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Multiversity 101: A Surprise Admission About the DCnU

By | September 12th, 2011
Posted in Longform | % Comments

As a very small part of the comic book critical community, I have to say I have my fair share of experience of being negative. Sometimes cynical, sometimes completely jaded, and the more closely I get involved with comics, the more I seemingly have an edge about comics and the less I tend to be excited about them.

And when I first heard about the DCnU, those negative thoughts came rushing back to me. I thought things like “what a total marketing ploy!” or “I bet this lasts exactly 8 months before another event negates it.” Basically, anything I could think of that sounded skeptical, I threw it out there.

But then a funny thing started happening.

I started getting excited.

A Lapsing Fan

Pre-DCnU, DC proper (meaning not Vertigo, of whom I am an eternal lover of) was not earning a lot of money from me. In fact, the only books I was buying at the end of the previous universe were Scott Snyder, Jock and Francesco Francavilla’s Detective Comics as well as Gail Simone and J. Calafiore’s Secret Six.

For someone who at the end of 2009 in our Decade in Review retrospective passionately fought for DC as the Best Publisher of the decade, to be down to two books in total from a line of 70+ books is insane. As a reader though, I felt that I was driven to it by a line of titles that stagnated in quality and in overall enjoyment.

Then DCnU was announced and I thought “more of the same, they’re just trying a hail mary to attempt and maintain relevance.”

Basically, for all intents and purposes, I was a lapsed fan in the making. I was turned off by the present and highly skeptical of the past.

A Funny Thing

When DC started rolling out the titles that would make up their “new 52,” I scoffed. Besides a few select titles (BLUE BEETLE! BLUE BEETLE! BLUE BEETLE!), I managed to come up with legitimate arguments as to why many of these books should not be purchased.

Time started passing, and that’s where the funny thing started kicking in.

I started thinking something besides the idea that these comics could be bad. I started thinking that these books could be anything. No matter what title you were talking about, from Josh Fialkov and Andrea Sorrentino’s I, Vampire to Jeff Lemire and Alberto Ponticelli’s Frankenstein: Agent of SHADE, unlike the previous incarnation of the DCU and even Marvel, these books felt like they were rife with potential and not something I could assess easily from the outside looking in.

That maybe, just maybe, the DCnU was going to do what it aimed to do and make comics exciting and more accessible for new and old readers both.

That I could get back to where I was at one point: someone who was excited to read DC Comics.

That alone made me excited.

Reality Sets In

For the first time in a long time, I am genuinely excited to get to my comic shop on Wednesday so I can experience something new from DC. Even if the books managed to disappoint me and just read like the same ol’, same ol’, DC had me there. They managed to get me to the point where my foot was in the door again.

And after two weeks of the DCnU, I can say something for a fact: I have checked out each and every title so far.

Even though I genuinely liked less than half of them and loved exactly one of them (Scott Snyder and Yanick Paquette’s Swamp Thing), my enthusiasm came out unscathed. Next week this whole deal starts all over again, and with it comes fun titles like Nathan Edmondson and Cafu’s Grifter and the aforementioned Frankenstein title. Beyond that, we’ve got books like my beloved Blue Beetle and Snyder and Greg Capullo’s Batman.

Continued below

While the skeptical, discerning adult still existed, it has become united with a part of me that I long thought was lost: the kid I was who thought that inside the front cover of every comic I picked up could be the best comic I’ve ever read.

Sure, that little kid still didn’t enjoy Hawk & Dove, but he did marvel at the pure ridiculousness and energy of OMAC, and will enthusiastically pick up that title next month even though my adult side belittled it repeatedly previously.

So the reality is this. Not every comic from the DCnU relaunch will be good. Not every comic from the DCnU relaunch will even be mediocre. But I’m someone who has went from dutifully picking up two DC books to enthusiastically grabbing everything in sight while spearheading Multiversity’s efforts to shine a light on the whole effort, eagerly anticipating the arrival of Friday so I can drink beer and enthusiastically talk DCnU with my friend and podcast co-host Brandon Burpee.

That in itself is wonderful, and in that regard, I have to say the DCnU has been a resounding success so far.


//TAGS | Multiversity 101

David Harper

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