DC's Relaunch - Bold New Direction or Wasted Opportunity?

Love it, hate it, or couldn't be more indifferent to it, even the most casual comics fan is probably aware that tomorrow, August 31st, officially marks the debut of the so called "DCnU", the line wide reboot of DC's comics properties. For months, the online comics community has been buzzing about it. Some people, um...let's say resistant to change...even bothered to protest about it at San Diego a month or so ago. DC has reported that several titles have garnered orders in excess of 100,000 copies, a number which, in 2011, is likely to give them the big chair at the market share table for the first time in a loooong time. I heard that mainstream news organizations have been roused to write about it; my extensive research (which consisted of typing "NY Times" into Google) confirmed that this is so. So this is a good thing, right? Well, maybe.

I mean, I really love comics. I want them to be around, in print if possible, as well as colorfully adorning pads and tablets and phones. When people say, responding to doomsayers, that comics will always exist, even if the direct market collapses, even if those who make them have to do so in their basement studios and distribute them by bicycle, I always think, yeah, but I want to buy them in stores. And all at once. I don't want to have to scavenge for them.

And they had to do something. Comic sales have been decreasing for quite a while now. Despite already attracting seemingly unprecedented levels of mainstream attention and acceptance with movies and reviews in Entertainment Weekly and famous nerds like Nicholas Cage talking about them on talk shows, the books themselves, the comics that are at the root of all this cultural cache, don't actually seem to sell very well.

So, why am I not more excited about this? You don't have to go much further than the tagline that greets you on DC's website: "The official home of DC Comics, the home of Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, Green Lantern, The Flash, and the rest of the World's Greatest Heroes!" The promotion for this momentous relaunch, this gamble that DC is hoping will reward them with thousands of new readers and the return of thousands of other lapsed ones, has been nothing but superheroes, superheroes and more superheroes. These characters inspire people to pay 10 bucks to sit in sticky theater seats while rowdy kids pelt the backs of their heads with popcorn. They sell DVDs, clothing, and those famous lunchboxes. For many people, comics readers and average citizen alike, superheroes ARE comics. But that's not the DC I know and love, and I can't help but think it's not the DC that could catapult comics to a position of real artistic and entertainment relevancy.

Now, there are a few books in this DCnU that fall into other genres: Swamp Thing, Blackhawks, and I, Vampire, for example. It's a tiny percentage, though, and conspicuously absent from most of the promotion DC is doing. At the same time, DC's Vertigo imprint, long the home for some of the most critically lauded and convention pushing comics in the mainstream, seems to be hemorrhaging titles, with Northlanders, DMV, and Scalped all coming to an end within the next year with nothing announced to replace them.

In addition to publishing the adventures of some of the world's most recognizable superheroes and some of the most famous superhero stories (Watchmen), DC has also given us books like Stuck Rubber Baby, a story about a young man's encounters with homophobia and racism in the turbulent American South of the 1960's, and Pride of Baghdad, a poignant parable about war and fear. It has given us crime epics (100 Bullets), dystopian futures (Y: The Last Man) and new mythologies (Sandman). A book I just purchased, Aaron and Ahmed, tries to answer what would drive an otherwise normal, sane and loving man to kill himself and others in the name of Jihad. For each book I've listed, there are a hundred more just as daring, just as crazy, just as personal, just as powerful.

I like superheroes. I have loved some superhero stories. I don't think it's an exhausted genre, wilted and spent, ready for the rubbish heap. But I don't think it equals comics. It's one facet of comics, one so shiny and colorful that it has dazzled many people into thinking it's the entire jewel.

I have always been of the opinion that comics don't sell poorly because they're not any good. They sell poorly because too few people know what they're missing out on. They think comics are men and women in tights, and for better or worse, reading about superheroes doesn't interest them. When comics find their way into these dubious people's hands, usually due to the persuasive powers (i.e. begging) of their significant others, the reaction is often startled pleasure, gasps of, "I had no idea comics could be like this!"

With all of the publicity of this relaunch, with this clean slate to work with, DC could have caused those startled gasps and dawning realizations to emanate from thousands of budding new fans. Instead they chose to enforce the stereotypes, to hammer them home with spandex covered mallets, to practically ensure that the uneducated will catch one glimpse of the same old thing dressed up in a new coat of paint and turn up their noses again, maybe forever. And that feels like a huge, wasted opportunity to me.