Let's start over again

DC Comics has recently decided to be ridiculous (ok, maybe not recently, but my specific examples are recent) by having an entire run of Batman comics entitled Batman R.I.P. which ended with Batman not really dying. Then, in DC's Final Crisis, a muddled, terrible story, Batman is apparently killed by Darkseid. I say apparently because DC has worked themselve a loophole that is far too dumb to go into. So now, DC is going to spend a year having a "Battle for the Cowl" in which a bunch of people will fight to be Batman before the real Batman comes back to take back his cowl. Yawn. I liked the idea better when it was called Knightfall. Now, I'm not just one to make fun without offering a suggestion (ok, I am, but not this time). DC needs an Ultimate line of comics. They need to steal Marvel's idea for an Ultimate line, which is basically a reboot of everything but without ruining the continuity that hardcore fans love. I'm not even a Marvel person, but I own a ton of Ultimates stuff because its easy to get in to (without 30 years of backstory to get caught up on).

Seriously, an Ultimate line for DC (obviously with a different name) would give DC a chance to do things that would make fanboys go nuts but without effecting their readership. They could make Batman something besides a rich white dude (probably change the white before the rich since poor people can rarely afford bat-shaped jets that fly out of holographic mountains). Make one of the major superheroes homosexual (I'd say the Flash, but that would lead to so many very terrible jokes). Kill off some people and leave them dead (Jimmy Olsen, I'm looking at you). Change who characters are (wouldn't a Supergirl who wasn't related to Superman make for more interesting stories than having cousins have to move to West Virginia to restart their species?). These are just some of a million things they could do.

Some will argue that DC has sort of done this with their All-Star lines, which are out of continuity and often change things. I'll admit, the idea of All-Star is good, the execution was piss poor. Basically, it became a forum for Frank Miller to show us all how crazy Batman is (Miller's Batman is a whole other post). Aside from my dislike of Miller's Batman, it was just a shitty comic. I also tried reading the All-Star Superman. That wasn't so much a reboot as it seemed like a bet between the writers as to just how much Superman continuity they could cram into a comic while leaving a page or two for story along the way (however, in their rush to make every Superman nerd orgasm in his pants while reading the story they forgot to include the story part). I know this is never going to happen, until I rule the world. I promise though, after I rule the world, this is the second thing I'm changing, right after the institution of Topless Tuesdays.