I’ve been reasonably critical of DC’s company-wide relaunch, but three months in I’m softening slightly. For all the stuff DC has done wrong here, they’ve also done a few things right.

* The Detective Comics Batman is pretty interesting. Very much an old-school Batman story with roots in the kind of Strange Tales horror stories we had before the Comics Code. I continue to enjoy Wonder Woman, which gives us an entirely new–and altogether superior–version of the character, rooted in Greek mythology. And I’ve even fallen a little bit for Gail Simone’s Batgirl. As much as I liked Barbara Gordon’s Oracle, as Batgirl again she’s definitely a fourth-tier hero. And it’s kind of charming. She’s a little like the goody-goody version of Jessica Jones: always a step behind, slightly crippled by self-doubt. But clever, in her own way.

* I don’t actually like Grant Morrison’s Action Comics. Or the new Justice League. But I haven’t jumped ship on them. Yet.

* The single smartest thing about the new DC universe is that it does not appear to be a coherent universe. So far as I can tell, there’s no character continuity. Not just in events, but even in how they’re written. The Batman of Justice League is tonally very different from the Batman of Detective Comics, who is almost a different character than the Batman in the plain-vanilla Batman title. A Darkseid invasion in one book does not seem to have bearing on stories in any of the other books.

What this does is free up the writers to simply tell stories. Detailed continuity has really crippled both Marvel and DC over the last couple decades–especially when it comes to the yearly event books, which then push their tendrils into the publishers’ full line, interrupting normal storytelling and forcing the entire company to deal with the same central topic. It’s not an accident that over the last 10 years or so, some of the best storytelling from the two big houses has come in runs that were deliberately out-of-continuity: The early Ultimate books; Alias; Gotham Central; The New Frontier; Wonder Woman: Hiketeia, Joker.

I’m not sure DC had to reboot it’s entire line to do escape the narrative confines of continuity, but it’s probably good that they did, whatever the route they took.

* At the end of the day, no matter now much I’ve complained about the New 52, the central fact is this: After three months, I’m following maybe a half-dozen DC books. In the three years prior to the relaunch, that number was a consistent zero.

I’ve got a short item up at the Standard on Superman renouncing his citizenship. It’s another brilliant move from the crack team running DC.

In related news, I found a high-grade copy of Silver Surfer #4 last night . . .

Update: Here’s is a perfect example of a very particular kind of journalism. Over at Reuters, Alex Dobuzinski has a piece about the reaction to the news of Superman’s impending citizenship renouncement. He writes:

In the comic, Superman never actually renounces his citizenship, he only talks about his plans to do that.

But conservative commentators reacted with disgust to the new storyline, given that the fictional superhero has long proclaimed he stood for “Truth, Justice and the American way.”

In a blog post at The Weekly Standard, senior writer Jonathan Last questioned Superman’s beliefs, now that he seems to have rejected the United States.

“Does he believe in British interventionism or Swiss neutrality?” Last wrote. “You see where I’m going with this: If Superman doesn’t believe in America, then he doesn’t believe in anything.”

Maybe “conservative commentators” have reacted with disgust. And I’m certainly bent out of shape about it. But the point of my complaint–and I don’t think it was buried too deeply–wasn’t “hey, here’s another bit of PC nonsense.” It was: “Hey, Superman needs this anchor to give his character dramatic weight and meaning and what DC has done strips him of that.”

I realize this is a (slightly) nuanced argument but isn’t it pretty obvious that it’s a literary, not a political one?

Whoa.

Catching up with Brian Azzarello’s Luthor which is, so far, probably the best Superman story ever. You might remember Azzarello as the guy who wrote the really great Joker graphic novel.

Once you put aside the childish Gene Hackman Luthor and the green power-suited Super Powers Luthor, the only version of the character that really makes any sense is an Ayn-Randian objectivist whose only interest in professional villainy is in seeing Superman put down because of what The Big Red S represents. In the opening of Luthor, Azzarello’s Lex puts a very fine point on this: “All men are created equal,” he says, talking about Supes. “All men. You are not a man.”

In this imagining, Luthor is in some ways just a more extroverted Bruce Wayne. Of course, Bruce and Clark are respectful friends. But as we all know, the minute Batman learns of Superman’s existence, he begins trying to figure out how to kill him. You know, just in case.