Trying to Make Sense of the New 52

I am confused. I have been a comic book fan for more than twenty years and have been able to keep track with any confusing storyline throne at me by any number of titles. But the New 52 has me scratching my head on a regular basis.

For those not in the know, The New 52 refers to the recent reboot of titles at DC Comics. Every title got a brand new #1 one issue. Now here is where the confusing part began. While numerically titles were reset to one, some titles continued their story lines from before the reboot. Green Lantern continued the events of War of the Green Lanterns as if no reboot happened. The multiple Batman titles didn’t necessarily continue stories from before the reboot, but it referenced events that occurred in the pre-New 52 universe.

The real victim of the New 52 from my perspective was Superman and the Teen Titans. Apparently the original Teen Titans team never existed. This is most clearly revealed in Red Hood and The Outlaws #1 where Starfire and Red Arrow meet and apparently have no idea who each other is. Though there is recognition between Jason Todd (Red Hood, former Robin II) and Roy Harper (Red Arrow or as he was known in the Teen Titans, Speedy). Also the Teen Titans that exist in this New 52 were just recently put together by Red Robin (Tim Drake, former Robin III).

And yet with all this confusion involving former Robins, the Batman titles are going along fine. Better than fine. The recent Court of Owls storyline showed an excellent sense of cohesion among the many titles connected to Batman. Which is confusing because his colleague in Metropolis received such a complete make over.

The Last Son of Krypton has had a number of changes made to his character and history. For one thing his marriage to Lois Lane has been completely retconned away. The two aren’t even in a relationship. The famous Death and Return of Superman storylines never occurred. Superboy was only just recently cloned (again showing a problem with the Teen Titans storyline). Supergirl just arrived on earth as opposed to being on earth for years. Also Superman’s uniform is now Kryptonian battle armor.

Now the New 52 is not the first time DC has tinkered with its continuity. One of the most famous DC storylines was 1986’s Crisis on Infinite Earths which eliminated the DC multiverse. Before then, there were multiple different versions of Batman, Superman and other characters all with different ages and backgrounds existing on their own separate parallel earth. A few years later the company launched Zero Hour which was meant to further fix any continuity problems left over from Crisis. 2005 brought back the return of the DC multiverse which remained pretty separate from the core universe but allowed writers to play with some of the Elseworlds characters that had been established over the years.

The point is all these different reboots was meant to make things LESS confusing for the readers of DC Comics. It took the foundations already established by previous writers and got rid of a lot of extraneous information. However the New 52 does not do that. If any thing the New 52 has added a lot of brand new extraneous information that just makes in harder for readers to understand. Of course this has done nothing to curb my comic book buying and I still come home every week with a big stack of DC comics in my pile.