Change for the sake of change.

Well…..that was immature drivel.

I don’t know a huge amount about the “New 52” take on the DC universe (I stopped paying attention to DC’s output when they changed their logo to look like a half-unwrapped Acme magnet) but if the Justice League: War animation is any kind of summary, I’m glad I’ve not wasted my time.

Batman now seems to think it’s impolite if he doesn’t tell everyone who he is, Wonder Woman has taken to talking like a really, really bad Shakespearean actor and Superman is a dick.

Ignoring the animation’s terrible narrative, what struck me like a rancid kipper in the face was how god-awful the character designs were. In this instance; particularly Darkseid’s. Yeah, he wore a bucket on his head in the past, but it worked! It added to his menace as a laser-firing brick of doom. You took one look at him and you knew who he was.
Watch Superman/Batman: Apocalypse. THAT version of Darkseid is an iconic badass.
In JL:War, he’s a forgettable Christmas Tree.

It’s the same with Wonder Woman’s new, bling-free cozzy and Supeman’s blue romper-suit. They’re all just so bland.

Change for the sake of change is always a bad idea, especially if the designs you’re f**king around with have 70 years of development behind them. It doesn’t matter how talented the artist charged with the task is; you can’t just alter an icon overnight. You end up with the overworked crap we see in the “New 52”.

That this “New 52” garbage exists at all supports what I’ve said about both DC and Marvel for years, now: they don’t make comics. They don’t tell stories. They’re advertisers. Everything they do is written off as such by their parent companies. Their job is just to keep their IP on the shelves and in the public eye so that they can peddle the next movie/game/lunchbox that features those characters.
If that wasn’t what they do, they’d leave their tired old pantheon fallow for a few years and come up with some new characters and new mythologies, rather than brutalise what they already have in their stable via a botched "revitalisation".