Sr.Ghost: gailsimone: APE IN A CAPE: That List of Five Characters People Want To...

Sr.Ghost: gailsimone: APE IN A CAPE: That List of Five Characters People Want To...:

gailsimone:

APE IN A CAPE: That List of Five Characters People Want To See Back In The DCU

differenzeartistiche:

gailsimone:

Yikes. That made me miss some characters bad. Quite a few of them haven't been used much for a good while, but some I still think of as active and vital.

I don't really have many answers about the suggestions people made. I know who is coming up in my books and a couple others, and I know some…

It's not haranguing at all, honestly, please don't give it a second thought.

Okay, I am probably not the best person to speak to this, because the comic that absolutely HOOKED me on comics as a kid broke every single rule about what is supposedly 'accessible' for new readers. It was a JLA comic, and it had not one, not two, but THREE superteams in it, across multiple Earths and timelines, (The JLA, JSA, and Seven Soldiers of Victory. I got it used years after it came out and didn't understand how to get the rest of the story—I searched fruitlessly for it at the drugstore for months!).

It was everything a new reader friendly book is not supposed to be. It didn't even explain who the characters were. And there were two Robins? What?  It just baffled me. You could not intentionally make a comic that was more deliberately alienating to new readers.

And I LOVED it. That made me a DC fan forever, that book. I wanted to know who all those people were. When I do a crossover, I'm always hoping to capture a little bit of that, "who the hell ARE these cool people?" vibe.

So I have always been a bit skeptical that continuity makes books intimidating.

At the same time, I do HEAR it all the time, from readers and retailers both. That people are afraid to try X-men because there's eighty books and a million characters and they all have history, or the Green Lantern stuff, or Legion of Superheroes.

And I know sometimes even being in the industry, I don't always know where a decent jumping on point is. And it's been enough of a problem that we do know for a fact that people will avoid SOME titles if they feel that they can't possibly catch up.

Again, the idea here was to raise ALL boats. Crossovers rarely benefit individual titles in the long run.

There's no good answer to, "my favorite character isn't in the dcu."  That sucks. But I find new characters and new versions of characters that I end up loving all the time. I didn't think I'd love Steph as much as I do because by the time she was Batgirl, I was on a ferocious Cass reading bender.  There's gonna be some mistakes and bad calls, but the field is open enough that we can adjust and improve, as well.

Thank you for your post, it makes sense. I'm not trying to sell anyone, just trying to answer the questions frankly, albeit from a different pov.