I could be wrong, but I think that I am the target demographic for DC’s reboot. I am a fan of comics, but I rarely buy single issues and have never seriously followed DC. As such, I am open to the idea of jettisoning years of convoluted backstory, so that I can follow a character. I don’t care that the Flash totally pants the Green Lantern in GL #630, and so the Green Lantern Corps has a grudge against all speedsters. The fact that Darkseid is really Wonder Woman’s uncle-in-law on her mother’s side doesn’t mean a thing to me. [ed: I’m pretty sure you just made all that up.] [Ben: That’s sort of the point.] [ed: This is a cheap and insulting way to pad this piece.] [Ben: Sorry.] The point is that I know a little bit about most of the more famous characters in the DCU, and I was really excited about the reboot.

And then, I read some of the books. I should say right now that I didn’t read Action Comics #1. I only read Detective Comics, Green Arrow, Green Lantern, Red Lanterns, and Resurrection Man. I was not impressed. Now, I should qualify that by saying that I really enjoyed Detective Comics and Green Lantern, but neither of them felt like a #1. They both felt like they were the first issue in a new chapter, but if I didn’t know anything about Batman or Green Lantern, then I wouldn’t have been able to follow these books. The same was true for the Red Lanterns, and I read the Wikipedia page for Resurrection Man before I got the comic. Of the books I read, the only one that may be considered an actual reboot was Green Arrow, and that was just a hot mess.

I don’t want to get into how good the comics were, although, some of them were just terrible. I want to focus on the reboot as a whole. While I can get behind some of the interesting things that it seems like DC is doing, I don’t think they went nearly far enough. It is not enough to change the number on the book to a #1; you have to change the story to match. It seems like DC was too afraid of scaring off their established readers to try anything interesting. I will pick up a few this week and next, because I am a stubborn nerd, but they will have to do something different for me to come back for issue #2.