Is change good?

[trashcanman]

Okay, the topic at hand is DC's Amazon princess. There isn't a man alive who doesn't have this iconic character burned into their brain.



Is that image a problem for anyone? No? Well they're changing it anyways. What's easily one of the top most recognizable and beloved outfits in fiction is going bye-bye for now in favor of a more modern getup. Say hello to Diana's new hotness.



Hmmmmm...

Add blonde hair, more black, and some fishnets to that, if you would.



Why you gotta step on my girl's toes? The short leather jacket is just stupid considering there's another heroine with the same look and it adds nothing to the character in my opinion. So long pants and a leather jacket are totally going to make a timeless character more hip and crap, huh? She's apparently getting a less quaint new origin story as well. Anybody want to place bets on sexual orientation while they're rewriting Diana's history? The occasional costume change can be cool (I dug Green Arrow's hooded avenger look), but this one just strikes me as a temporary and lame attempt to create buzz. Not a fan. Go fuck with Superman's outfit or something.

[The Curmudgeon]

Superman's outfit? Oh, that's been done.



What's that shit, you ask? Well, if you had to sum up why I fucking hate DC Comics (even their NAME sucks! Detective Comics Comics?), check out this mind-fuck.

In 2003, DC Comics released a 12-issue limited series entitled Superman: Birthright, written by Mark Waid and penciled by Leinil Francis Yu; this series was a retcon of Superman's post-Crisis origin, replacing Byrne's version, yet using some elements from that version; it also reintroduced various pre-Crisis elements discarded in Byrne's revamp, along with elements that subtly tie into the Smallville television show. Due to the effects of Infinite Crisis, both Birthright and Man of Steel were removed from canon.

Un-fucking real. So the comic that removed parts of the history of the character was eventually removed as well? Arrrrgh.

As for WW.. hmm. Yeah, it's shit. It basically just makes her look like 10000 other modern day super heroes. So are they going to retcon her to be about 15? Cos that's what she looks like in that picture. Don't worry about it, though - no doubt she'll be retconned again in a few years and the original costume will return.

[trashcanman]

Retconning never makes anything better. Ever. DC is horrible about that stuff. Usually sticking with the Gotham/Star City sets lets you avoid that stupidity. But then there are the big ongoing "events" where they do stupid shit that dramatically affects the titles you read like when they blew up Oracle's clocktower in a Batman event that spanned like 5 different titles so Birds of Prey readers suddenly found the team homeless one month and had no idea why unless they were following an otherwise unrelated story. Ditto with Green Arrow/Black Canary, which ended in a Justice League mini where Arrow killed a villain in cold blood and Dinah left him as a result. But since I only subscribed to the actual comic featuring those characters, I had no clue what the fuck happened until I researched it later. They seriously expect you to buy every single comic they put out just to keep up with the few titles you actually want to follow?



Marvel is a lot better about that stuff and at least give you the heads up regarding crossovers and events.

[The Curmudgeon]

Things happening outside the comic I'm reading is frustrating, but I can handle that. It just shows the whole "universe" side of things, I guess. I actually subscribe to five different Marvel comics, but they're UK reprints that bind together about three comics a month, so if something like the clocktower exploding happened, it would be in there even though its from a different series. It's a neat idea that's been continuing in the UK now for over 15 years.

But at least the clockwork incident you mention is following continuanty, at least that's taking reference to what's happened before and running with it. I know Marvel aren't perfect at this either, but DC's seemingly never ending desire to just say "TEGROF" to the fans and then wipe out fucking decades of continuanty is staggering. So you spend all that time and money reading and following characters, storylines and situations.. only for them to be rendered moot and pointless? Fuck that.

[trashcanman]

Yeah, I like the whole universe thing, but all I'm saying is that if you are going to destroy the headquarters of a fucking superteam, it'd be nice if you did so in that superteam's monthly series instead of letting the reader pick up an issue and suddenly it's just gone. Major stuff like that needs to be confined to the series it most affects. They could have kept the Batman issue as it was and shown the incident from a different perspective in the BoP issue so that readers would at least see some of what happened. Marvel's actually gotten pretty bad about making you jump from series to series as well. Messiah War had me jumping back and forth between X-Force and Cable for a story that ended up being painfully average so I had to spend extra money just to be underwhelmed by a bland storyline.