Comments

1
I'll save myself the effort of doing full reviews and say that I largely agree with you down the line.

I'd personally rank Batman & Robin as better than Batman, but it was a solid baseline Batbook.

I found Red Hood to be significantly more offensive than Catwoman. The latter is just cheesecake worth rolling eyes at and looking away. Red Hood didn't just turn Starfire into a slut, but a brain damaged slut. That was a book without anything even approaching a redeeming quality.

I probably liked all your "inoffensive middle ground" books more than you. But the lower-tier DC quality level has been so low in the last decade that maybe average just feels above average these days.
2
For the final week, I'm really looking forward to GL: New Guardians, JL Dark, Superman, and Teen Titans. There's a couple other potential ones.

I wish they'd just let Seaman die, though. He's not even half as interesting as Namor, who is already one of the least interesting Marvel characters.
3
Thanks for these reviews, Paul. Having been back into comics for a few years now, I decided upon hearing about the DC relaunch that I'd move away from getting monthly issues for the titles I was into and just wait for the trade paperback collections to come out. Now having read your reviews of a few titles I was interested in, I might not even do that. For example, I wasn't interested in Catwoman, but wanted to give Red Hood and the Outlaws a try, and now you (and Ms. Hudson's article) have helped me decide not to do so. Whether it's sexism or just crappy writing or art, I don't want to support it. It's why I'm likely not going to pick back up Birds of Prey post-relaunch -- Gail Simone did such a great job with it, seeing it someone else's hands just feels wrong.
4
Great review of the Starfire reboot by a seven-year-old girl: http://io9.com/5844355/a-7+year+old-girl…
5
@4 - Awesome article. I was so relieved when I saw that the dad didn't actually let her sit and read Red Hood.

Best quote from the comments:
"It's like offering kids marijuana laced brownies as a gateway drug, and then when they're old enough to pay you steer them into injecting straight battery acid. Beyond the moral implications it's just bad business. You lose your prospective customers before you ever really made money off them."
6
So what's the reason for the DC reboot, again, and who was it done for? It sounds like they are doing only relatively minor tweaks to character concepts and origin stories. I grew up on Marvel comics (but haven't read them since college) so, as a person who doesn't know Nightwing from night elves, why do I care if 17% of his origin is different? It seems that most of the characters still fill the same role in the DC pantheon as they did before. If I didn't find DC compelling prior to the reboot, such small changes seem unlikely to change my mind. And if I *was* a reader beforehand, wouldn't it be annoying to have decades of canon discarded?

Certain reboots make sense to me, for example JJ Abrams "Star Trek". Most of the fun comes from seeing new actors inhabit such archetypal roles. Combined with the courage to fundamentally alter the setting (with the destruction of Vulcan) the end result was enjoyable and made you wonder where they would take things in the next movie.

The DC reboot feels less like a fundamental reset and more like they just decided to give all their titles new writers and new artists, all at the same time.
7
@6 - The point was a publicity stunt, basically. I would have prefered that they had the balls to fully reboot and start everything truly fresh, but I'm not in charge over there. The end result is really just offering "new" readers a moment when they know that everything is supposed to be at a jumping-on point instead of having to guess.

I suspect it'll have much less effect on truly new readers, and much more on Marvel Zombies and lapsed-in-general comic fans. Bringing old readers back into the fold may not grow the industry sustainably, but it's more dollars at least.

I've always been more of a Marvel guy, myself, and this stunt has definitely increased the number of DC titles I'm likely to continue reading.
8
Thanks! I am going to check out the new Wonder Woman and Blue Beetle.

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