The Black Hood, Static, and Batman?!?

[Renegade]

Don't know if y'all caught this or not, but the news out of San Diego is that the Milestone Comics characters (Static, Icon, Hardware, etc) and the Archie/MLJ characters (The Shield, The Black Hood, The Web, etc) will be joining the DC universe proper in the months to come!

The Milestone thing doesn't surprise me so much, but even though DC did publish the Impact line 18 years ago with the MLJ characters, I still find it surprising to see them coming into the fold now. I wonder though if DC won't  have too many super heroes running around now though. All the regular DC characters from the past 70 years, plus the Fawcett characters (mostly ignored except for the Marvels), the Charlton group (Blue Beetle and Captain Atom being the ones mostly used), and now these two sets too. Holey Moley!

[zuludelta]

Interesting. I got into the Milestone books back when they first came out (particularly Hardware... I really dug the sketchy quality of Denys Cowan's art when I was a kid). I just hope that DC editorial handles their incorporation into the larger fabric of the DCU better than they did with the Wildstorm characters (which basically all boiled down to the stories saying "yeah, the Wildstorm characters are okay, but they're nowhere near as good as the 'proper' DCU characters").

[tommyboy]

Some of the impact stuff was OK. I enjoyed Messner-Loeb on the Jaguar.
But I do agree that given they just re-established a multiverse, do they really need another set of heroes?
As fond as I am in a strange way of the original MLJ comics, I worry that they might get the same sort of treatment that the Charlton heroes got (ie killed, revamped pointlessly, replaced).
More wait and see for me on this.
P.S.
"yeah, the Wildstorm characters are okay, but they're nowhere near as good as the 'proper' DCU characters" sounds about right to me..
 

[zuludelta]

P.S.
"yeah, the Wildstorm characters are okay, but they're nowhere near as good as the 'proper' DCU characters" sounds about right to me..
 

Ha ha, you do have a point there tommy.

I guess my point was that DC took a line of titles that already had an established and sizable fanbase, and basically stripped it of everything that was unique about it in a poorly handled attempt to incorporate it as another one of the DCU's "Earths".

Sure, most of Wildstorm's "in-universe" characters and stories were horribly derivative, but the few bits of Wildstorm goodness that saw the light of day were generally due to the fact that most of the imprint's writers/artists had a lot more creative latitude under the old Wildstorm line editor Scott Dunbier's regime. With Dunbier out, though, the Wildstorm imprint lost any firm sense of direction. Is it a forum to publish movie, TV, and video game licensee comics? Is it a creator-owned imprint a la Vertigo Comics? Is it "DCU junior"?

To me, the most significant evidence of DC editorial's mishandling of the Wildstorm acquisition was the exodus of top talent that occurred shortly after DC bought the line from Jim Lee:

Warren Ellis, Mike Millar, Art Adams, and Bryan Hitch all swore off any future work with Wildstorm (and to a certain extent, DC) partly because of creative disagreements with DC management a couple of years into the DC-Wildstorm merger. Jim Lee had to fly out to Alan Moore's home to convince him not to prematurely take away his award-winning Tom Strong, Top 10, and Promethea books from the ABC sub-imprint because of a prior beef with DC editorial (Moore and Lee worked out a compromise where DC's editors and Moore would have as little creative contact as possible). In 2006, Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson took The Boys (what was then Wildstorm's best-selling book) to Dynamite Entertainment because their superhero parody/satire had apparently upset DC higher-ups so much that they ended up cancelling the book 6 months into its run.   

I guess my point is that DC likes to have very tight editorial control over their books, and the way things are run there right now, editorial staff have a much larger say over creative content than in most other comics publishing ventures. That approach has served DC well for its "in-universe" titles for the most part (despite some recent misfires) and they've wisely taken more of a "hands-off" approach when it comes to the Vertigo books. They have a history of not really doing all that well when they try to incorporate pre-existing superhero creations into the DCU fold, though. Apart from Captain Marvel and Captain Atom, their Charlton and Fawcett acquisitions pretty much fizzled under DC's stewardship and the Wildstorm Universe characters are pretty much following suit. I'd just hate for the same thing to happen to Milestone's stable of characters.
   

[bredon7777]

Any word if this includes Xombi?  I loved that book.