Ok wait so why do I still care about the DC Universe again
The upfront notes:
My second book of the year was Ken Liu's The Legends of Luke Skywalker - I loved The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories and when I learned he had done a licensed book I knew it would either be a delightful passion project or the worst kind of slumming it. Fortunately it was the former, a solid little delight. It'll have to sustain me awhile, as I'll be doing a lot of comics rereading over the next month and change to prepare for a big piece I'll be doing: once I clear some time again I'm leaning between The Three-Body Problem, The Obelisk Gate, and Theatre of the Gods as my next read.
The news of Disney's 'Storyliving' community led to my being recommended Defunctland's engrossing mini-documentary on EPCOT, a story you can pause for a bit at a random moment and then restart with a phrase like "which would give Disney autonomy from nearly all local and county oversight".
I don't know what to make of what's happened with ComiXology beyond horror, and musing over how many comics I eventually got in trade on there cheap so I wouldn't have to transport the physical copies, all of which was now pointless. I suppose whether or not the situation improves depends on whether this comes down to a middle-manager scrambling for their job, or someone a rung or two higher going "whatever, this is 0.1% less trouble for us to manage and the whole thing isn't even a rounding error to Amazon".
Regarding comics announcements in the last several weeks: Deniz Camp was a pal back when we were both regulars on the CBR forums, so I guess that and Maxwell's Demons being excellent means I'm getting him and Jon Davis-Hunt on Bloodshot. I swear I had guessed every single Marvel character remotely up for grabs for who Al Ewing could go to next if not making the jump to DC aside from Ant-Man, but I'm sure it'll be good, especially with Tom Reilly onboard! And I'm obviously very excited for Zdarsky/Jimenez on Batman; even the plot sounding rote is interesting given the former's Daredevil work has been all turning conventional plots for the character on their heads (and between kicking off with The Knight and 'Batman's Doomsday', he's not playing around with that 'you have to give him a beginning and an ending' advice, huh).
Morrison in passing the buck to Ha has prolonged my Superman porn scandal-borne misery, along with the director and star chiming in; I suppose this is my life now. For those with no earthly idea what I'm talking about, there are links to each relevant point of the still-unfolding plot in this thread.
Why do I still care about these chumps?
Not as in why do I care about any of those given characters; plenty of them are historically pretty dang good. But why does the basic prospect of all of them sharing a space alongside one another as a collective enterprise give me a unique jolt? It's something I've been thinking about with the upcoming Dark Crisis being described as a 'celebration of the DC Universe', because that's what Death Metal and Doomsday Clock and DC Rebirth all were. We should be well and truly partied out over the last several years, and I might be inclined to suggest some of that energy might be best devoted into making their core lineup of titles something actually worth celebrating. To be fair they've got plenty of Black Label and limited-run titles doing excellent work right now, but those are again outside the 'core' world and shared narrative. And that shared narrative, the very concept of the shared universe, is a marketing gimmick: you get to see all your cartoon friends playing together, and also a few you might not really know but they're cool enough for the characters you like so maybe YOU should check out what they're up to too. I'm a Savvy Consumer™, I know what's up, you can't just throw a few buzzwords in front of my face and get me to offer up a blank check of emotional investment.
And yet. And yet and yet and yet. The moment Daniel Sampere threw up some of that advertising art for Dark Crisis with everybody together, I felt that jolt all over again. No matter how critical an eye I cast on the mechanics of the thing and how it exists and why, something about the prospect of that world clicks with me in a way no place else in fiction can compare with. No matter how badly it locks itself into a spiral of diminishing returns under inmates doing agonizing interviews about how fun and what an honor it is to run the asylum, I want it to be that beautiful...something it is in my eyes, that spark that flies out from dead wood when you bang the sticks together hard enough.
Some of it's as simple as superheroes and Superman in particular being a special interest for me. But I've spent my public online life picking apart what it is I like about Superman so much; if when I think 'superheroes' in the broad sense I either really mean 'DC' or archetypes mainly under their umbrella, some prodding here might be useful too.
Easiest potential place to start is with some of the common signifiers bandied about, your legacies and mythologies and such. It's also the easiest answer: nah. It couldn't really be when I regularly talk about how much the JSA and Teen Titans suck, but the issue runs deeper. I like the prospect of generational heroes, but in terms of individual character motivations as with the likes of Wally West's heyday as The Flash and Starman, and as a theoretically powerful way of recontextualizing symbolically loaded iconography such as Jon Kent and Dick Grayson or Jace Fox becoming the new Superman and Batman. Whereas when the idea of 'superheroes accumulate history, and sometimes use names and costumes that used to belong to somebody else' is treated by readers and creators in the real world as something that actually matters unto itself, that all these made-up people have inherent weight and dignity and are worthy of investment in their own right regardless of whether the stories are worth a damn? You've lost me.
Hey, I can like the inter-character dynamics and continuity stuff as much as anyone on occasion! The first event comic I was ever fully all-in on was Blackest Night for Christ's sake, and half the appeal of Dark Nights: Metal for me was bringing a ton of exciting long-unused toys out to be played with again. But the idea of that as the driving appeal of a world of magnificent primary-colored soaring superpeople - who's dating who, who resents who from which 70s filler issue or 90s crossover event, which characters have 'earned' which treatments in accordance with their 'feats' and fandom adoration? That's how you get the take on that world in Young Justice, where the costumes and cosmologies are a low-scale low-effort incidental sideshow in a universe where the fundamental forces are angst, eternal plot obstruction, and uwufication in an endless effort at maximizing ease of investment while minimizing meaningful catharsis. Characters and the worlds around them can swallow themselves whole in the effort of becoming the most inoffensive, straightforward, marketable versions of themselves, or from the accumulation of unworkable baggage, or simply getting a dope at the helm who throws the whole thing helplessly off-course. Some are perfectly willing to strap themselves to that perpetual out-of-control train ride for its own sake, but it's not the heart of the appeal for me.
Is it some other ingredient in the batch then? A fundamental flavor of 'DCness'? I do like the sense of weighty, archetypal myth some stories try and capture with the characters - your DKRs, Kingdom Comes, All-Star Supermen, the 'overpeople' page of Swamp Thing, that whole JLA "they're like the Greek Gods, Superman's Zeus, Batman's Hades..." notion. But it's rare a depiction of the characters truly goes all-in on that, and rarer it works; for that matter, it typically leans on an idea of the superfolks as being of inherent cultural and moral importance, which is a contentious prospect at best for even the biggest names nevermind the rank-and-file. Plus it's a hop, skip, and jump from there to 'superheroes inspire HOPE', as if the concept of somebody in a weird suit who's really good at something and goes out to 'fight crime' is so pure and transcendent in a vacuum as to be inherently resistant to unpleasant readings, or that 'hopefulness' is even the only truly valid mode for the subgenre to operate in.
Another option would be the kind of luminous neon-scented strangeness underpinning the whole affair that I do dearly love. The idea of the DCU as the home of the Boom Tube, a rainbow of Kryptonites and power batteries and alternate Earths, pogo stick getaway chauffeurs and novelty cities in bottles and costumes that fit inside rings. Of childhood friends from the future and superpets and professional deathtrap-designers and purple rays and alien medical implants that let you talk to cities and pantheons where the gag is everyone's name starts with the letter D. Or as Gerard Way's Doom Patrol put it, "Star-stuff...implosion...and one's understanding of the words courage and valor. ... The hopes and dreams sewn into the tights of supermen and superwomen. ... The stratosphere where the radioactive can render you blind, or imbue you with the senses of a jaguar." But there's a problem here too, and it's one that applies to every other component I discussed so far: they aren't DC exclusive. Other stuff can be colorful and epic and steeped in history with a dash of hope on the side. There is no flavor that a sufficiently talented set of creators can't iterate on. It's not even a matter of "but DC has ALL of that": Scott Snyder's Justice League while flawed is a run I very much enjoy that covers all of the above, yet I wouldn't point to it as the prime example of DC done right.
So what is it? Is there even an 'it'?
Nope. DC isn't anything. But when done right, it can be everything.
On the other side of the aisle, Marvel's core strength is a unifying sense of identity as a result of effectively originating from a handful of creators. There's a sort of Lee/Ditko aesthetic binary, but beyond that you largely have varied scales of well-meaning, self-destructive snarkers struggling to do the right thing in spite of their endless foibles and failings, whether fighting in the streets or the stars; characters who fall outside that template like Captain America or the Punisher are defined by their deviation from the norm. That's not a flaw, that's what you get by default in a shared fictional setting with a cleanly defined point of emergence. You can have something like America's Best Comics where Alan Moore and the assorted artists he worked with created a truly sprawling and heterogenous world, but that's a small-scale instance not easily replicable on a substantial scale. Generally speaking, the conceptual boundaries of a setting are established at inception.
DC as we understand it on the other hand wasn't any one thing at its beginnings, but a product of assembling and swallowing assorted other comics companies and the work of countless creators over its early decades. From that early grotesque monopolistic feeding frenzy, an unexpected spark emerged: the concept of a cosmos that rather than an organically grown, preplanned shared space, is a panoply of irreconcilable concepts arbitrarily and forcefully bolted together. The rules of each corner bear no meaningful relationship to one another except as forced to by a given storyline, and as a result it's a world where Starman, Shazam! and the Monster Society of Evil, and Sandman can coexist in defiance of all sense along with Hitman, Plastic Man, and Wonder Twins. You can do comics that highlight the dichotomies in play such as Batman/Superman: Archive of Worlds or World's Funnest or any number of Grant Morrison works, or stories that reframe the entire enterprise through distinct artistic prisms like New Frontier, Other History of the DC Universe (both of which do plenty of work of their own to highlight how far afield the corners of the shared space can get from one another), or fistfuls of anthologies. It's funny animals and fantasy quests and neo-noir and spacefaring romance crashing into one another endlessly with, at their best, only the minimal necessary effort of smoothing over the inconsistencies.
Maybe I'm predisposed to that view, and to seeing it as a good thing, from one of my first books as a kid being DC's The Greatest Team-Up Stories Ever Told collection. I know full well it's a model that could only have come about on the scale it did by way of capitalism's worst excesses, one of the many original sins for the cape and tights crowd to reckon with. But however accidental it's a view that speaks to me: not just as an ideal fiction-generator, but as something more authentic in its embracing of oddity and the countless frameworks through which individual stories can be experienced than any single template can allow. It feels truly expansive, and thus in its absurd way a closer approximation of reality than a world where everything sort of makes sense side-by-side; after all, what could be less 'real' than getting how everything works? Granted it's something that's impermanent in the same way as every other proposal I floated as long as the powers that be chase after house styles and One True Visions as they understandably feel they must. But while any given flavor will come and go, as long as DC is built on the assumption that Metropolis and Gotham exist at the same time in the same world even though they're the irreconcilable products of two different strains of adventure fiction, that crack at the foundation will open back up and send a million tales spinning outwards. And to me, there will always be something lovely about that inevitability.
-- David Mann, 3/8/2022