Hi Gamma Heads,
Welcome back to Content Overload, the series where we go in-depth with my favorite media.
Today, we are looking at not just one book but an ideal. The idea of reinvention in comics, specifically DC Comics.
This article is one I wrote during my time at Savannah College For Art and Design. I was obsessed with the idea of cyclical storytelling as it exists in comics and wanted to combine that with my love of Young Animal Comics, an imprint of DC. Let me know your thoughts in the comments below.
Comics take chances, that’s how the medium has survived. From Funny Pages of the Platinum Age to the reinvention of the superheroes during the Silver Age, there has always been innovation. And DC Comics has been at the forefront of that. They were the first to take their characters of the Golden Age and rework them for a whole new generation. That reinvention of old characters is a core idea of DC that has carried throughout the years from Watchmen to Vertigo to Young Animal.
One of the first key examples of this tradition is Watchmen. Watchmen was written by Alan Moore, with art and lettering by Dave Gibbons, and colors by John Higgins. During the Golden Age of comics, publisher Charlton Comics was putting out characters like Blue Beetle, Peacemaker, and the Question.
But like many publishers, they went under after WWII. DC Comics came in and acquired the rights to all of their characters. Moore wanted to do Watchmen with these characters but was told by editorial that there were already plans for them so he and Gibbons created analogs for them in the Watchmen. That change for a new generation is one of the best examples of how DC has managed to incorporate and rework old characters to keep them relevant for the new era.
Doctor Manhattan, as seen above, is Watchmen’s version of Captain Atom. Captain Atom is a radioactive superhero, but Manhattan is an entirely different beast. He has powers over reality itself and can alter timelines. He is the best example of reinvention in the book as he would later go on to cause timeline changes in the main DC universe in Doomsday Clock.
To understand the main example of Young Animal, you have to go back to Vertigo Comics. DC in the early 1990s had a myriad of odd characters and mature stories that they were putting out. Under the leadership of Karen Berger, an imprint was launched that provided a space for both these stories and future ones. Vertigo would go on to gain critical acclaim for stories both in and out of the DC Universe.
That part is crucial to the idea of this tradition. Creative teams took characters like The Doom Patrol, Shade the Changing Man, Swamp Thing, and more, and brought them from their past as silver age characters into the present time. Those stories explored themes like gender, mental health, and religion all while still having the signature weirdness that the brand had become known for.
Young Animal was an imprint launched in 2016 under the guidance of longtime comics writer and musician Gerard Way. Way was a part of a generation of writers and artists who grew up reading Vertigo Comics and were bringing those ideals into their stories.
The idea of reinvention through the lens of Young Animal can best be seen through the huge crossover event Milk Wars. Milk Wars was the first and only event that Young Animal held but it explores the tradition ideal best. The titles that were involved were Doom Patrol, Shade The Changing Girl, Cave Carson Has a Cybernetic Eye, and Mother Panic. Most of these titles were nebulous about how in-universe they were from Doom Patrol being a treatise on fan fiction and reboots to Shade continuing the story of Meta, they were addressing things that were both in and out of continuity.
But Milk Wars changed that, it situated the event firmly in the main DC continuity and helped cement these characters in that. All while changing and reinventing them for the next generation. The image above, an advertisement for Milk Wars, best shows how the event was an example of this tradition but in a satirical manner. The event changed Batman, Superman, and Wonder Woman into cleaner and more easy to accept versions of themselves, at least by 1950’s standards. It mocks those ideals by contrasting them against the edgier and weirder characters of Young Animal.
The Vertigo era characters were more mature as they tackled tough subjects with wacky adventures. Then during Young Animal they were reinvented again to address both their past as well as issues topical at the time. During that time they were even changed again during Milk Wars to add them back to the main universe and cause some status quo changes along the way like Robot Man becoming human again.
That’s the DC tradition. There are numerous other examples from Quality Comics characters to Captain Marvel but they all show how DC has taken the time to reinvent old ideas and bring them into fresh new stories.
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