A giant mea culpa.
Creative Staff:
Story: Geoff Johns
Art: Gary Frank, Ethan Van Sciver, Ivan Reis, Phil Jimenez, Joe Prado, Matt Santorelli, Frank
Colors: Brad Anderson, Jason Wright, Hi-Fi, Gabe Eltaeb
Letterer: Nick J. Napolitano
What They Say:
It all begins here. Do not skip to the last page. Do not let a friend or message board ruin this comic for you. The future (and past) of the DC Universe starts here. Don’t say we didn’t warn you!
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
While originally a Marvel Comics fan through my pickup of the Star Wars comics back in the late 70’s as a child, my eventual investment in the DC Comics universe came in the mid 1980’s just as things began to come together for Crisis on Infinite Earths. That was a strong jumping on point for many readers as the publisher worked to consolidate and solidify the way things worked so that they could move forward in a more cohesive and accessible way. I’ve long been of the belief that these things must happen because of the complexity of shared universe storytelling and the weight of it all over the real world years. And DC Comics has done several of those to varying degrees, most recently with Flashpoint, which lead to the New 52. I really enjoyed the discovery phase of much of that but fell out of things for a bit before reconnecting in the past year with more of their fringe standalone books.
With Rebirth, Geoff Johns works with a top notch team to put together an 80-page special for $3 that serves as both recap and foundation for what’s come before and what it will become. It’s a complicated process because it’s very much a “the more you know” the more you get out of it experience with the characters and situations. The premise is a solid enough one in that after the Flashpoint event that wiped away a lot of things and a lot of years, Wally West was one of those things and has been stuck in the Speed Force ever since. He’s now finally able to make his way into the world again having seen how things have turned out and is doing his best to try and grab onto reality or at least get those smart enough to figure out how to fix things to realize they’re broken. That means mostly getting to both Bruce and Barry to get on the same page, which isn’t easy when you’re as disconnected from reality as he is.
Throughout the chapters we get a lot of narration from Wally about what he sees and what’s lost and it’s certainly something you know a lot of fans have written over the years in general. It’s not an indictment of what happened in the 80’s but rather just a nod that things went too far. Fans and publishers alike really loved the deconstruction of heroes and the way it was explored, but for many of them we simply didn’t get the rebuild that they needed. We’ve had instances of it in recent years, notably with the Flash: Rebirth event and what Geoff Johns also did with Green Lantern after what they put Hal through. But it needed to be a wider and more conscious company approach that had to be taken to work through this and expand while recapturing what used to work so well for so long. For good reason. Wally’s nods to these things, noting the way some of the characters are hollowed out now because of it, gives us the various facets of it all and that serves to make it feel like it has the right weight to it.
For me, Wally was “my” Flash as I came in post-Crisis. I spent years buying lots of back issues of Barry’s run pre-Crisis and learned to love the character, so having both of them back in the world really fits well for me and using Wally as our guide through this, with all his experience, is pitch perfect. Johns knows these characters and what makes them tick and that’s critical for a venture like this. What’s likely to be a lot more controversial is the use of the Watchman mythos within this as a reason behind things, the darkening of the world and the attempted fix. I’ve read some stuff about the intent of it and I completely agree with the way it looks to be playing out as I think it’s a highly creative use of the cast of characters and their run to reshape things here – though I’m not keen on them being integral to the shared universe in the long run. Right now, however, it’s an intriguing use that clicks in a way that I hadn’t even thought about until the book arrived and all the dialogue about it hit. There’s a lot of meta in this book and Watchmen itself was its own weird creation and commentary with massive ramifications. The fact that the book still often hits the top of the charts for graphic novel sales thirty years later isn’t something to be taken lightly.
The artwork in this book is pretty much fantastic. With varied teams and some continuity to be had across it, it could have been a large mess but they found a great way to blend it all quite well, even with different colorists. Part of this works because there are sequences where it really does harken back to years gone by. When we get Wally’s origin story it felt like a completely faithful remake in tone and style to those days and that’s bloody meaningful When it gets darker with Batman in his cave, that has its own tone. But it all flows together and I’d be hard pressed to really find significant differences that would stand out in a bad way. This is a team that put in some fantastic work and the payoff is there in every panel.
In Summary:
Is that optimism I feel? Hope? Potential? I’ve felt it before but there’s that sense about Rebirth that they have figured it out, that they are trying to do a course correct here. Not just a post-Flashpoint course correct but an industry-wide course correct going back to the darkening of the 80’s comics. The comics industry as a whole is bigger and wider now than it ever was before in terms of the content produced and taking the chance, the risk, of trying to infuse more hope and optimism into the superhero side is hugely appealing. I’ve spent the last year or two with DC Comics by playing in their fringe books where things are less connected and more varied, which has had its own kind of lightness and optimism. It won’t be in every book to be sure, but seeing more of what made me a huge fan of this shared universe decades ago come back to the surface has me ready to check out a lot of new books as they land. This is a primer for what was and what is while laying the groundwork for what will be. It’s definitely a challenging book in some ways depending on your familiarity with the material, but I suspect the reward will be strong.
Grade: A-
Age Rating: 13+
Released By: DC Comics via ComiXology
Release Date: May 25th, 2016
MSRP: $2.99
It’s a great deal at 80 pages for $2.99. The story feels closer to a mini-series than one issue. There are a couple of big surprises for DC fans and it paints a hopeful future for the characters.