Board Thread:Comics/@comment-43505-20160203015524/@comment-29709325-20160821061804

Rebirth is, thankfully, a soft reboot, but also a bit of course correction, and it's sort of clever how they're going about it (some would say shameless too, but at this point, I can live with that! DC is learning from some of their mistakes, this is not necessarily a bad thing, you know?): It actually continues from where New 52 left off (which is where the "not a reboot, never was" line comes from), but it's also introducing the concept of "someone" messing with the timeline of what appears to be Earth-Prime (and possibly others? not sure), so there's room for a bunch of retcons of the things fans didn't like and for reintroducing characters that had gotten written out or ignored by New 52.

Some excellent examples that are moves I like so far, out of the titles I follow:


 * BOTH versions of Wally West being canon = now 90% of the arguments (I'm not naive enough to think ALL of them lol) about the "racebent" Wally are null and will hopefully mostly end, because with both in continuity as entirely separate 'related' characters as opposed to the black Wally being the 'replacement alternate' Wally, each side of the debate gets 'their' Wally, which each get to grow into their own character again. I like this. I also like the "oh goodness now we have a metric ton of new speedsters and one of them is a murderer" thread that's been introduced into the Flash book; I haven't read Flash comics very much before, but I'm enjoying this run. The art is cool too, which is a nice bonus.


 * Wonder Woman's background's stupid retcon from under Azzarello is hinted as being about to go RetGone. Don't get me wrong, his run was...interesting, and the art by Chiang was fantastic, but the way he re-wrote the Amazons as being savage Straw Feminist stereotypes was just...not even offensive, just kind of tritely on the nose, shallow, and over the top and made no sense if you actually examined it beyond surface level (how would a woman as kind and accepting as Diana have come from such an openly misandrist society, seriously). We don't know what her final origin story is going to be yet but my money is on a return to some variant of the peace-loving Amazons that we had pre-New 52/Pre-Flashpoint...who made more damn sense, you know? At least in terms of Diana's personality, considering they raised her/she was raised around them.


 * Cassandra Cain and Steph Brown being back (in Detective Comics)! Also, Batwoman gets a major arc, and I love me some Kate Kane (they even had a brief appearance from Renee Monotoya in one issue! I missed her so much!). Not sure how I feel about who the Big Bad in this one turned out to be, but well, contextually it kinda works. Will be interested to see how this plot wraps up, and look forward to more Batwoman, Orphan and Spoiler especially.


 * I actually have yet to read more than the previews for "Batgirl and the Birds of Prey", but I like that they're providing a proper continuity nod to Babs having still been Oracle for a while (because a lot of people got the impression that New 52 had completely erased that part of her life, and were sad to see it go because they actually liked her a lot as Oracle). For those who don't know, the event that kicks off that book is that Barbara Gordon, as Batgirl, finds out that the thugs she just beat up got information from "Oracle" - meaning, someone is using her old identity/code name, and selling information to criminals under it, so she teams up with Black Canary to find out who's doing it. I'm intrigued enough I'll probably give it a try sometime, though the art is a little awkward here and there. I do love Babs and her BoP crew though, so even if the art was terrible (and it's not, from what I saw, just...awkward in places) I could probably overlook that if the story is good.


 * OK confession time: I wandered off from DC for a while. I was already playing catchup when I got into Green Lantern comics so I'm literally years behind (I mean, I haven't even read Brightest Day yet, just the main two Blackest Night books are about as far as I got, before skipping over to the more-relevant Flashpoint mini), and while I have spoiled myself a bunch for things like Wrath of the First Lantern stuff, I hadn't even managed to spoil myself for "Lights Out" and definitely have not been keeping up (though from what I've seen, I missed a great series of stories with the Sinestro book), so I am INCREDIBLY confused as to what's going on with the Emotional Spectrum Entities and such right now, or why the heck the GLC got sucked into another dimension that they barely survived. BUT I will say this: I like "Green Lanterns", I fell in love with Jessica Cruz from practically the first page of her, and while it's been uneven (especially on the art front), I am fond of this book and look forward to seeing how her and Simon reconcile their differences and grow as a team. Also wondering what the hell...Krona? I'm right and that's Krona, right? What the hell he's doing there (I had thought they had killed him off but then: timey wimey going on, so). Hal's book likewise has me intrigued, and I'm wondering how the Corps is going to recover from the situation they've gotten into. Definitely staying on my pull list.

I don't know much more than that because as someone else pointed out the number of twice-monthly titles gets expensive if you have too many series you're following; I'm basically following only four series on weekly pull list, and waiting to MAYBE pick up others. But I'm kind of hopeful with what I've seen so far, and mostly enjoying it; certainly, so far, it's been worth keeping them on the pull list. I've heard the other main title I was interested in, though, Wonder Woman, has a fairly slow pace so I'll probably be picking that up whenever it hits collected edition anyway, especially if I'm right and they're planning to collect the alternating stories (they switch back and forth between a story set in the present and a story set in the past, so really it's actually two monthly WW books that get released two weeks apart anyway) in different volumes.