of the details of how his powers work that people later in the thread come up with to explain why GL made that frikking fighter plane. The only way we know that this is Hal Jordan, who was a fighter pilot before he became a cosmic cop is that we remember this from the old DC universe, where this was true. But this isn’t meant as a gotcha against Francisco, because as Ken also indicates in his review in those last two paragraphs, this comic, the first in a bold new DC universe depends for all its impact on the associations the readers bring along from the old DC.

Thought experiment time. For Batman, Green Lantern and Superman, substitute one of the very many imitators they’ve all had over the years, some dumb old analogue from one of the nineties superhero universa that nobody remembered or cared for. Having doen so, would this comic make any sense, once you lose all the emotional baggage “Batman”, “Green Lantern” and “Superman” bring with them?

I think not.

It’s the fundamental irony of this reboot: for all it tries to be new, different and accessible for new readers, it still depends on the seventyplus years of baggage these characters drag with them, because otherwise nobody would care. Without that history as a crutch, a reboot like the NuDC is just not possible. And of course it does mean that the reboot will fail and the “new” continuity will get as tangled as the old one was, within the year.

(Apart from all that, Justice League #1 is still a bad comic which doesn’t even tells a complete story or even a chapter in a story, but just goes through the motions as it cycles through a series of bad action movie scenes.)