Videos by ComicBook.com
There’s a pile of books featuring characters who hadn’t been published regularly for years, some titles featuring new characters or legacy characters, and much more genre diversity than they’ve had in the last couple of years, as the titles had drifted back to a pre-New 52 status quo of being almost exclusively traditional superhero books.
That doesn’t mean they have given us everything we’d have liked to see tried, though, and while it’s obviously impossible to please everybody all the time, it’s worth taking a tour through what might have been…!
UPDATE: Eleven, not ten, because in the first time we neglected to include…
Marc Andreyko’s Manhunter was one of the best comics of the last twenty years, and Kate Spencer has been nowhere to be seen since long before the Flashpoint Crisis.
It’s too bad, too; she’s a character who would be perfect to introduce right around here. She needed the history of the DC Universe to provide her with her equipment, but she doesn’t really need the Manhunter legacy, considering her loose ties to any of the rest.
In spite of persistent rumors for years now that he would have another solo series, it looks like The Greatest Hero You’ve Never Heard Of will continue to operate in the shadows of the DC Universe for now.
That’s too bad, since there’s a huge upside to having a time-traveling hero working in a universe whose timeline and continuity is as hazy and uncertain as the DC Universe has been since 2011. Booster bopping through time fixing stuff would give the publisher a great opportunity to establish some of the canon which up to now has been assumed but not in evidence…and the carter family dynamic introduced in the character’s previous volume could be even more interesting if Booster and Rip are some of the only ones who know everything about Convergence and the multiverse.
That’s a bit surprising, perhaps, considering he’s playing such a big role in Convergence…but at the same time, who knows what his status quo will be at the end of that story?
No idea what you would actually call this book, but taking a page out of Marvel’s incredibly cinematic universe-friendly Avengers Assemble book from a while back and make a comic that features Green Arrow teamed with The Flash, The Atom, Black Canary, Wildcat and Firestorm.
Having a comic where the non-Justice League Justice League of the Arrowverse could get together seems like a no-brainer, even if it’s set in the DC Universe rather than any continuity TV fans would understand right away.
With a movie reportedly in development and a comic on sabbatical for over a year now for the first time in recent memory, the Legion has to be something that’s hanging heavy over DC Editorial.
Legion Lost, which wasn’t a bad book but never caught fire, represented the publisher trying to find a way to integrate the Legion characters into the DCU proper. With books like Prez and Bat-Mite coming soon, though, it seems they may finally be comfortable letting books exist in their own space within the DC main line…so maybe that’s hope for the Legion?
Same as you see with Legion. The nearest I can tell is that they might worry that another reboot of the Shazam franchise might have the same result as the last couple — a short-lived series that doesn’t survive until the movie is out in a few years.
So instead, spend a little time in development, find the perfect pitch and push it to market at a time when it has the best chance of success.
But I don’t want to wait that long, and it’s hard to imagine Doc Shaner’s Shazam in Convergence won’t be basically perfect.
The Captain Marvel/Shazam franchise has been a problem for DC basically ever since they acquired it, with only famed Superman artist Jerry Ordway really managing to make it a big success for a while. Still, some of the top talent in the business is chomping at the bit to give this a try. How hasn’t it happened yet?!
Since the launch of the New 52, DC hasn’t shied away from the ’90s…and the Darkstars — a part of the Green Lantern family of books but without the baggage of actually being Green Lanterns — were definitely a part of the cosmic landscape of that era.
The team was always a little schizophrenic, which is a problem that coming in after the reboot could help to resolve. It struggled with finding an identity apart from being the not-Green Lanterns, and often got saddled with taking on castoffs from other franchises who needed a home at the time, including John Stewart, occasional Green Lantern Charlie Vickers, and Donna Troy.
It seems DC would rather the team be forgotten, along with L.E.G.I.O.N. and other similar concepts from around that time, now that Geoff Johns has brought back Green Lanterns as the DCU’s pre-eminent space-cop group.The last time we saw them was in 52, when their brand had been co-opted by a zombie queen, and the characters were all or mostly dead way before Flashpoint.
This is a character that supported a long-running book for a while, and Kirby nostalgia is powerful on the Internet. Could it easily go wrong? Well…yeah. But that’s true of almost anything.
I really hoped that when we saw him in Futures End: Booster Gold #1 that it meant there was more in store for him…but it looks like if there is, it ends with Convergence, which is kind of a shame.
While it’s understandable for DC to be a little gunshy with this property — it’s been relaunched a number of times over the years and often seems to have a problem connecting with an audience — the fact that he hasn’t had one since the start of the New 52, has been playing a major role in The New 52: Futures End and will be appearing on Arrow staring in less than a month seems to be just begging for a contemporary reimagining.
If there’s one thing we learned from Action Comics writer Greg Pak’s short-but-brilliant run on Valiant’s Eternal Warrior, it’s that a story can be set in the distant past and still serve a role in helping to define and shape the universe in which it takes place, planting subtle seeds to be harvested at a later time.
Anthro has huge potential to be a fun character, and it’s too bad it’s unlikely he’ll get a shot anytime soon.
This is a character who could have fit in very nicely with some of the crazier new books DC announced, and his homeland of Skartaris will even be playing a role in Convergence.
Too bad we won’t get any more adventures of Travis Morgan…but maybe it’s for the better, since creator Mike Grell finally got to send the character off the way he always wanted to, just a few years ago?
One of the most enduring characters to come out of the ’90s, John Henry Irons was introduced into the New 52 almost immediatley…and then not much has been done with him since, really.
Part of it could be that the storyline he’s most associated with may or may not have happened anymore…but c’mon! He’s a great character, and at a time when DC is trying to get some different kinds of books out there with a diverse group of leads, why not go for a black man whose career path provides ample opportunity for science-based villains, government conspiracies and more?
