Kicking off their New 52 trade program, DC Comics has collected a small number of its recently-relaunched superhero titles already. The first pair that I was able to dig into–Animal Man: The Hunt and Justice League: Origin–provided a few surprises along the way.Comic book fans have, of course, been talking at length about “decompressed storytelling” for years now. The first I remember it was nearly 15 years ago in a discussion about James Robinson’s Starman, but I was a kid and it’s likely that the conversation was going on for some time before that without my knowledge. The idea, for those of you in the dark, is that many of today’s comic books are written with the trade paperback or collected edition in mind, and therefore the short-form, serialized monthly comic is not their ideal presentation and often gives readers a dull book that seems to go nowhere for months at a time.For those of us who read most of our books in trade, or who prefer character-driven stories as opposed to plot- or action-driven ones, it’s not always a bad thing. Robinson’s Starman remains a high point of the last 20 years in American comics for many critics and fans, and two writers notorious for decompression–Marvel’s Brian Michael Bendis and DC’s Geoff Johns–have consistentliy churned out some of the best-selling stories in years, so it’s not as though this is strictly one of those “critics are out of touch with the average reader” things.
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