Marvel and DC Comics are the big dogs of the American comic industry, and they’ve been copying each other in various ways since almost the beginning, when DC created the superhero from men’s action/adventure stories, noir, and sci-fi/fantasy. One trope that both of them have been using more and more as the years have gone by is the reboot. Basically, every so often characters and teams (and often entire universes) get a restart of sorts, sometimes right from the beginning. Most of the time nowadays, especially from Marvel, we get a reboot every time a new number one issue comes out. Reboots have become one of the most important tricks in the oeuvre of superhero comics.
Over the years, we’ve gotten some amazing reboots, ones that fans have loved, that have led to some of the most beloved comics ever. We’ve also gotten some bad ones that failed completely. Here’s five reboots that succeeded and five that failed completely.
“Onslaught” was the big event of 1996, and it led to one of the most infamous reboots ever. In the ’90s, classic Marvel heroes like Captain America, Iron Man, the Avengers, and the Fantastic Four weren’t popular, so the publisher offered Image co-founders Jim Lee and Rob Liefeld those four books for a year to get the sales up. Heroes Reborn was hyped to the gods and ended even worse than we could have imagined when it was announced. Lee’s books, Iron Man and Fantastic Four, were better than Liefeld’s, but they were all bad. The books were panned from the beginning, Liefeld was let go, and it ended with a 13th issue crossover with Lee’s Wildstom Studios. Fans hated this reboot, and it’s gone down as legendarily terrible.
The uproar caused by Heroes Reborn showed that fans cared about these characters, so Marvel decided to actually try with their classic characters. 1997’s Heroes Return brought Captain America, Iron Man, Avengers, and Fantastic Four back to the 616 Marvel Universe (after Heroes Reborn: The Return, which is honestly really good). These books, with talent like Mark Waid, Ron Garney, Kurt Busiek (who wrote Iron Man and Avengers), Sean Chen, George Perez, Scott Lobdell (who would replaced by legendary X-Men writer Chris Claremont by Fantastic Four #4), and Alan Davis (who would also leave Fantastic Four and be replaced by Salvador Larocca), with The Mighty Thor, from Dan Jurgens and John Romita Jr., joining later in in the year. These were all back to basics books, and fans loved them. While Avengers, The Mighty Thor, and Captain America were the best of them, they were all more successful than before, and laid the groundwork for the successes of the ’00s.
The New 52 is one of the most interesting reboots of them all. Former DC boss Dan DiDio decided that the best way to get a lot of sales fast was to reboot the DC Multiverse after making massive changes over the ’00s and early ’10s. It was successful at first, but the fact of the matter is that the planning for it was nearly non-existent, causing behind the scenes chaos that would make a lot of creators very unhappy. It was “edgy” and “modern”, and just didn’t really resonate with fans after a while. While there are some cool books from these five years, mostly because the publisher had some great writers on them, DC fell from grace and it’s taken years for them to bounce back.
Crisis on Infinite Earths is an iconic event, and it led to one of the most successful reboots of all time. The landmark 12-issue series ended with destruction of the DC Multiverse, with Earths-One, Two, S, and X melded together into one world. DC planned this event for years before dropping it and had a plan for everything. It kicked off with writer/artist John Byrne’s Man of Steel, and went from there, with Wonder Woman and Justice League reboots and a new Batman origin, among many others things (like the British Invasion). It modernized the DC Universe for the ’80s, took numerous characters to all-new places, and led to years of success for the publisher. This is the greatest universe reboot ever, and that’s all there is to it.
New Teen Titans was huge in the early ’80s, and would be one of DC’s most beloved books over the rest of the decade. However, the team’s popularity would fade away after years of increasingly convoluted changes to the group. In 1996, the publisher would decide to try again, with writer/artist Dan Jurgens creating four new characters — Risk, Argent, Prysm, and Slager — for a new version of the team led by the Atom, who was physically (but not mentally) de-aged in Jurgen’s Zero Hour. New Teen Titans co-creator George Perez was brought on to ink the book, but even he couldn’t save it. The problem was that no one wanted to read about these characters, and the whole thing would last two years.
The Justice Society of America was the first superteam. They faded away in the early ’50s, came back in the early ’60s and had their own Earth-Two comics in the ’70s and ’80s until Crisis on Infinite Earths. The post-Crisis years weren’t great for the team, but after The Golden Age and Starman made fans interested in the Golden Age characters in the ’90s, they’d get another chance. JSA was launched by The Golden Age/Starman writer James Robinson (who would be replaced by Geoff Johns after issue #6), David S. Goyer, and Stephen Sadowski in the 1999, and fans loved it. It combined the past and the present wonderfully, and kept getting better and better. After Johns joined the book, JSA became the most beloved team book of its era, and the team became a favorite of fans ever since.
The Avengers were huge from 2005 to 2015, but their popularity in comic shops faded, ironically enough while the MCU was making them household names. No one was buying the Avengers comics, so in 2018, the year of Avengers: Infinity War, Marvel rebooted the team to make it more MCU friendly, with Captain America, Iron Man, Thor, Captain Marvel, Doctor Strange, and Black Panther joined by She-Hulk, who wasn’t in the MCU yet, and Ghost Rider. They hoped that moviegoers would show up, and they didn’t. The book sold fine at first, but started to bleed readers and never got within sniffing distance of the top of the sales charts despite the movies. This run, from writer Jason Aaron and numerous artists, ran for five years, but it was never popular or beloved, and shows that MCU synergy is no replacement for good ideas.
After the post-Crisis reboot, we got the Justice League International, which did quite well, but eventually became a cycle of diminishing returns. Fans didn’t want funny Justice League comics starring B and C-listers as the ’90s went on, and writers Grant Morrison and Mark Waid had an idea: bring the Big Seven of Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Aquaman, Green Lantern, the Flash, and the Martian Manhunter to the Justice League. Waid brought them together in Justice League: Midsummer’s Nightmare and then Morrison launched JLA with artist Howard Porter. They gave readers the kind of awesome superhero spectacle that they wanted from the team, and JLA lasted from 1996 to 2005, before the team had another reboot after Infinite Crisis. It’s gone down as one of the greatest team books of all time.
The Inhumans were created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby in the Silver Age. Fans loved Black Bolt, but the group had very few hits in their own books. After the rise of the MCU, Marvel decided to put the X-Men on the shelf because they didn’t own the film rights and start to push the Inhumans. In 2013, Black Bolt detonated a Terrigen Mist bomb in Infinity, with Matt Fraction launching a new reboot. Charles Soule would replace him in 2014 and after the end of Secret Wars in 2016 Marvel expanded the line, with the Terrigen Mists making people around the world turn into Inhumans. They became the new mutants of the Marvel Universe, and had numerous books and new characters. This lasted until 2018, with the only success being Ms. Marvel. Fans just didn’t want the Inhumans in the place of the X-Men, and they’ve been gone ever since.
Throughout the Inhumans push, Marvel kept publishing X-books, but they were usually helmed by lower-level talent and left out of event books, advertising, and merchandise. They still outsold the Inhumans though, and when Disney bought 20th Century Fox, the mutant film rights reverted to Marvel. The House of Ideas tapped A-list writer Jonathan Hickman to reboot the X-Men, leading to the revolutionary Krakoa Era. This new status quo gave mutants their own nation, the living island of Krakoa, and allowed creators to take mutants in all new directions. While there’s an argument that end of the era was bad, the beginning was so good and there were great comics until the end like Immortal X-Men, X-Men Red, Wolverine, and X-Force (yes, those last two were great and no, I won’t take any questions). It’s the most successful Marvel reboot in years and is beloved by many X-fans.
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