You
want to know my dirty little secret? The thing that I keep at the
back of my mind in a world of constant disappointment, dashed hopes
and thwarted expectations? I want everything to succeed. I don't
expect everything to succeed but I want it to. I want Batman vs.
Superman: Dawn of Justice to
break the pattern of DC film offerings and be a fantastic movie. I
want to like whatever old or obscure junk my friends point me to on
the internet. And do you know what? Bitch and moan as I do I want The
New 52 to be the game-changing, artistically inspiring revival DC was
hoping for.
The
New 52 has outlasted my expectations, no two ways about it. When it
was announced I thought it would last a year, two at pinch and here
we are three years down the line and it is still DC's main publishing
continuity. Three years is a long time, long enough that I'm a
different person now than when Justice League #1 came out and this
experiment has had a good while to validate itself. So has it? Just
in my own highly subjective personal view?
Eh...
very nearly almost.
Now, one of the problems I had with this idea out of the
gate was that DC was mixing soft and hard reboots within the same
initiative. Batman and Green Lantern (Green Lantern especially) were
basically continuing where they left off with a slightly adjusted
past timeline, soft as it comes. Wonder Woman was getting a new cast
and status quo but that's just what happens to Wonder Woman and she's
never needed a reboot for it, that's what she calls “getting a new
writer”. Meanwhile the Teen Titans suddenly have a whole new
history: Tim Drake is their founding father now, the Dick Grayson era
Titans were never a team, in fact only three of them seem to exist in
the New 52. That's an astonishingly hard reboot compared to what Hal
Jordan and Bruce Wayne went through.
Reboots happen, though, and what mattered to me then and
matters to me now are the stories being told in this new framework.
Does what has been done creatively validate the business decision
that started it all?
As I said: very nearly almost, in a few cases, a bit.
The
simple fact is that after three years DC is finally getting its
collective head around what it wants and how it wants to achieve it.
This should probably have been a realisation that came a bit sooner
(preferably three or four years sooner) but here we are and at least
it does feel like the moment has arrived and that moment is called
Batman Eternal.
I
already mentioned in my Tim Drake/Harper Row post (and the series
really needs to return to them at some point) that I liked the series
but I want to get into the real nuts and bolts of how Eternal
works and why it works. You see, the whole series is devoted, on
multiple layers, to asking and answering one question:
How in the hell does Gotham City work?
The answer is presented mechanically by removing one of
the city's most essential moving parts as Jim Gordon is indicted for
multiple counts of manslaughter and watching the whole thing fall
apart. And here we have the crux of the matter: with this move DC is
finally taking advantage of the door they opened when they made
everyone younger and less experienced. The pre-Flashpoint Jim Gordon
was practically as sainted a figure in the fiction as he was within
fandom. He'd been Commissioner forever, he'd pretty much succeeded in
stamping out police corruption in the GCPD or at last at Gotham
Central itself and he was damn near untouchable on a moral and
ethical level.
New
52 Jim is younger and has been Commissioner for about six years. He's
not as popular as he was pre-Flashpoint and his crusade against
corruption isn't as advanced (look at his immediate successor for
evidence of that). From a storyline perspective there's more weight
to the public siding against him than there would have been before.
Yes, we know he's
innocent because he's Commissioner Gordon but the backlash is at
least believable.
It's
not just Jim, either. Eternal
finally integrates the new Tim Drake into the Bat-family. Death
of the Family and a few stray
guest appearances where he was a visitor notwithstanding this is
genuinely the first time we've seen this Red Robin operate in Gotham.
He has his own base in the city, possibly even several, and this
causes tension between him and Bruce but obviously the tension is
manageable or even a joke since Tim still has his Gotham privileges.
Y'know, not that I think even Bruce could revoke those from Tim even
if he tried. The fact is, though, that this relationship is subtly
different from their pre-Flashpoint one: Bruce is a former mentor Tim
isn't too worried about pissing off instead of the stand-in father he
wants to surpass, which is probably down to this Tim not being an
orphan.
And
that's not even mentioning the two characters Eternal
has introduced to the New 52: the Spectre and Spoiler. Corrigan we've
seen the least of but this version seems actively afraid of the
Spectre which, whilst not out of line with past interpretations, is
at least an interesting choice of several potential angles.
Spoiler meanwhile... well, they really thought that one
through. We're finally at a point where she has a costume and has
chosen her hero name but they've actually thought about how the word
she chose to describe herself has changed in the years since her
original introduction:
Spoiler is now a vigilante with a blog!
This isn't me being a sad bastard and identifying with a
character because of my hobby, by the way, which was obviously what
DC was courting when they did a similar thing to Superman. This is me
laughing with DC at a cool idea that ties in with not only
modernising the character to include an angle modern, baggage-free
readers would actually expect and a funny little acknowledgement of
the role internet fandom has played in her enduring popularity and
multiple resurrections.
And dear God they have finally worked out what they want
to do with Jason Bard. This guy again. This guy just turns up and I
don't know what he was originally but I've seen him used as a street
level PI free of Bat-connections, a uniform cop witless foil for
Barbara Gordon, a dirty tricks man for Tim Drake and now as “l'il
Jim Gordon” with a twist. So, yes, this angle is interesting, this
angle is good, let's run with this, see it through and maybe then we
can finally say we have the definitive Jason Bard interpretation and
move on. Still, though, this is a case of using an existing character
name and the broads strokes of their past incarnations to wrongfoot
the audience because what nearly every version of Bard has agreed
with is that he's a bit shady but ultimately on the side of law and
order. This creates expectations of the new version and that you can
play with and DC has, gleefully.
Now,
I'm specifically singling out Eternal
because there's enough meat for a whole Comics Ramble in it. It isn't
the only example. Wonder Woman
has been taking advantage of the new start from day one; the latest
Teen Titans run under
Will Pfeifer is examining how superheroes and social media would
interact; Justice League United
shows huge promise; and I am absolutely fascinated by Grayson.
Like I said, the New 52 is on its way to being validated as an
experiment...
… if its lucky.
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