Back to the New 52: Forgetting Sidekicks

Oh, those poor sidekicks.  They were trapped in limbo.  Of course, now they are back, and I’ll get around to discussing Rebirth eventually, but right now we’re still on the initial chaos of the launch of the New 52 back in 2011.

So some of those kids were forgotten as if they never existed.  Some were rebooted.  Some were left alone.   And sometimes, depending on which title you were reading, all of the above?

So we learned that the Teen Titans history did still happen, and we learned that it didn’t.

Over in Red Hood and the Outlaws, for instance, Roy Harper remembered the Teen Titans, but Starfire didn’t.

Wonder Woman’s reboot negated Donna Troy’s existence, and Flash’s reboot removed Wally West from history.

And Cyborg was now a founding member of the Justice League, which made his debut years earlier than in original canon and with a different origin.  But was he also a Titan?  I guess it depends on if you ask Roy or Starfire?

Meanwhile, the new Teen Titans (as opposed to the New Teen Titans, which were the older Teen Titans, but not the oldest Teen Titans), were being completely rebooted.

Superboy (the clone of Superman) was a brand new hero having never been seen before.  None of his previous stories counted.  Tim Drake was now Red Robin (yum), having never been Batman’s sidekick, and also debuting for the first time.  Bart Allen was arriving now from the future for the first time, also negating all his previous adventures as Impulse, Kid Flash and Flash.

Also joining the “I’m a new kid on the block again.  Forget all the old stuff” were Blue Beetle (Jaime Reyes, leaving out Ted and Dan from the past), Hawk & Dove, and some others.

Part of the reasoning for the erasing of the past and rebooting was that whole compressing all of DC history down to a five year timeline (when pre-Flashpoint it was about 15 years).  The other reason was that DC was trying to lure in younger readers, and new readers.  So it made sense for a relaunch of their young heroes, with no prior history, so that new readers could be introduced to them for the first time.

I said I wasn’t going to talk about Rebirth yet, but I will say that DC has found a happy medium in Rebirth, restoring those parts of DC history that we older fanboys were outraged to lose, while maintaining the reboots that were the most popular with the new readers.

So next I’ll talk a bit about DC’s New 52 historical and future settings.