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

Although, to be fair, not all of their female characters' origins involve gruesome rape. Sometimes that's just how they're ultimately dispatched.

Bleez was once a princess on the planet Havania, renowned for her great beauty. Many men sought her hand, but she rejected them all, often in an extremely rude and abrasive manner. Two of her suitors, especially humiliated, sought out a Sinestro Corpsman and tempted him with stories of Bleez's beauty. He went to Havania, where he murdered Bleez's mother and captured Bleez, taking her to Ranx the Sentient City. For some time during the events of the Sinestro Corps War, Bleez was raped and tortured by members of the Sinestro Corps, but managed to escape when Ranx came under attack during the Battle of Mogo. The Sinestro Corpsman who had originally abducted her pursued and caught her, and forced her to kiss him. As she was being pushed to her limits by this final indignity, a red ring found Bleez and inducted her into the Red Lantern Corps. Her blood was transformed into burning plasma, and she vomited it into the Corpsman's throat. Before he could recover, she killed him in a blind fury. Later, she was among the strike force that ambushed the Green Lanterns transporting Sinestro back to Korugar for execution.

oh look the dc universe wiki has a page devoted to comic-book sexual assaults :( http://dc.wikia.com/wiki/Sexual_assault

In a vague attempt to provide any kind of context and/or justification, the Red Lantern Corps are formed through RAGE so they all have pretty horrific origin stories.

On the other hand, the person that created them did so knowing they would all by definition have horrible origin stories.

The only justification I can come up with is that Kirkman is worse

Disagree! But I have a weakness for Bendis-y talk talk.

They can both be terrible, but Kirkman doesn't have control over a whole company's universe (except in the obliquest way as Image's COO).

seemed like refried horseshit to me, but what do i know.
http://io9.gizmodo.com/green-arrow-might-be-the-biggest-surprise-of-dcs-rebirt-1780887777

Tuomas, as I explained ^^^^^ this is that same Superman. The actual same one

But isn't that Superman the post-CoIE version, the one who existed from the Byrne reboot up until Flashpoint? So basically what they'd done is kill the Nu 52 Superman and bring back the regular version?

exactly

Yes. Plus that Lois. And their son, Jonathan.

Johns has written individual comics I have liked and Kirkman hasn't. But yeah, unlike Johns, I guess Kirkman doesn't drag everyone else down with him.

Beardy Superman is really the post-Smallville, post-Infinite Crisis Superman, with younger (dead?) parents rather than the Byrne version with ol' ma and pa.

I thought he was the Adventures Of Superman Superman? He was in Convergence at least.

Kirkman is actually good example, because Invincible kinda presages the tonal shift in DC comics after Johns and his followers took control: that odd combination of Silver Age pastiche interspersed with bursts of gore and violence they could never have done back in the days when the readers were mostly kids. But IMO this is more forgivable in Invincible since it's an original creation, and that tone was there right from the start, so it's not like Kirkman was derailing beloved cultural icons or anything.

otm - at least kirkman was shitting in a sandbox of his own creation

OMG, people mired in comics lore ITT can't figure out which Superman they're discussing. Congratulations, DC!

http://www.newsarama.com/29635-mystery-of-a-second-new-clark-kent-key-to-action-comics-rebirth-run.html

Actually this makes it even more confusing

He's not from the same place as Wally West in Rebirth, so he's from... where?

Johns and Didio's asses?

If they don't care about a coherent continuity, they really should just ditch it altogether. Clear the slate every issue or three.

given the ever-increasing rate of dc reboots from crisis to the present we're probably only a year or two away from continuity being reset from panel to panel

Maybe I'm getting old and soft but I actually am kind of interested in reading adventures of Lois & Clark & Son. Also Chinese Super-Man ofc

I like gene luen yang and have some hope for that book.

I mean, pvmic, but having hope in any DC book in C21 is being on a hiding to nothing

I thought he was the Adventures Of Superman Superman? He was in Convergence at least.

there are (searches quickly) over 700 issues of Adventures Of Superman, did he really stay the exact same version in that title forever? not a pedantozing, but this is prima facie a bemusing distinction

I always associate AoS as an 80s book, ignore me.

Batman Rebirth w: Tom King & Scott Snyder a: Mikel Janin

It's been Mikel Janin's GRITTY cover on the posters but Howard Porter's variant is the highlight of Rebirth so far. Liefeld Groin but with 250% more Batgroin. The costume not only gives no support, but Bats will need to be careful not to knee himself in the cock next time he's in a FITE.

The issue itself sees someone knew turn up to confuse Alfred before the first of many Calendar Man/spores/DYS plot hints is thrown away. We then jump to a quick background catchup advancement - Bruce is back in charge on Wayne Enterprises - before physics CRUMBLES BEFORE THE MIGHT OF THE BAT. Bruce is falling from a pipe but manages to get leverage OFF THIN AIR and jumps back up OFF NOTHING to grab hold again.
Surprise guest and Bats have a conversation about how he isn't going to be Robin because Bruce would rather dress him like a hornet. There are more musings on regeneration including Calendar Man climbing out of his skin and Bats holding his breath as if he's got lungs like Captain America Profile Pic. I thought it was Joker that had some jellyfish DNA? Alfred FEEDS THE BATS, TUPPENCE A BAG with the makings of guacamole. Maybe if they plant the stone they can grow a plant. Regeneration and Renewal. DO YOU SEE?

I liked this, but it feels like Snyder and King were just setting up for their respective Batseries. And it could have been published any time i.e. no apparent Rebirth content.

Green Arrow Rebirth w: Benjamin Percy a: Otto Schmidt

Whereas this is a book which couldn't have happened outside of a reboot.

Dinah is the Johnsiverse Black Canary, only not the time travelling one, whereas Ollie is the Kevin Smith one maybe? Except he is SO close to giving us The Finger (and Dinah even refers to his Denny O'Neil character) it must happen eventually. And there's a reference to Roy Harper, Super Junkie which bearing in mind Ollie appears to be about 30 is going to be confusing in this continuity.

This is an abduction storyline to show Ollie CARES, MAN. Seattle has Morlocks that are selling people to california for nefarious purposes NO DOUBT and the dynamic duo sort of break it up (but not enough for it not to feature in forthcoming issues). Then we get to the real meat of the issue. Ollie and Dinah clearly have The Horn for each other but unless you've read Rebirth #1 and some of the supplementary material you wouldn't actually realise this is supposed to be An Thing and linked to the lost time. So they save the kid (because there's always a kid) and his mum and then go on the roof to make out. OR DO THEY?

No Rebirth plot in here either.

Green Lanterns Rebirth w: Geoff Johns & Sam Humphries a: Ethan van Sciver & Ed Benes

In space a Guardian (hang on, they all died in the Johnsiverse) is fleeing thousands of Dominators (who I thought got wiped out in a different chapter of Geoff Johns Action Figure Funtime, was maybe the reason John Stewart was in Guardian Jail) through space while a narrator (who turns out to be Atrocitous, but could possibly have been Doctor Manhattan if, you know, DC actually wanted to use the Rebirth plot at all) explains what's happening for people who have never read any GL. Which might as well be all of us, let's face it.

Simon Baz and Jessica Cruz are introduced for those of us who have never read any Johnsiverse GL. Which might as well be all of us, let's face it. Hal gives them a crap training mission which they fail, and he tells them they'd better work out how to improve because he's going to be too busy looking up Wonder Woman's skirt, then buggers off to do that.

But OH NOES. ATROCITOUS AND BLEEZ AND DEXSTARR. And a requirement to know what Blackest Night and Brightest Day were. Bang goes your chance to ditch continuity baggage, but then Johns can't bring himself to throw anything away.

Rebirth content: zero.

Superman Rebirth w: Peter Tomasi & Patrick Gleason a: Doug Mahnke & Jaime Mendoza

80s Superman recaps what happened to Johnsiverse Superman AGAIN then climbs into the tomb where he finds Lana breaking in. You didn't know that she was kind of like Danger Girl by the end of the Johnsiverse, did you? A kind of sexy archaeologist spy, but ginger. Anyway, they talk interminably including recapping The Death of Superman and how if he came back like Jesus then the Johnsiverse one is bound to as well. Then attempting to resolve continuity conflicts makes him realise that's not going to happen so he buries him.

All told, this is pretty awful and pointless. If you've read the Superman continuity since Convergence then it doesn't tell you anything you don't know from reading them, and if you haven't then it doesn't do anything other than tell you that 80s Superman is now Superman. And no Rebirth content except a gentle hint that not everything is as it should be.

Definitely some mixed messaging about whether this is actually for new readers or not...

I actually read the entirety of Blackest Night and I remember fuck all about it except that I didn't like it at all. So, yeah, good on DC for handcuffing their newest reboot to that convoluted, 6- or 7-year-old pile of trash.

kinda liked the tom king batman #1 (not batman rebirth #1 which was bad as noted)

i feel like we had more or less the same read there aldo.
I just read wonder woman / aquaman / flash; anybody want hot takes on mostly cold garbage?

please yes, much more fun than actually reading the cold garbage itself

These threads are a reassuring reminder that I'm missing nothing by avoiding post 1990s DC comics

Seriously, what a nightmarish era to be running a comic book shop

do it felicity

Yes please to someone else joining me (I am behind in reading).

These threads are a reassuring reminder that I'm missing nothing by avoiding post 1990s DC comics

― Crazy Eddie & Jesus the Kid (Raymond Cummings), Wednesday, June 15, 2016 9:48 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Ooooh, even as a hardcore Marvel stan, I want to give you a recommendations list. Despite current appearances to the contrary, they've put out some really good stuff in the past twenty years!

I've heard so many good things about Snyder's Batman but I know it's been tainted by a number of crossovers so I don't know if I'll ever muster the courage to actually read it.

Yeah, make no mistake there has been a lot of good comics printed. The trouble is that DC don't seem to know it, and neither do the public (which may be down to DC not pushing them) c.f. Dial H.

Of course, the same is true of Marvel.

I read a book or two of Snyder Batman, it was dumb

will write up some rebirths in a lil bit; just picked up a bunch more of the reboot so there's a deep dive in my soon to be future.
i haven't tried to follow a DC universe reboot since Millenium I think; figured this would be an interesting side project. thus far it's not but it is a heads up into how convoluted they've made the timelines and storylines and reader experience.

Yeah, comicsalliance talked a bit about the convolutions here: http://comicsalliance.com/dc-universe-rebirth-1-roundtable-review/

Millennium was just a two-month crossover, no rebooting involved

(Legends the year before was still doing some boundary-drawing in the wake of Crisis, but not newly changing anything)

more dating myself there; as you say, that's all post crisis cleanup. I do remember waiting breathlessly to buy next issues of the man of steel and perez's wonder woman.
those were the days.

Aquaman Rebirth's writing isn't as bad as, say, Green Lanterns or Green Arrow and the storyline is hardly as convoluted or pointless as Superman. This one's more of a (you should forgive the pun) superstandard book. Plot in a nutshell is the most traditional of first issue intros: a monster attack is thwarted by a superhero and then a new bigtime baddie (SPOILERS: it's Black Manta again) is revealed on the last splash page. If you've read a comic before, you've read this comic already. The art is a confusing mix of five pages of high-detail, dark brooding Image-ry in front and back and the bulk of the work in plasticine orange and teal cartoonishness; the jolting switch from style to style doesn't help build the tension. Compare these two images, only a few pages removed and you tell me what the tone is meant to be:

http://i.imgur.com/c8Shc8q.png

http://i.imgur.com/FKUH7rC.png

Trite and true traditions and Deadline Doom aside, Dan Abnett does a workman's job of injecting some semblance of ham handed complexity to the story. The monsters attacking the surface dwellers are controlled by a fanatical group called The Deluge, "an Atlantean terror cell FIERCELY xenophobic". Just in case you need it spelled out to you:

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

So they're ISIS and Aquaman is Obama, to grab an imperfect simile. Aquaman is the hero stuck between worlds with only the council of his queen Michel- I mean MERA to counsel him the best way forward. There's the suggestion that Aquaman is already exhausted balancing hawks on land and on sea and I suppose dark and brooding NO ONE MAN SHOULD HAVE ALL THIS POWER Aquaman is as reasonable an option as any for a character that really never found a character defining arc. As an aside, I always thought a good take would be an Alan Moore approach and instead of having him "talk to fish", (though apparently he's sensitive about that too?) -

http://i.imgur.com/qNqc3d3.png

- why not have him talk directly to all the microlife in the sea: coalescing plankton and algae and effectively controlling water _itself_, perhaps as an emissary of "the blue" to Swampy's green. Hell, that would power him up to be notably stronger than Superman even and rebuild him as a character who would only come out when the gloves were truly off. Sorta like what they used to do with The Spectre.

Nonetheless, I appreciate them not forcing the rip van winkle beard or captain hook arm on this incarnation; he's an Aquaman familiar to anyone from the Superfriends. I imagine we're bound for a lot of ripped-from-the-headlines suicide bomber and anti-atlantean trooper face offs with our hopey-changey stand in stuck in between.

so, Flash Rebirth. Um, have you seen the Jason Pearson alt cover? You'll believe a man can run without an ass.

http://i.imgur.com/bG0NxxO.png

Even contemporary Frank Miller isn't that sloppy with his chiaroscuro. Di Giandomenico's interior art is an improvement of sorts but his willowy and pensive Metal Hurlant eurostyle is an awkward fit for a book about movement. All's fine when it's just people talking but the (unfortunately very many) flashback panels or fight sequences are labored and the computer-added electric speed force effect unnecessarily crowds the panel. I can deal with it but, especially given the density of the text surrounding the already sketchy art, it's not easy on the eyes.

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

http://i.imgur.com/C7NMxXh.png

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

So let's talk about that story density. Joshua Williamson is the writer and he's the creator of a handful of Image books run through a Vertigo filter that I flipped through once and never came back to: Ghosted, Nailbiter, Birthright.
He's been tasked here with adding 2+2 and making 15; in one issue we have an origin story, an alter-ego story, family drama, loads of backstory from the last incarnation of the character, the resurrection of a missing character (kid flash), the introduction of a new storyline (a shadowy character has rewritten everyone's memories and revamped continuity and who knows what's real anymore!!!?!?!?!!), a double splash page and two pages of batman team up with TWENTY separate boxes of background text arduously linking all this to the soon-to-be-revealed Dr. Manhattan Rebirth storyline on the strength of The Comedian's blood smeared happy face pin. It adds up to too much of nothing much, a mini-series crammed into 20 pages because we gotta get this goddamn ungainly bird off the ground. I barely know what's happening but it's clear this is meant to be the key storyline to open up the larger themes of rebirth so good luck figuring out why or where we're going from here.

I trust Greg Rucka as a writer; generally he does okay even when he's tasked with thankless work. Wonder Woman Rebirth asks more of him than is fair and it mostly capsizes under its own weight. Again, the balance of words to images is roughly one sentence of omniscient narrator per panel and that's not comics so much as it is Prince Valiant.

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

Even so, what Rucka's trying to do here is less convoluted and explain-y than most of the other books; he's miles better with dialogue and monologue than most of his DC colleagues. Wonder Woman, armed with a magic lasso of truth, has begun to see through multiple continuities and she doesn't appreciate the idea that she's being regularly rewritten to match some other unknown (presumably male) plotline. So she challenges reality itself and heads off after "God".

http://i.imgur.com/bwAA8Dm.png

It's not much different than the plot of Preacher in some ways but I'm hopeful Rucka can do something interesting with it. Lord knows that Morrison reboot did the character no favors.

This is another book with a bunch of different artists providing an array of different styles. My favorite is Liam Sharp who does a decent job of layout and detail. In any case, it's hard to make heads or tails of all these glimpses of story and drawn-by-committee books; even the best of them don't succeed at telling a coherent story. Wonder Woman is probably among the stronger of the pack but it's still barely a prologue.

Man, I can't even muster enough curiosity of the morbid variety to actually read this stuff. Glad youse guys are sacrificing yourself to the cause for our entertainment, though.

I'm not high, but trying to read those Aquaman pages made me feel like I was.

i just read Green Lanterns 1, Green Arrow 1, Superman 1, Titans Rebirth, Superman 1, Dark Knight Returns: The Darkening 1 and Batman 1. One of them is pretty good. Guess which one.