This time, the Giant Ants have come for YOU

So, last night I was playing a solitaire game of Heroclix, with the 1954 film Them playing in the background... not because I was actually watching it, mind you. It's just one of those films you simply don't change the channel from or turn off once it's on. Truly, the finest film ever made in which giant ants kidnap children in Los Angeles.

Anyway, I wasn't paying it any mind, so intent was I on the Dynamic Duo's attempts to get past the Joker's goons. Suddenly, I was jolted out of my Gothamite reverie by two quick and truncated iterations of.... the Wilhelm Scream.

Now, I have absolutely no doubt whatsoever that if you are reading my blog, that you have heard the Wilhelm Scream at some point, although you may not have recognized it as such. You'd have to have avoided films nearly entirely never to heard it. My father, may he rest in peace, knew next to nothing about comic books, but he was a movie nut who was able to rattle off the filmography of Francis X. Bushman long, long before there was IMDB.com. And my dear sweet white-haired flower-tending mother is a monster/horror movie expert who's counting the days until she can toddle down to the Bijou with her bonnet and reticule to see "Final Destination 5" in 3D. As result, while I'm definitely not a movie fan, I can't help but pay attention to movie trivia, like the Wilhelm Scream.

So, while it had slipped my mind that the Wilhelm Scream occurs in "Them" (four times, in fact), even in the distant background it was instantly recognizable and shook me from my comic book dreaming.

Well, the same thing is happening right now. Except the giant ants have been replaced by...

universal reboot.

And I can no longer fight the schadenfreude of it all. I am now laughing, out loud, at the Wilhelm-screaming panic of my fellow comic book fans. "*Sputter*! The... the continuity that I've invested so much time and emotional commitment to is... is being tossed aside! BETRAYERS!!!!"

I puff my metaphorical cigarette nonchalantly at your distress... welcome to 1986, kids. You'll get zero sympathy from my corner (that's zero as in "Zero Hour") during your little crisis (that's crisis as in, well, every other reboot). Where were your voices when the Penny Plunderer was erased but the Giant Penny remained? Why were you silent when people started pretending that J'onn J'onnzz, who had been absent for the entire Bronze Age "has always been the soul of the Justice League"? Where was your outcry over losing characters when they killed Supergirl or Vibe? Where were you when my DCU was taken from me...?

Perhaps you weren't a reader at the time, or weren't even born yet. For whatever reason, you didn't care about these things, because, well... they were before time. They weren't part of your comic books.

When I was a kid, comic books and associated publications had reprints of Golden Age and Silver Age material in them. It was wild and weird or at least very very different from what I was used to reading. But I was still trained by DC to consider it an important or at least relevant part of "my comic books" and their background.

When the Giant Ants of the Crises came, I didn't scream. I knew I didn't need all those stories "in continuity". They were, after all, still in my head, which has a greater capacity to hold stories than continuity does. Continuity has trouble containing contradictory stories within itself; my head does not. And, who knows, clearing the decks for new stories might bring me some new stories I might enjoy. Which is, in fact, what happened.

You didn't care when the Giant Ants came for someone else's version of the DCU. So now the Giant Ants of the Universal Reboot (and, yeah, I will continue to call it that, no matter what DC tells me) have come to destroy your version of Barbara Gordon. Or the Atom. Or the Teen Titans. Or Superman.


Well, you know what? I do not care; man up. You don't own these characters and neither do the creators who write their adventures; the publisher does. Do I always like what they do with them? No. But I do like the fact that they are, for the first time in what seems like forever, more interested in getting new readers and in going forward than they are in looking backward and keeping old readers (that means you now, kiddies; welcome to adulthood).

You've been enjoying your shrinking picnic in your private little sandbox of continuity for some thirty years now. And now the Giant Ants-- the fiends!-- have come to spoil it for you.


Go ahead and run away screaming the Wilhelm Scream if you want; I'll be laughing at you as you do. Because you, the reader, can, will, and eventually must be replaced. DC knows this, even if you're only just figuring it out.

Or you could stay and welcome our new insect overlords, as I intend to. Because the Giant Ants will win; whether you will win depends on which side you pick, not how hard you fight.

Say "uncle" to the ants!