Too Good, Too Bad

From Kiel Phegley’s coverage at CBR of a DC panel at Toronto’s Fan Expo

The idea of killing, reviving and rebooting characters multiple times became a central focus of discussion after a fan asked Didio why DC was constantly second to Marvel Comics in terms of sales. Didio took the question as an opportunity to address what he thought was one of his company’s problems over the past few years, which in his words was “My problem with us is that we reboot the characters too much.

“What happens is that if a character doesn’t work, we go, ‘We got a brand new direction to put him in! We’re moving him into something new! We’re going to try something brand new and different! We’re going to throw everything out and start over again!’ We make that mistake, but what that does is, it alienates fans.

“Our biggest mistake is that we don’t continue and build on…what we should be doing is let it sit for a while and then come back with a good strong story with what’s going on. That’s what Geoff [Johns] does. That’s Geoff’s secret weapon. He doesn’t throw it all out and start all over. He builds on what’s existed and makes it better…We get too worried about the minutia…all we should be doing is telling great stories with our characters.

D.C. has run into a glut of good fortune lately, and I’m betting that it may all lead to a problem and serious decision making very, very soon. On the one hand, you’ve got the Batman: R.I.P. story arc, written by Grant Morrison. Morrison’s one of the current gods of the fanboy pantheon, and one of the few who’s been working recently for DC and not Marvel. He’s one of the company’s big guns right now, and they need to continue to be thankful they can somehow get him to work for them. I haven’t been reading the story regularly myself. I’ll admit that Morrison’s good, but not at the top of my personal list of preferred writers. In addition to that, my constantly held belief that 22 pages every one or two months is a frustrating and ineffective way to tell a story holds even more true for anything Morrison writes. It’s all complicated in such a carefully designed manner that it often feels like nothing’s happening until it’s almost over and the pieces start to come together, so I’ve already decided to wait and catch this one in a trade collection.

But the problem with the arc isn’t how dense the plot’s become. The problem is that it’s crashing head-on into the wild success of the Dark Knight, the motion picture event that’s put Batman back into the eye of the general public and pushed DC’s superhero properties front and center on the stage of upcoming Warner Bros. films. With public interest in Batman at what may be an all time high, DC would probably want an accessible version of Bruce Wayne’s dark, brooding hero available on the shelves for fans of the film who aren’t that into comics to pick up. After all, Marvel’s had a fair amount of success timing the new launch of an Iron Man series to coincide with the success of their biggest summer blockbuster. But instead, DC’s got Morrison’s Batman: R.I.P., which is quite possibly the worst introduction into the comic universe to give someone whose most recent exposure to the character was Christopher Nolan’s film. They’d read one or two issue, have absolutely no idea what’s going on, and then stop paying attention to the character all together. What’s more, the upcoming plan for the aftermath of the series seems to be another arc, entitled “Batman: Battle for the Cowl”, in which various other figures will attempt to take on the role of Batman as Bruce Wayne is out of commission. Exactly the opposite of the direction Didio seems to be encouraging his creators to take in the above quoted sections. And how did fans react to this at the same event?

When pressed on the issue of new DC buttons promoting Nightwing possibly taking over the role of Batman, Didio again asked the audience which of the supporting Bat-characters should replace Bruce Wayne as the Dark Knight. The majority of the crowd agreed Bruce should not be replaced, and then Didio admitted, “I have no idea what those buttons mean.”

I don’t know what DC’s options are into terms of what’s been completed in their production schedule and what can still be altered. And I’m not usually one to argue that comics characters should never be changed. I’m usually on the side that says real, meaningful change happens far too little in these storylines, and I’d usually be applauding an effort like Morrison’s. But this is clearly, at least from a business standpoint, terrible timing for DC. If they want to ride the coattails of the Dark Knight into a lasting increase in readership for Batman, they need to put Bruce Wayne back under the cowl and return to roughly the status quo as soon as possible. The success of the Dark Knight has at least something to do with the fact that Batman is one of the few DC characters the company had gotten mostly right to begin with. Or else they’re likely to alienate fans in just the way Didio speculates they will.

(This will eventually be crossposted at my other site, www.holdreset.com, as I plan to do with all comics related posts)