The Self-Destruction of the New 52 Part 4
By Arnoldo Acosta
“The one thing about The New 52 is that you can’t reintroduce these characters twice. You have to make sure when you do it; you do it right, If you look at them across the line, there are some books where they’ve done a great job reintroducing characters and some where they’ve done a terrible job.”
-James Robinson
This quote from James Robinson speaks loud of the sad truth of the New 52. I said this before in part one of this article. The New 52 was an opportunity to make a better DC, but that doesn’t mean that such opportunities should be wasted.
There are many characters that I can point out as wasted opportunities but those are just consequences of a bigger problem. I just want to give attention to a little thing:
As I mentioned in Part 2, on 2010 DC rebooted Wonder Woman before the new 52 under the pen of writer J. Michael Straczynski(JMS). This was similar to elseworld story in which Wonder Woman had to leave Themisira when she was just a child and end up being raised on the “Men’s World”.
The general consensus was that most fans disliked this story for many reasons which included the sudden departure of JMS from the book. Personally I thought it was pretty good as “Elseworld story” and I think most people just hated it out fear that this was going to permanently replace Wonder Woman.
However the thing that is impressive about this story is the coverage, this was a huge story at the time for many reasons but one of the most important parts was that “Wonder Woman was getting pants”, It got covered on the news including The New YorkTimes.
The story run its course and was later replaced by Brian Azzarello’s version of WW which I already covered on part 2 of this analisis. However there was one single feature that was carried from the JMS All-New Wonder Woman into the New 52. THE PANTS
It seemed that DC was going to committed on covering the sexy legs of the legendary amazon. It looked that the change was permanent and Wonder Woman was going to get a new Iconic look.
WRONG!
Despite being Diana feature with pants on the solicitations for covers of issues #1 and #2 of Wonder Woman and Issue #1 of The Justice League she got still got to be redesigned to be use shorts instead of pants.
This was a complete last minute decision.
That is the problem with DC: No Commitment.
This is the reason of the existence of the New 52, DC lost the commitment to their own universe and throw it all to start again, some benefitted but most didn’t. Im not complaining over the fact that Wonder Woman is not wearing pants (though she does look better with pants). The problem is that DC, and that includes its editors, writers and artists took a decision to do something and then they regretted that decision and took another one.
Now this wouldn’t be a big problem specially after the new 52, except that it happens again:
And again…
And again…
And again…
And again…
There are many more examples than even I can count and show here.
In some cases this results on minor changes and others is because DC is trying to correct mistakes but none of them are signs of progression by the story. All are symptoms of the same illness, lack of foresight.
DC needs to think about that decisions it makes; think of the positives, think of the negatives, think where this ideas will lead next year, and if the ideas end up having ill results then find a way to fix them, not just get rid of them.
Here is a humble suggestion from my behalf:
Measure Twice, Cut Once!
…Why should readers care about the current cast if DC has already shown a willingness to ignore 18 issues worth of plot developments at the drop of a hat?And if the old status quo is intended to be restored eventually, that's even less reason to care about this team…
I really cannot put it on better words.
To be concluded…
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