DC's 'Flintstones' Reboot Is So Much Bleaker Than You Would Have Expected

Even though we're living in the year 2016, it's hard to deny there's a certain 'vintage' air to our days at the moment.

After all, everything old is new again — a rejuvenated blink-182 have a #1 album in the US, Pokemon are a thing once more, and a bunch of classic cartoons from the mid-to-late 20th century are being re-envisioned as part of DC Comics' overhaul of several characters owned by Hanna-Barbera.

First announced back in January, DC's Hanna-Barbera line of comics is designed to update and modernise several of the animation company's best-loved franchises, and includes titles such as Future Quest (a sci-fi/action crossover book featuring the cast of Jonny Quest and characters such as Space Ghost, Birdman, Mightor and more), Wacky Race Land (a Mad Max-style take on Wacky Races), and even Scooby Apocalypse, now two issues deep into saddling Those Meddling Kids from Scooby Doo with their biggest challenge yet — actual mutants and monsters.

Also freshly in publication is their reboot of The Flintstones, whose #1 hit shelves this month and which actually seems to have changed its conceit a little since its initial art pitch, and not just because they've decided to age Pebbles and Bamm-Bamm into their teens.

Where early indications suggested that writer Mark Russell and artist Steve Pugh weren't looking to mess with things too much — Fred was described as "still the simple man, striving to be the king of his castle", Wilma still his "tolerant but not-indulging wife" — it becomes clear, pretty quickly, that this is a much sharper, darker and generally bleaker book than anyone was reasonably expecting.

And it's excellent.

fyi: Spoilers for The Flintstones #1 follow.

The story opens in the present day at a natural history museum, where a curator proudly explains their most popular exhibit, an unusually well-preserved Neanderthal they call 'Lorenzo', was found in the ruins of a Stone-Age civilisation "at the edge of the Bedrock Valley" before we flash back 100,000 years, to the town of Bedrock itself.

Here, we reacquaint ourselves with Fred Flintstone, ever-put-upon employee at Slate's Quarry and a veteran solider of 'the Paleolithic Wars', in which he fought with several of his fellow Homo sapiens against a simpler, vanquished group (identified only as 'tree people' so far). However, whatever animosity existed during the wars is clearly dying off, and Mr Slate wants Fred to wine and dine three Neanderthals — each "twice as strong as Homo sapiens" — to give up their 'savage' ways and convince them to join the clearly superior modern world.

Thus begins our gentle slide into total and unexpected sadness, as Fred plies the would-be workers with tickets to a fight night and all they can eat at Outback Snakehouse — after taking them to a war vets' meeting, in what is probably the single most depressing Flintstones moment in history.

It doesn't stop there. Every time you think you've hit the bottom in terms of being punched in the emotions by what could have been a toothless family-friendly comedy title, someone goes ahead and throws you a goddamn shovel and goat-jackhammer and tells you to keep digging.

Oof. Fred has been optimistically wearing that tie for his teenage daughter's entire life. He fought for his civilisation — he put his life on the line in combat that clearly involved dinosaurs and men battling side-by-side, which is a terrifying prospect — and came back home to an evidently dead-end quarry job fuelled by the cruel hope of upward mobility being forever dangled in front of him by a dictatorial employer who throws hot-tub parties and generally represents everything for which the 1% is generally criticised.

And he can't explain to the Neanderthals why any of that is a good thing, ultimately describing the concept of money to them as a means to "buy something someone else hated making". The grand irony at the base of it all, then, is that it's the Neanderthal the modern world knows as Lorenzo who ultimately gets remembered by society, and not the ultra-wealthy, then-important and powerful Mr Slate — but you'll have to read the full issue to find out why that is, because I don't want to totally give this story away.

Wilma, meanwhile, is given ample chance to spread her wings far beyond the 'tolerant wife' archetype she's been backed into for most of her existence; although she still appears to be a stay-at-home mother, she's actively pursuing her own dreams and goals as a handprint-painting artist. Even this plot line isn't free of life's random cruelty, as her excitement at being told her work will feature at an exhibit soon turns to disappointment as she discovers the "Outsider Art" section is literally outside, while a bunch of art snobs — and, to her chagrin, Fred — dismiss her seemingly rudimentary handprint paintings without a second thought.

Cue another unexpected moment of depth and sweetness as we find out more about Wilma as a person than we have… well, ever … while explaining to Fred the significance behind the works, which are far more to her than "just handprints". (Click the pics to enlarge)

Amongst all of this, the pair's best friends and neighbours, Betty and Barney Rubble, add to the drama but understandably get less page time than the Flintstones (and thus appear less changed from their original iterations, though there is still development there).

Like Fred, Barney is a veteran of the Paleolithic Wars, and has at least been given an upgrade in the looks department, if not brains. Betty, for her part, has been given a more obvious edge of unintentional antagonism injected into her character, as she represents everything Wilma wants to be, effortlessly sliding into the perfect dress while her friend and neighbour struggles to find a suitable look for her exhibition opening and pours her heart out about her nascent impostor syndrome among the art world elite.

Neither Pebbles nor Bamm-Bamm have made an in-story appearance yet, though their significant ageing will undoubtedly yield entirely new takes on the characters when they do rear their heads.

Ultimately, Russell strikes a remarkable balance in this book between biting satire and the more innocent, but still adult, humour that defined its source series; his Bedrock is both littered with the cheap, delightful puns of yore as well as the obvious pockmarks of classism, racism, warfare, capitalism and other issues that pervade our own society to this day. Even the museum curator's assumptions about Lorenzo's identity and status are dripping with irony about the fleeting nature of human importance.

Sure, there are still plenty of elements here that wholeheartedly evoke the original cartoon — for example, a couple of the Flintstones' animal appliances/servants exchange witty comments with each other, while the inclusion of a new mobile technology called the "shellphone" is so thematically perfect that it seems odd that it didn't come from the show — but this is, across the board, a much darker vision of the modern Stone-Age family than we bargained for, and the story so far is all the richer for it.

The Flintstones #1 is available now.