[Leo656]

Complicated issue, which to me comes down to a combination of "Telling new stories is Hard" and "People like Status Quo" with a hefty dose of Nostalgia Blanket.

It's not impossible to tell new stories, or even to move the plot forward, but in the late-90s and early-2000s, DC had a bad run of attempting to do both of those things with results that weren't always so great. So people start openly petitioning for things to "Go back to how they were Before", as sales start to slip when the New Stuff isn't grabbing the proper attention. So the publisher gives in to demand, sales spike upon the return of Hal Jordan or Barry Allen or Superman's old costume or the yellow oval on Batman's chest, and they run with that for a while. But eventually, you have to try and move things forward again but people remain resistant; they're happy to see what's familiar again, but when things start to change even a little bit, they get nervous. Sometimes the new stories are good, but sometimes they're bad, and that makes people even more skittish about things progressing in any appreciable fashion. So you're forever in this state of two steps forward, one step back, and eventually two MORE steps back and the whole dance starts again.

So when in the absence of any idea how to proceed, and with the audience at large being anxious about new ideas or story progression, the writers and publishers are all but forced to go back to the last time there was any sort of positive consensus about the characters. The last time there was NO divide in the audience and everyone more or less agreed, "Yeah, this is good", with only about a 1% margin of error.

For Superman and Batman, that becomes the Reeve and Keaton versions, respectively (and in my opinion, regrettably, but that is after all only My Opinion). We're also seeing it on the other side with Tobey's Spider-Man and all the people clamoring for more of That, 20 years after the fact. Same thing; A Thing comes out, it's almost universally acclaimed, and then New Things come out that are more divisive. There's more and more discord amongst the fans, and so they all retreat into the warm blanket of Nostalgia and "simpler times".

I get it. I don't particularly like it, but I understand it. I absolutely favor the Cavill Superman movies and the Bale/Affleck Batmans, but the fact is, nobody's ever going to be making any comics of those movies because the opinion on those movies is so split, with everyone on either side being so tribal about it. If they were to hypothetically make a comic book about, say, Affleck's Batman, or even a book set in the Schumacher Batman "universe", the arguments in the Comments sections of every news article would completely overshadow the project itself, like what we see any time a DC movie comes out, period. You'd have people who were excited, but also people shouting them down with "WHO even wants this? Blech!" And that's bad ink.

What they're trying to do with these nostalgia projects, is please the mythical "Everybody". Reeve Superman and Keaton Batman are the proverbial "sacred cows" for each of those characters; you're more or less not allowed to say they're anything less than great, and when in doubt, you can trot them out again anytime and people will unanimously cheer. They're a "safe" bet for any project. "If THIS doesn't make people happy, then nothing possibly can."

Mark my words, when sales on the IDW TMNT book dip below 3,000 copies, OR the book gets outright cancelled, they'll announce a "TMNT '88" comic book set in the Fred Wolf cartoon universe. It's absolutely going to happen at some point. It all depends on how desperate they get, and when.

I get it. I personally don't feel the same way most do about wallowing in nostalgia; I love to revisit the past but I don't necessarily want to live there, and I'm not of the opinion that what we had Then was in any way "Better" than what we have Now. Frankly, with regard to these two projects, I've written novels' worth of words about everything I think is wrong with Burton's Batman movies and the Reeve Superman flicks. I grew up with them, they're "Fine", but they're not sacrosanct to me the way they are to some and part of me even resents them a bit for the way people cling to them the same way they cling to FW TMNT, and never letting the characters move past that interpretation even decades after the fact, when objectively better things have come along.

BUT, at the end of the day, it's just ink. Like I said, I get it. And it doesn't hurt me in any way, it's not even a bad idea in and of itself, although like Aqua said, a better time probably would have been 10 or more years ago. But am I excited about either? Eh. Like IMJ said, if a collected edition comes out I might buy it.