Waking Up To Find Harry Potter In The Shower

As I've mentioned before, there are times when the comic book industry seems to have quite the inferiority complex about itself.

And as a result, there are times when the industry sets ridiculously low standards for itself, and trots out the "we're only comic books, don't expect much from us" line of reasoning.

For example, take Flushpoint. Obviously there's a lot of controversy over DC's big move. And a lot of that controversy is over the wisdom/desirability of rebooting the DC Universe's fictional history yet again.

[DC officials can continue to hem and haw and try to claim it's "not really" a reboot all they want. But the solicits tell us this a world where Superman was "the world's first Super Hero," and there was therefore no Golden Age and no JSA. There's really no way you can tell us that isn't a reboot, even if you resume it in media res. Man up and admit it, DC.]

Now me, I generally oppose reboots, you all know that. I think they're usually pretty bad ideas, show a real lack of creativity, and break the show's/creators' unspoken contract with the audience.

Yes, there are counter-examples, reboots that work. But please note that there is a huge philosophical difference between, say the new Battlestar: Galactica, which rebooted a thirty-year old TV show, and rebooting a comic series that had brand new stories just last month. There is a huge difference between rebooting a "dead" intellectual property and on that is currently ongoing.

And, as sure as the suns rises in the east, many of the defenders of the Flushpoint reboot choose to blame the readers for actually caring what they read about. Here's a series of Tweets, from various comics professionals. I'm not naming names, because I don't want to get into a tit-for-tat argument here; I'm just interested in examine the ideas. Here we go:

"I hope this reboot retroactively revises the content of my back issue collection. Otherwise the stories won't "count."

"When DC reboots Batman, it won't render my old Batman issues meaningless because I enjoyed them and they meant something to me."

"Readers only worrying about comics that "count" is part of how we got into this downwards sales spiral."

Gotta love that last one. I would have thought that the price of a comic book increasing over 1000% over the past thirty years, or short-sighted decisions allowing comics to lose 99% of their retail outlets over that same time, or the increased emphasis on violence and gore, or bizarre editorial mandates to continually reboot their product might have had a heck of a lot more to do with downward sales. Nope, it's actually the fault of fans who care about the stories they're told. Mea culpa.

Blaming the "fanboy mentality" has always struck me as pretty absurd, especially since DC has been in the grip of that same mentality themselves. There has been no consumer demand to keep redrawing Hawkman's history, or keep rebooting the Legion, or to bring back Barry Allen. That's all been DC's brass.

It's also DC brass who has, with every press release declared with bated breath that the reboot is "history-making" and "unprecedented." So, DC can get excited, but when people who think it's a bad idea get just as excited they can be dismissed as fanboys? Quite the double standard.

And yeah, the argument patronizing as hell. We do know the stories aren't real, we do know the older stories still exist. C'mon, that's not the argument that anyone is making. Set up a decent straw man, at least.

But perhaps more importantly, if other "legitimate" media tried the same tactics, they would never get away with blaming the fans.

Consider this hypothetical: J.K. Rowlings releases the 5th Harry Potter book, and in the first few pages declares the events of the 3rd and 4th books never "happened;" she declares that the series was getting too "complicated" and she was resetting things. What, exactly, do you think the reaction to that by media and fans would have been?

Of course, those are her books, and she can do what she wants with them. And yes, books 3 and 4 would still exist, even if overwritten. But somehow, I doubt people would be as forgiving of the "history-making" move, and instead we would here a lot more media outcry worrying about the fans who invested so much time and money following Harry Potter.

Obviously, a large part of that is because people think that books "matter" more than comics. And I suspect you wouldn't see as many book industry officials denigrating their own work by declaring "reboots happen-get over it." You would have serious discussions over what, if anything, an author owed her fans.

Second example, non-hypothetical this time. For those of you youngsters out there, Dallas was once the biggest prime time show in America. Go figure. But it was huge with a capital H. But Patrick Duffy, who played the "good" brother Bobby Ewing, decided he wanted to leave the show, so in the last episode of the 8th season, his character dies in a car crash.

So they went through the 9th season, and life went on. Bobby's widow, Pam, re-married, people lived and died and hooked up, children were born, things blew up. But rating started to slide for various reasons, and so the producers prevailed upon Duffy to return to the show.

But how? Well, there were any number of ways they could have done it--this was a soap opera, after all--but they way they chose? In the vary last scene of Season 9, Pam wakes up, and finds Bobby alive, taking a shower!! And how did they explain it? The first episode of Season 10 revealed--and I'm not making this up--that EVERYTHING that had happened in Season 9 had been a dream of Pam's. Never happened. None of it. The babies who were born, the people who had married or died, the things that blew up...magically undone.

Fans were upset. The show became a laughingstock (well, relatively more so) with critics. The creator of the show dissed the move as disrespectful of the fans.

And no one was dismissing fan concerns as "fan entitlement," no one tried to say, "Well the old stories still exist, so get over it."

Why? Because TV is "more important" than comics. Because in that medium, people understand and respect the emotional and intellectual commitment fans have to serial fiction. Because they understand that, on some level, creators have a social contract with the audience not to arbitrarily and repeatedly say "never happened," and that doing so has negative repercussions.

Comics creators, though? They don't respect their medium or their fans. They'll pull stuff that would never happen in other media, and if people complain, they'll trot out the "it's just comics, get over it" meme.

If you want to defend the reboot, great. If you want to discuss whether it's a good idea or not, great. But in your defenses, please don't denigrate the medium as not important, and don't mock the fans for the emotional and intellectual investment they've made. Hell, maybe even acknowledge that your comics work might be important enough for people to care about. "It's just comics" and "the fans shouldn't care so much" or just really, really foolish arguments to make. Comics should be as respected as other media, and dissing your product and your fans to defend (what I feel is) a dopey move is just counter-productive and sad.

Thus endeth the rant.