Go, Read: Tim O’Neil On DC’s Rebirth Initiative

Tim O'Neil at Trouble With Comics provides a longer-than-usual, thoughtful-as-usual answer to the question of how much success we might expect of DC's latest line-wide editorial initiative "Rebirth." It focuses on the use of the Watchmen characters as narrative elements in the story designed to introduce the initiative into the rolling plotline in which the entire company -- save for a few stand-alone projects -- participates.

I wanted to wait a while and read a few more issues of that series before I commented; I'm not immersed enough in that world to know what they're doing and which plot points are serious statements about the state of superheroes and which ones are feints in some other direction. I'll write that piece, but maybe I can slap together some thoughts before comics' summer becomes road trips and extended twitter fights.

The idea asserted that somehow DC superhero comics got discombobulated or knocked off-message by exposure to Watchmen and comics like it strikes me as insanely silly, a Twinkie defense for shared-universe mismanagement. It's certainly not to my mind even an accurate historical reflection of how some of the approaches in question developed, although I'll grant that making that kind of pop-culture hunch isn't exactly the work of Henry Steele Commager. Moreover, there's a very good argument to be made, and people are going to make it, that it's the treatment of creators like Alan Moore in a general creative-exchange sense -- holding valuable creators to the letter of the law for the benefit of less-interesting creators and editorial managers, the reduction of everything into malleable properties and the notion that you just sort of have to position these creations into new stories by whomever -- that is what is most deeply harmful to the grand acts of creation that are these extended soap operas.

Me, I think we're well past the day where sales are automatic to the point where the bulk of a line can be ordinary yet sustainable. Comics need to be pretty good on an individual basis right now, at least until a much bigger audience is built that just wants to buy random, ordinary books at mid-'70s numbers. Good luck with that. Batman Vs. Rorshach, if that's where they're going, needs be to a good comic book story -- not just good solicitation copy. It needs to be a thrilling comic doubly so for the gag reflex of its manipulative and gimmicky nature, and triply so because it comes at a cost of making your company a less attractive place for many of the creators that have the juice to decide where they're going to set up shop. As far as the end result of a more positive, happier line, I also have my doubts that things like that work as editorial edicts. Comics that are forgettable and hopeful tend to limit their effect to making the people that were buying this stuff anyway a little happier than they were buying the comics that were forgettable and miserable. I also wonder if the math is there for any of these top-heavy company infrastructures to continue making sense. In that way, efforts like these are a scramble for survival: not of comics, not of the DC Universe, but of a way of conducting business that employs that many executive-level decision-makers.

In the end, if you're an editor with a mission to publish an entire line, every problem probably looks like it needs a line-wide revamp.
 
posted 11:55 pm PST | Permalink
 

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