Producer 1: I have an idea! Let’s forget the long history of character arcs, plots, and places, and completely relaunch our superheroes”
Prodcuer 2: What, are you crazy? The fans will kill us! That’s tantamount to rewriting the Bible in their eyes.
Producer 1: Producer 2, I feel like you’re being a little extreme. They’ll still have all of their old comics to play with. At the very least this can be a little experiment.
Producer 2: A little experiment that will get us killed! Whatever we create, they’ll compare to the originals.
Producer 1: What originals?
Producer 2: You know, everything that existed in the DC universe before.
Proder 1: Multiverse.
Producer 2: What?
Producer 1: There were 52 worlds before.
Producer 2: Sure.
Producer 1: And the continuity between those worlds was all garbled up.
Producer 2: Yeah, but they’re comics books. There are thousands, if not millions of them. How could we ever make sense of the continuity of things?
Producer 1: By starting over.
With that fictional conversation, the New 52 were reborn. Like Producer 2 feared, many people were underwhelmed with the reboot. But it’s not just because it’s a reboot of what everyone knows. It’s because a lot of the reboots were over-sexed (Starfire), over-bloodied (Wonder Woman), and in general over-edged versions of their former selves. Yet, it wasn’t all bad. Batman and Justice League were done particularly well, the new characters were amazing (Prez, Midnighter), and though some female characters lost some of their feminist spirit, others emerged stronger than they were before.
Below’s a look at 3 female characters that the ups and downs of their New 52 reincarnations...
