Thread by @KurtBusiek

Some of the online reaction to what’s going on at DC makes me think of Ace the Bat-Hound again.

If you’re personally affected by the layoff, my full sympathies, and you won’t care about this. But for others...

A couple of times in the past, I’ve run across comics fans online trying to figure out whether Ace the Bat-Hound was a copy of Krypto the Superdog, or maybe of Rex the Wonder Dog, since Rex appeared three years earlier.

There was much debate and comparisons of content choices...

…after all, Ace has no powers, and he and Rex are both German Shepherds, etc.

But in the whole discussion, there were two names that didn’t come up: Lassie and Rin Tin Tin.

Ace and Krypto both debuted in 1955, and Rex in 1952, so surely that was significant, right?

But.

Lassie and Rin Tin Tin both had hit TV shows starting in 1954. Was it possible that that had an effect on comics aimed at kids in 1955?

Hmm.

Lassie, as well, had been a movie star since 1943 and in prose fiction before that. Rin Tin Tin had been in innumerable movies and a popular radio show starting in 1930.

And they were the most prominent pop culture “wonder dogs,” but not by any means the only ones.

But the fans trying to figure out the logistics of it didn’t look beyond comics. They just looked at the stuff they were most interested in and tried to figure out how two superhero dogs had arisen at much the same time, as if nothing from outside could have been involved.

Heck, Ace the Bat-Hound’s Wikipedia page still says that Ace was inspired by the success of Krypto, even though the first Ace story would have had to be written and drawn before the first Krypto story had even hit the stands.

The world of things you’re interested in is affected by the larger world, and if you only look at the stuff you’re interested in as if it exists in a vacuum, you won’t understand why things happen in it.

DC was hit by a devastating wave of layoffs yesterday, and there are people now trying to blame it on the fact that they don’t like the comics, or even on a variant cover that I don’t think has come out yet.

But the layoffs at DC were only part of a larger wave of layoffs...

…that hit Warner Bros. and HBO, because of issues that happened on a level that had nothing to do with DC Comics.

It had far more to do with people not going to the movies during a pandemic, billions of dollars in lost revenues, and the HBO Max rollout being a majot stumble.

Much like the Marvel bankruptcy of the 90s had nothing to do with the then-very-profitable Marvel line, but with corporate debt being piled on the company by its owners, who were leveraging it to buy other companies they shouldn’t have bought.

The upshot of all this is — if you’re trying to analyze a big thing, you have to look at the big picture, not try to take one piece of it and find the answers within that one piece.

It’s a big thing. It had reasons on the big-thing level.

And Ace is a good dog. They all are.