DC Rebirth: I Haven't Been This Excited Since Crisis on Infinite Earths

I'm old. No, I mean I'm ancient. Yesterday I rounded the corner on forty-nine, and for my birthday DC put out a bunch of books. Never mind that it was a Wednesday anyway. I'm old, let me think what I want to think.

Being old, I'm jaded. I was a comics reader -- a DC reader -- at the twilight of the Silver Age, into the dawn of the Bronze Age. And, God help me, I've tried to stick with it through the years, through all the twists and turns, the bad decisions and some good ones. I'd pretty much given up through the New 52, reading only a very few titles that still made sense to my history-filled mind that wouldn't let go of the past. So when I saw that DC was going through a "Rebirth" my initial reactions were cynical: "Well, that sure lasted a long time."

My cynicism blinded me to my own history. There was a name attached to this project: REBIRTH. There was also a writer attached to this project: Geoff Johns. A younger, more mentally-nimble me would have immediately put two-and-two together and realized this was the same Geoff Johns who miraculously (in a brighter rescued both The Flash and Green Lantern from publication obscurity -- both in titles that carried the heading REBIRTH. I should have had faith.

So I read REBIRTH #1. In my car. I'm old, I'm allowed to do things like that. I looked at the first few pages, just glancing, seeing the artwork looked nice, seeing a mysterious voice in text boxes set things up.

And then lightning struck.

And I read the whole thing. In my car.

I haven't been this excited about a DC Comic since CRISIS ON INFINITE EARTHS #1. And I was -- well, never mind how young I was when that came out, because inside right now, I'm that kid again.

The history is coming back -- or parts of it, maybe viewed in a new, fresh way. One of my favorite characters is coming back as well, hopefully to stay, and I couldn't be happier. And it's not just that a character is coming back, but character in its most general sense is returning to the DC Universe, or at least so it would seem. And with a twist thrown into the whole thing from a DC Comics series that I never in a million years would have tied to a major DC event, something that -- if it ties into the quote that I think it ties into -- I have to think that God in the DC Universe may have just been given a name, and that name just might be Osterman.

Phil Jimenez, Ethan Van Sciver, Ivan Reis, and Gary Frank have all contributed their talented pencils and pens to this effort, and I don't think there's a coincidence that all of their styles -- their tight lines and hyper-attention to detail -- stem from a school of design that arguably began with George Perez, the aesthetic architect behind the original CRISIS ON INFINITE EARTHS. Bringing in these guys to illustrate the story, written by a guy who is a master at playing the long game in storytelling, truly evokes the COIE feeling and all that came with that era -- an era where you had favorite books, but you wanted to read all of the books -- and not because they were tied into any event, but because they all shared that same universe of characters you loved and that feeling naturally seeped through the boundaries of each title.

So why am I smiling like that 5 year old kid who used to get Curt Swan and Murphy Anderson SUPERMAN comics from the barber shop? Because, like that mysterious person in REBIRTH, I've seen the future. And everything is going to be all right.