What Do You Want to Be when You Grow Up?

Here, I’ll indulge in discussing something a much better writer explored in much greater depth. In an edition of his famous Ask Chris column, former Comics Alliance writer Chris Sims (of whom I’m a huge fan) figured out why DC keeps making bad decisions. He dubbed it The Problem.

In short, The Problem is this: DC wants to be Marvel. Marvel was cool; DC was old school. So they rebooted after Crisis and tried to make their universe more like Marvel’s. The Metagene was introduced and gave DC mutants. They greenlighted books like Firestorm in an attempt to develop their own Spider-Man.

DC has rebooted and shifted and done so much because they really want to be Marvel. Even today. DC Rebirth finally seems like a start in their attempt to re-DC-ify their universe again, but the New 52? That was DC wanting to be Marvel. And what does Marvel want to be?

Well, they also want to be Marvel…just 1996’s version of Marvel.