DC Comics Rebirth: The Five Biggest Surprises

So we still know relatively little about DC Comics’s Rebirth initiative.

The project will kick off this summer with DC Universe: Rebirth #1 by Geoff Johns, and then head into a line-wide relaunch that sees most of its books going back to #1, except two flagship titles which will restore their pre-Flashpoint numbering.

It will reportedly restore “legacy” to the universe, focusing on the idea that the base they’ve created is one for a strong DC Universe, but there’s “something missing.”

A lot of this stuff had been predicted or teased in the weeks leading up to the Rebirth announcement, but what were the big surprises to come out of ComicsPro this week? Read on…!

DRAWING THE LINE

DC is holding the line at $2.99 — after years of following Marvel into $4 land.

That’s huge for retailers and customers who had been worried about the rumored move to twice-monthly comics for a number of DC’s top-tier books. That did, indeed, happen…but the overall reduction in the number of books the publisher is making, and changes to their major families of titles, mean there’s a relatively small number of customers whose bottom-line cost will change significantly.

And if there’s one thing that came out of this announcement that’s absolutely listening to feedback from retailers and fans, it’s that the cost of your average, monthly comic book is too high.

RENUMBERING THE FLAGSHIPS

DC Comics’s flagship titles, Action Comics and Detective Comics, will not only go twice-monthly — but they’ll do so starting at a number over #900.

It won’t be long before the two most storied titles in comics history actually reach the #1,000 milestone…!

LEGACY

Rebirth will apparently be about “legacy,” and will build on everything that’s come before. 

And obviously, there have been a great many fans who have said “legacy” is a big, big part of what’s missing in the DC Universe and what makes the post-Flashpoint DC Universe not fire on all cylinders. Losing that connection to the Golden Age heroes, losing Wally West’s epic journey from sidekick to oneo f the greatest heroes in the DC Universe, losing entire characters whose journeys didn’t fit into the timeline required by DC’s “five years ago” caption at the start of Justice League #1.

Besides the Justice Society of Golden Age heroes, there’s things like the All-Star Squadron and the Young All-Stars — those characters’ children and succcessors — and even characters like Kyle Rayner and Wally West, who took over when Hal Jordan and Barry Allen, respectively, were no longer capable of being Green Lantern and The Flash. Those characters have been touched on in the New 52, but in the absence of the kind of generational element of their development, they’re very different and not as rich as they once were.

NAMES AND FACES

Some of the names dropped and faces seen in Geoff Johns’s initial announcement interview with CBR are pretty remarkable.

Yeah, we probably won’t see anything like Guy Gardner: Warrior in the near future at DC, but with an emphasis on “legacy,” it’s cool to see Ted Kord and Jaime Reyes, the two Blue Beetles of the post-Crisis on Infinite Earths era, together, as they were in the Johns-penned Booster Gold: Blue and Gold collection.

Also, his mentioning Saturn Girl is music to the ears of Legion of Super-Heroes fans who haven’t seen their favorite characters more or less at all in the post-Flashpoint DC Universe.

THE NARRATOR

“I love this world, but there’s something missing,” says a mysterious narrator at the start of DC Universe: Rebirth #1.

That’s per Geoff Johns, and it’s a really interesting reveal.

Who could the narrator be? Well, we’ve got some thoughts on that, so stay tuned…but such an explicit tease and such an interesting mystery wasn’t really what I expected out of a conversation where so little in the way of concrete information came along.