DC is rebooting their entire line of shitty comics. This is huge news because it means that the company is finally going to devote themselves to encouraging innovative creators to come up with fresh, meaningful stories, at least, say, 20% of which will no longer feature 40, 50, or even 80 year old characters promoting bone-headed violence, occasional fascism, and casual racism.
Ha ha. No, I lied. It doesn’t mean any of that. It’ll be the same stupid characters in the same stupid stories created by the same bunch of unimaginative, borderline morons you’ve come to know and love. It’ll be stories mostly about white men mostly for white men who love their own childhoods so much that they don’t care how much said childhoods are repeatedly, brutally, and incompetently defaced. It’ll be crap and everyone will know it is crap, and there will be massive crossovers which will be mostly devoted to rearranging the crap in the toilet bowl, and then standing back and watching as the crap floats aimlessly out of position and chortling happily at the amazing newness of those patterns formed by the same old crap which have been sitting in the same damn bowl for decades.
Of course, everyone has an inalienable right to love their cultural products, no matter the stench. And now there are films which somebody other than the same eight people seem willing to watch no matter how lousy they are, and somehow that validates everything. Iron Man was a dunderheaded imperialist fantasy for the scumbag arms dealer in all of us, but, hey, Robert Downey, Jr. is a cutey; who can argue with that?
Still, I can’t help wondering…is there a moment, sometime, when we can maybe stop this? When we can pick up these slack, sodden bags of incompetently tailored power fantasies, look at them one last time, and say, you know…fuck this shit. I want my power fantasies to be competently tailored…or at least not moldering. Let me give my hard-earned cash to some moron who owns the boring, derivative nonsense he’s peddling, rather than to corporate drones so soulless that they’re willing to thank their overlords for letting them drool lasciviously on the sloppy seconds of octogenarian serfs?
Maybe that moment will never come. Maybe Superman will always stand for truth, justice, and using your godlike powers to beat up criminals rather than to make the world a better place. Maybe Wonder Woman will always show that strong women wear spangled stars on their derriere and promote peace by hitting people. Maybe Spiderman and the Thing will always demonstrate the heroism of protracted whining. Maybe the comics audience will just get older and older but never die, just shrinking and becoming thinner and thinner until they’re all tiny and brittle like insects, rubbing their legs together feebly to emit their little cricket cries..”is it in continuity? *chirp* “is it in continuity?”
Maybe that’s what has to be. But damn it, even if there’s no hope, even if our cause is doomed, still, I say, the fight is worth it. Stand up now; join hands and say it with me. Say it proud! “Don’t reboot DC! Just fucking die!”