The newest issue of Justice League, Detective Comics and Action Comics will all carry the number one, resetting their long and tangled continuities. While the Flash is the one giving the story reason for the new timeline, it was DC managers looking to counteract negative sales trends over many, many years.

It’s a risk to bring in new readers at the expense of the old and also ties into parent company Warner Bros. attempts to tie in the properties to TV shows and movies. “[This could determine] whether or not DC Comics, as a comic-book publishing company, will continue in the future,” said Rich Johnston, a blogger for Bleeding Cool. “There’s an awful lot at stake here, and that’s why they’ve thrown everything and the kitchen sink at this.”

Late last year, writers started devising a plan that would disentangle certain story elements (like Superman being married to Lois Lane) and renumber the entire line, hopefully bringing in new fans while not alienating the old. “I certainly wouldn’t buy a DVD series of a hit show and start at Season 7,” said Jim Lee, co-publisher of DC Comics. “I would want to go back and start from the beginning.”

The move also follows increased plans for reboots in the comic-based movie industry. Sony Pictures is releasing The Amazing Spider-Man, starting fresh from the previous Spider-Man trilogy started in 2002. Meanwhile, Man of Steel is a reset of the Superman franchise given a soft reboot in Superman Returns and follows The Dark Knight Rises, itself the third movie in the reboot of Batman.

“That whole attitude of, “˜Oh, go ahead, start over, reboot,’ people get tired of that and it worries me,” said Jim Shooter, a former editor in chief of Marvel Comics who now holds that title at the comics publisher Illustrated Media. “As storytellers, I don’t know where we wandered off to.”

The business model of shipping 22-page comic books to shops every week is on the verge of collapse in and of itself; DC is already planning for the future with digital versions being sold of all their new comics.

“It’s hard to see it persisting into the future in exactly the way it’s existed before. It’s going to stop as soon as it stops becoming profitable,” said Laura Hudson, the editor in chief of the Web site Comics Alliance, who added. “I love print, I love going to the comics shop, I’ve done it for more years than we can count.”

Source: New York Times