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Underground > Comic Books >

DC Comics, broken?

  
  

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Benny the Ball
21:56 / 31.12.08
I've always been more a DC than a Marvel person, loving the odd old Justice League that I picked up as a kid, often featuring other worlds, demons with strange powers, magic and heroics combined in fantastic tales that tied up in 22 pages, but of late I'm just not enjoying them as much.

Marvel seems constantly stuck in some huge cross over event (I know DC have this too, but Marvel seems to not even have a break between them these days) and I've never really been the biggest fan of their stuff, when compared to DC, but DC cannot get a story together at the moment, it seems. All the real world problems, like late books, aside, the over use of Darkseid in the last few years has, in my opinion, completely removed any threat he presented, Geoff Johns, continuity king that he is, bless him, just isn't that good a writer, and I'm tired of seeing the equally over used threat of Superboy Prime in every book he writes.

Characters are being killed off left right and centre, and the whole thing seems totally directionless - I've felt more informed as to what is happening at DC through the last few issues of Ambush Bug than any of the actual books that I've picked up.

So, how do others feel DC is going at the moment?

Are people enjoying any of this?

What would you do to fix it?
 
 
Mario
23:35 / 31.12.08
I think both Marvel & DC are broken, and neither of them will be getting a lot of my money in '09. Both are spending far too much energy on bold, line-wide changes, instead of simply focusing on good storytelling.
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
00:02 / 01.01.09
Are characters being killed off? I seem to recall feeling that one problem is that the earth-shattering changes that take place in the DC Universe aren't all that earth-shattering, partly because people are staying dead for less and less time, perhaps out of hunger for sensation. Ted Kord being killed did feel significant, but was stylistically muffed. But who else died in Infinite Crisis? Superboy, offspring of a reviled storyline about whom nobody cared? Terra? Judomaster? It was all a bit underwhelming. The death of the New Gods was just unconvincing - a month or two later, and at least one set of them is absolutely fine.

Creatively, there are certainly some problems, but these feel like a tributary into the real issue - that sales of the comics just aren't very huge. DC makes a lot of money by providing properties to Warner Brothers to make movies, but but. Would the recent Nolan movies have been significantly different if there had been no Batman comics for the last four or five years. Outside a small audience of diehards, where is the development potential?
 
 
Benny the Ball
00:17 / 01.01.09
There are a few heros that have been killed off and handed over to Geoff Johns for his Black Lantern series (Martian Manhunter is the biggest one to come to mind).

It just seems that there was a sense of promise and hope coming out around the end of the Infinite Crisis or Identity Crisis or whatever it was, like the dark grim and gritty was going so far as to actually coming absurd and going to end - ASSuperman, Blue Beetle and Booster Gold were all books that were presented as lighter and story for story sake comics, but there you go.

Sales are suffering, a few Comic Book Store guys have mentioned that Diamond have talked about drops as high as a 1/3 in future orders.

Is it the end?
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
00:41 / 01.01.09
Oh, I forgot about Martian Manhunter. Which, hmm. Why did I forget about Martian Manhunter? Possibly because he went through the whole pointy-head bondage gear phase which seemed to make the character a bit of a mess before he died, and perhaps also because without a regular gig in the JLA or a monthly series (or a team book at all - he was dropped from Outsiders, also), he didn't have a lot of pull. Death and a chance to be resurrected in a bit as "classic" Martian Manhunter seemed to be a decent way to deal with the character. Nobody's expecting him to stay dead very long, though, are they?
 
 
Benny the Ball
01:05 / 01.01.09
It's sad, and I'm not so naive to not expect it, but the empty killing of characters for nothing but cheap story telling purposes, is another thing that has gotten me more this year than most. I guess the return of so many of the killed characters that had stayed dead so long just highlighted the desperation of most of the story telling.

So, would people want a total reboot, restart and return to how things were at some time they preferred, or would they like a radical change to actually affect the DCU?
 
 
Mario
01:28 / 01.01.09
Neither. If either company wants my coin, they should let the writers write, and not worry about Events. For Goodwin's sake, the return of Barry freaking Allen was postponed until March or April because they wanted to fit it between a Bat-event and a GL-event.
 
 
Alex's Grandma
04:43 / 01.01.09
It does seem sad that DC, having published most of the best mainstream comics of the Nineties (including the early, superhero-ish Vertigo material, for the sake of argument) has allowed itself to sink back into the role of doddering uncle, again.

All the Silver Age re-boots. The return of Hal Jordan, and so on. Who wanted Hal back? Why dig up the Green Arrow? How many now living can really remember what Barry Allen was like in the first place?

Is the current vogue for nostalgia at DC editorial doing them any favours? Or should they just stop, before it's too late?
 
 
Mario
11:24 / 01.01.09
Actually, the nostalgia may be the part they are doing right. Marvel's approach of radically shaking up the line may pay off in the short term, but attracting older readers back helps in the long term.
 
 
Our Lady Has Left the Building
15:01 / 01.01.09
Hmmm, is the fact that I seem to generally like (not love, mind you) Geoff Johns stuff because I'm not a huge DC comics reading fan? I also don't really care about characters dying because, as Haus says, they're either insignificant characters that are dying off because no-one likes them or they are characters that will be back later, for all the fuss about bringing Hal back, look at how difficult it was to kill the fucker off in the first place.

The problem that seems more pronounced with Marvel (from my equally little-reading outside perception) is that they change things in a major important way... for a few months. Tony Stark, Director of SHIELD, is an idea that, if you bring it in, should be played with for several years before you toss it aside, if you can't think of good stories then you don't bring it in in the first place, and so now we're supposed to care about Norman Osbourne, Director of SHIELD? Why should we, when we can guess it'll all be gone after whatever the next Summer crossover is?
 
 
iamus
22:25 / 01.01.09
that sales of the comics just aren't very huge. DC makes a lot of money by providing properties to Warner Brothers to make movies, but but.

My incomplete understanding is that the comics themselves are often seen simply as an IV drip that keeps the branding alive. The real money comes from the lunchboxes, movie deals and limited-edition padlocks with the actual comics being a very niche market that doesn't count for much of the overall gross. They need to keep their Supermans and Batmans ticking over to continue to sell stuff off the back of them. As well as this, DC lose money if their presses are not running constantly, so they end up needing to produce a constant stream of comics that are, perversely, secondary to their main business interests.
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
23:05 / 01.01.09
Just so. Which also might help to explain the recent mania for revivals, beyond the editorial answer - DC's bankers, in terms of the properly saleable properties, seem to be few. Batman pulls in the big money. Superman not so much at the movies, but has a pretty powerful brand and a long-running TV presence. After that, where do you go? Birds of Prey was cancelled, Aquaman didn't make it to cancellation. the JLA and LSH sustained Saturday morning TV shows, with the help of the presence of at least one of the big two. And it probably is a big two - Wonder Woman can't get off the drawing board. So, perhaps the aim is to get some marketable properties out there to cherry-pick - including Flash and Green Lantern classic. In terms of getting people to read the comics, it's probably not a sustainable strategy, but as you say the comics aren't really the point.
 
 
iamus
02:56 / 02.01.09
Partly for new marketable IP I reckon, but if they were really intent on that there would be a whole lot more innovation in the medium. One good thing about the comics being so cheap to produce (with so many hungry writers and artists that would love the opportunity to work on them) is that they'd be a great testbed for wholly new ideas refreshing themselves every month, but that's really not the case (well, not in Superhero comics). As well as being a bit staid, it's an incredibly insular business and if you're not already on their moneybooks, you've got a really tough time getting your foot in the door.

Personally I'd say that the drive for revivals and superboy punches and suchlike comes pretty simply from a complete death of imagination. They're mining the back-catalogue for genuinely exciting works that were made by interesting and innovative people, exhuming them and setting them to work again like dour, reanimated grundies. Madly hoping they'll still contain enough life behind the rancid, rotting flesh to put off the necessity of coming up with new exciting, interesting and innovative works that might upset the bankability of properties that have had tried and tested appeal for decades.

Nobody wants Superman to change, because his S-Shield has been making pots of money in other media for ages. I'd also reckon there's a fear of coming up with any new forward-thinking IP that might challenge the ideological purity of the big-hitters, undercutting them and hurting the brand. It's like pre-adolescent dread. An entire industry living in fear of the day its balls are going to have to drop and things become more exciting but less certain.

Add this to the fact that the presses need to be constantly printing and you have an industry that's really just there to, in a purely physical sense, plow out as much glossy paper as they possibly can. Hence shit books. Lots of shit books. Doesn't matter how bad they look or read, as long as they hit deadline and get lined up on the plates between the one that came before and the one that's coming after.


As addendum, one night a little neon-pink wagtail flew through my window in a dream and told me that the head honcho of a large, unnamed children's-pictorial-supplement producing corporation (and who's initials may or may not be somewhat synonymous with BIG TITS) once said (paraphrasing) "I produce periodicals. I'm in the business of quantity not quality".

I can obviously make no personal assurance on the veracity of said neon-pink wagtail's statements, but zhe was a trustworthy sort.
 
 
Benny the Ball
12:45 / 02.01.09
Funny, and yet the books keep coming later and later...

Do companies still stock pile submissions for late fill-in issues?

When was the last time that you can remember reading a self contained story within a series?
 
 
iamus
17:35 / 02.01.09
Funny, and yet the books keep coming later and later...

Well, I've never gotten the impression it was the most competent industry either.

From what I've seen, missing deadlines can incur quite a hefty penalty. I know of cases where people have continually busted a gut, working as the last link in the chain of perpetually late books, pulling ridiculous shifts in front of the computer for up to half a year, pulling arses out of fires every month, only to get treated really badly when one book where the insane pacing let up a little just made it in by a bawhair.

Thing is, there's a lot of genuinely talented, clever and lovely people in the industry having their backs and spirits broken by moronic business choices that seem to be made to keep the whole universe in homeostasis.

As far as I see it, if you want to bring change to a character, you don't kill him or bring her back. You write a different character that makes them think. You introduce agents that agitate and force everybody else to recontextualise themselves around them. And I think that's why there's a problem there. With the current hyperanal approach to continuity, there's no room in the DC or Marvel Universes for that kind of character. You introduce something weird into the universe and the universe gets a little weirder to compensate. What happens when someone like that teams-up with Superman? What happens when they fight Batman? What happens when they take Wonder Woman out dancing instead of putting her in a refridgerator?

Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman would all change a bit, and you'd never know what they'd change into until they did. If you're running a business that's not as interested in the evolution of characters as it is in the recognisability and endurance of brands over a long period of time (movies take ages and lunchboxes are evergreen) then that doesn't make good business sense.

At the same time, change is inevitable, even if it's just through degradation. What happens if all that the kids are reading today are just the regurgitated ideas from yesterday filtered through the lens of realism? Where's the logical endpoint of that?

None of this is the whole case, obviously. Despite the best efforts of the industry, some great, interesting, fun and thought-provoking stuff gets made, but it really is anomalous. It's a shame. With such a large amount of comics needing to be made every month, and with such a pool of talent the means are there and waiting. They're just not aligned right.

From a purely personal point of view, that's why I find Grant's work to be some of the only stuff worth reading. For whatever weak points crop up in the writing, and regardless of where the hypemouth leads, it's consistently trying to shuffle the deck and deal the death card. I have no idea where Final Crisis is going, but I'd be surprised from previous form if it doesn't have something big to do with that.
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
19:56 / 02.01.09
Man, if you haven't read Knightfall or Rock of Ages, you should prepare to have your mind blowed.
 
 
Benny the Ball
23:26 / 02.01.09
Also, not much has actually been added to each reboot/retelling of the origin, adding one 'neat' idea. DC especially seems stuck in some crisis->reboot->re-origin->mess it up->crisis loop.

Geoff Johns is a big seller, so I can understand him having so many key titles, but he's good for little more than cool moments that fill the pages of Wizard (oh, Sinestro builds a fear corp, and a ring seeks out Batman - clever!) and seems to have little direction - so he suits the DCU to a tee at the moment.
 
 
Our Lady Has Left the Building
18:04 / 04.01.09
Grant Morrison is a big seller, so I can understand him having so many key titles, but he's good for little more than cool moments that fill the pages of Wizard (oh, Talia actually has Batman's baby, and a mysterious unidentified fuckwit seeks out Batman - clever!) and seems to have little direction - so he suits the DCU to a tee at the moment.
 
 
Char Aina
18:09 / 04.01.09
Batman of zurr-en-arr was good, though. As a concept, in terms of delivery, all of it. It was Batman as fuck, and I think demonstrated to me(among other bits -cup switching, acting at being in love, etc) that Grant Morrison gets Batman.

While there were some good soundbite/panel-bite moments in among it, I think there was more to it than just wizard friendly chunks.

Did you not like all that safety-personality stuff?
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
18:17 / 04.01.09
Had I not read the Invisibles, and the Filth, and for that matter the Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, I think my mind would have been blowed by it.

I thought the Batman of Zurr-en-Arr stuff was pretty ace, but Batman R.I.P - the actual story as a whole - was a bit of a mess, and tailed off into an editorially mandated anticlimax, which I think takes us back to the topic.
 
 
Alex's Grandma
18:50 / 04.01.09
The hitchhikers' guide to the bloody galaxy has got sod all to do with whatever it was the nonce was on about, yer bloody bastard.
 
 
Benny the Ball
19:18 / 04.01.09
The remit is naturally to sell more units, and this in turn leads to the need for further money making turns - it wasn't that long ago that a lot of books contained a general sense of a contiuous story line running through it, but that an important element was to ensure that each book was leap-on-able enough so that the casual reader could join at any time, bigger stories running through several issues were relegated to mini- or maxi-series. I would often pick up odd books here and there just for a quick read.

Now the creation and editorial is so tied into the pitch of getting a story into a fixed length so as to ensure trade paper collections to be the standard tale format.

Joining a comic book at any point past the first few issues leads a reader to playing catch-up, or seeking out collections or earlier issues, sometimes at great cost.

Maybe I'm being overly nostalgic and naive, but there has been a noticeable dip in story telling quality, be it the style of writing, the writers, the editors or the readers.
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
19:27 / 04.01.09
Really, though? I mean, I think the industry is in a bit of a death spiral, but when's your comparative golden age? I think a lot of people tend to feel that the period when they were most into comics is also the time that comics were at their objective best...
 
 
Alex's Grandma
19:52 / 04.01.09


But I don't think there has. I'll admit to finding comics far more entertaining now than I have in the past, and to not being on side with your John Byrne beard thing, B the B.
 
 
Benny the Ball
20:03 / 04.01.09
I tend to think fondly of a few periods -

Early interest (the first discovery) - late 70's, picking up comics at random from local shop or from sunday market/car boot sellers (also a friend of a friend of the family was a dustman, and would often bring around a mixed bag) - loved the Justice League mainly at this point.

Wider eyes - Early/Mid-80's, along with the british print runs of a lot of books, uniquely british stuff like Warrior and 2000ad, Battle (later Battle Action Force), Eagle, I found things like Alan Moore's swamp thing, Legion of Superheroes, X-Men, which led to my discovery of actual comic book stores.

Boom time - late 80's early 90's - picking up anything and everything, local shops (News-agents) holding stuff for me on a monthly basis, and me going in and working my way through pretty much everything available - big Marvel interest at this time (Acts of Vengeance?), and the reboot (post Legend) Justice League (my favourite book), Flash etc. Also early pre-vertigo Vertigo (Shade, Sandman).

After that my interest went really, I got a lot of the early Image stuff, out of interest, but what with Direct Sales, rising prices and generally messiness of industry, I found myself really not into the whole thing, even buying some books and adding them to a pile of "I'll read those later" that I never got around to.

I went back around the time of the 2nd Dark Knight series, going in and out - picking up Hellblazer here and there, New X-Men, Justice League, and followed 7 Soldiers, some of the Crisis (ID, Infinite) but for the most part, I've been a very casual reader for the last decade or so.
 
 
Benny the Ball
20:07 / 04.01.09
I guess a dip in quality is a bit snide - I do find most books muddled now a days though.

Also, I don't get the John Byrne beard reference.

Oh, and Lady..., my attack on Geoff Johns is more because I'd mentioned him before, I don't think that he is terrible, and everything else is great, he does however seem to be the golden boy at present (every books store near me heaps nothing but praise on what he's doing)
 
 
dark horse
21:15 / 04.01.09
yeah the early 90s are definitely a time i think fondly of too!
 
 
Neon Snake
07:09 / 05.01.09
Why is that? What was there in the '90s that was made it such a golden age?

Genuine question, that. I only sporadically read comics through the '90s, and have been reading much more in the last few years than before, and I always hear about how great the '90s were, and how fucked the industry is now, what with their focus on making money over producing good stories and so on.

I mean, yeah, sales are down, but, y'know, Playstation/Xbox and all that, plus the sheer difficulty of actually buying the blasted things without having to travel for an hour each way for a lot of people.

(A lot of people = me. But it's teh internets, so therefore me = wholly representative of the general consumer, obvs.)

Was there really such a comparitive wealth of good comics coming out of (specifically) DC back then?
 
 
Slim
08:29 / 05.01.09
I'm still curious as to why DC is not doing well compared to Marvel. While the entire industry may be in trouble, in October 2008, Marvel had 17 of the 25 top-selling titles. Is the writing at Marvel better, is the organization better run, or are the characters simply more appealing to the comic audience?
 
 
Benny the Ball
13:42 / 05.01.09
I think dark stallion might be being a bit disingenuous, but the early 90's saw a lot happening in comics - lots of great writers were finding their way over to the US from the UK, some of the still favourite artists were just coming about in this period. There was also a lot of great independent books being published.

Marvel seem better organised at at least getting all of their books running on the same story - DC has had some problems with events not crossing over well, not linking up, late books have big knock on effects etc.

As a side, I went to the comic book store yesterday, and was just overwhelmed by the number of event titles that the big two have out at the moment. Marvel seemed to be running three events at once!
 
 
Alex's Grandma
13:55 / 05.01.09
Like yourself, Neon Snake, I didn't read that many comics during the Nineties. About five a month compared the twenty or so I'm on at the moment.

It's fun to complain, of course, but I don't think there's ever been a better time to be reading the wretched things. There may not be anything that's, you know, brilliant, coming out at the moment, but there is a lot that's good.

Unfortunately though (in my humble, etc,) very little of it's being published by DC. Whereas in the Nineties they seemed to have most of the best writers, not just on the early Vertigo material, but on mainstream stuff like 'Hitman' 'Starman' and Morrissey's 'Justice League'.

These days though, the line's being run by an oddly distracted Grant Mitchell (does he care any more, about what he's writing? I always said that woman would be his downfall) and Geoff Johns, about whom the less said the better, I think.
 
 
Neon Snake
16:21 / 05.01.09
Over the least couple of years, I've read a fair bit from the '90s, Hitman and JLA included, and enjoyed a fair bit of it. You named Starman as well. Now, none of those titles were big hitters (JLA aside, and that was only after it's launch - it was this run that put JLA back at the top of the pile, right?)

So, is it that there was a bigger variety back in the '90s? More choice of author and style? I've read very little of Robinson's work, and haven't read Starman (o/t - is this the Omnibus that came out recently, and is it worth reading, then?), but Ennis and Morrison are very different.

I'm lucky in that I've been thoroughly enjoying all of Morrison's current stuff, but as you say, between him and Johns, in the last couple of years, yes, they've covered...what? Batman, Superman, Green Lantern, JSA, 52, and Final Crisis? More?

Maybe that's why it feels broken - if you don't like Johns and/or Morrison, you're left with pretty slim pickings, I guess.
 
 
My Mom Thinks I'm Cool
16:40 / 05.01.09
I think in the (late) 90's there were a lot of writer-created characters getting big things done - preacher, invisibles, transmetropolitan, etc...which was pretty sweet in a creative way.

today most of my favorite comics' writers are confined by other people's characters (All Star books, 7 Soldiers and 52, ellis on Thunderbolts and XMen, Iron Fist, etc) which, surprisingly, seems to be working even better. for me, anyway. plus stuff that just keeps getting better, like Hellboy, new weird stuff like RASL, Mice Templar, and Umbrella Academy, and having Joss Whedon working in comics seems to be a pretty good thing.

I don't care much for big sloppy crossovers, but in general I'm as happy today as I've ever been - no real nostalgia for me. there's plenty of stuff to blow my money on when I hit the shop.

why's Marvel doing better than DC? I'm not sure...in terms of production, it seems obvious that SI came out quickly and regularly and got its shit done, whatever you think about the story, whereas FC is getting more and more behind schedule. surely that doesn't help any.
 
 
Alex's Grandma
17:48 / 05.01.09
It might be that there are only so many good writers to go around, and Marvel's hired most of them.

Also, I know who I'd rather work for, if I had the choice. The moral grey areas of the Marvel universe, even if they aren't always that well thought-out, seem to be more interesting, and relevant to these times of ours, than whatever it is Green Lantern's up to at the moment.

With the exception of Batman, could it be that DC's main properties are basically a bit out-dated? I'm trying to think of anything that would get me to read 'The Flash', for example, but in the absence of the sort of sweeping changes that would cause heads to explode all over the interweb, I'm kind of drawing a blank. Aquaman, Wonder Woman, poor, dead Martian Manhunter ... there seems to be too little wrong with these people. You could have years of fun with a character like Tony Stark, that sloshed, arms-dealing paragon of a man, whereas Hal Jordan is, what, fearless? What does that mean? Perhaps that he's psychotic, but the trouble is that DC's characters now look to be so entrenched as stand-up guys, as to preclude the possibility of them being interesting, ever again. Trying to make them a bit darker, as in 'Identity Crisis' ... well I suppose everyone knows how that turned out.
 
 
Neon Snake
19:31 / 05.01.09
A lot of the Marvel comics in the top 20 have quite low issue numbers; I suspect that an amount of their success has to do with launching new series - along with perennial faves like Spiderman and suchlike.
 
  

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