I’m going to ask for some latitude this week, because this edition of World’s Finest Wednesdays doesn’t have a whole lot of Superman and Batman content, but I’m setting something up, so I’ll get there.

I had one of those, “I never really thought about that before but, at the same time, the world is on fire and there’s a lot going on at the moment, but still, that’s kind of weird that things lined up like that,” thoughts the other day while at work.

One Year Later happened 20 years ago this year.

The New 52 began 15 years ago this year

Rebirth began 10 years ago this year.

Infinite Frontier started 5 years ago this year.

From a thousand-foot view, the fact that there is a five-year gap between those eras in DC’s history line up neatly. If you squint, it looks like it was planned to happen that way. Corporations thrive on five-year plans after all, so it’s possible. The idea that it was all some grand plan falls apart quickly when you start looking into the dates each of those publishing initiatives started (some of them began in the beginning of the year, some more towards the end of the year) and how each of them played out.

But there is something kind of strange that it was (roughly) five years between each of them.

The reason any kind of grand plan falls apart is due to the fact that The New 52 and Rebirth (and possibly Infinite Frontier, but I wasn’t as engaged in the DCU when that went down, so I can’t be as sure) were both reactions to a downturn in sales. I could be wrong (and I am open to being corrected) but if memory serves, The New 52 happened mainly because 2010 was a bad year for DC as a whole and they needed to turn it around. Rebirth happened because The New 52 was successful at first the initiative had run its course and the DCYou thing they tried in 2015 after Convergence just didn’t take the way they wanted it to. In both cases, DC needed a boost (and quick) and The New 52 and Rebirth provided that.

The five-year thing stops after Infinite Frontier. Since then, DC has done regular resets following events. Infinite Frontier gave way to Dawn of DC which gave way to All In, which is still a thing. Both the Absolute line and the Next Level line aren’t technically new initiatives as its own thing and a continuation of All In respectively. DC seems to be doing its version of the Marvel model in the late 2000s and the 2010s when, following Civil War, you had The Initiative to Dark Reign to Age of Heroes to Marvel Now and so on.

There was a time when I was kind of put off by the idea of floating from one initiative to another and I could be kind of annoyingly whiny about it. I thought it was “stupid” and “a dumb sales gimmick” and “they didn’t know what they were doing”.

You know…typical early 21^st century Internet fanboy behavior.

I also wore an onion on my belt.

(It was the style of the time.)

Eventually I realized that, at the end of the day, the comic book business is a business. Back then the industry was trying to survive in the face of shrinking distribution and stiff competition for the dollars of kids, teens, young adults, adults, senior citizens, and (I could be wrong about this) the recently deceased.

I could be stretching things with that last one.

The point was that, for a brief period, that business model was working. Now, DC and Marvel face the same challenges they did back in the early 2000s, nineties, eighties, and so on. They need to retain the readers they have while, at the same time, get new people to buy their product and there’s no magic spell to make that happen. Also, the super hero genre is not doing as well as it used to (in the ebb and flow of reader whimsy) and the fanbase has changed significantly over the past ten years as well. I don’t hold TikTok and other social media platforms as the most accurate way to judge these things (it’s hard to tell when the people genuinely love these things or if the people are trying to become influencers without watching a lot of content) but there is actually a younger audience getting into comics at the moment.

I don’t know how they afford them, but they’re out there. Buying comics and inadvertently making me feel old.

(Seriously. Listening to them talk about comics from the early 2000s like it was the Paleolithic Era makes me want to turn to dust like Thanos just snapped his fingers while also remembering what it was like for me as a younger reader looking at the sixties and seventies as these mythic far-off times. It’s weird to have both an existential crisis and a rational examination of a phenomenon.)

My point, and I swear to God I have one, is that if this is what is working for DC at the moment, then they should keep doing it.

Also, I like the fact that they aren’t trying to have every book have the same look and feel and are actively trying to court a wide variety of readers.

I seem to be drifting a bit. Back to the point and back to Superman and Batman.

Given that we’re in an anniversary heavy year, I thought it might be fun to look at the various times DC has done their reboots (both soft and hard) and see what impact they had on both Superman and Batman. My memory is that Superman usually ends up getting more of a revamp than Batman does, but that has more to do with the fact that Batman has, up until the past year or so, been the more popular of the two by a country mile. DC has definitely mucked with Superman more than Batman, but Batman has gone through some changes and growth over the last twenty years, so I may be surprised at what I rediscover.

There may be weeks were I do other things World’s Finest related, but the plan is to come back to this on a regular basis.

In the next installment I’ll be writing about where Superman and Batman were during the time of Infinite Crisis to set the scene for One Year Later.

Spoiler warning…they weren’t getting along too well.

More to follow…