That DC Reboot Is Still Newsworthy, Right?

Wow, once I got over the initial ballsiness of DC's linewide reboot, I'm back to being fairly apathetic about mainstream superhero comics. Nonetheless, here are the five most interesting September issues:

Action Comics #1
Written by Grant Morrison
Illustrated by Rags Morales

Morrison writing Superman. Movin' on.

Stormwatch #1
Written by Paul Cornell
Illustrated by Miguel Sepulveda

There's my brah!

*Bump*

The Martian Manhunter's my second favorite character in comics, and I was confident he was going to show up somewhere in the new DC lineup, but not in Stormwatch, the Justice League of Totally Killing People. However, that does actually seem like a good fit for him. He's a hundred-thousand-year-old Superman/Clayface/Invisible Phantom/Professor X, which slots him in well with the power level of a team that includes the likes of The Doctor, aka the guy who can do anything. He's also always been a hair beyond the black and white morality structure that tends to define the rest of the JLA, and the solicitation text mentioning “changing [the] minds” of new recruits implies that he's more hardcore than usual about it.

I've never read any Stormwatch beyond a single trade of The Authority, but they're intriguing characters I'm interested in getting acquainted with. However, I do know enough about them to know that the costume redesign on the Midnighter there is... far from amazing. Trading trenchcoat for spikes, huh? Fire your tailor. I'm also not super keen on Martian Manhunter's no longer popping a killer collar. Apollo I could take or leave; he looks kinda good with short hair.

Also, written by Paul Cornell! He's pretty good. So, Martian Manhunter, a character I love, working with a totally different team, which has gotten good buzz in the past, written by Paul Cornell. We got a winner.

Aquaman #1
Written by Geoff Johns
Illustrated by Ivan Reis

I love Aquaman. He's had so many interesting, short runs... Come to think of it, maybe he'd be better off as an “occasional miniseries” kinda guy. Here's the thing: Johns' take on Aquaman, from what I've read of the Brightest Day miniseries, has been a pleasurable silver age-kinda romp with a zombie twist, but certainly nothing that'll get my three bucks month after month. The solicitation calls it “a thrilling new take,” so ideally it will be distinct and different. Johns really hits roughly 1 in 3 times, Ivan Reis is a good penciller, so they've got one issue to wow me. WOW ME.

Teen Titans #1
Written by Scott Lobdell
Illustrated by Brett Booth and Norm Rapmund

Superboy #1
Written by Scott Lobdell
Illustrated by R.B. Silva and Rob Lean

This is what being a relapsed Young Justice fan is like. Willing to ignore all the objective warning signs my brain is screaming at me for the chance to get some of that old magic back.

I mean, look at those Titans costumes:

• Superboy's sunk from jeans and a black Superman t-shirt to just the black t-shirt.
• The new character in the bottom left, “Bugg,” looks like a combination of Witchblade, Marrow, and Livewire.
• Robin's stolen something out of the Falcon's closet, painted it red, and added way too many utility belts. I mean, just look at him: utility belt, utility harness, and two more utility belts around his shoulders. There's preparedness, Robin, but that would make Batman take a step back and go “whoa whoa, let's not go nuts.”
• Wonder Girl's rocking that barbed wire lasso, because she's not so nice this time around, and you know what else isn't very nice? Barbed wire. Even the worst outlaws lassoed things with rope, y'know.

These are outfits that are really going to appeal to those poor kids that were recently awoken from their cryogenic freezing in 1992.

(Got nothing against the robot Tron suit from the Superboy cover, however.)

Two things appeal to me about this. The first is that they are really, really breaking away from norm here. For me, Teen Titans is meh at best, boring strip-mining of boring stories from the past then another teenager gets a bullet in the brain at worst. Here you're not seeing any of the legacy Titans characters; it's just the “new generation” and a couple new (yay!) though uninteresting (boo!) guys, and they're really messing with the preexisting guys. Tim Drake looks to be jumping onto the superhero scene with no ties to Batman and using a bulletproof cape and jet pack, Wonder Girl's a “powerhouse thief.” This is definitely a new thing, and, though I really love the characters as they were, I'm willing to give it a shot.

Secondly, you have Scott Lobdell writing. He's done quality work on the teen team book Generation X in the past, and here, judging by interviews, he's been given a huuuuuge degree of latitude to redesign and write these characters as he sees fit. Hopefully that'll lead to some really good, creative stuff. Furthermore, him writing both titles makes for easy crossover appeal. Put me down for a few issues, but don't prove my conscience right, then I'll never get him to shut up...

Toonami Aftermath Interview

Are you done watching Toonami Aftermath yet? It's been a few months since I mentioned it, assuming you heard about it from me. If you're not, that's cool, come back when you're done.

Okay! I recently had the pleasure of interviewing "Toon," the mysterious creator and showrunner of Toonami Aftermath, through e-mail. He was super gracious and eager to answer all my questions, so if you need another reason to watch the hundreds of hours of free entertainment he provides, there you go. If you're as interested as I was about the origins and logistics of a project that obviously involves so much work, passion, and, let's face it, vulnerability to litigation, read on (My questions are bolded):


First of all, I suppose I should ask: who am I talking to in these e-mails?

Most know me by the nickname Toon, I am the creator of Toonami Aftermath.

Who's the team behind Toonami Aftermath, how did you come together, and what lead to the decision to create a Toonami "revival?"

The Toonami Aftermath team is smaller than most people imagine. I created the site and developed the tools needed to schedule the broadcast and monitor/update the schedule. Notable contributors are:

• Mercurius - Contacted me and offered help in making promos. He made a handful of show intros for Toonami Aftermath, all of which are top notch.

• Sonicstormer - Head moderator, he is in charge of pretty much all moderation which includes the chat and forum; he's the hardest working person on ToonamiAftermath.com. If I ever got banned from my own site for breaking our own rules, Sonic would be the one to do it.

• TallestRed - Our server admin, he is the computer expert of the group. If we need help with the server, general coding, or we just need advice about what software to run or what coding method to use, Tallest is the guy to talk to. If you've ever used the little buttons that change the stream quality on the front page, that is only a taste of what Tallest can and has done *wink*.

• ShepherdGrey - Another moderator, he is the guy that logs in every couple hours just to tell everyone to "GBTW!" (get back to work). Actually, Shepherd is our pretend lawyer who wrote the Terms of Service and basically owns your soul if you didn't read the fine print.

• Hangingsquid - A moderator, top contributor in the forums, recently a server admin, and soon to be an affiliate with the launch of his own "InternetTV" website.

• Last but not least is Xioustic - a mentor and the person responsible for the conception of the website. Toonami Aftermath used to just be a broadcast on ustream, but Xioustic offered to buy a domain and host a small site on his personal hosting plan. If it wasn't for Xioustic I don't think we would have ever launched our own server.

I couldn't possibly name all the people that make ToonamiAftermath.com awesome, there are so many inspiring and intelligent people here. The viewers are also top contributors, they are the voice of Toonami Aftermath. You guys all rock!

Once your goal was established, how did you go about turning Toonami Aftermath into a reality?

It was January 10^th, 2010 when I solidified in my mind what I wanted to attempt. At the time I had just discovered a Dragon Ball Z marathon stream on the web. This brought me back to a place I had long since forgotten, and I remember talking to my grade school friends, asking if they ever watched Toonami. To my surprise it turned out I was the only one that did among my group of friends until I started chatting up with my buddy Nick, who was raving about how much Toonami meant to him. To Nick, Toonami wasn't just a cool animation block on TV, it was something more than that. We discovered that we were both uncompromising fans of the 1997-2002 Toonami and shared a lot of insight about the dub of DBZ we liked and other shows like ThunderCats and Gundam Wing.

Shortly after the 24/7 DBZ stream was discontinued it hit me like a ton of bricks. I started asking around, tapping into my friends' friends' animation collections to rebuild the archive of programs that made Toonami legendary. Within a couple of days, Nick and I were watching an original Toonami block lineup: ThunderCats, Ronin Warriors, DBZ, and Gundam Wing. And in just over a week, Toonami Aftermath was ready to broadcast... indefinitely.

A 24-hour broadcast necessitates more than a weekday afternoon's worth of content, and your extended schedule's featured everything from Cartoon Cartoons to Mystery Science Theater 3000. You've also aired redubbed promos, custom show intros, and even the odd retro commercial. How do you make decisions regarding what content to air, and when and how to do it?

I spent a few sleepless nights drawing up what I remembered of Toonami's scheduling, placing shows and promos in their original order, gathering promos, and encoding DVDs. It was a torrent of great feelings putting the schedule together. I might have thought, "Why stop at Toonami? Let's see Space Ghost Coast to Coast, Cartoon Planet and Cartoon Cartoons as well!" but in reality I didn't think about it at all, it's just something that naturally seemed like the right thing to do.

I have an obsession with how scheduling of content affects the viewer experience. If the broadcast was a marathon, viewers would get their fix of a show, watch nonstop for a couple weeks, and never return after that. I see that kind of behavior as not only unhealthy, but also not entertaining. The addition of the other weekday shows was a no-brainer: the more good shows that were in the schedule, the better they could be scheduled to avoid becoming a marathon.

I did decide to indulge in the Toonami block more than originally scheduled on television, but that is to be expected from a stream named after Toonami, of course. The original Toonami promos that are used are all there because, well, they are Toonami. After you've done everything that you possibly can with the original content, all there is left is to fill in the gaps in the schedule. Inevitably there were show and promo gaps in the schedule, so naturally I decided to find affiliated or similar shows of high caliber to fill in those timeslots. With the contributions of Mercurius and VSigma100 we have custom Toonami intros for shows that did not have any originally. Everything else is simply for fun, but I try to maintain the integrity of a broadcast that knows its content and won't break the experience with petty jokes or misplaced content as much as possible.

Are you worried at all about getting sued for broadcasting this material, or at least unceremoniously shut down? How seriously did you take possible legal ramifications into account when you started the project?

Of course getting shut down was always a possibility and something that I've never taken for granted. I have been contacted by copyright holders in the past and have taken actions to minimize the chances of problems in the future. But in any case, I decided after testing the waters for a few months that we'd be up long enough for it to be worth a shot and here we are today, a year and a half of broadcast and still working at it.

How closely does the Toonami Aftermath of today match up with your original intentions? What's next for the project?

The original goal was simple: I wanted to recreate a specific Toonami schedule using the show content and promos. The success of completing this goal was massively fulfilling. Things have changed over time, but I've made it one of my top priorities to only meet this goal even further as the scheduling has matured.

The second goal which immediately followed was that of practicality. Too many good ideas go wasted with the absence of practicality. I needed to somehow automate the daunting scheduling process so that I could stream Toonami 24/7, year-round. The process of scheduling a broadcast is no easy feat. My progress in completing this goal has been over a year in the making. For the first month and a half I used to take 1 to 2 hours PER DAY just to get all the content in order for the day's broadcast. I forget how, but I managed to bring that down to a 30 minute process after a couple months; I think I made templates.

Around the time that I launched the website I came up with a more advanced templating process that took around 10 minutes per day. The reason it takes so long is that subsequent episodes need to be loaded each day and they must be timed so that they broadcast at the correct time. The 10-minute template process is where I settled at for somewhere around 8 months but it still wasn't close to what I hoped for. I still had to remotely log in every day to put in my 10 minutes.

Finally, in early February this year, after consulting TallestRed on simple coding techniques, I was able to create a 99.9% automated scheduling process. Now I spend 15 minutes per week scheduling 110 hours worth of different content. That number is rising to 118 hours worth of content soon and the automated process is now progressing in the area of better timing and more dynamic scheduling. At this point it is impractical NOT to stream, I spent more time responding to your questions then I have this month scheduling Toonami Aftermath.

The weekday schedule was revamped for a third time in March, it is everything that Toonami is supposed to be all in one big package. The revised weekend schedule is coming out this June and it will be everything a weekend schedule is supposed to be: fun, dynamic, and adventurous. Even still, there are always unannounced progressions being made and some secret for now. Stay tuned where it's still fun.

Could you tell me more about these templating tools you use? Did they exist in some form before you began broadcasting, or were they built from scratch? What's the process that takes a collection of video files and turns them into an ordered, uploaded broadcast?

Well actually the "templating" I was doing at the beginning consisted solely of well-organized archiving and simple playlist templates. The episode numbers have to be changed to keep each series progressing day by day, so I created the playlist templates with all the intros and promos laid out in order so that only the episode numbers had to be manually entered. This gives the viewers the next episodes in all the series aired each day while maintaining the same promo and intro scheduling in order to keep the playlist timed for schedule. As simple as it is I don't know if I would call this “from scratch,” but the idea was certainly my own, and of course these playlist templates were all based on my own playlists that I constructed for Aftermath.

We now employ a script I wrote specifically to automate that entire process, and that is definitely from scratch. Its function is to automatically progress each show day by day until it reaches the end of the series, in which case it starts over. It does this at an interval of 1 week at a time, although I could make it run at any interval I want it to. The only manual entering of schedule content are the 2 feature films and 4 Rifftrax of various films that are aired each week. Besides saving me all that time scheduling, the script has allowed me to be a little more creative by having certain shows only appear on certain days and even rotate promos day by day to give the broadcast a more dynamic feel and use more of our available catalog of awesome shows and promos.

Is there any particular program or programs you use to schedule, broadcast, or otherwise run Toonami Aftermath? Do you use something entirely built from scratch, or, say, something like Windows Media Player in a modified capacity? I have no knowledge of the technical side of video production, scheduling, and streaming, so forgive me if this is a really basic question.

As you'd imagine, there are a lot of requirements to make a broadcast work: audio normalization, gapless playback, video size/aspect ratio compensation, compression, bandwidth and even crash handling, which Flash encoding is constantly prone to. I use Kmplayer for playback, SCFH to capture video, and Flash Media Encoder (by command line and batch script) to stream to justin.tv. All of these programs run inside a Virtual Machine in Virtual Box on our server and keep the quality of the broadcast as high as possible at all stages. There are too many other utilities that are used in the editing/encoding and schedule planning stages to name, but for example I occasionally will use winamp to help time a schedule. These programs are all great, but at the end of the day the secret sauce is in the batch scripting.

Wow, that's even more complex than I thought. Do you have any formal training in video production?

No, I don't have any training whatsoever. Some might call it dedication or obsession, but really it's just a long and fun game; the fulfillment is worth far more then the effort, and for that reason I would be mad not to do it. It would not be worth it if the Flash encoder crashed every hour or even every day, I can't be around to reset them all the time which can result in hours if not days of downtime. I couldn't put in the hours it would take to keep up the schedule, time is better spent researching batch script than entering hundreds of lines of playlist variables (episode numbers) manually every day.

So yeah, I guess you can say it is a complex setup in that it took a long time to figure out what and how to implement the ideal solutions. But hey, the way I see it I intend to broadcast Toonami Aftermath indefinitely, as long as possible, so it doesn't matter if I find the solution tomorrow, next week, or next month. Finding the right way is worth exponentially more fun days than days of frustration.

Thanks again to Toon, who, again, was super awesome. Now, get back to watching Outlaw Star.

Hey Wait A Minute

In Final Destination 3, if the roller coaster was supposed to crash because the guy riding it drops his camera, and the guy gets off the ride because his friend has the prophetic vision of the roller coaster crashing... why does it still crash?

...Anyone remember Final Destination 3?

A Lot of Thoughts on DC's Rebootingest Reboot Ever

Note: People, I know this is all over the place a bit, but I need to get it published, because they're leaking info every day that's making me go back and rewrite things. If I'm still interested when all the titles and status quo have been revealed, I'll probably follow up.

DC is rebooting their continuity. But this time their approach is different enough to warrant slightly less apathy than that statement would usually entail. They're canceling most of their line and launching 52 new number ones in September, with the intention of continuing on unhindered by decades of near-worthless continuity and never going back there again. It's a gutsy move. Others have spelled out the business angles eloquently and comprehensively (do check out Greg Hatcher and David Uzumeri's takes), so let me just hit you with some of my thoughts:

So, how exactly does this new continuity operate? Okay, let's run this down. Crisis on Infinite Earths started everything over again. New continuity, nothing old counted, many new origins (back when that was still interesting). Infinite Crisis was a lot more subdued; it was basically the same post-Crisis universe with a few background details changed: Batman caught his parents' killer, Wonder Woman was a founding member of the Justice League, Kryptonians are now a race of xenophobic warmongering monsters. Same house, different furniture. As I understand it, this is different from those two. It's an entirely different universe, ala Marvel's Ultimate universe. When all of DC's new titles hit, we're reading about characters with pasts completely untied to anything that happened in the “original universe,” and they're a few years into their careers. This is a good way to go about things. Because it means...

No more origin stories. We know why Batman fights crime, okay? You don't have to keep telling us these stories with new “twists” and “insights.” It's pretty much been done to death, and adds nothing substantial anymore. Assuming I understand the direction of their “new universe,” they've got this problem pretty much licked. You don't have to explain how Superman decided to be Superman, how Lex Luthor became such a prick, and why they have this antagonistic relationship. They've met, they hate each other, we all know it. That's where we start, and now you can just GO, y'know? Sweet.

It's going to be refreshing to not have to worry about continuity even a little bit. Did you read Flash: Rebirth? I suggest you don't; one of the issues was literally a lecture about the complexities of the speed force, which had grown from a simple convenient explanation into this huge tumor that was cutting down on the amount of pages where the Flash could catch bullets and stuff. How about Legion of 3 Worlds? Much better, but still pages and pages of what happened to the Legion, why there were three Legions, where were the Legions that weren't those three Legions, etc. etc. In this new status quo, Superman can just go to the future and have an adventure with the Legion; you don't have to “clean things up” before you can have your fun. You don't have to jump through hoops to explain how Sinestro is alive; he's just alive in this new continuity. I've always thought that most comics just aren't long enough for the money, but cutting out most of this crap is going to be equivalent to a 20% page increase, easy.

Treat each story like a movie. I recall one of the writers of Ultimate X-Men said that he planned each six-issue arc as a movie: beginning, middle, and end, with enough information to get those who hadn't seen the original up to speed, as well as a few sequel hooks. If you're going for the casual fan, this has to be done; they're not going to stay when they pick up a trade that has 3/4ths of a story. Whether your arc is one issue, four issues, twelve issues, whatever, stick to that formula. I'm not saying give up the serial, soap-opera nature of comics; just keep in mind that you can't trust that the new fans you want will follow your title with soap-opera dedication. And with that in mind:

Keep each issue exciting. Can we please have a “one fight scene per issue” rule or something? Don't get me wrong, you can have your big emotional issues. Just... 19 times out of 20 have a goddamned fight scene in your superhero comic book, and make sure you have a good reason for not including one the 20^th time.

Keep each title relatively self-contained. You want Wonder Woman to team up with the Flash? Cool. Have the writer of the Flash just write Wonder Woman into his story. None of this part one in Flash, part two in Wonder Woman crap. Keep things as simple as possible here. Oh, with that in mind:

No more crossovers. Lately, as DC has been getting more and more desperate (desperate enough to try this rebooting thing, even), they've been cranking out the crossovers, and good God nobody cares any more. Flashpoint had something like 27 tie-ins, and I don't mean regular issues that were crossing over. Specially-produced tie-ins. Come on. I wouldn't read as much Flashpoint as they're publishing if they gave me the issues for free. Knock that off. So now you're thinking, okay, how about a few summer issues where all the heroes team-up and fight a cool fight, keeping the entirety of the events self-contained so as not to mess with the story-arcs of the individual titles? That's called Justice League. No crossovers.

Keep in mind that it won't last forever. You're trying to get away from continuity and having to make sure everything checks out with all of the stories you've published in the past. Soon enough though you'll have to fact check with the new stories you're publishing, and you'll start running into the same pitfalls. Don't get me wrong: you'll be going at it in a much more unified, cohesive way than the “what the hell ever, they're just comics” mindset of writers in the 60s, but soon enough you'll have to make sure everything jibes, make a retcon here and there. So, just as you're saying that the current DC Universe's story is done, know that eventually your new universe will have to bow out and be replaced as well. Plan for it. Oh, and with that in mind:

Don't bring anybody back from the dead. Start your new universe with the people you want alive, alive. If you don't want them to die, don't kill them. If they do die, let them die. You're going to have to reboot the whole shebang again soon enough anyhow, so you can bring them back without the crap later.

You now have more wiggle room for change... but not too much. Your B-listers can be completely different and go in whatever direction you want now. Good! Maybe you can make people care about Hawkman. But let's face it... Superman and Batman are always going to be Superman and Batman. You're not getting too far away from that iconic stereotype. And that's not a bad thing; hopefully, with this new, tighter continuity, you won't have to pull ridiculous Knightfall-style stunts to keep them relevant and fresh and interesting.

New! Characters! It's fun watching the Legion fight the Fatal Five. But don't just throw a list of old, rejuvenated supervillains at us. Howzabout some new ones? And some new heroes too! And supporting cast members! And maybe some new settings! Go for it! You have a new world to build, do it! Take pitches! So far we've seen maybe a third of the massive list of September titles, and so far they've all been characters we know and love. And that's fine and all, but I hope a handful of them are completely new, promising characters. Put a few more in the backgrounds of group shots. Surprise me!

The old universe isn't going away yet, and that's terrific. DC execs have said that the higher-selling titles, such as the Green Lantern franchise and Grant Morrison's big Batman storyline, are going to continue. This is good for two reasons. The first is that both of these get a ton of mileage out of the decades of twisted continuity. Now, in Green Lantern's sake it's half clean-up work and I get the feeling the same stories could be told better and quicker without having to twist old continuity to fit, but in Grant Morrison's case he uses that 60s Batman stuff in really terrifically interesting ways. The second reason is that now they have to worry a lot less about stepping on other writers' toes. Everyone else is going to be gone, so you can shoot “old” Superman in the head if you want to. Blow up the Earth. Go nuts, we don't need it tomorrow. Of course, once those story-arcs are done, I'm guessing it'll be toodle-oo to “old Earth.” Cya, pal!

Make it easy for new readers to distinguish between “old” Earth and “new” Earth. Alright, so. Grant Morrison's Bat franchises are staying put. I don't know how many of the supporting Bat-books are going to continue being published, but it'll be at least three or four. Over in the reboot, there's going to be another ten Bat-books launched, some by the same creative teams with very similar arcs (e.g. Damian Wayne, Batmen around the world). You want new readers to read the second one. I don't know how that's all going to shake out... put a disclaimer on the cover or something. Do not let those new readers walk into anything about the Black Glove, that is for very advanced, sophisticated readers which new readers are not.

52 #1's is insane in all the best ways. DC is launching 52 new series, set in their new, simpler continuity, in September. A lot of people have said that it would be much less risky to start with the big guns and slowly transition in. But that wouldn't be nearly as much fun. It says to me that they're really putting a lot of weight behind this. This is their new universe, in its entirety, and you're going to see every corner of it immediately. Street level, cosmic, horror, western... all the major heroes, the New Gods mythology, everything baby. They're trying to replicate that feeling you first got when you picked up a comic and saw all these characters you didn't know and all of these veiled references to past events you didn't recognize, a universe bigger than one book. We've all since kind of... memorized the universe, know the major players and their convoluted backstories, and know that nothing new will ever happen. Here's new players, new backstories, and new things, and it's all here at the same time. They're going whole hog on it, and more power to 'em. While it's probably foolhardy from a business perspective, that's exactly what endears me to it.

This works so much better than twisting current continuity. When a team of writers pitched a reboot of Superman back at the turn of the millennium, they used the principle of “recognize and transcend;” instead of changing time and starting over, acknowledge that the old stories happened and introduce new storylines that take the character and status quo where you want it to go. That's been DC's policy for the last decade or so, and... it really hasn't been working. They've mostly been taking things back to the 60's status quo, so, for instance, Superman's cousin shows up in a rocket and becomes Supergirl just like in the 60's. Hooray! But, in the meantime, there's been three or four other “Supergirls” that have filled in that role. From a storyline perspective, this is the fifth Supergirl that Superman's met and worked with in roughly twelve years, but he's never going to acknowledge that or mention it or have that past experience weigh on him in any way because it detracts from the “pure” 60's status quo they're trying to create. It doesn't work, at least the way they've been doing it. So, just starting over, they can do whatever the hell they want. Go for it.

This is coming out of left field, huh? I thought Flashpoint was just some Flash-centric crossover, but it turns out it's going to alter everything more radically than any other storyline in comics history. Was this planned from the start? It's weird... at first I thought Flashpoint would be a Sinestro Corps War-style self-contained crossover. Then I found out it was more of a Blackest Night-style super crossover taking over the entire line. Then it turns out it's the biggest and most “important” crossover in comic history. I was fed up with the second one, but like the first and third... there's a bell curve thing going on. And I guess this makes Professor Zoom the greatest villain in DC history?

Seriously, this fixes so many ways continuity gets in the way of the story. Like, how they have to kind of handwave the fact that Batman's had 70 years of adventures in roughly, what, 12-13 years of time? Or that the Earth has almost been destroyed roughly 400 times in those 12-13 years, and every living person isn't hiding in a bomb shelter every single day? Or that Superman's fought Brainiac literally dozens and dozens and dozens of times and he always comes back and repeats the same process? Now, this all goes back to the fact that for the majority of comic history writers weren't worried about the next issue because they though the series wouldn't be around in six months. Compare to Ultimate Spider-Man, where the villains show up differently, sparingly, and always come back in a clever way, and the first 100 issues or so take place in one year of Peter Parker's life (that poor, poor bastard). This new universe should take its cues from that.

The girls finally get to put some pants on. Thank you almighty God in heaven. If nothing else, this makes everything worth it. DC has decreed that there will be no more panty shots. Wonder Woman's weird armored bathing suit is the worst looking thing ever, and the fact that DC is finally, finally changing it to something much more practical speaks volumes about their commitment to this new universe. This is great.

Justice League is DC's front runner. Justice League #1 launches on August 31^st. It's the “first chapter” of this new universe, its golden boy, and this is as it should be. It's amazing how much they've shafted that book, when it should be their #1 book. It's got all of their most recognizable heroes; when a kid wants a comic book, you should give him or her Justice League. So... making it their #1 book is good. Do that.

Digital comics! Wait, I don't actually care that much about digital comics. At least not until they come out with a color Kindle; reading for any length of time off a traditional computer screen hurts my eyes. Still, it's a super-obvious idea. Maybe you can sell them to people that don't go to comic stores! Even do some commercial advertising. But I'd say price the comics in the "less than one dollar range" and make sure that at the end of each issue you can find all the related titles easily. Also, if you're going to do that last one, give Justice League #1 away for free, and then let readers find Superman, Wonder Woman, the Bat-universe, etc. with a variety of convenient buying and subscription options.

But... will they really change that much? At the end of the day, the same group of people that have gone to extreme lengths to transform the line into the comics they read as a kid now have nothing stopping them from doing just that. There's going to be a lot of streamlining, don't get me wrong, a lot of getting rid of the crap weighing the characters down, but I'm thinking that we're mostly going to see the classic characters. They say they're updating them for the new generation and all, but I dunno... Not that there's anything inherently wrong with the classics, but give us a new Green Lantern or something.

Please don't “normalize” things. Let's face it, in the X-Men movie universe, Prof. X isn't going to be falling in love with an alien battle princess any time soon, nor will the X-Men go to hell, travel through time, or fight Dracula. They cut out a lot of the totally crazy comic stuff, for a lot of good reasons. Though I know you're just dying to get a piece of that huge superhero movie pie, recognize the difference in medium and don't follow the studios' logic minutely. When I say “steamline,” I mean cut out the retcons on top of contradictions on top of explanations that have piled onto each long-running character's backstory, not take away the crazy fun stuff that made us endure through it all. If your oh-so-valuable new readers are too jaded to accept tiny, bespectacled mind control worms from Venus, then your new readers can get fucked. Keep DC swarming with magic robots.

So... yeah. I'm down! Put me down for a copy of Justice League, Martian Manhunter (you know it's coming), maybe a few Bat-titles, Legion... hell, my wallet...

Still not planning to read Flashpoint.