I’m not much of a comic person. I don’t go out and buy new issues of things, with a couple of rare exceptions, and there’s a narrow band of trade paperbacks that I buy – Y: The Last Man and The Walking Dead, for examples, and the Buffy Season Eight stuff. Any of the “traditional” comic trades that I have fall into the “event” category – stuff like Batman: Year One, Watchmen, that sort of thing.
I have toyed with the idea of getting into DC and Marvel’s core comic universes, picking up issues and jumping straight into the deep end, and before I lost my job last year I actually picked up a few issues of various stuff to get myself started. Having a friend who works at Marvel certainly helps – she can, when she’s not busy working on Super Secret Projects™, provide me with new materials to peruse. Which is nice.
I had yet to truly delve into DC’s stuff, and now they’ve rebooted all of their core lines there’s really no incentive for me to do so. Why would I want to invest in any of their comic universes when they’ve made it clear that they’ll quite happily undo years, sometimes decades of history to try and bring in new readers? What reason do I have to get attached to characters, or to follow storylines that may be largely irrelevant a handful of years down the line?
So congratulations, DC Comics. In your pursuit of potential new readers, you’ve alienated a potential new reader.