Let's go around posting how we'd reboot each of the 52 titles, then I'll post everything in Rob's new site. You can mention what creators you'd put on that book if you want, unless they are Mark Millar because fuck Mark Millar.

Here's the full list: http://www.itsalltrue.net/?p=12864 I'll start with the first one and then someone can pick up the one under that and so on:



JUSTICE LEAGUE #1
I think the flagship Justice League comic should use important, recognizable characters only (no Cyborg, is what I'm saying here) but it should also be free to play around with them, meaning that ideally those characters should appear in this comic only so that writers don't have to worry about keeping up with the continuity of their solo books. So what I'd do is this: take advantage of the fact that at the DCU you usually have more than one guy using the same superhero name at any given time and put a bunch of the duplicates here. So my roster would be: Batman (Dick Grayson), Flash (Wally West), Green Lantern (Kyle Rayner or John Stewart), Wonder Woman (Hyppolita), and also Hawkman and Aquaman since no one cares about them and 90% of the time they won't have their own book. Superman would be a part-time member, coming in every once in a while to give a pep talk or punch something. He's not usually very good in team books anyway, since his powers tend to make everyone else redundant.

This could easily become a C-list Justice League but it doesn't have to be that way: for a mainstream audience it wouldn't make a difference if the guy dressed as Batman is called Dick or Bruce as long as he's recognizably Batman-like, so just play it that way. Likewise, most readers have no idea what Flash or Green Lantern are called. Just make sure they don't get whiny and it should be okay.

Aquaman

Fuck choosing the creative team. I just want to make an aquaman title that downplays the lame parts of his character (talking to fish, wearing a really homosexual costume), and emphasizing the abilities that make him useful in a fight (IIRC, he has some sort of super strength). Just focus on good stories without resorting to edgy/angsty gimmicks.


Cyborg

Make him caucasian. Cuz I'm racist.

Wonder Woman. The character gets the shield of Zeus (the Aegis) as a new weapon (it creates storms) and the hammer of Hephaestus (it can create volcanoes). So she gets nerfed up. And then Authority the fuck out of the character: Trigon the Terrible appears and is poised destroy the world, and WW chops off his head and mounts it on a pike. Starro takes over the planet, and WW decides to deal decisively and barbecues him. Kanjar-Ro's invasion fleet destroys the Philippines and blows up Manila ("Neil! Nooooo!") and Wondy repels the invasion and drops him into a lava pit.

I'd really like to see a major DC character be kick-arse in a real war instead of pussyfooting around with "Oh, let's imprison this insane mass murderer so he can escape again and kill more people". This character is the only one which has the potential for it.

Not that I read the cultural gutter which is superhero comics anymore. Next!

The character should look like a lamprey fish. Get him creepy like that amphibious alien from Ben 10, about the size of the Hulk because he has to resist deep sea pressure, white and pasty, maybe even with scales. The character doesn't talk to fish. He eats them, raw, with fish juice spilling onto his chest.

There was an hypothetical reboot of Aquaman done by Wizard 5 years ago which had him as a Caesar leading legions underwater, with Atlantis like an underwater Rome. Centurion armour. Quite liked that.

Immigrant convenient store owners Martha and Jonathan Kentivich blow a tire coming back home from a visit to Martha's sister in Smallville. While changing the tire, the couple are witness to the arrival and appearance of a cloaked alien escape pod. Within the pod, a small humanoid child. With the ship dissolving the moment he is removed, the Kentivich's decide to adopt and raise the seemingly abandoned child. They name him Clark.

He is raised in the urban environment of Metropolis, becoming an introspective man with strong ties to the neighborhood he calls home. During puberty, superior physical and mental resilience begin manifesting. With his internal organs arranged nearly identical to humans, the Kentivich's family doctor can only guess that he is simply "growing up". Once Clark's symptoms reach beyond human limits (his skin can no longer be physically separated), the family decides they can no longer trust anyone else with his condition and begin creating excuses for him when accidental public displays occur. Clark grows up carefully during his teen years, always holding back. Allowing others to win the basketball game. Always coming in second in any competition or struggle. By fifteen, he begins wearing fake reading glasses, to further emphasize his act of weakness.

With his adoptive parents succumbing to their elder age by his eighteenth birthday, Clark sells the store and goes to college. While studying Journalism, he meets and has a one-night stand with a sophomore named Lois Lane. One night only, as the next morning upon sobriety they both find they cannot stand one another. They will, however, continue to find their lives intertwined on many levels, though not necessarily romantic.

Finding a passion in writing, Clark becomes a freelance novelist and part-time columnist for TheDailyPlanet.Com (a site whose editor happens to be college flame-meets-adversary Lois Lane). He changes his publishing/pen name to "Clark Kent", in hopes of maintaining a slightly separate or "secret" ID between his public persona as a known writer and columnist, and the kid from the streets of Siegel Parks.

It's during research for his stories (mostly focusing on the urban decay of Metropolis) that Clark begins to understand the city's needs. Begins to truly see the corruption, crime, and decay that purveys his landscape. He realizes that someone, somewhere, needs to take a stand. Against criminals. Against corruption. Against social injustice. Against all the sins the world tries to ignore. To reclaim the streets of Metropolis for its people.

Clark Kent can leap a mile-at-a-time. Running speeds of up to 250-mph. Vision that can excite atomic structures, or penetrate them with x-ray radiation. A hide that can be penetrated by nothing less than a Hydrogen Bomb. And a benchpress of up to two-tons.

He must become more than a man. The city needs a hero. A champion. A protector. A super-man.

Action Comics #1
Written by Pro M. Etheus
Art by John Cassiday

Lame. He needs to be a mightier man of steel than all that.

Green Lantern Corp

For millennia they've been called the police force of the universe. After the removal of the cruel, totalitarian Green Lantern Sinestro, Sector 1417 is left in ruins in the wake of the power vacuum. Anarchy and revolution destroy most of the worlds' governments and create the perfect breeding ground for crime. Pleas from those worlds to the Guardians lead to Tomar-Re and Guy Gardner being dispatched with a crew of young recruits to stabilize the sector. The task won't be as easy as they first thought as the criminal element has entrenched itself deeply into the fabric of the planets' cultures.

Part space opera, part police procedural, alien backdrops frame noir tales of deception, violence, and murder. CSI's got nothing on Tomar-Re's brilliant scientific mind, and "Dirty" Harry Callahan himself couldn't think of better ways to use the Lantern ring's power to crush the criminal scum of the galaxy than Guy Gardner.

Nope. Golden Age style. Get back to basics and find the man, first...

Lothar is all about finding a man.

Mark Millar will write half of the books, to piss off Mxy and Ani. Jeph Loeb will write the other half, to piss off everyone else.

He should be able to fly. This jumping around is bullshit.

I've always hated the fucking Flash, so I'm going to do JLI next, following Pro M. Theus' prosaic waxing.

***

Justice League: Stormwatch Planetary Relief Column #1

Earth's thin red line, based in an enormous Thanagarian warship called "Stormwatch", operating with letters of marque issued by the Guardians of Oa valid throughout space sector 2817 via their representative, Raker Qarrigat.

Piloting the spacecraft is Swift, and the crew is an international cast of heroes: Rocket Red, Blue Devil, Goraiko, Warmaker One, the Master/Pulse8, the Shining Knight, Zealot, Jackson King, Mr Majestic, a reformed Killer Frost, Firehawk, and Dr Light (Kimiyo Hoshi).

They are lead by the reformed villain and master strategist, but still nonetheless very sinister, Kobra. Kobra has blackmailed Samson and Atlas into being his (often errant) personal bodyguards, and has as his wildcard a standing mercenary contract with Lobo.

Their mission: to harass the unified armies of Darkseid, Mongul, and Kanjar-Ro in their ultimately unstoppable task of conquering nearby planets such as Rann, Khera, Pytharia, Okaara, and Tamaran, and stopping the occasional alien raid upon the Earth.

I was going to pick Captain Marvel to reboot but with DC selling off the characters to someone with an online petition, why bother?

Precisely what I was thinking. Knowing Cap Marvel wasn't going to be available and will shortly be owned by the new publishing company ShazamPorn Comics Inc, I subbed in Mr Majestic.

Read a book and learn some history...



I like!! A wonderful mix of Marvel's Thunderbolts, with a dash of the 90's L.E.G.I.O.N. and the normal Stormwatch/Authority badassery.

And I called your love for Killer Frost waaaay back:

Shit I should have followed my instincts and got Silver Banshee instead.

I was going to include Jakita Wagner and Axel Brass too. And then I thought that was way out of continuity. And then I punched myself in the balls for being a comics drag queen. And then I lost interest and pressed "submit".

is "losing interest" gonna be your thing now?

... When has it not been?

I was just re-reading your JLA proposal Mxy. This is actually a very good idea. Sub in Donna Troy for Hippolyta, and Mon El for Supes, and it'd work a treat.

This leads in to developing a romantic relationship between "Superman" and "Wonder woman" which the existence of Lois Lane currently restricts.

only until next month, Dave.

I would read Dave's versions of DCU. good shite.

also like Doc's take on GLC. Tomar and Guy as goodcop/badcop. hell yeah.

Pro, reboot somebody other than Superman for once.

Nightwing: I would write Dick Grayson as a man that is abnormal. Due to the violence of his youth he is still a crime fighter, but he has some unusual quirks. He is addicted to violence (not killing) in an unhealthy way. He has also spent so much time working nightly patrols and watching he has become something of a voyeur living vicariously through the actions of others. He has slowly become all the things he hated in Bruce--a ladies man, a player, emotionally unattached.
His life never works. He is too self-absorbed for a functional relationship, he isn't capable of coping with his extreme emotional desires.....violence, adrenaline, philandering -rampant sex with any number of women. and he also isn't able to cope with the things his outward mind wants conflicting with his deep rooted dysfunctional side. He truly loves Barbara Gordon but can only hurt her. He secretly hates Bruce for dragging him into the crazy world he exists in......a lifestyle forced upon him.

He also has a huge thing for Selina Kyle..........huge! He really likes watching her, and still gets all fumbled around her....
Not quite Punisher violent, but more psychologically dark than Punisher's revenge schtick.

Son,I've read more books than you have smoked pot!

The golden age was dumb and that's why they changed Supes and gave him some real power.


Superman should have flight,but not warp speed flight.He should be a little slower than Flash.

Superman should have strength,but not enough to toss planets around.

Superman should have a hide of steel,but not be invulnerabe to everything.

Superman should have heat vision. I don't care if he has x ray vision.

They could get rid of freeze breath and most his vision powers.

He should have super hearing,but not so good that he can hear a bug fart on the other side of the planet.

That's where you lost me...

Superman should have a big dick (a very big dick).

Firestorm:

The oldest and most carnivorous of Sun-Eaters, notorious to galactic civilisations as the Firestorm of Life's End, is many parsecs in diameter. With some effort, he squeezes down and adopts a human interface in order to better understand these small sugars-fueled creatures who have repeatedly thwarted him and his brothers. It was intended to be a week's intelligence gathering.

As he enters US airspace, he inadvertantly stops a nuclear catastrophe by consuming the hard radiation and absorbing the blast of an old Soviet hydrogen bomb smuggled into Chicago by neo-Nazi terrorists trying to kill the President.

In doing so, he is hailed by Earth's population as a hero, and discovers to his bemusement that he likes being praised for altruistic deeds.

But Earth's Green Lanterns recognise him for what he is, and with extreme caution seek to capture him. So, resisting the temptation fight and eat the power of their Batteries, he camoflages by taking the identity of an astrophysics student enrolled at the University of Chicago.

When two of his brothers, the Echo of Stars' Graves and the Shadow of Worlds' Dust, arrive in the Solar System to consume the sun, Firestorm of Life's End must make a choice: fight his brothers and be exiled by his species, or save the Earth.

Of all Superman's powers, if I were take away one it would be heat vision. First off, as others have noted, once you can kill people by looking at them, any other power is superfluous. Second, for about the past ten years, it's led to artists thinking they can make Superman look 'kewl' and 'badass' by drawing him with glowing red eyes.

besides, I believe the proper look of the heat vision is the one used by Christoper Reeves' Superman, where it's similar to a magnifying glass, and only works like a really effective blowtorch/welder. A lot of comic book artists make it look and act like Cyclops' optic blast.

Absolutely. Glowing red eyes suck. Also, heat vision makes no sense. Is it how a solar powered being throws up? Why would you otherwise emit an energy source for no purpose? X ray vision makes sense: the materials on Krypton are crushed by gravity into complex, dense compounds. But why vomit hot radiation through your ocular senses? What crazy evolutionary forces were in play?

Get rid of it.

But a guy flying around in tights and a cape is perfectly sound logic?

Yeah, yeah, it does. He farts electromagnetism.

Pro does that a lot. Minus the flying part.

In my version, he always does...



Brilliant. I'd read it. I especially like the idea of the names for the Sun-Eaters. I'm not sure about the longevity of the concept, as the moral ambiguity of the lead character would grow tiresome if not focused one way or the other within about two years of the book. However, on the other hand, Irredeemable is a perfect showcase for that kind of storytelling, too. Have you read that? Brother, if not, you PM me your mailing addy and I will send you the first trade. That's how much I love it. It's the single comic book I actually buy anymore.



Agreed about the glowing eyes. I am WAAAAY past that. I got tired of it when Jim Lee decided that he walks around and has conversations while low levels of solar radiation is leaking from his pupils. Come on.

As for heat vision itself, I don't know. I think if worked properly from the right angles and written usefully, it would work. Like, perhaps, it drains him to a point he can only use them in short, brief bursts. Like a Hail Mary in a fight when he's down? I don't know. It's worth thinking about. I wouldn't toss it.



Agreed, except I hate, hate, HATE seeing the little red beam of light drawn from his eyes to the surface. I much prefer the eyes-light-up-red, surface-spontaneously-burns look of it. Or, like one of the few effects they had right in Smallville, where it just looks like heat radiating from eyes? Again, I don't know.



Good question. I know that, in my personal reboot up there, Krypton's never even given a name, much less seen and explored. I prefer a Krypton unseen. That way, it's far more alien to the imagination, versus Brando walking around in a robe or something. So, for all we know, what we call heat vision on Earth, might simply be an evolutionary defense mechanism from their ancestors. Where on Earth he can generate an elevated amount of radiation/heat in physical surfaces, on Krypton the eyes might simply "glowed" red for some emotional/autonomic purposes? Again, it's all in the imagination and willingness to suspend disbelief.

But, I'm not so sold on it that I wouldn't be willing to give it away to make the struggle more difficult for the character. That's the whole point for me, anyway, is to get back to a core basics for how I perceive Superman.



He's really the only one I remain interested in. I simply don't care about any other characters anymore.



He knows. Doc's seen the pics...

Please stop PMing them to me and follow the court order.

Oddly enough, that's Pro's redesigned Superman costume.

I can't believe Nowhereman isn't here to post the Photoshop of me as Liberace...

fair enough. starting to get that way myself.

really enjoying Dave's takes though. Firestorm. epic. sci-fi with a small pinch of Sandman and just a bit of fanboy. nice.

Challengers of the Unknown

After a dangerous encounter with a UFO, USAF Col. Kyle Morgan convinces the Pentagon to allow him to assemble a group of varied specialists, all of whom have had their own near death experiences due to unusual circumstances, to combat the strange and unexplained. Given funding and other material support, he soon establishes a network of scientists, engineers, soldiers, and historians to become a covert troubleshooting unit for the US military. With an hourglass symbol to remind them all of the borrowed time they now live on, they traverse pocket universes, thwart ancient alien menaces, and seize magic relics from power hungry sorcerers until that borrowed time runs out.

Making the Challengers more of a Planetary type group gives the writers the ability to create or use pre-existing characters who will fit a certain story instead of trying to force characters to fit the situation as well as allowing for a few to be sacrificed as needed.

I'm gonna take on Green Lantern too, because thedoctor is a drunk and should not be trusted.

First of all, I'd get rid of the Guardians. Fuck them. There's not a whole lot to do with them, as evidenced by the fact that they keep turning them into bastards and yet for some reason the Corps still put up with them. One day the Guardians go too far and there's a big fight between all the Green Lanterns and them. Or maybe they're killed in a freak kitchen accident, whatever. Anyway, Alan Scott is elected as the sole New Guardian since he's got that meteor inside him so he can create new rings, and also because he's the first Green Lantern ever and it's ridiculous that he isn't even in the book.

When news that the Guardians are dead spread around, criminals all over the universe go apeshit, raping and pillaging entire galaxies and forming fleets of space pirate ships. These ships travel mostly in the empty voids between sectors, boarding the spaceship of every bastard unlucky enough to run into them and adding it to the fleet. Hal Jordan is sent out to infiltrate a pirate fleet and gather intel for an eventual GL smackdown. However, Jordan finds that not everyone in these ships is so bad (some people have joined out of fear or necessity), further complicating the situation.

I see you never grew out of your space pirate phase.

Wow. This is a really good idea. Seriously, doc, you should try and sell this to DC. It's better than any Challengers reboot I've seen in forty years of reading comics.

Yeah, the idea of an redux Planetary / Global Frequency in mainstream continuity is a logical exploitation of Ellis' best concept. I was ever hopeful that a frozen American super soldier would be found in the Arctic by The Four, who decided that they couldn't be bothered defrosting him. Challengers of the Unknown could investigate:

a a corrupt female cop with a strange sorcerous glove which eventually consumes her and itself when it realizes what she is and what it perpetuates;

b the orbiting hulk of ruined space ship from a utopian future, clearly the victim of combat, filled with the corpses of pointy-eared aliens and their cyborg adversaries;

c a Japanese atomic powered robot in the shape of a boy, which during it's test run suffers a systems crash which over-rides it's altruistic programming, sending it on a rampage through Tokyo;

d the ruins of an ancient Gaul village and it's inscribed formula for super-strength.

Lots of fun to be had with this. Great idea.

I was talking to someone the other day about why Wonder Woman hardly ever works anymore.
we basically agreed that she has no reason to be in Man's world. WWII made sense, but the ambassador didn't work, etc. There has to be a reason for WW to leave a place like paradise island. A good reason, and there hasn't been one recently.

World eating monsters like starro and Trigon could help give a reason.

Yeah, fuck the Green Lantern part, I'll just do a space pirate comic.

Space Pirate!

A Chilean cinematographer is minding his own business walking down the streets of some city north of Santiago one day. A flying saucer appears above him and abducts him. Small hot alien chicks give him a hook, an eye patch and a large penis. He has sex with them all and they give him the flying saucer. He becomes Space Pirate!

That's Mxy's true to life story.

But you need to replace "Small hot alien chicks" with Lothar, Wondy, and MEM.

And replace "large penis" with "animatronic sock puppet".

Now we're talking!

cinematographer?

I barely knew her!

It took this long to come up with that. You can't rush comedy, especially ones that are gold.

Champagne comedy.

Hawk and Dove - Writer: Anybody Artist: Rob Leifeld
Dove's almost non-existent ankles break while on a mission leading to her being captured and killed. Holing up in the JLA HQs, a grief driven Hawk builds a time-traveling suit based on Linear Men and Cosmic Treadmill technology. Arriving back in time, he learns his calculations were wildly imprecise as he re-enters the timestream at Dove's funeral. Grief turning into rage, he kills his past self creating a time paradox that fractures the the New DCU forever. How could this get any worse? Well, let's just say that rage draws the attention of a blood vomiting space kitty! Hank Hall of Earth, welcome to the Red Lantern Corps!

I thought about this leading into a Johns/Leifeld mini-series: Flachpouch: Pockets in Time where the Flash battles Hawk in the remaining pockets of the universe that are slowly being destroyed by the paradox. The climax of the series reveals the true villain, Wally West. He pushed Hawk out of the timestream at the wrong time knowing that he wouldn't be able to control his rage. I hate to turn Wally bad like that, but it couldn't be any worse than anything DC has done with him lately. But, I thought the title would just be pushing the Leifeld humor a little too much.

For my favorite title Legion of Superheroes, I would reboot it by combining aspects of all the previous reboots into one. They would have a really huge membership with a primary core cast being focussed on from story to story. They would be aware that their history is all messed up due to the Time Trapper's manipulations but there wouldn't be anything they could do about it other than preserving what they had now. The title would not be held accountable for the ongoing changes for the present day DCU. Superboy would be the one from the silver age. Maybe he would be from an alternate universe or be part of some chronal destabalization by the Time Trapper, whatever. With that in place they could just go on and have adventures using the futuristic backdrop that helps make the Legion unigue.

They would also age in real time as much as possible. That would force change and growth without having to do another reboot IMHO.

I like the Legion having some effectively immortal members in it too: Red Tornado, Dr Fate, and some New Gods. A Green Lantern would be nice too. Never got the exclusion on that.

i always liked the idea of having a super hero character age in real time, go through real seasons, etc. thought that'd be a unique angle. ...though i don't know if i'd waste it on the legion... (buuuuuurn)

The Legion sorta aged but that ended after Giffen's 5 years later. Than it was reboot, reboot and reboot. As for an immortal character being in the Legion, Monel is over a thousand years old. He may actually be (or will be?) DC's longest lived superhero.

I think Vandal Savage is a little older.

He died in a car accident a coupla months ago.

He didn't notice that the lights had changed.

In DC One Million Vandal Savage is one million million years old.

Funny. He doesn't look a day over 900,000 million.

I liked it better when he had wacky powers in the beginning of the Wally West Flash series. I know this because I read Mxy's blogs and stuff...

Vandal Savage is a super-villain. Or has that been retconned?

Is the Phantom Stranger still alive during Legion's time?

JLA #1 comes out next Wednesday right? I'm just gonna dump all this crap on a Mighty Geek post. If someone wants to reboot Shazam now's the time!

Shazam: An ethnic gay guy named Billy Batson spends all his spare time helping the homeless encounters an old dying man near an abandoned subway. It turns out to be an ancient wizzard named Shazzam who attempts to steal Billy's body and becomes the world's mightiest villian. The spell gets botched though and Billy ends up having the evil wizzard's powers when he says his name. The catch is the longer he keeps them the more influence the old wizzard has over Billy.

Grifter: a gunslinging vet becomes involved with a Kherian warlord and learns from her the ultimate secrets of fighting. He becomes the irrepressible Grifter: toting his hi-tech weaponry, he roams the world brawling, cracking jokes, and occasionally taking jobs for money, but hides a deep secret.

His real name: Joe Chill.

intriguing.

I kind of like it but one of the problems I have with DC is that every few years they weight of their own continuity tends to bog them down to the point where they can't tell decent stories.

Making anyone but a random mugger who just happened to kill the wrong people the murderer of Bruce Wayne's parents takes the idea of "it could have happened to any of us" out of the equation and robs the Batman creation myth of more than a bit of its power.

Personally, I think the best concept was the "Zero Hour" version where Bruce (and we) never knew who the mugger was. It added a bit of pathos to the character, the idea that he would always wonder if the guy he beat up that evening might have been "the one."

I'm with G-man here. Dave, you're fired!