My52

I miss comics.  I never really outgrew the adolescent wish fulfillment of superpowered comic book heroes.  The truth is they sort of outgrew me.  DC Comics was the publisher I held onto the longest, but eventually even it outpriced my budget and out-“matured” my sense of taste.  Recently, my comic hobby has been little more than reading Wikipedia and daydreaming about what I would do with the characters if *I* ran the zoo.

Then, a couple years back, DC Comics did something interesting.  In the fall of 2011, they just up and stopped writing their stories and started all over again (mostly) with what they called the “New 52”.  I don't blame them for seeking younger readers, but these newer, hipper, edgier characters were clearly not meant for me. 

Honestly, if the worst thing I can say about the Teen Titans is that 
Superboy has a tattoo, that just confirms I'm being a curmudgeon.

But then the armchair comic editor in me realized that, if DC Comics aren't using their old continuity, why couldn't I?  They've an entire universe of beloved characters and stories just collecting dust.  And while I'm not interested in actually writing individual issues (which is a big lie), I still boil with ideas of how I'd use those characters and what type of stories I'd tell with them.  Let's call this mental exercise "My52."

Except that I won't be starting exactly at the end.  While one of my goals is to refrain from any wholesale retcons, I won't feel guilty ending Blackest Night in the same way the original authors did: setting things up for the stories I want to tell.  So my continuity will hold true up through issue #7, but expect a significant rewrite of the finale in Blackest Night #8 in a future blog post.

Before I get into specifics, though, let's set a few ground rules.

1. I'm not a business.  I don't need to worry about concerns of income, marketability, or maintaining copyrights.  I don't care how popular Batman is, he doesn't need more titles than Flash.  
2. I have to respect what writers have done before.  Blackest Night #8 rewrite aside, this isn't a retcon exercise.  I need to make the best of what there is, not what I *wish* there was.
3. Because my comic reading was pretty slim there toward the end, I'm pretty sure some inconsistencies will creep in.  So while I won't intentionally rewrite timelines, I accept that some may get rewritten by accident.
4. I don't need to kill off characters to get them out of the limelight.  Characters I consider too boring or confusing or otherwise don't inspire me will just quietly get on a bus and go off to live new lives.  I won't need to explain where Beast Boy went to explain why he's not in my Teen Titans.
5. My52 will continue the concept of the 10-Year Sliding History which posits that all DCU history occurred within the ever-compressing past 10 years (an outline presented quite well in 1994's Zero Hour event.)  Because a lot has happened since then, I'm upping it to a 15-Year Sliding History.  The original Teen Titans have aged, characters will have had children, and so on.

Now, while it would make the most sense to pick up where they left off when they started their New 52, I have to confess I don't actually know that much about the comics published in the last couple years of DC's pre-New universe.  I think the most recent DC comic I read was 2010's Blackest Night 8-issue miniseries.  I liked it quite a bit, even if it was a bit gory (it gets a pass, though, because it was about zombies).

This is the Dark Knight, you know...rising.

What I do know is that Blackest Night ended with the return of several formerly-dead characters, such as Martian Manhunter and Aquaman, as a way to set things up for the future. So when it comes to selecting a stepping off point for My52, the end of Blackest Night seems like as good a spot as any.

An example of the Timeline presented in Zero Hour.  

For our purposes, change that "10" to a "15."

  

Coming up next: Blackest Night #8b and the starting status quo.