The DC Comics Announcements: A Final Word

And with that, DC Comics finished announcing their 52 titles set to begin in September. There were some good ones (Justice League, Nightwing) and some bad ones (Detective Comics, The Fury of Firestorm); then there were some awful ones (The Savage Hawkman, Hawk & Dove) and some excellent ones (Action Comics, Justice League International). But at the end of the day, DC Comics has officially changed and while some may argue that this is a good thing, I'm not entirely sure it is.

For one thing, three of my favourite books, Power Girl, Secret Six and Booster Gold have all been cancelled; they've been replaced with titles such as Catwoman, Suicide Squad and Blue Beetle which will probably continue the great style and fun, but I was enjoying my old books. Scott Snyder's move from Detective Comics to Batman means he'll be making the eponymous Batman title a must-read, but to do so, he's traded the fantastic double-team of Jock and Francesco Francavilla for the '90s-infused pencils of Greg Capullo. And I like Greg Capullo just fine, and I'm excited for Batman to be a good book again, but there's nothing explosive about that announcement. Snyder was already writing a Batman series, and now that series will be written and drawn by Tony Daniel, the man who has been single-handedly responsible for driving the eponymous title into the dirt.

There seems to be no logic behind these decisions, from a modern point of view. The majority of the 2000s was spent trying to bring people back to comics after the horrendous era of the 1990s, and now it seems as though we're taking a step back, with creators like Scott Lobdell, Fabian Nicieza and Rob Liefeld all being handed a role in this revival of DC Comics. But why give work to those who were part of the problem to begin with? Is it because they're friends with Bob Harras, the new Editor-In-Chief? It feels as though they're deliberately trying to force modern readers away from the material, and make it more like it was during the speculator period. The period in which Marvel Comics was on the edge of self-destruction, and the majority of comic readers despise.

It could all turn out to be folly, and these books will actually all be really good. But right now I just have a nagging feeling that this is the beginning of the end for DC Comics; the books I love so much all seem to be fading away, dying or being handed over to creators I loathe. Hopefully Grant Morrison's Action Comics and  Dan Jurgens' Justice League International will drag my sour feelings out of the gutter.