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Batman writer Scott Snyder explains his biggest regret about The New 52 and its failure to utilize the mysterious Pandora.
With the massive New 52 initiative all but erased in the pages of DC’s comics, star writer Scott Snyder revealed his biggest regret about the controversial reboot.
For the 10th anniversary of the New 52, which saw DC relaunch all of its titles with new number ones, backstories, and character designs, Polygon spoke to the creatives involved with the project about what exactly went wrong. Since its launch, DC has essentially removed all of the new continuity elements, and Snyder discussed just how challenging the concept was — and what it was missing.
“We didn’t really have time. We were starting over! Making the characters younger, their histories malleable, and because it was all so raw and unformed, so new and exciting to everyone, there wasn’t really a chance to build an uber-story yet — we were making it up every day and then tearing it apart and then making it up all over again,” Snyder said. “So we were all just working on the fly — it was innovative and fun, but as exciting as unpredictability can be, it can wear on everyone a bit.”
The main failure many have pointed to is that all of the new stories and books lacked a cohesive story that tied things together. Instead, different creators went in different, sometimes contradictory, directions. In the beginning, however, there was a tease of an overarching idea with the mysterious Pandora, who was introduced in 2011’s Flashpoint #5. Pandora unified the DC universe with the worlds of Vertigo and Wildstorm before appearing in the first issue of each of the New 52 titles.
In the end, the character didn’t matter much. For Scott, the failure to follow through on Pandora and have an interconnected story is what doomed the New 52 from the start.
“My big regret, architecturally, is that in all the exuberance we didn’t get a chance to build something equally exciting when it came to an overarching story, something to play out in a year or two, something that spoke to the spirit of the whole initiative,” Snyder continued. “Something risky and bold but that also eventually looked back at legacy, like, ‘OK, the story is, Darkseid removed five years from everyone’s lives, and the only character that knows this is Pandora, and she’s going to go through this and this and this, but it’ll play out over a couple years, and so hint at that and that and that, and in the end, what the heroes will realize is, new is good, change is good, but you have to respect the past too and that’s what the final fight with Darkseid will be about.'”
Dan DiDio, the co-publisher of DC Comics during the New 52 and one of the architects of the initiative, also spoke about the lack of follow-through on Pandora, saying, “There was probably going to be a greater role for the Pandora character early on. She was going to be a little bit of a mechanical character behind the scenes who was working some of the differences out on how the world moved forward from what happened prior to Flashpoint.”
Despite the grand plans for her future importance to the DC Universe, Pandora’s last appearance was in the publisher’s next reboot, 2016’s DCU: Rebirth #1.
Source: Polygon
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