Blue Beetle & DC's New 52: Out of El Chuco and Into the World

It has been several months since DC relaunched its universe with 52 new comics titles. As we speak, several books have been cancelled and several others, less than 6 issues old, are undergoing creative changes. I've only been reading two of the new books, Swamp Thing and Blue Beetle, though I hear great things about Animal Man.

My interest in Blue Beetle stems from my fascination with Watchmen (Night Owl is the analogue for Charlton Comics' Steve Ditko-era Blue Beetle) but intensified when I came to UTEP at right around the same time as the most-recent Blue Beetle, featuring 16 year old Hispanic El Pasoan Jaime Reyes as the eponymous hero, was coming into his own. Alas, Jaime's first series was cancelled after less than 50 issues, but the character was revisited in 2011 in a new Blue Beetle series that is ongoing and not bad.

One of the things that made Jaime's first series so interesting -- and which made it a liability to DC, most likely -- was that it dealt with issues of the Borderland, immigration, and Mexican American life in the American Southwest. Jaime found himself becoming the regional hero for both El Paso and Juarez, MX. One editor has said that DC overestimated the amount of attention Americans were putting on immigration issues at the time and has stated that the first Reyes series was a "gimmick."

I don't buy it. While I do think DC tried to appeal to new, younger, browner demographics with the character, I don't think he is a gimmick, as evidenced by the fact that DC sees him as important enough to keep him around now and in how they built him up as a character on the cartoon Batman: The Brave and The Bold. They know they've created an important property.

Interesting, then, that the series' writer wants to take Jaime away from El Paso and place him in the larger, more "traditionally Euro-Anglo" world of the DCU. Frankly, I think they had to do it because keeping him in El Paso would have meant revisiting the violence in Juarez,MX. A fictional hero has no clout when he's saving lives in funny books while 8 murders a day are taking place in the real world territory he's claiming to protect. And who knows who might have protested the previous Reyes series and for what reasons.

At any rate, CBR has an interview with current Blue Beetle writer Tony Bedard in which he explains plans to move Jaime out of the Sun City and into the world at large. Read it here. Whether DC is asking him to do so to move him further away from real-world local problems and closer to global and galactic fake ones remains unknown.

Image: Are real-world issues boxing in the potential of DC's Hispanic Superhero?