New 52 Superman and Wonder Woman

Point. So, a year more then. Then again, DC brass has mentioned plans for a reboot every decade, so they could reasonably keep on until the Universe is retcon-punched yet again.

Hitting the reboot button every decade....it's really stupid. I'm not trying to be "screw new readers" but when majority of your readership are older fans of the previous established continuity, why are you going to continuously hit the reset button?

I know the standard answer is "to attract new readers" but the problem there is it's a temporarily and lazy fix. DC got what, maybe a year boost in sales before the titles returned to the same standard numbers.

I honestly don't even think the New 52 was new reader friendly. Like, at all. I was never big on DC, but I thought that, with the reboot, it might be a good idea to start reading. It didn't work. I still felt like I was being thrown in the middle of a established story, even at the first issues. Except with the New 52 I couldn't even go to the Internet to figure things out. Not to mention the mess with the Batman and Green Lantern continuity.

So, yeah, not entirely sure the "attract new readers" thing worked at all. Didn't work for me, at last.

edited 8th May '14 8:05:42 PM by Heatth

It's worked for Gundam and Digimon.

Not really comparable, for several reasons. The "reboots" there are just a completely different thing from what DC does. For starters, Gundam and Digimon don't have the same characters in their multiple "reboot". You don't get to see Amuro Ray or Taichi/Tai anywhere but their original continuities.

edited 8th May '14 8:53:35 PM by Heatth

Yeah, but a lot of DC characters have gone through so many different interpretations that they're really more like several different characters who happen to have the same name and costume.

edited 8th May '14 9:10:29 PM by RavenWilder

They still have the same name and costume. They are still lauded as the same character. And most of them have the same basic concept anyway. Still not the same. Also, that was only one example of how those are simply different things. Most Gundam and Digimon continuity don't actually even last a decade. They are over and a couple of years and that is it. With a fully finished and closed story. Fairly different of how DC comics work.

Besides, I wouldn't even call Gundam and Digimon examples of Continuity Reboot. Notice Gundam not even listed on that trope and the Digimon example as not absolute. The article doesn't make terrible clear but I would say the difference is that each Gundam and Digimon season don't actually attempt or prompt itself as a rewrite of the previous. They are just their own thing, just with the same name and sharing a few key concepts/themes.

edited 8th May '14 9:33:22 PM by Heatth

Honestly in the age of wiki's continuity lockout is less of an issue than it has ever been. If anything the reboot made the lockout worse because absolutely no one knew what was canon.

Yeah, that was my personal problem with it.

Admittedly, I am not exactly a casual reader. Not sure if most people would bother searching through a wiki to figure out things, so this is not the end all solution. Still, I don't think the New 52 did a good jog with its reboot.

Let's see. Digimon adaptations.

• C'mon Digimon: A boy likes raising virtual pets, a huge 90s fad. Another does not. Another, richer kid from an electronics company, builds a device that lets virtual pet creatures interact with their owners in 3D. The first two use this device to further bond or express their disgust. The third uses it to make people sad when he kills their pets before physically destroying the devices themselves. The three meet up, Hilarity Ensues.
• Digimon World: A boy is playing with his virtual pet when a monster hooks up with it and drags him to another world, whose denizens are being driven mad by a hacker having a field day with a world made entirely of data.
• Digimon Adventure: Natural disasters strike all over the world and seven kids at summer camp get lost in the upheaval, finding themselves totally clueless and reliant on protection from transforming monsters who grow stronger when the kids are in danger.
• Digimon World 2: After obtaining his monster taming license, a boy joins a local militia to defend his home. A cool car comes with the job.
• Digimon Tamers: Confused monsters are stumbling onto our planet and causing mayhem. The only things capable of stopping them seem to be a baker in training, an arrogant ruffian and a pacifist computer gamer, who beat them back through a combination of popular trading cards and a quartet of monsters who have sided with the human children against their more destructive brethren.

DigimonVTamer01 is set in the same world as C-mon while Digimon Adventure 02 and Digimon Adventure Anode Cathode Tamer are direct sequels to Adventure so I did not count them. But you have an idea how Digimon's first five "reboots" differed from each other. DC has four such reboots with a supposedly upcoming fifth. How do you think existing reboots measure up and what do expect of the fifth? In particular, compare the three main humans of C-mon to Tamers. Do you think we could get a Superman who is actually a boy working in his family shipping business, who contracts superpowers while passing a strange yellow sun and then uses them to defend the nearby life bearing water planet while trying to keep the whole thing secret from the rest of his people? Could we have a Wonder Woman who ventures into "man's world" fight battles and get stronger? A Batman who does not particularly like fighting but feels the current circumstances leave him with no other choice?

Frankly, it doesn't matter if the original canon/ continuity is easily available to the new readers. They won't read it. Even with the greatest information gathering tool ever created at their fingertips and pretty much anything they could possibly want to know about any character just a keystroke away, people will still not do the research. How many questions do you see on this very forum that could be easily answered by a simple internet or, for that matter, wikipedia search?

Ahem. Sorry about the rant.

Anyhow, I recall reading a fanfic once where the writer paired up Superman and Wonder Woman; it was written from Lois Lane's perspective, and mostly dealt with her feelings of regret over letting Superman get away. The writer (who was a woman, if it matters) seemed to feel that Lois was kind of condescending (what with the "Smallville" nickname and all)

Was this a Lois who knew about Superman and Clark Kent being the same person, or a Lois who was still in the dark?

This was a Lois who knew Superman and Clark were one and the same.

I'll do the research when I'm actually reading the comic. When I'm not in the story itself how should I know where to start? I was assuming some of you would have a grasp on the New 52 landscape and how it relates to the previous, Post Crisis one.

The main problem with DC's reboots isn't the rebooting itself—it's that it's a COSMIC reboot.

As I said a while back in a different forum, the main problem is that the old continuity never got closure. In Digimon, the current story or arc ends. Stuff resolves. But in a DC reboot, the story comes up with some sort of in-universe reason why things were changed. That means that if you were a fan of Lois and Supes as a couple, those characters had their marriage undone by a cosmic time unwinding. How many stories have we read when stuff like that happens and we're supposed to be horrified? But now, it's supposedly fine? Why? Because management says so?

That, and rebooting does nothing for you if you don't actually wipe the slate clean, and if you go right back to the bad habits that created the mess you're trying to reboot out of in the first place.

That, and the fact they reboot so often anymore means they get to waste time restarting the same plotlines and reintroducing the same characters all over again before they can get anything new underway..

While I don't really care who DC chooses to ship their characters with, this whole "you should reboot every ten years" seems like a foolish writing decision in general. Especially with this weird halfway measure they've taken in regards to Batman and the Green Lanterns.

This is what things like Alternate Continuity is for, by the way. With that you can write whatever new situation you want without creating a big huge mess. (The major thing that actually made sense here was them making Earth 1 and Earth 2 a thing again.)

I dunno. If you're going to do a reboot, having it planned out ten years in advance is probably better than throwing it together at the last minute.

That is probably the best argument I have read for the reboot, from a narrative perspective.

I thought of a way to salvage the Superman Wonder Woman pairing for those who do not like it either. They have sex, Wonder Woman gets pregnant, she gives birth to...A-ko Magami! She becomes the soul survivor of the New 52 Superheroes when the inevitable reboot comes and has adventures in a used futuristic world.

edited 13th May '14 7:14:11 PM by IndirectActiveTransport