Pre-teen girls react to DC's reboot. Good stuff.

Obviously i don't have any direct skin in the DC reboot game, but on the other hand i want it to succeed for the sake of the industry. I misinterpreted the intent when it was first announced, thinking the whole point was to bring in younger readers, but it's actually apparently about attracting teenage boys who fell through a time warp from 1993. Coincidentally, i pointed to the Teen Titans cartoon as a better way to go, at least for the clean accessible look, and the first girl in the article above is also looking at her favorite character Starfire, who she knows from the cartoon, and wondering why she's now running around in a tiny bikini.

The Beat says "it is not practical for DC to have rebooted its entire line in a form that 7-year-olds could read". I'm surprised by that comment. I think for most of super-hero comics' history they were written in a way that 7-year-olds could read them, even if they were also written in a way that older readers could enjoy (at least starting in the 1960s). I'm not necessarily saying it has to be that way. I've enjoyed the fact that comics have gotten more mature in recent decades (and i'm not talking about characters running around in tiny bikinis), and if kids aren't going to read comics anyway, you could argue, why not? But to say it's not practical is kind of odd. It's a question of who DC wants to target. They could have tried to expand back to the young kid market. Instead (snark aside), they seem to be targeting the slightly older teenage boy market. And wherever they tried to expand, it would still be a balancing act between attracting new readers and keeping the existing fanbase. I suspect the fanbase would be more tolerant of an approach that was similar to the Marvel Adventures line than the Image Returns! style that DC chose (and i'm calling it that based on what i've seen online; i've read only two of the reboot books, and one was Omac). But whatever.

Anyway, read the article for some cute observations.

Ridiculous poses, attitude, and clothing aside, i think that regardless of what age group you're trying to appeal to, if your goal is to tell a story and not just make a picture flip book, having any character doing nothing except posing for most of the book makes for a bad story.

It had to be a conscious decision to drop any attempt at story and character development in favor of sexed up images because i can't conceive of how this could have been ok'd otherwise.

If DC thinks this will increase their chances of return buyers, i think they're sadly mistaken. Based on what you can find online for free featuring anime/manga characters, you don't need to pay DC for tarted up versions of their female characters in brokeback poses.