Revamp the DC universe!

Cafe Society
1

Maybe you thought Infinite Crisis was an element in futility. Maybe you thought that Crisis on Infinite Earths didn’t go nearly far enough. Maybe you thought you could have done a better job.

Prove it.

If you were appointed editor-in-chief of DC Comics, given ultimate editorial control over all hiring & firing decisions, and assured a ten-year-reign in that position, how would you revamp DC?

Here’s six things I’d do:

  1. Starting with the aftermath of COIE, I’d restart the universe from scrap–no story told beforehand is in continuity now. The new publishing history starts in 2000, twelve years after Superman’s first appearance, and there’d be a 52-part maxiseries (like the current 52) summarizing the new history.

  2. The Justice Society would be only a historical artifact. No member of the Society is publicly active as a super-hero, having been forced into retirement by McCarthyism. In addition, the mortals in the group–Flash, GL, Wildcat, etc–are all dead or in nursing homes, and there’s an editorial edict that none can be reintroduced as active characters unless they’re killed in the same storyline.

  3. Metahumans–and I’m including non-powered characters like Batman in this group–are as scarce as hen’s teeth. Earth has about 75 super-heroes total, and maybe twice that many super-villains. One exception: secret civilizations like Atlantis and Paradise island still exist, but no more than two persons from such worlds are allowed to be major characters.

  4. After the McCarthy hearings in the 50s that caused the dissolution of the JSA, there were no public heroes until Superman appeared in the late 80s.

  5. Resurrections are even rarer than metahumans. Writers are only allowed to kill off characters they create, and characters can only be brought back to life if the EIC agrees.

  6. Matt Wagner’s TRINITY is told pretty much as is; Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman were the first of the new crop of superheroes to show up. Superman was the only hero around during the first year of his career; Batman and Wonder Woman showed up during his second year; Robin, Flash, GL, and the other primary JLAers showed up in year 3; and the JLA wasn’t formed until year four.

Anybody else?

2

I wrote a long post containing a lot of pretty substantial changes I’d make to the DCU (including throwing Jason Todd’s decomposing corpse into a sun and imprisoning Lex Luthor and nuking Paradise Island and…well, you get the picture) but then I realised the one thing that the DCU needs:

No more continuity.

That’s right, not even of the parallel-universe fucked up comic book kind. Just abandon the idea of an internally consistent shared universe. Share characters, share locations, share storylines, but in general there is no link between any given story and another. Assume that unless it is explicitly stated otherwise, each comic (graphic novel, arc, whatever) takes place in a seperate Hypertime, unreachable by any form of technology existing in the DCU because…it’s just a story. Accept that this Batman, although he has the same origin and rogue’s gallery and everything else as the Batman, did not fight Hitler, or watch the Joker shoot Barbara Gordon, or kill Superman unless it says so. Include a tiny (one page, one panel, one whatever) refresher at the beginning of every issue reminding you of Batman’s origins, but otherwise give the writer free reign.

This will:
-Simplify comics immensely, hopefully making the concept more accesible to new readers.
-Elminate the need for constant retcons. Last year’s Batman operated In The Modern Day and started fight crime Twenty Years Ago…and so does this year’s Batman. And so will all the Batmans between now and when the show become unprofitable [/Troy McClure]…unless the writer wants to mention that Batman began fighting crime This Year or Yesterday or a Hundred Years Ago. This brings me on to my next point:
-Grant much greater artistic freedom. Suppose a writer wants to write a killer story with Dick Grayson/Robin and the Spoiler fighting Smallville Superboy? Let them write it, and put in the backstory themselves.
-Elminate the absurdities that come from a 60-year backstory. Why doesn’t Superman do X? Well, because in this story, he can’t, and needs to get by on his quick wits and charm.
-Put a nail through the head of every Internet fanboy out there, who will scream, write frothing message board posts, and die, simultaneously. Which is reason enough in itself.:smiley:

3

No more Byrne.

4

Only good suggestion I’ve seen so far. :smiley:

5

***Revamp the DC universe! ***

What?! Again?!

Don’t give DC any more bright ideas, ok?

6

Bad idea. Let me 'splain. One, the OP was asking how you’d change the DCU, and under your proposal, there is no DCU, so it’s hardly applicable.

Two - The first half of every story would have to be dedicated to explaining the specifics and particulars of THIS Batman that you need to know. There’s no way to build on previous stories.

Three - What you’re proposing is, essentially, turning the entire line at DC into a series of disconnected Elseworlds miniseries. They did this for a while, sort of. There were fifty billion variants of Batman available each month, each taking the time to explain how this one was different, et cetera. They don’t do this anymore. Apparently, sales weren’t what they wanted them to be, or else they’d still be doing it. And your proposal is even worse than the Elseworlds - because the disconnected miniseries you propose would have the different versions of Batman often so similar that the casual reader would be confused. It’s fairly easy to establish “Batman, but in Victorian London” as a separate entity, but “Batman, de-emphasizing his detective skills” isn’t much different from “Batman, playing up his Ninja skills”.

So, in short - it makes things more complex, not simpler; it’s bad for business; and as for artistic freedom - there’s a way, in comics, to have complete artistic freedom. It’s called “Invent your own fraggin character”. If you want to write Superman, on the other hand, write Superman. He’s not unable to fly. Lex Luthor isn’t a co-survivor of Krypton. He wears a cheesy costume. He can optionally fight giant robot spiders, but you can just as easily put that in Wild Wild West.

I just don’t understand the mindset that can simultaneously want all the credit and glory and acclaim of Superman’s iconic status that comes from his history and at the same time want to discard that history. It’s like wanting to swim without getting wet. Good luck with that.

7

Dang it, Happy Clam beat me too it.

I’ll still say it anyway: I’d treat every book like it was an All-Star title. You’d have to stay faithful to a character’s core concepts (as EIC, what’s a “core concept” to a previously established character is my call), but past that, your story arc only has to maintain continuity within itself. You can reference previous story lines (assuming the story’s still accesible to a brand new reader, of course), but you don’t have to. Once you’re done with the run, the character will be handed over to a new team, who can ignore whatever parts of your story they want to (although I’d try to discourage writers from contradicting each others plots just because they can, not that they don’t do this already).

I’d also encourage writers to create their own characters, who, unlike bigshots like Superman and Batman, would exist in their own books, ideally remain driven by a single creative vision, and have a begininng, middle, and end to their story. Like Sandman or Starman.

But that’s not quite what you’re asking. I’ll get to actually changes to teh DCU later.

8

There is one thing I like in Skald’s proposal, and that a new firm starting point, and a miniseries to cover the backstory. Figure out where the DCU is, write an outline of where it has been, and then keep it consistent. Avoid sensationalist retcons. (“Ah, but he was a robot since back in the 40’s!”) Avoid sensationalist character deaths. If you kill someone they should stay dead*, but as escapist literature, you should rarely kill people. (* Exceptions allowed for characters with appropriate gimmicks.)

Writers claim they want to make character death meaningful, so they don’t want to resurrect characters. That’s great. However, killing off twenty people to show how badass your new villain is sort of undermines your credibility on that point.

Just because a character has been out of the limelight for ten years does not mean you need to sacrifice him as cannon fodder or replace him with a hipper, more ethnically-diverse equivalent. Replacement heroes should arise organically. Sidekicks. Friends. Family Members. Rarely should we see a complete stranger take up a character’s mantle. (coughFireStormcough)

Of course, these are broad points. They don’t address specific continuity issues.

Oh - In addition to JThunder’s Byrne rule, I’d add : No more Chuck Austen.

9

Becuase some of the history is stupid, and most of it’s irrelevant to the story I want to tell. And what Happy Clam and I are proposing isn’t that complicated.

Look, let’s take Batman, for example. At one point, DC was asking you to buy all the following contradictory versions of Batman:

  1. Batman of the regular DCU
    2a. Batman of the Timmverse (B:tAS, JLU, Batman Beyond, etc)
    2b. Batman of the associated comics, which are only somewhat in continuity with the cartoons.
    3a. Batman of The Batman
    3b. Batman of The Batman Strikes!
  2. Batman Begins (and realize that it’s different that the Batman of Batman through Batman & Robin).
  3. All-Star Batman and Robin.
    And that’s not counting Elseworlds and the Teen Titans cartoon (which references Batman sometimes but isn’t clearly in continuity with any other version. If DC can expect us to follow five different versions of Batman simultaneously (and make no mistake, they want us to watch the TV shows and movies), then they can simply not hold successive Batman writers to follow each others’ continuities.
10

Anyway, here’s what I’d do, if I had to keep a coherent, shared universe.

…

Actually, I can’t really beat Skald if I was building it from teh ground up. Although I’d let Jay Garrick, Alan Scott, and maybe Wildcat remain young through various chicanery. Wildcat is well aware that he’s living on borrowed time, however, and he’ll die heroically in fairly short order.

11

“Stupid” is in the eye of the beholder. “Why’s he gotta have a spit-curl?” “You mean a green rock can kill him? How lame!” “Don’t be silly, people can’t fly!”

One of the consistent reasons I heard for the cancellation of JLU was that DC thought the Batman brand was being too diluted by all these incarnations. Pointedly, aside from a first season appearance by the Joker, no Batman : The Animated Series villains were allowed to appear on JL. They preferred to focus on the more anime-inspired The Batman!

While I’m sure they’d like us to consume all the versions of the Batman, I don’t think you can make the case that The Batman! cartoon is targetted at readers of the comics. I will also note a recent tendency to converge the mainstream DCU and the Animated Universe - Harley Quinn and Live Wire; Mr. Freeze’s origin revamp; the current appearances of the Toyman and Metallo in Superman comics.

And if there is no continuity, why would these different creative teams take on Batman sequentially? Certainly, they can overlap. Without the “coasting” effect provided by regular readers of a continuous title, they’ll need to hedge their bets - put out multiple miniseries so that if one doesn’t sell, perhaps the other will.

Then they glut the market and have the Elseworlds problem.

All-Star Batman is a way for DC to satisfy continuity-phobes, while maintaining the regular line for us folks that prefer things that way. If you don’t like continuity, just read the All-Star stuff and leave those of us who like a bit of history to the rest of it.

12

Nuke it and replace it with Astro City. Buseik’s characters are more interesting, anyway.

13

The solution to the glut problem is to limit the amount of Batman books on the market at a time. Easy. And it makes more room for original characters anyway.

14

If you like shiny, happy, flawless cardboard cutouts. I found Astro City to be an interesting experiment, but never got into it because Busiek tends to write about archetypes rather than people, ideas rather than characters.

15

When I said that I wanted to do away with continuity, I obviously wasn’t saying that Bruce Wayne should be given a power ring or anything- save that for Elseworlds. I simply meant that you should seperate comics from the idea that everything has to fit neatly into the established “continuity” universe. I’m perfectly happy to have five titles running cocurrently, each containing a Batman basically identical, but none being bound to decisions made in the other titles, or, for that matter, in previous storylines. Want to give Joker a new gizmo and not worry about it next episode? Go ahead. Essentially, I’d like for each storyline to be a self-contained…well, story, all starting from more or less the same place (Superman comes to earth, fights crime, same rogue’s gallery et al) but free to go wherever it wants.

16

I’ve been developing, in my head a personal version of the DCU - basic plot concepts mapped out from 1939 to 2030, plus jumping ahead to the run from 3000 to 3020.

It, while, I think, interesting, is, due to several points, entirely unsuited to being the primary DCU - for one, time would be explicitly allowed to flow within it at approximately the same rate as in the real world, meaning characters would become difficult to use fairly quickly. (I would be happy to post details if anyone was interested. >_> )

Certain details of it would be carried over, however:

The Vertigo/DC divide would be reversed/soundly ignored. Characters like John Constantine, Swamp Thing, and so forth would be within the DCU again. While Hellblazer, Swamp Thing, and the like would remain Mature Readers titles, that wouldn’t make the characters unusuable in non-MR books, or prevent them from using non-MR-based characters. Although, crossovers, of course, would happen only when extremely character appropriate, and not require reading the MR book to follow the non-MR.

The Green Lantern Corps and the JSA’s Green Lantern have only the most tenuous connections. As such the Corps wouldn’t be called Green Lanterns - but, rather, ‘Guardians of the Emerald Sun’ - that’s just the name applied to them by humans, due to a) the similarity to Alan Scott’s powers and b) Hal Jordan taking the name in honour of Scott…

The most powerful characters - the Kryptonians, the Daxamites, the Green Lanterns, certain top-level mystics - would have their power levels lowered.

Certain characters - particularly mid-to-top level mystics - would have their power-sets specified and fixed, requiring an in-story event to increase or change them - preventing writers from pulling out a Miracle Power out of their asses to resolve a corner they’ve written themselves into.

All the planets used in the stories would be within the same damn galaxy. And quite clearly so.

It would be even bigger on legacies than it is now.

17

Tengu points out a divide that I think is even bigger than the continuity/non-continuity split: Real-Change vs Illusion-of-Change.

Real-Changers want Batman to get old die and be replaced by Dick Grayson or Tim Drake. And they’d like it done ASAP, please.

Illusion-of-Changers fret about how Spider-Man is married now, and wonder if killing Gwen Stacy was a good idea.

RCers made Hal Crazy. IoCers brought him back.

Happy Clam and my suggestions would be the best of both worlds. Want to write a story where Bruce dies and Tim reluctantly takes up the mantle? Go for it. Then the next story will be about Bruce Wayne, since that’s the Batman people want to read about.

18

But what happens if I like a particular character written by a certain writer? If I like Tim-as-Batman, I’m fine for a few issues, but then after the creative team leaves I have to go out and find a new series i’m interested in. With the current system, I can pick up an issue or two, find out if I like the character, and if I do i’m assured of (at the least) a good few series before I have to look for a new one. Sure, there’d be more chance of me finding a character I like, since under your system there would be many more iterations of a character; but I’d still prefer finding it hard to find a good character that’ll last for a while than an easy-to-find character that’s gone after an issue.

19

Under the current system, the next creative team is likely to undo any changes your preferred writer made anyway, so it’s pretty much the same situation.

20

Oh, I’d still let tell JSA stories; I like Garrick and Scott & Wildcat. I’d just set them in the past. Wildcat’s gimmick of having nine lives works for me, though, and since there’s no successor Wildcats to get confused about, he can stay.