4 Reboots That Actually WorkedSo in the last few weeks, DC Comics has once again rebooted their superhero universe. I confess I haven’t read any of the new DC Rebirth issues (I’m a wait until it comes out in trade paperback kind of guy), so I am not here to offer commentary on the quality of these issues. But if you’re looking for that, it does seem like a lot of people are really digging this new DC Universe. But then again, people seemed pretty pleased with the earliest issues of DC’s previous reboot, what fans and pros eventually took to calling the New 52. But then that fell apart so bad that a website devoted to counting the number of days since DC Comics last screwed up rose from the wreckage.
Now I don’t know if DC Rebirth will be more successful than the New 52. You know I want it to be, because I wasn’t very fond of a lot of the stuff in the New 52, so I want to be able to enjoy reading DC Comics again. But right now, I think it’s too early to tell if this will be a huge hit, or if it’s going to flop as hard as the previous reboot. But that does bring me to today’s topic I want to pontificate on a little bit. Comics, specifically superhero comics, tend to go the reboot route quite often. And it seems like that never really works out too well. If anything, it usually is a temporary boost in sales and interest, before all of the insanity catches back up and another reboot is seemingly warranted. But is it always that bad? I say thee nay! This is a list of times when reboots weren’t so terrible and actually worked out quite nicely! My first example is one that many people probably don’t even consider a real reboot, but it is the mid-1950s, when the Silver Age of Superheroes began at DC Comics. Superheroes were huge in the 1930s and 1940s, but after World War II ended, funny animals, true crime, romance and westerns all became much more popular, and superhero comics were only hanging on by a thread. A few characters and titles stuck around, but for the most part, everyone’s favorite superheroes just quietly disappeared. And that’s how it was back then. If a title or a genre wasn’t doing great, it was quietly replaced by whatever was doing well at the time. So by the mid-1950s, Julius Schwartz reintroduced the Flash to the world. Still the same superpowers, but a different dude, a different costume, different supporting characters. Everything was different, and new and exciting! And Schwartz followed this with reboots of Green Lantern, the Atom, Hawkman, as well as soft relaunches of the superheroes who had stuck around, like Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman! This one might not immediately come to mind as a reboot because most of the time, when you think of reboot in the way of superhero comics, it’s a big huge sweeping change that gets everybody talking (and usually complaining). But back then, most of the people reading comics in 1956 probably had no idea there was ever a character named the Flash. For them, this was just a new character for them to read about. Of course later they explained that this was a parallel earth, which in itself led to a whole heap of problems that are neither here nor there. But this was probably one of the most successful reboots of all time because Schwartz and his co-creators didn’t feel beholden to what came before. They jettisoned what didn’t work and updated the characters and concepts for a new age. Just about every other reboot I can think of is going about in the most asinine way possible, by trying to move forward for a new audience, while remaining shackled to the old stuff it is allegedly getting rid of. This reboot didn’t have that problem, and, not coincidentally, it was hugely popular and brought in new readers and singlehandedly ushered in a new era of superhero comics! Remember how I said the revelation that the Silver Age reboot was all set on a parallel earth separate from the stuff that happened in the 1940s brought a whole bunch of problems? Well, basically, once that cat was out of the bag, things got really convoluted. More and more parallel earths were created, some just to justify a mistake made in a previous comic. By the early 1980s, editor Marv Wolfman had gotten tired of it all, and was already in the midst of planning to wipe the slate clean and start fresh. And that’s just what happened when he and his collaborator artist George Perez brought the 12 issue Crisis on Infinite Earths to the world. I’ve talked about Crisis before, so no need for me to belabor what I’ve already stated elsewhere. Needless to say, Crisis wasn’t the best story ever, but it did pave the way to a really great reboot. This might seem unusual if you’re familiar with the DC Comics of today, but back then, editorial basically handed the keys to the Ferraris to all the hot young talent and let them roll out whatever stories they wanted to tell. Sure, there was some editorial guidance. Some creators weren’t allowed to use certain characters because other creators were already working on a story with those characters, stuff like that. In my humble, that’s what made this reboot so great. You didn’t have so much micromanagement from on high (which was really what tanked the New 52, if you ask me). Creators were allowed to, shock and awe, create. Now I don’t want this to become a session of how much we hate the evil editors who don’t let creators do whatever they want. I do believe editors are necessary and can even be beneficial in the production of art and stories, but in this case, I think that less is more is what helped make the post-Crisis DC Comics such a roaring success. But what about the competition? Although DC Comics has more of a reputation for rebooting than Marvel does, that doesn’t mean the folks at Marvel are strangers to this idea. They’ve tried their hand at it a few times, with varying results. One of their attempts is a strange one to include on this list, because it’s not especially fondly remembered. But that’s only because of its connection to a previous reboot attempt which was really reviled. After the big Onslaught story which teamed up the Fantastic Four, the Avengers and the X-Men, Franklin Richards of the Fantastic Four family vanished the Avengers and the Fantastic Four to an alternate reality where their lives were started over, with many changes and differences added in for good measure. These new books set in a brand new Marvel Universe (while the original Marvel Universe was still going on, mind you) were handled by Rob Liefeld and Jim Lee, two gentlemen who had worked on some of the company’s hottest titles just a few short years earlier, before they had left with other creators to form their own creator owned company. Now they were back with this event, called HEROES REBORN, and it was more or less universally disdained. After roughly a year of stories set in this new Marvel Universe, Marvel pulled the plug on the whole thing and brought all of the characters back to the Marvel Universe in an event called HEROES RETURN. You might say this one shouldn’t even count as a reboot, but I’d say it does, especially when you consider this return to status quo allowed the creators to undo some of the hasty changes they had made before, such as turning Tony Stark into a time-displaced teenaged version of himself. This coupled with the fact that, like Crisis on Infinite Earths at DC a decade earlier, it paved the way to some very well loved series’ such as Kurt Busiek’s Avengers and Iron Man runs and Mark Waid’s Captain America series. Marvel’s other big attempt at rebooting things came a few years after HEROES RETURN, with the Ultimate Universe, which was considerably more successful and well known. This one, like HEROES REBORN, was happening while the main Marvel Universe was still going on. Unlike HEROES REBORN or RETURN, this universe wasn’t in any way connected to the previous, older universe. It had characters with new updated histories, some more radically changed than others, but you didn’t have Ultimate Universe characters interacting with mainstream Marvel characters (well, not initially. It took about a decade for that to happen. Famously, one-time-EIC said that once they had characters from the universes interacting, that meant they had officially run out of ideas). I feel like this one was pretty big for a couple of reasons. Of course there was the talent behind these books. I feel when you’re starting a new universe, a big thing that helps is having a small group of likeminded folks working together. In the earliest years of the Ultimate Universe, it was really just Brian Michael Bendis and Mark Millar putting the stories out with their artistic collaborators. That kind of unified vision among creators is contagious, and the fans can catch it and it makes them excited to see what’s going on. But on top of all of this, the Ultimate Universe came at a time when the internet was really starting to catch on (you can see some half-hearted attempts to use the internet to tie in with comics from the late 90s, but it didn’t start to work out well until the early 00s), and movies about superheroes started pouring in much faster than they ever had before. There was a weird synergy going on with the Ultimate Universe because now, if they were making a new Spider-Man movie, they had the opportunity to look at this new Spider-Man who had been going on for 2 years, instead of being overwhelmed by the old Spider-Man who had been around for 40 years. That didn’t always happen, but you can bet the movies drawing influence from the new Ultimate Universe in turn directed fans toward the new Ultimate Universe, which was a big factor that was never present before, and I don’t think will ever be present again in any future reboots. These were just a few of the reboots that have come out over the years that I feel were more successful than others. But what do you guys think? Are there any good ones I missed? Or are the ones I listed awful and deserve to be forgotten? Let us know in the comments, and be sure to keep it trashy! _____________________ YOU MAY ALSO LIKE: - Top 5 Deaths in Superhero Comics - Heroically Wasted: 5 Comics Characters To Have a Night Out With - Fanboy Outrage: 4 Historical Cases of Panic and Confusion |
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