Casualties of Reboot: DC Cancels More Books, Shifts More Creative Teams

It has been 17 months since DC blew up their entire line of comics, shuffled all their creators around to different books, and blew up their entire history of continuity. You know, for everyone except Grant Morrison, who has been allowed to continue his Batman saga that started several years ago in Batman Incorporated like it’s still 2009… or sometimes, considering all the Silver Age characters Morrison’s shoveled into that storyline, like it’s still 1959.

And the New 52 reboot was an unqualified success. It put DC over Marvel, in both sales numbers and dollar earnings, for the first time. It refreshed the classic characters of the DC Universe for a new generation. Truly, those 52 books signalled the start of a thousand-year uncontested reign. Nothing could stop them. They would march to victory on a road of bones. They would drive their enemies before them, see them broken, and hear the lamentations of…

What’s that? DC’s cancelling six more books?

Whoops.

All New, All Incomprehensible: The Ravagers #1 Review

Last September, DC Comics rebooted their entire universe, with the stated purpose of making each and every one of their books accessible to readers who had never read any of their books before. It is now June, and DC Comics has released The Ravagers #1, and apparently their commitment to making books accessible to readers unfamiliar with existing continuity lasted almost exactly ten months.

The Ravagers is a superteam introduced in the latest few issues of Teen Titans, which I haven’t been following as closely as I perhaps should be because it started as a decompressed and slow paced riff on The X-Men and became, well, a decompressed and slow paced riff on The X-Men. Well, apparently somewhere around Teen Titans ninth issue, they introduced The Ravagers, victims of the fiendish plot of shadow organization N.O.W.H.E.R.E. to activate the metagenes of unsuspecting teenagers and to force innocent comics writers to type longassed acronyms.