Wonderful

Of all the news that’s come out of San Diego Comic Con, I think Wonder Woman’s retractable pants is the weirdest.

DC has spent most of San Diego Comic Con trumpeting details of The New 52 and why everybody needs to be reading it. To answer our question about how Batman can have multiple Robins in only 5 years, it sounds like Batman has existed longer than that. Officially, Superman is the first hero of The New 52, but only because Batman was working in secret behind the scenes. I’m assuming that means that the Robin parade happened during this time, and that Batman got outed a little bit after Superman appeared. This would explain why Justice League #1 appears to start with Batman getting hunted by the GCPD.

Nobody would discuss the future of Batman Beyond which tells me that there’s something big about to happen there. A while back there were interviews with the creators for the yet unsolicited Superman Beyond book that indicated there might be a whole set of Beyond universe books. I’m betting this is why they’re not talking about Batman Beyond yet.

Of the characters that Ret-Conned HQ is interested in, we’ve heard that Stephanie Brown, Cassandra Cain. and Power Girl are all still around. It also was strongly hinted that The Atom who is in the Justice League is Ryan Choi, not Ray Palmer. Granted, while it’s great that we know these characters exist, there wasn’t a clear indication about when or where we’d see them. It sounds like that Karen Starr will make appearances in Mister Terrific, which makes sense as both she and Holt are running fancy tech companies. Simone coyly talked about other supporting characters in Batgirl, so maybe Stephanie or Cassandra show up there.

The New Gods have apparently been shoved off to Earth-51 and that probably means they won’t be making an appearance until Morrison finds time to write his Multiversity series. That’s rather disappointing to hear since I thought that this would be a perfect opportunity to reintroduce them, mainly because Ret-Conned HQ wants more Big Barda and Scott Free action.

I found it interesting that while Marvel spent the weekend talking up The Fearless as part of the follow up event to the currently running Fear Itself event, DC stated that there will be no major event comics for several years. Instead, the regular books will keep coming and work to build this new universe. This is the first time since I’ve been reading comics regularly that the big two are taking such different approaches. It’ll be interesting to see who works out better in the long run.