I love comic books. I have for as long as I can remember, and I suspect I'll keep on loving them no matter what the comic industry throws at me. I enjoy books from many different publishers, including Image, Marvel, and Dark Horse, but DC has always had the top place in my heart. They gave me Batman, the character who helped me to stay passionate about cape comics year after year. They gave me Booster Gold, and helped me to love and appreciate the company's entire roster of B and C list heroes. They gave me Superman, who took me way too long to appreciate, but who is now an inspiration to me on a daily basis. And then they told me that everything was going to change.
The news of the DC relaunch came as I was going through a rough time in my life, and as a result of this, my response wasn't particularly positive. I wanted my comics to be my constant, something I could count on with the rest of my life was falling apart. The idea that characters I loved might change until they were unrecognizable or vanish from continuity altogether was painful to me. I didn't want to lose the history of Young Justice or the Justice Society of America. I didn't want Babs to stop being Oracle or for Mr. Terrific to lose his wonderful jacket. It was just too much change, and I was miserable about it.
But somewhere in the flood of new announcements, my feelings about the relaunch began to change. I still thought all the lines on the new costumes looked silly, and I still thought they were wasting years worth of potential stories, but in the midst of all these feelings I started to feel some excitement. Part of this was due to the contagious enthusiasm I saw in creator interviews, but something else had started to form in my head. A challenge.
And so, I decided that I would read every single one of the new 52 comics, and review them as well. I also decided that I wanted to encourage others to do the same thing, and to try and collect as many reviews of these new comics as I possibly could.
52 issues is an awful lot of comics, and I imagine I won't be reviewing many of them past the first issue. But I'm committed to giving each of these new comics a chance, and to keep on reviewing them for as long as I'm reading them. If people enjoy this site, I may even branch out into reviewing more than just new DC comics.
I fully expect to hate some of DC's new comics. But I'm pretty sure I'll like or just plain feel neutral to a whole lot more, and I imagine I'll love a couple of them too. No matter what, I want to have a whole lot of fun with the DCnU, and I hope that the books make this challenge worthwhile.