A digital copy of Astonishing X-Men #44 was provided for review by the author.

As a lifelong X-Men fan, I have learned that X-Men fans are, and this is putting it kindly, fickle. On top of this, they have an even more abusive relationship with continuity than most other fans of most other superhero comics – to the sensation of mattering that propels the die-hard shared universe fan through a story, even at times when their joy has abandoned them.

A book like Astonishing X-Men, with its formula of top-tier creative talent plus high-concept storytelling minus the shackles of strict continuity that bind the other books in the X-Office is always a challenge to fans. Even the much-lauded Joss Whedon/John Cassady epic that kicked the series off had its share of continuity-guardian detractors, though in the end it gave us a resurrected Colossus, an out-of-retirement Kitty Pryde, major supporting players like Danger and Armor and the definitive bible on how to write the Scott/Emma couple, all of which have mattered very heavily in the past few years of X-books.

There’s no arguing the ‘top-tier’ part of the Greg Pak/Mike McKone team-up that kicks off in Astonishing #44 – Pak’s long-form Hulk (and Hercules) story that just wrapped up in advance of the Aaron/Silvestri (and company) relaunch is already a modern classic and McKone’s fluid, emotive pencils made him a must-have for past projects like Exiles, Avengers Academy, Amazing Spider-Man and Teen Titans. In fact, I’ve been pining for Pak to write an ongoing X-Men series since his damn-near-perfect Phoenix: Endsong limited series six years ago.

Unfortunately McKone’s cover for Astonishing #44, depicting Cyclops sharing a passionate kiss with a mohawk-sporting Storm, seemed to signal that this was an out-of-continuity ‘imaginary story’ that would have little consequence. And yes, there is a bit of alternate timeline tomfoolery that leads up to that moment, but that isn’t an impediment to thoroughly enjoying an issue that is a fun, super-competent jumping on point.

Pak’s script may seem subdued at first blush, but perhaps only by comparison to the bombast and pomp of the other series from the X-office of late – nobody dies, nobody turns evil, nobody is resurrected and the status quo doesn’t seem to be forever altered. And, of course, the issue’s payoff (mutants in captivity used to power a city) sounds a lot like the logline of Mike Carey’s recent “Collision” arc in X-Men: Legacy (drawn by Clay Mann). Pak’s strength in this issue is in his characters – predominantly Cyclops – and in an accessible script that uses what it needs to from continuity while still respecting new readers. An early scene of Scott and Ororo sparring includes color commentary from the supporting cast that illuminates the action and serves to establish the theme – Cyclops’s emotional state is central to this story, as opposed to Kieron Gillen’s Uncanny X-Men where the mutant general is more closed-off. It seems at this early point like Pak’s story will deal with the consequences of Scott’s behavior elsewhere in addition to telling his own high concept action/sci-fi tale.

Mike McKone’s pencils shine here, especially when given the reins fully, as he is in a sequence when Storm and Cyclops combat a trio of Sentinel robots.

With all the hubbub around the other ‘Regenesis’ launches/new directions, it might be easy to miss Astonishing X-Men. It’s a title that’s shipped irregularly for much of its life, and it’s not being given the same level of promotion that some other books under the ‘Regenesis’ banner have been receiving. But Astonishing is a book that shouldn’t be missed lightly, as it has the makings of an iconic and emotional Cyclops story at its heart. I look forward to seeing where Pak and McKone go with it.

I thought that Justice League #1 was not the sort of book that you’d want to use to wow new readers. But I’m not a new reader. I’m a very old reader, having read comics now for nearly 30 years (I started very young). I am not the target demo here, and frankly that’s as it should be.

With that in mind, I’m approaching various people I know who have a passing familiarity with superheroes but who don’t read superhero comics on a regular, monthly basis and I am going to ask them to read four single issue comic books. They are all issues that I like a great deal, with recognizable characters, and they all exist at different points in continuity.  They are:

Justice League #1 (2011)
X-Men: Scishm #3
Secret Avengers #16
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles #1 (2011)

These are all comics that you might see prominently featured if you walked into any comic shop this week. Two are brand-new, bottom-floor relaunches. One is the first issue of a new arc by a new creative team on an existing, albeit young, book. One is smack dab in the middle of a big event storyline built on decades of continuity. They are all, by my own estimation, good and enjoyable examples of comics. They are the books that a brand-new reader, if such a thing truly exists, might walk out of a shop with.

You’ll see the results starting next week.

Let’s assume that you’re running a comic book publisher.  One of the big ones.  Your market share has slipped, you’re afraid you’re losing relevance and you decide that, from a marketing perspective (and likely from a story perspective, too) you need to execute a balls-crazy Hail Mary play.

You decide to rejigger your entire publishing slate and package it as a fundamental reboot of your shared superhero universe (which you will then backpedal on whenever asked about it because, as a businessman who is wholly dependent upon fan whim to make your living, you have a hard time committing to bold decisions and never know if your decision is the right decision until you read about it on the Internet afterwards).  You want new readers. You want lapsed readers to come back.  You want to make superhero comics, as a genre, matter again.  These are all good goals. They are praiseworthy goals.

So, toward that end, you lead off with a relaunch of your line’s flagship superhero team book. You give it the biggest big-name creative team you’re able to. You rejigger the roster so that it resembles the iconic roster that everybody loved when the book was last at its creative high point.  Smart thinking, to be sure.

You promise big. Then, to all of those fabled new readers, eager to be shown the promise of comics, you give…what amounts to a bottle episode: two characters spend a lot of time talking and we see brief glimpses of two other cast members. That’s it. Slow. Clap.

Look, it’s not a bad issue. I enjoyed Justice League #1 more than I’ve enjoyed any JLA book in the past few years. But the best you’ve got – and this is a circumstance where you should be bringing the best you’ve got – is a winking reference to the Christopher Nolan Bat-films and a scenario that is totally bereft of imagination, majesty, bombast and cinematic impossibility, which are all of the things that superhero comics, at their best, have to offer.

It is incredibly easy to get cynical about fandom. We can, collectively, be utterly joyless bastards about the things we profess to love a lot of the time. There are a lot of things we feel, some rightly and some wrongly, about Our Things – stewardship, ownership, affection, disappointment, even equivalency – but the feeling that we seem to share with less and less frequency is wonder.

There is a tension, when it comes to comics, between commercialization and myth.  Superheroes are, as so many people have pointed out so many times, our modern gods.  But they exist inside a medium that has always baldly run itself as a business, not an art or a faith. Every time that the grand myth of comics makes changes that serve the business of things, it breeds a dissonance that turns into dissatisfaction that, in the worst of cases, becomes betrayal. After all, if comics are our mythology, then it is surely just as jarring to discover that creators can’t understand Wonder Woman as it is to learn that God does not answer back. So we manage our expectations, and that’s the bane of wonder. Comics are a medium where we often tout that anything is possible, and that is what wonder is all about.

Captain America is an example of the sort of movie that can be made when you stop forcing concessions from wonder and just tell the story you know the myth deserves. The film watches like a macrocosm of Steve Rogers himself, internally and wholly noble and decent, always the film that its makers want it to be from start to stop without ever being grim and gritty or sexed up. It may not have the flying battle armor or the warring gods of the other Marvel movies, but that character it radiates is just as literally wonderful.

Just a few seats away from us in the theater, a man sat with his two young sons. All three were edge-of-your-seat engaged in the movie from start to stop but the youngest, who looked about six, shouted and whooped and cheered whenever it was appropriate. He was open to it; he didn’t know how to not be. When the Avengers teaser happened, the kid freaked out. That is the way I want to feel. That kid is my hero.

If you’ve been up in the air about how exactly you should feel about the DC Comics relaunch looming in September, I think the best signal to pay attention to is Marvel’s most recent news announcement.

DC: We’re restarting everything at #1.*

Marvel: New Spider-Man book.

Sick. Burn.

It’s almost a parody of the DC relaunch: a formerly hot 90s artist and a reliable but unexciting second-tier writer serving up a book about a classic character with an unchanged status quo and that’s major news that hits the AP wire.

With only a few notable exceptions (mostly the stuff we’re seeing out of Jeff Lemire, Scott Snyder and Paul Cornell with their more supernatural-tinged books) the whole thing seems less about crazy high-concept ideas with talented execution (which is my elevator pitch for what makes comics as a medium so awesome, really) and more about a daring idea laid low by editorial cowardice and easy complacency.

Am I being too hard on them, maybe?

*But a lot of stuff isn’t changing. Some stuff is. But honestly, it’s not a big deal. It only really affects minor characters and possibly Superman. And it’s not going to erase any of the confusing stories that might appear, albeit artificially, as an obstacle to entering the hobby.

My Lantern Pony Corps #1: In brightest day, in blackest night, no pasture shall escape their sight.  Chartreuse Harmony is a brash, fearless filly who lives in Ponytopia, a magical place where friendship is a physical object and the sun is powered by wishes. But when Chartreuse Harmony is chosen as the newest member of the Green Lanterns, she’ll learn a valuable lesson about friendship from the Pony Lantern Corps – Blue Lantern Azure Dream, Yellow Lantern Scaredy Belle, Violet Lantern Purple Reverie, Indigo Lantern Compassion Breeze, Red Lantern Sanguine Rush and Orange Lantern Avarice Dancer!

Justice Hipsters #1: They only fight crime ironically, and they knew about Batman back before his parents died. This Issue: The Terror of…Pitchfork!

RAM #1: The multicultural man-computer RAM is BACK! Once a marvel of modern technology, the DCU’s second-favorite cyborg is now antiquated, less functional than an iPod touch.  Down on his luck and clinging to DOS as ‘the greatest and most flexible OS ever conceived’, RAM just might be our only hope to solve a globe-spanning techno-mystery cloaked in secrecy and awash in conspiracy.

The Red Bee #1: HE’S A BEE! AND THAT’S AWESOME. ALSO, HE’S RED! THIS SEPTEMBER, ASK NOT FOR WHOM THE BEE STINGS – IT STINGS FOR THEE!

Watchmen #1: I don’t even think I need to say anything more about this one. This nightmare scenario was ‘leaked’ as news out of last weekend’s HeroesCon and it’s truly, unfunnily, frightening to consider that, yeah, someone probably seriously suggested this at one point.

To be a nerd or a geek is to be a constant victim of diminishing returns, drawing Vader-like on the dark energies of the Force to sustain one’s fandom – a little more each day, a little more each day, and a consistent parade of  ‘a little more’  adds up over time. To quote Father Guido Sarducci, “Thirty-five, a-thirty-five, a-thirty-five,” marching on into infinity.

As time increases, it will unfailingly require more to sustain less.  There are  maybe fandoms where this is more apparent than comics, but I admit that I haven’t seen them.

It is a truism for the fan – whom the writer, the editor, the artist and the publisher demand to function as some sort of crazed street team groupie to save his or her favorite book from the ax of declining sales – as much as it is for the writer and the editor and the artist and the publisher, who find themselves resorting to tried and true tactics after progressively shorter and shorter cycles.

I am writing, of course, about DC Comics’ recent announcement that they are orchestrating a line-wide reboot of their superhero universe, complete with a propaganda explosion of fifty-two new ongoing series launching in September 2011.  Only a bit past five years after the last reset button was pressed at the end of Infinite Crisis, which is about ten years after Zero Hour, where the DCU was rebooted again -  less than ten years after Crisis On Infinite Earths, which was twenty years after the first great revisionist era of DC history that relaunched The Flash and Green Lantern and began the boom period of the ‘Silver Age of Comics.’

I am trying to examine how I feel about the news.  To be honest, a total line-wide, back to #1, honest-to-Grodd reboot of a decades-old stentorian popcult mass like the DCU is slightly insane, as is the attendant +50% increase to its publishing slate.  It has the potential to alienate a noteworthy portion of “those 50,000 fans” that conventional wisdom suggests the industry always panders to.  For that reason alone, I want to give the thing a chance.  But….

But there’s always that fear that this is just one more finger in the dam, hastily plugging another sales leak without any thought to repairing the crumbling, leaking edifice that is contemporary superhero comics. DC’s track record suggests that it just might be.

The double expectations behind the dollar signs in Dan Didio’s eyes right now are that 1. movie and cartoon fans will gravitate toward a reset continuity with a low barrier to entry with wallets in hand, and 2. that combining this initiative with same-day digital releases of its books will empower throngs of new and lapsed fans to climb aboard the bullet train to Comics Junction.

Is that plausible? Maybe. One has to wonder, however, if a more movie-friendly change in direction is informed by the evergreen sales of Watchmen. After all, it is not informed by the retailers who report lacking movie bumps from other adaptations. People who watch Batman Begins and love Batman can watch him in other movies, in his own animated series, in the Justice League animated series, Young Justice and plenty of other straight to DVD, Netflix-ready films. On top of traditional novels, audiobooks, video games, Pez dispensers, et cetera ad infinitum. People who like Batman can find a lot of Batman in a lot of places. They don’t need to go to comics and they aren’t likely to if they haven’t been into comics previously. We are, as a culture, voracious media consumers, but not always open to leaving our comfort zones to do so, as proven by the fact that the ‘crossover myth’ that someone will see a movie and realize how amazing comics are is, in fact, a myth.

Likewise, the digital media explosion didn’t happen because suddenly you could download music from iTunes. It happened because it was easy to do and cost-effective. The former is hindered by the abundance of incompatible comics apps in the mobile device marketplace (as opposed to a simple, portable file format like the MP3) and an inelegant search architecture. The latter isn’t going to happen because DC will desperately try to give brick-and-mortar retailers every assurance that they are not being thrown under the bus.

Faced with a twin lack of familiarity and value, it is all too easy to imagine the bold, new DC underperforming and seeing those fifty-two titles pared back to about thirty in less than a year. Of course, it will then be the fans’ collective fault for not buying everything and forcing their friends and significant others to buy everything, too.  And when that happens, about three years from now, some other linewide crisis will conspire to put everything back just the way it was.

Comics culture is very caught up right now with Superman renouncing his American citizenship in last week’s Action Comics #900.*  David Goyer’s story, “The Incident” is perhaps the most noteworthy addition to the anniversary issue, but it’s not because of the citizenship controversy; it’s because “The Incident” is maybe the worst and most out-of-character Superman story I’ve read in recent memory.

In “The Incident,” Goyer writes a Superman that is acutely aware that he is not human. He is all about showy uses of his power (he pre-diagnoses the national security advisor with skin cancer), veiled threats and several other reminders that he is not one of us and nothing like us – he is Superman and he is above us.

How the Man of Steel should interact with terrestrial politics is something that many authors have played with over the years, and while no answer truly feels satisfactory, Goyer’s is especially so. Taken in the context of the other stories in Action #900 (by current scribe Paul Cornell and screenwriters Paul Dini, Richard Donner and Damon Lindelof), Goyer’s story is the odd man out. The theme of the issue, when considered in aggregate, is that, for all his cosmic power and limitless potential, Superman is “just” a man, that his unwavering dedication to his morality and his compassion are the things that really set him apart from his foes, his peers and everyday humanity.  That very topic is the theme of “Grounded,” the misguided and critically lambasted Superman-Walks-Across-The-Country-Because-He-Has-Sad-Feelings story that is also currently being serialized.

There is a kernel of an excellent Superman story within “The Incident” – inside the controversial frame of the story, Superman attends a peaceful protest in Iran in solidarity with the protesters. He does not speak or move, but the impact of his very presence bolsters the demonstrators, boots their numbers to over one million, and communicates a message of unity to at least one of the Iranian soldiers present to keep the protesters in line. If that were the beginning and end of the story, it would perfectly communicate what Superman is and what Superman means, much like this oft-cited page from All Star Superman #10 does:

Instead, Goyer chooses to leave us with a characterization of the character that runs counter to other depictions of him in the same issue in order to make what I’m sure he believes is a very valuable point that Superman shouldn’t focus on the small stuff, ignoring that he’s at his best when that’s exactly what he chooses to do.

*This is the only time that I can recall this particular subset of people being angered by the removal of an immigrant alien’s citizenship.

It seems distasteful to me that DC Comics is attempting to generate profit from the death of a creator who they consistently treated poorly while he was alive and working for them and whose legacy they at times seem actively interested in mishandling.

The simple solution is to simply not buy the issue, and donate the three dollars to the Hero Initiative or to a charity of your choice in McDuffie’s honor. Do that instead.