Remake/Remodel: DC Rebirth so you don't have to

Hasn't Johns himself been the main architect of the DC universe for the last 10+ years? So if he felt DC has become too dark, why hasn't he done anything about it before?

exactly - he's the guy behind the dcu's weird dismemberment fetish and already the architect of numerous reboots. at this point it's like letting a builder who's managed to accidentally burn down your house three times to take one more crack at getting it right

I would actually be enthused about some of these titles, with the knowledge that they weren't made to start spiralling down a Johns drain, but DiDio still means that they'll probably mostly suck, or the good ones will wink out of existence for no reason.

Such a depressing list of writers -- with maybe one or two not-terrible, but also not-that-exciting exceptions.

Total anecdotal side note: although my general DCU dilettantery ended abruptly with the advent of Flashpoint, it should be noted that I've bought Swamp Thing and Hellblazer comics as long as I've been aware of their existence (since like 1990) and that also abruptly ended at the same time (although I do intend to read Snyder's Swamp Thing at some point, as I've heard good things). It's mildly distressing to see that those characters are still mired in this convoluted garbage that I don't foresee ever wading through. I did look through an issue of the recent (and I guess now cancelled) Swamp Thing by Wein and Kelley Jones and it was easily the worst issue of Swamp Thing that I've ever seen (and I lived through the Nancy Collins run). Congratulations!

And, yeah, with few exceptions their writing roster has been underwhelming. I'll never understand what pulled, like, Greg Pak and Ann Nocenti to the Darkseid.

What I was told at the roadshow leading up to rebirth is that Johns isn't writing because he's overseeing all of the Rebirthverse, not focusing on live action. That could have changed.

This is a fairly recent development in the wake of Superman v Batman's underperformance and what is probably Zack Snyder's quiet demotion.

So that he can bring that Green Lantern magic to the movies.

I'm assuming a Johns Superman film would only make sense if you'd watched Season 3 of Smallville and the first colour season of George Reeves Superman, co-star Dean Cain as an alternate Superman that married Lois, feature the death of AIDS Advert Superman and have Gene Hackman play a Superfriends Suit Luthor.

Actually, what am I saying. I'd rather watch that than another Snyder film.

It's working already!

What are the TV shows like - isn't he involved with them too?

Yeah, he is to some extent. They're dumb and occasionally grim but also goofy and campy and fun and somewhat self-aware.

Greg Berlanti is the exec producer on those shows and he's also apparently moving up to the cinematic leagues (working on a Booster Gold movie) after Snyder's fumble.

Johns wrote two (admittedly pretty good) episodes for Season 1 of Arrow and was Exec VP on Season 1 of Flash. Doesn't do anything any more.

Flash - both seasons have been pretty dumb fun, though S1 more so. S2 in particular, although S1 is still guilty, too frequently indulges in a series arc it doesn't have the chops to carry off. When it's Monster Of The Week in Flash mythos then it's one of the most fun things on TV.

Arrow had an average S1, a pretty great S2, a mediocre S3 and a dreadful S4. Much of this is allegedly because Stephen Amell's supposed to be a nightmare to work with leading to main characters quitting, but that doesn't excuse terrible writing and pedestrian direction.

Legends Of Tomorrow was a lot of fun but kind of disappeared up its own wazoo naking the plot as timey-wimey as possible. Could have been half the length tbh. But next season - JSA!

Supergirl is deeply mired in the Byrne era book and is just as much fun, except when it dips into Silver Age goofiness. The Flash crossover ep was really great, I thought.

At the end of Flash S2 Barry does a Flashpoint. The main effect of that is that Supergirl will move from Earth 1 to Earth 0 (in comics terms, it's actually un-named alternate Earth to earth 1 on tv). Who knows what else will happen.

xp Does that include Gotham - it seemed a very different beast to Flash / Arrow / Legends of Tomorrow.

Gotham is a different beast all together, it's on Fox whereas all the rest are on The CW (now Supergirl's moved to join them).

For me, Gotham has been patchy. The second half of S1 was kind of pointless stretching of plot, and S2 could be cut by at least 5 eps. BUT the last few eps of Gotham have been properly great. Clayface was superb.

xpost Gotham is unrelated to the other shows. Haven't watched.

I also hadn't watched Supergirl yet but aldo's description has definitely piqued my interest.

There's also the dearly departed and short-lived Constantine which was just finding its footing before it was cancelled. Pretty decent adaptation, and Matt Ryan was effing perfect in the title role.

Wally gets sucked off by the Speed Force. Result.

um

Supergirl has an episode called For the Girl Who Has Everything, which is exactly what you think it is. Do I need say more?

They completely fucked up the chance to adapt the Moore/Gibbons story properly, though. So much of the episode was spent developing other subplots that the whole "what if Krypton hadn't exploded and Supergirl still had a good life there?" scenario (i.e. the most interesting part of the original Superman comic) was given maybe 5 minutes of screentime, which totally deflated the drama of Kara finding out what it was all about and forcing herself to leave.

There's always the animated JLA adaptation.

Total sidebar digression here but...why the hell doesn't DC get Timm & Dini to manage their cinematic universe? I for one would be shoveling money in their direction.

Dwayne McDuffie would've been perfect.

they should get jim shooter for the lulz

DJP, you missed the real slashfic payoff sentence:

He then exposes himself to Linda who has no idea who he is, which makes him sad until he gets sucked off again.

oh no I didn't

i read some of the rebirth #1s. I guess i should talk about it?

In Green Arrow #1, we're meant to already know who all the characters are but still want to have the story told to us again. In this incarnation, Oliver Queen is the openminded white billionaire all us openminded white guys know we would be if we were rich; he blows off a date with a conservative hottie when she doesn't agree with his politics and then gives a hundred bucks to a random homeless kid. Or to put it in even clearer terms:
http://i.imgur.com/nB5FHLd.png
then two pages afterward, brokeback pose black canary gets into it with him in an alley. So maybe not THAT social justice warrior, just enough that dinah is meant to pose this a zinger:
http://i.imgur.com/jK2Momb.png
See, as it happens, the homeless population of Seattle lives in a tarzanesque hoovertown that's being terrorized by begoggled morlocks whose sound effect of choice is "slurm" and Black Canary is trying to defend them and Green Arrow didn't realize it was a thing so HERO TEAMUP.
After shooting one of these slurmanites with an arrow to the knee, GA threatens their captive so: "Listen, Worm. There's a special black chamber in my heart. It's full of sharp objects, but it's pretty much absent of mercy. And it's reserved especially for those who prey on the weak. You have five seconds. And then I'm going to take you there for a special V.I.P. tour." So that's Benjamin Percy's writing.
Otto Schmidt's art is sketchy and reductive but not unpleasantly like a swipe of late Eisner or prime Thurber, except when it devolves into sheer amateurishness or the muddy coloring reduces the whole thing to an inkblot.
Here's an example that covers all those bases:
http://i.imgur.com/j3GVvJp.png
Anyways back at the plot: the morlock creatures are capturing the homeless and then selling them as WHITE SLAVES (basically everyone in this book is white and blonde and good or inhuman). Dinah and Ollie shut down the ring with a lot of carnage and some angry reddit style threats: "I might not have any special powers. I might be young. I might be a loudmouth. I might have a lot to learn. But don't underestimate me... I'll make you feel debased, devalued, bankrupt in every possible way." Following which, we get rear view shots of Black Canary's ass falling out of her leather shorts and we are left with them presumably making out in his super cool apartment. This is worse than impotent rage fantasies for kids. It's impotent righteous rage fantasies for manbabies.

as it happens, the homeless population of Seattle lives in a tarzanesque hoovertown that's being terrorized by begoggled morlocks

at least this is pretty otm

Batman Rebirth #1 is considerably better. Tom King, who I love, is co-credited with Scott Snyder for the story; I've read nothing by the latter but I gather he's the batman go-to guy of the moment? I'm totally out of tune with what the dark knight is (or even "is") in DC's current universe. Millionaire ubermensch in the nu-Tony Stark mode? Stoic super soldier with a desperate desire to be a mentor? Morrison-esque untouchable icon? Or Miller-esque sadist bad cop? In twenty pages (this is less of a chapter one and more of an opening paragraph), he's most of those things, more or less, from page to page.
There's a lot of out of sequence story pushed together here. Bruce is training a protege to be not so much a robin as a lieutenant? And he's fighting to save the city. And defusing a bomb? And doing one-handed chin ups off the side of a building while taking a business meetingThe desequenced storyline connects thematically with the current baddie of choice: a version of Calendar Man who does a weird Benjamin Button thing and regenerates anew from his husk of body as the seasons change. He's threatening Gotham with, i dunno, SPORES, I guess. The whole thing is over before it really gets any footing but it's certainly promising. King's tough guy batman dialogue is sufficiently pulpy to hit the spot for me:
http://i.imgur.com/JSyrTZG.png
Mikel Janin's arts is reasonably functional but his bruce wayne looks too much like a young Jon Hamm for my taste. The backgrounds are either undelineated pastels or overcrowded messes of computer assisted art. Worse, Janin's layout grids feel oddly static; witness this triptych of alfred dropping an avocado into the batcave (yes, seriously):
http://i.imgur.com/2QdizWO.png
This book is apparently spinning off in two directions: an eponymous Batman book written by King with next-gen Marc Silvestri David Finch and "All-Star Batman" with Snyder and JR jr.

Green Lanterns Rebirth #1 reminds me of how much I have always loathed Geoff Johns' writing. SO much overwrought self-referential exposition and soap opera monologue. It's like somebody read a lot of Claremont but felt that his characters just didn't talk to themselves enough. I've tried to read Johns' earlier takes on the Lanterns and hoo-boy they're not good. I gather this story takes place in a heavily crafted, thoroughly delineated Lantern Johnsverse and guess what? You don't need to know anything about it to recognize that this is a mismatched buddy cop story and nothing but.
Three pages of ponderous introductions reveal the Guardians are being chased by those dumb Invasion aliens and there's a Pandora's box or who knows what. And now we've got "real life problems" with the two new Green Lanterns on earth and because Marvel seems to be selling more with diversity, one is a presumably middle eastern guy who looks like The Rock and apparently got the ring in guantanamo (what the fuck?) and the other is a presumably latino woman. She's named "Jessica Cruz" but I'm not sure what race means when everyone in the world looks like a Maxim action figure. Here's the totally normal way Jessica is met by a friend:
http://i.imgur.com/SpZow3g.png
In a pair of brilliant character designs, our middle eastern lantern who is TOTALLY NOT A TERRORIST Y'ALL wears a balaclava and the female lantern has no irises and some sort of strange lantern shaped eye highlight and impossible posture.
http://i.imgur.com/yJpmbnM.png
also, hands are hard to draw.
http://i.imgur.com/VzUNSlX.png
So these guys meet and they bicker and then Hal Jordan shows up and they are put on notice that they've got to MAN UP and be partners because there's some huge universe changing thing happening and they don't have TIME to put up with you ROOKIES. Just once it would be nice if the new Lantern could come on board during a period of peace and go through several years of regulation training. Anyways, Hal ditches them and then there's a splash page with a bunch of evil red Lanterns and one of them is named ATROCITUS and the other one is a splayed vampirella on a throne of skulls with an impossibly placed evil cat between her spread legs and the cat has a power ring on its tail and jesus christ am i supposed to take this seriously or what.
The art is total bog standard raised on Image stuff; I was surprised the penciller is Noah Van Sciver's brother but that probably just tells you where my reference points are at these days.

the cat Red Lantern was one of the GOOD things to come out of all that GL hubbub years back

Superman Rebirth #1 is something different from all the rest of these. Where the other three pamphlets serve as reboots of one fashion or another, the Supes book is a muddle of near-hopelessly mashed up continuities with visual details, historical eccentricities and superhero trivia explicitly cherrypicked and reshuffled into a barely coherent guidebook for an uncertain future. We get Byrne's Fortress of Solitude and cleaned up blacksuit Fabio Superman with a beard and Nehru jacket superman and secret agent Lana Lang and SEVEN PAGES of Doomsday Death of Superman recaps and all of this patent absurdity is treated so deadly serious and served by the most apathetic dialogue and lack of action. The transition between panels here is emblematic:
http://i.imgur.com/Mn8QIsJ.png
THE HORROR! THE PAIN! "By the way, that's an interesting device you're using there." "I MAKE things to help me DO things." Hmm, yes. I see, I see.
The plot synopsis, such as it is has Lana Lang trying to take dead superman's body to be buried in smallville when alt-superman shows up to stop her and then they convolutedly stroll down multiple reality memory lanes. Then they bury him and alt-supes smiles. The big takeaway is that dead supermen rise again. Except when they don't and they probably won't now. Except probably they will. I barely follow and I definitely don't care. Read all this essentially meaningless word soup and tell me how much patience you'd have for more:
http://i.imgur.com/BQTTTsf.png
Doug Mahnke's art is... not good. That's a Major Bummer (pun intended) as I grew up reading The Mask and loving his weird mix of photorealism and caricature. I don't know what you'd call this though:
http://i.imgur.com/3D7W6C2.png

in sum: it's been since morrison stopped batman and dini stopped detective since i followed a dc book regularly. Collectively, these four books don't make any compelling argument toward my giving a shit about the structure of their newest universe. I suppose I'll have a go at Tom King Batman but horrendous Top Cow style art may make even that unbearable.

Ugh, that's Mahnke?! His stuff was soooo good when I left DC a few years ago (apparently the same time as you).

Geoff Johns GL has always been dumb as dirt (yellow equals scaredness! red equals angryness!) but that corner of the DCU was pretty fun up until Blackest Night.

Johns' GL was okay, but the Green Lantern Corps was really fun for a while, especially when Dave Gibbons was writing/drawing it. It had a sort of a 2000AD style "space weirdness" vibe to it, with an interesting rotating cast. But then all that Red/Blue/Orange/Pink/etc Lantern Corps bullshit started happening, and everything was swallowed by Johns' silly megacrossover, at which time I bailed out. I did eventually read Blackest Night, but it was just filled with the sort of grim'n'gritty stuff (pointless, gruesome characters deaths, gratuitously gory action scenes, macho posturing, etc) Johns now seems to be highly critical of, so pots and kettles etc.

Noah Van Sciver's brother has been drawing ugly Green Lantern comics since years before Noah was drawing badly-printed sad-sack bakery comics

(and was the first Quitely fill-in on New X-Men, the only thing I've ever read by him)

yeah for a minute there i was like who's Noah? didn't even realize Ethan had a brother

shared feelings on Mahnke btw

The crappy quality of the Mahnke art must be because of the inker, right? He was still producing great stuff in Final Crisis, it's hard to believe his art would've deteriorated so much in only a few years.

The last image Forks posted looks as if Mahnke's pencils were inked by Liefeld, with all the cross-hatching and wrinkles and weird lifeless eyes.

Do any of these Rebirth books actually follow up on the cliffhanger of DC Universe Rebirth #1? I'm still confused on where exactly the Dr. Manhattan plot is supposed to continue?

Mahnke's Johnsiverse work was appalling.

Having them in my 'to read' pile I can't answer for definite but I'm 99% certain none of them follow up the end of DCU Rebirth #1 Special in the slightest.

http://i.imgur.com/BQTTTsf.png

by my count there's 260 words in these panels and none of them are interesting, informative, witty or even comprehensible without the context of however many back issues of superman I'd have to wade through to work out why there are two supermen and one of them is steroidal will riker

the cat has a power ring on its tail

waht

how did i miss out out on this startling development in the dcu

i feel like it says something profound about the cultural milieu of the 90s and the 10s that returned-from-'death', black-suited superman sported a mullet then and now has a beard and both are used to denote that he has been profoundly changed

brb gonna write a thinkpiece on the man of steel and men's grooming

The cat (Dex-Starr or something?) has been around for at least like six or seven years at this point, TBF.

jesus christ dex-starr's origin story is one of the most harrowing things i've ever read

animal abuse + rage-fuelled cosmic powers = comics aren't just for kids anymore!

I've often worried about Geoff Johns. Some of the stuff he writes is like seeing a kid who's constantly drawing pictures of his house on fire and his family dead on the lawn. I hope he's okay.