I had given up on DC quite some time before and sampled the New 52 to see what is was all about. So I probably was among their target audience. I lasted less than a year and it wasn’t because of continuity confusion or creative musical chairs. What New 52 looked like to me was more darker, more gritty, more anger, more violence, more twisted, more psychopaths, much more blood, and enough powder from all those grinding teeth to provide sand for the beaches of Florida. Not for me, thanks.
Writers, of course, can’t help but advance characters, but what makes things worse is that then they’re eventually, inevitably returned to some earlier state, inconsistently, even without these kinds of continuity reboots. Even if the character’s circumstances are static, sort of existing in a perpetually moving window of time that only goes back a few years (i.e. the standard approach), you end up with the comic book problem of having any major changes undo themselves - characters die and come back to life (sometimes over and over), new family members (and clones) are discovered and lost, the family tree getting ever-more complicated (even if empty), etc. The only way to really do long-running comic book characters, if they’re not going to actually age commensurate with their experiences, is just to selectively choose what the continuity is for each particular comic book run. (Which sort of happens in that writers choose to ignore/focus on different elements, but the pressure is to have this absurd continuity to keep readers buying issues and allow for cross-overs, etc.)
I don’t have an opinion on New 52, but this ignored Zero Hour in 1994. Kieran Schiach gets into it about 40 minutes into this episode of X-Plain the X-Men (concerning complex continuity as part of a cross-over between multiple comic book podcasts). Kieran’s segment on the DC Multiverse starts closer to 34 minutes if anyone wants the whole bit.
Also in that episode I linked, Jay Edidin (who hadn’t come out as trans when it was recorded) started talking about the idea that editors-in-chief were responsible for changing the characters to fit versions they recognize.
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It was actually “kyptonian armor” if I remember correctly. And it didn’t make a lot of sense. They even mocked the old “underwear on the outside” in an early issue.
I think it flopped because while a lot of B and C tier characters got good writing, the main trilogy had generally fairly average writing to poor. Superman’s was particularly challenging to follow. They had no idea what they wanted to do with him and it changed all the time, plus had a very odd relationship with Diana that was forced in with the skill and finesse of a 12 year old writing mature adult erotica.
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Just wait until Batcow’s secret twin is revealed!
I wondered if renegade Douglas employees were operating in secret, churning out new planes. DC-11 through DC-51 we’re failures, this time they were sure they had a winner but nope.
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