LNH/LNH20/LNHX: The Tao of Reboots

[Adrian James McClure]

OK, I realize I was still being unnecessarily snippy and trying to
explain myself, which is always a bad idea. I'm sorry.

Discussing the philosophy behind revamps and reboots is still
interesting to me, though, so:

On Nov 15, 11:12 am, Martin Phipps <martinphip... at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Anyway, I can understand why people
> want to start fresh and use their own characters.  I just feel it
> throws the baby out with the bath water.  But that's just my opinion.

Isn't that what LNHY did, though? It doesn't have ANY classic LNH
characters, except Exclamation!Master! and Kid Enthusiastic.
(Respectively a villain who became a hero and a hero who became a
villain.) I wonder if the difference is in the ambiguous way the
revamp/reboot is being pitched. It's being handled like a reboot even
thought it's not really a reboot. It's more like the transition from
Earth-2 to Earth-1 in the DC Universe, but done intentionally. LNHY
underwent the fate of all alternate universes in superhero comics; it
diminished and got eventually ignored. (I also think the tonal clash
in the setting that resulted from "The Devil Came Down to Georgia,"
even though that was a good story in and of itself, and the
unnecessarily restrictive "only one LNH member per writer" rule hurt
it too. But that's a whole other rant.) LNH20 is kind of being treated
as the "main" universe, the "Earth-1," but the "Earth-2" is still
around.

Personally, I think this is how DC should have done its own reboot. DC
had a problem in that there were a lot of books that were floundering,
but a few--the Green Lantern and Batman titles--that were doing really
well. So DC changed the universe but without rebooting those two
lines, turning everything into a convoluted mess. What I would have
done is create a new "Earth-1" which would be treated as the primary
world, while letting Green Lantern and Batman continue on the old
Earth. I'd also do the reverse of what LNH is doing with the "iconic"
characters--most of the main heroes of the original Earth die, and the
former sidekicks and minor heroes have to come to the fore. But
obviously, I'm not running things. DC's current agenda is doing very
well in terms of selling comics, at least right now, but not in terms
of setting up a workable universe or, in many cases, actually making
comics that are worth reading. They're riding high now, but I think a
lot of their mistakes will hurt them in the long run.

AJM (Though I do appreciate the fact that we finally have a
Frankenstein book now)