>...I would like to think those who followed us understand the need to keep working to broaden the reader base, not to shrink it by sticking to outdated continuity. My generation was lucky. The super-heroes began all over again in the late '50s and early '60s. We didn't worry about 1940s continuity. Most of us, in fact, didn't even know about the old heroes when we began reading comics. Every generation of comic-book readers deserves to have the comics belong to them, not to their older siblings and parents.
>-Marv Wolfman, July 15th, 1998
What even was it?
A scrapped DC relaunch akin to the New 52 and Rebirth.
The idea was that all of DC's major characters would be replaced by new, more diverse versions. So you had Jon Kent Superman (who was ironically straight, his gf was Jenny Sparks), Yara Flor WW, Jace Fox Batman, Bolt from TTA would have become the new Flash and you had a new female Green Lantern that would have been tied to magic and horror like Alan Scott rather than space corps like Hal or John
The idea was that those characters would have formed the "Justice Alliance", succeeding the Justice League the same way the JLA succeeded the JSA.
There would have been a new DC timeline with defined ages for all the characters. Bruce Wayne is 59. Dick Grayson is 41.
You might think this is nothing special but it gets progressively wilder from here.
What would have happened to the classic heroes? Well, Superman would have been the one responsible for the classic JL being disbanded as he tries to force the rest of the team to publicly reveal their secret Identity. Clark is losing his powers, so he moves to Africa and forms The Authority, adopting increasingly authoritarian methods. Also, Supergirl is a fascist for some reason.
Batman, on the other hand, after the death of Alfred lets Joker escape so he can kill Bane. When Joker actually kills Bane he retires from being Batman.
Well, anyway, Jace Fox (whose archenemy is Damian btw) eventually finds out Bruce and takes him to justice. However Clark frees him out of prison. This kicks out DC's civil war (and yes, DiDio actually described it this way) between the new generation and the old generation.
However, Superman at some point loses control of his power and becomes the biggest threat to the DCU. So Batman commits murder-suicide and both of them die. If 5G had been successful, it would have continued. If it had been a failure, the deaths of Bruce and Clark just leads to another reboot.
This all got scrapped when DiDio got fired from DC.
Okay, but why was it called that?
"5G" referred to the five generations in the new timeline. I don't remember what each one specifically was meant to be but the current one would be the fourth one and the future scifi world would be the fifth.
It's not a very good name.
Sounds more like a cellphone thing.
Iirc correctly it was:
Justice Society - WW2
Justice League - Silver Age
Titans - the sidekicks to the silver age Justice League and their peers: Dick Grayson, Wally West, etc
Young Justice/Teen Titans - the current generation of teen heroes: Tim Drake, Bart Allen, etc
And then the Fifth Generation - the future: Jace Fox and Damian Wayne and Jon Kent
Is shit like this that led DC to recently admit that "Terry McGinnis is inevitable" with the entire zur shit
The image in the OP started off as artwork for 5G. The left is Gen One, the middle was Gen Two, the right was Gen Three. At least, according to Gary Frank.
If that's the case then that confuses the hell out of me. What the hell is Batman doing in a later generation than Barbara Gordon?
Because they represent the different eras of DC (
), not each generation of characters. Hence why NTT is part of 2G, for instance.
1G = Golden Age
2G = Silver/Bronze Age
3G = Post-Crisis
4G = Post-Flashpoint
So 5G would have been the "next era" of DC.
Also, AT&T owned DC back then so some sort of strange corporate synergy was likely a factor as well.
Yeah, that's really dumb.
>you had a new female Green Lantern that would have been tied to magic and horror like Alan Scott rather than space corps like Hal or John
Also Jo from the Far Sector.
Put DiDio on Marvel and he'll produce magic.
All the damage he would do was already done by quesada, who he kept trying to ape anyway. He'd bring nothing new.
This seems really weird considering Didio spent the previous decade killing off or erasing every single 90s replacement character and bringing back each and every silver age hero he could.
DiDio was weird. He didn't hate legacy characters. He hated characters he considered useless or redundant. The reason he hated Nightwing was because he wanted Dick to either become Batman or be Robin again. But then he hated Wally West as the Flash because he thought Barry and Wally were essentially the same character but Barry was easier to adapt due to his origin.
DiDio spent most of his tenure actually trying to push the Young Justice characters. The reason why he hated the original Titans was because he thought they were redundant now that YJ existed. The fact most of these characters were screwed during his mandate was mostly just incompetence I think.
Also he had an obsession with character ages. He said that the Trinity was like the Simpsons (never aging) but the rest of the DCU was like Harry Potter (constantly aging). New 52 and 5G was him trying to solve this problem.
>He said that the Trinity was like the Simpsons (never aging) but the rest of the DCU was like Harry Potter (constantly aging)
He’s not wrong but it’s weird he’d say that when the 90s had hit a sweet spot of having elder characters (Clark, Bruce, Diana), legacy characters (Dick, Wally), and new characters (Tim, Kon, Bart) but his shit like One Year Later and making Bart the Flash fricked up that balance hard
>Bolt from TTA would have become the new Flash
I thought they were planning on using that new Enby Flash from that alternate Earth.
>A scrapped DC relaunch akin to the New 52 and Rebirth
Why so soon after Rebirth? Also the New 52 still feels like it was just yesterday
It was the Clark and Bruce heel turn that did it for me, almost as if DC thought Hydra Cap was a good idea but didn't notice the backlash.
It's DilDio we're talking about here. He probably didn't, or just thought "Genius!"
Jesus fricking christ
Why do these people think their job is to leave a footprint on the history of the universe?
5G was better off as an AU and that's what it became but even then it was messy because DC had to salvage as much as possible because they invested so much into it. Could've been some expanded setting for Batman Beyond.
Marv's line of thought only really makes sense in the past. It was a lot easier to throw out decades of history when all it took for a kid to believe they were getting in on the ground floor was a bright and shiny #1 printed on the cover. Even at the time of the quote, that illusion had been waning, and by the mid-2000s it took 12 seconds of mildly interested Googling to be permanently informed that Superman had 10,000,000 issues that you'd never be able to read.
Thankfully, everyone outside of the Big 2 bullpens knows that kids enjoy jumping into existing franchises with no context and that being overwhelmed by backstory is something that only happens to adults.
DC already tried replacing their cast with a newer younger version two decades earlier. With Kyle GL, Wally Flash, John Paul Batman, Matrix Supergirl, Arsenal Green Arrow, and I am pretty sure Artemas was Wonder Woman for a while.
Why is it the same guys who undid all of that, start complaining about how they need a new younger generation of heroes ten yeas later?
Confusing Artemis with Hypolyta.
While Artemis beat Diana to be Wonder Woman in Wonder Woman #90/0, it was treated as a joke in terms of "a grim and gritty b***h beat Diana for the right to be the new Wonder Woman but NO ONE is going to give her the time of day acknowledging it". Diana did get a new costume for like nine issues (short pants and jacket) but dominated WW #91-100 with Artemis running around getting told to frick off by everyone she met before dying a humiliating death at the hands of a woman hating mysoginist magician in #100. This hating on Artemis culminated ironically, in the pages of JLA where she showed up to take a spot on the roster only to find Diana as the team leader and the rest of the team telling her to frick off they were firmly Team Diana.
Ironically, one of the few redeeming things about the John Byrne Wonder Woman run was how Byrne went out of his way to redeem Artemis, making her likable, and essentially playing her straight as a darker, edgier Amazon hero as opposed to how Messner-Loeb only created her to shit on Azrael and other grim and gritty heroes.
As for 5G, the only people who wanted it to happen were those people who were sitting on copies of Legends of the DC Universe: Crisis, which is the first appearance of Justice Alliance; which would have replaced the Justice League and would have made the book a $1000+ back issue title if it had gone through.
This. The problem is DC deems anything older than five years to be "outdated continuity".
I think they need to go for Jim Shooter’s style of writing oversight, that every issue is someone out there’s first issue.
At the very least, they gotta have more stuff resolved in one issue. That goes for DC and Marvel, too.
He also kind of forgets that the way comics were done in the 40s and 50s was way different than by that point
That period of comics, they kept throwing shit and the wall and seeing what stuck. If it didn't, they tossed it and replaced with something else. By the 90s the Big 2 had consistent characters/franchises that sold well so it didn't have the same opportunity as the old stuff where you could simply toss it for five years.
No, seriously, what was it?
>Was 5G really that bad an idea?
Yes. As described in the leaks (which we know to be real because a lot of the shit in them was repurposed for Future State), it would have killed DC Comics dead in an instant. Imagine ALL the most popular characters aged 40 years, shelved and permanently replaced, not even with their various teen sidekicks, but with some made-up brand new Donut Steel buttholes nobody has ever heard of before. DC would have lost about 90-99% of its sales virtually overnight. It had to be emergency aborted.
That said, 5G's idea of splitting the continuity into formal generations and having characters from a certain "era" mainly interact with others from the same era had some merit on the abstract level, and could have possibly worked in a toned-down fashion AS LONG AS THE GODDAMN CURRENT ERA STAYS IN PRINT.
The part that especially irritates me personally (and is a certain sign this was dreamed up by Dan "frick the late 90's and early 2000s" Didio) was the fact that 5G would have completely skipped the era where the current young heroes are seasoned veterans running the show - it would have leapfrogged over it so that the teens go from rookies straight to middle-aged and useless, without ever experiencing "their" time of glory.
yes
homosexual
Boo-fricking-hoo, times change grandpa, maybe your generation didn't care about old continuity, but now that it's more accessible than ever, it's easy for anyone to like any time period of DC.
>Most of us, in fact, didn't even know about the old heroes when we began reading comics.
This is how it was to me when I found out about Valiant in my 20s. It was weird that in my lifetime a superhero publisher had come and gone without me knowing about them when I'm used to pop culture being circle jerked for decades on end. I started reading Wizard in the late 90s and by then they weren't talking about them anymore
What's the point of rebooting if they aren't going to keep issues numbered reasonably? They should go the 'Marvel Adventures' approach and just have self-contained runs retelling the characters from scratch.
they should fully reboot but they never will. They only ever do half reboots. With some parts of the universe starting over but others continuing on. It just creates endless messes. Now they are stuck with all these characters they can't get rid of.
Would a reboot even help at all anymore? I feel like if DC announced a true reboot, that would just cause most people to take it as an opportunity to quit reading DC.
Reboots only exist to make a fast buck off Number 1 speculators and then speed run all the stuff you just rebooted out of existence back into existence in a way that's more confusing than it was in the first place. Reboots DO NOT, however, attract new readers. Nobody's off in the distance pining to read a book of Superman but feeling scared because he's on issue 9783, wishing just wishing they'd slap a new number 1 on the cover so they can jump in fresh.
I don't think so
What you're talking about is series relaunches but you're right--it's fricking idiotic that we let industry midwits and mouth-breathers who don't read comics or manga say "people will get confused with issue #982, we need to relaunch" when it turns out constant relaunches don't work and makes things even more confusing than sticking to the old numbers.
you can get rid of character all the time, just ignore them. No matter how seemingly important they were, within a few years they can just become obscure trivia.
>DUDE JUST REBOOT
Let it go man, it's Joever, Crisis didn't work, New 52 didn't work, it's not going to fricking work, just keep going with what we have.
None of those were full reboots.
No reboot of any kind is gonna fix anything, it'd just make things worse.
Absolutely fricking not. The EVERYTHING IS CANON approach is much better than scrapping everything
"Everything is canon" is moronic and cripples the continuity. Contradictory things cannot simultaneously be canon, no matter how much DC pretends otherwise.
It’s actually “Everything is canon, until it isn’t.”
Meaning when you read any modern Titans storyline, you can still assume Titans West was still a thing that happened.
Until later on for instance, we see Beast Boy have a flashback when he first joined the Titans in the NTT era.
These are just hypothetical examples, but that’s currently the case of how DCU continuity operates now.
The problem with 5G was that it wasn't natural successors it was a bunch of new OCs that hadn't even had a chance to be established
This. It's so insane to try to replace Batman not with Dick Grayson or Damian or even Tim Drake or Jason, but with some brand new character. It's just insulting to the fans of any of the heir-apparents to be snubbed like that. And this was supposed to happen to every character, at the same time, and it was meant to be permanent. It's madness. Literally telling the entire fanbase "hey, your favorite characters are all GONE, what are you gonna do about that?"
DC has been trying their damndest to have their own Miles Morales so it makes sense with that context
The best example of this was Batman's replacement; there was already a pre-existing black member of the Bat-family that was related to Lucius Fox... So why the frick would they decide to go with his previously unknown half brother?
Weirdly enough, Tim/jace is the oldest Fox kid made, though he was totally rewritten.
It was pretty fricking terrible, but so is Cinemaphile so in a way they deserve each other.
It was worse.
Golden Age and Silver Age were literally different universes. The Crisis was about combining those things, thus making the continuity matter for the first time.
Marv Wolfman doesn't even understand what the Crisis on Infinite Earths was about.
Neither do you. Earth-2 - which comprised the stories of the Golden Age DC - wasn't even a concept until a few years into the Silver Age. Until then, GAge stories were still the stories of most of the Silver Age era characters (Superman, Batman, Green Arrow, Aquaman, Wonder Woman). Only Flash, Hawkman, Atom, Green Lantern, etc were considered new and different. Once the alt earths were eventually named, that's when you could start saying the Golden Age was a different universe. But even that's not true - because Superman and Batman still referenced that stuff on and off in their present Silver Age continuity.
And the eventual continuity of Earth 2/Golden Age mattered long before the Crisis: the JLA/JSA team ups, the JSA revamp in the 70s, All Star Squadron and Infinity Inc. All before the Crisis, the later two being popular sellers.
Crisis made sense of a continuity that was already there.
>Marv Wolfman doesn't even understand what the Crisis on Infinite Earths was about.
yes a terrible idea
shoving things in the face of the fans has literally never worked
you don't get the new fan base you try it for, and you alienate the faithful
Yes
I have to wonder in what world suddenly replacing all of your decades old icons with completely new, untested and unknown ripoffs of those icons that have nothing unique to them beyond being "diverse" would have ever been a good idea. This kind of gigantic overhaul only works when people really hate the old cast and want them booted to the curb, not people who cling to the teats of their old beloveds like Linus with his blanket even now. Honestly, if you told me that DC's stockholders were the ones who thought this stupid scheme up I'd have believed it.
They’re doing this on purpose. One of the writers admitted that both DC and Marvel try to provoke their consumers to anger by screwing up the liked characters for quick ragebait sales.
I'm gay and trans btw
Good for you, namegay. Good for you.
Is this a shill? Everytime someone calls out DC I see this poster mocking.
How does angr translate into sales when you can just get mad at a pirated copy?
Short term sales boost. Spiderman is notorious for this but it’s an industry norm for the big 2.
I think there were only a few that did. I imagine a lot of resources were wasted putting it together. I’m not privy to why Dido was fired, but sinking a ton of company money and time into a completely unworkable project would do it on any job I’ve ever had.
Both of the big two have been embarrassed by the demographic of their fans for over a decade and became convinced by the internet that a new audience was theirs for the taking if they covered up their female characters and increased ‘representation’ whatever that means at this point.
Imagine if record companies decided there were too many black fans listening to hip hop and went after a new audience comprised completely of people who had no interest in their music, like old Chinese women.
That sounds like the kind of thinking that most economists would laugh at for an hour straight before asking "You serious?", especially considering how many of those same people now writing comics were brought in from the fold from that embarrassing demographic of fans
>I’m not privy to why Dido was fired
He went 'all in' on 5G to find a new audience and put the old one out to pasture but he apparently got very tyrannical in his last few months with DC office staff trying to get it all ready for launch date. Also Time-Warner (now Discovery) management STILL thinks that Jim Lee is a modern Stan Lee so they figured as long as they have Jim they don't need Didio.
And Jim Lee is proving to be their downfall as Diane Nelson.
What carried DC was Johns, and not even getting rid of johns to hire bendis repeated the same effect Johns and Snyder had.
They hired Bendis because he got lucky with miles and thought it would work if they just did it with everyone not realizing that the reason why miles had any success in to begin with is marvel mishandling Spiderman to the point any alternative to current Spiderman seemed good at the time to readers.
Not even that, Miles didn't have any success until the first Spider-Verse movie, but Marvel kept trying to push him. The thing is that DilDio admittedly spent all those years trying to copy everything Marvel did for some perceived "success", and that included hiring bendis once he was done poisoning the well at Marvel.
This was one of the things that frustrated the frick out of me with Didio. DC and Marvel both have their own strengths and weaknesses and honestly DC’s strengths are Marvel’s weaknesses and Marvel’s strengths are DC’s weakness so going in with this attitude of “making DC like Marvel” is just a set up for failure. It’s like after Miura died and the guys who took over went “Y’know My Hero Academia is popular we need to make Berserk more like that”
>Was 5G really that bad an idea?
Yes it was, moron. Go back to DeviantArt where your filthy kind belongs.
Nobody is ever going to care about. Batman that isn’t Bruce Wayne.
Ever.
People liked that era during Morrison's run when Dick Grayson was Batman. They could have likely kept that going.
It's more that you can't take a rando and plug him in as Batman. Or Tim. Or Jason. Or Damian. Dick Grayson is the exception.
Gordon Batman wasn't really Batman, before anyone brings him up.
Until they needed a sales boost and then Bruce would return.
People who were down with morrison's run to begin with. There's also the fact Batman's return was implied from the moment he went missing, not due to a timeskip.
Because seeing the two sons have fun playing in daddy's clothes, is nice. It's cute. Especially with them both missing him. The spectre of Bruce Wayne is very present (And I'm not talking to the side story about him returning from cave-man time) when Dick is Bats, in the stories of him with Damian at his side. And it rightfully ends with Bruce taking back the mantle. That's a whole different thing altogether
what's dumb about 5G besides everything is that we already have a pretty handy generational guide starting from the golden age.
I think it could’ve worked (minus the bullshit authoritarian Superman and Batman letting joker kill bane moronicness) as a rebooted Earth 2 while letting earth 1 have lighter continuity and more classic versions of characters so you can have your cake and eat it too; Earth 1 could be for people like me who just want stories of Batman solving crimes or Superman stopping mad scientists and Earth 2 could be for loregays who want dense continuity and character progression
What we actually got with Future State & Dawn of DC is probably the best result of an inherently flawed idea.
DC's generational heroes are like teen X-Men teams: too many writers just create new characters instead of working with the existing ones. Its probably a royalties thing but a stronger editorial line would keep things in order.
DC already had too many legacy heroes: the 80s Titans, the 90s Young Justice generation. Plus concepts that were still popular like Batman Beyond.
There wasn't need for another "new generation" when there were already so many "new generation" characters waiting in the wings.
It's hard not to think 5G was agenda-driven between Didio feeling a little desperate + Bendis and his clique trying to put their own "Miles Morales" royalties stamp on DC
(cont'd) Who was 5G supposed to appeal to?
Was it supposed to get young diversity-friendly casuals into comic shops? If so, then no wonder people thought it was company suicide to replace the existing heroes.
At best, it could work as what we basically got:
>Future State: a Days of Future Past style glimpse of the future yet to come that can still be changed
>young new diverse versions of the Big 7 that should have been launched in minis, back-ups and/or team-up storylines in the franchise books
>a "Death of Justice League" style event where the Big 7 are taken off the table and the new generation has to step up and save the day
>then the status quo is restored and the 5G heroes can exist in a sister book called "Justice Alliance" or "Young Justice" or Grayson mentors them in "Titans"
if the plan was to just market 5G to young diverse friendly casuals, why bother with taking over the main publishing line?
Where was the harm in launching "5G" as a separate "Ultimate" or "MC2" style initiative?
Why couldn't it have just been a coordinated, marketed line of OGNs like Earth One or the DC YA OGNs?
>Who was 5G supposed to appeal to?
Most likely it was supposed to coordinate with whatever plans Hamada had for the DCEU for when the actors retired.
That's the real reason Marvel did All-New All-Different Marvel. To set-up replacements to use in the MCU when RDJ and Chris Evans retired.
Bingo. I'm surprised people didn't think this through
It's why MCU was still going full-force on the ANAD replacement heroes even while there was evidence it went over poorly. They didn't want to keep paying more and more to RDJ, Chris Evans, and others
I wonder if the janitor was there just watching the board meetings and thinking "isn't it safer to just recast...?"
Is shit like this that ushers even Primetime and Gwenpool to make Future's End/Beyond/LoSH the true Future of DC
Terry McGinnis will always be the true replacement of Bruce Wayne, as Carrie Kelley being Batwoman.
Nah, it only works as its own separate bad future thing.
Nah, he is Inevitable.
Mainly after the latest Zur shitshow
Nothing Chip Zdarsky writes is canon.
Tell that to Jim Lee and Diane Nelson.
It's specifically not happening, Batman Beyond is Earth 12 and Futures End was prevented.
Didio bad
yes, that the sum up.
Didn't 5G give people cancer?