Superman: The Man Of Tomorrow Animated Feature (2020)

[Leo656]

Originally Posted by sdp

I pretty much stopped caring after New 52, what reboots have they done since then?

I never understood New 52 since it was only another "somethings from the past are canon but not all", especially when it came to Batman being young but still having like 10 different robins, it was bound to be a mess. I remember reading that Classic Wally would be coming back and there was the whole watchmen being in DC comics now but never dwelled much into what happened.

Ehhhhh, "Watchmen" still happened in its own universe, they just did a cross-over. It's not like Watchmen is technically "DCU canon" any more than Silver Surfer is just because he once met Kyle Rayner. So it's not like they're "in the DC Universe" so much as "two universes owned by the same company had a cross-over", which happens all the time. It was only made a big deal of because it's Watchmen and therefore sacrosanct.

New 52 was DC giving up when Final Crisis and "World Of New Krypton" didn't set the world on fire with their sales as expected. Those were their "Big Guns" that were supposed to do huge business for the company, and they didn't. Not knowing how to top them, or what to do otherwise, they just said "F*ck it, start over." Which was very stupid and a total panic move, but hey... DiDio and WB.

The general idea behind the execution of New 52 itself was, "Make DC more like Marvel Comics so Marvel fans will jump over," or that people who'd never read comics at all would feel safe jumping in with a "blank slate". But it didn't work because you can't cross-pollinate between comic book companies any more than you can with wrestling companies; people watch their preferred show/brand for a reason. When WCW went out of business, their 10 million fans didn't start watching WWF instead, they just quit watching wrestling. They hated the WWF product, that's why they watched WCW. Same thing. Marvel fans like Marvel. They won't suddenly jump ship and pledge loyalty to DC because they become "Marvel-Lite", that's never happening. And we've seen that, now. That's what DC was hoping for, that they'd steal a big chunk of Marvel fans, but it absolutely did not work. SOME Marvel fans checked in out of curiosity and some of them even liked what they saw, but they eventually got bored and went back to their own sandbox, as expected. And that's perfectly fine; like I said, very few fans of one company are ever gonna "jump ship" and even fewer like both companies equally; they appeal to different fans for entirely different reasons. Always WAS the case, always will be the case.

New 52 was a failure before it happened because 1. It was a total desperation move made out of sales panic rather than storytelling reasons, and 2. "Make DC appeal to Marvel fans" was an inherently flawed and stupid idea to even attempt. For every one Marvel fan who picked up a DC book for the first time, they lost 50 loyal DC readers, and then most of the curious Marvel fans and casual non-comic book readers all went away very quickly, but the old DC fans didn't come back, and now they're all screwed up and don't know WHAT to do.

As you mentioned, stuff like "Batman and Green Lantern books sell, so we won't go full-reboot with them" definitely made it bumpy and messy. But the whole thing never should have even been attempted in the first place. "Brightest Day"-era was going fine, it just wasn't making boat loads of money. But it was better than anything they've since tried to replace it with, that's an absolute certainty.

The BEST thing they could do would be have Waverider or Booster Gold wake up and declare everything since 2010 was a bad dream, and pick up immediately where they were pre-Flashpoint. That's literally the only good thing they could do, but there's a ton of reasons why they won't and can't do that. But they should. Anything else is a Band-Aid on a bazooka hole.

As far as "other reboots" since New 52: "Convergence" was supposed to make all the different and conflicting DC timelines and continuities make sense, but instead they made it a lot worse by declaring the ending of "Crisis" never happened because they went back and stopped the Anti-Monitor from ever destroying the Multiverse, and that was stupid and annoyed a lot of people. So THEN they just sort of said "never mind" and had "Rebirth" happen, which is essentially, "Dr. Manhattan got bored and screwed up the DCU and that's why everything is screwy now", which allowed some wiggle room for the characters and concepts people liked from pre-Flashpoint to creep back in. But it's still a total mess, story-wise.

Again, it's like trying to clean up dog sh*t with a dry piece of newspaper. You're just making a bigger mess. Don't let the dog sh*t on the floor.