The Four Color Media Monitor

And our nightmare. Mainly because of how he's still lurking in the background (and if Bob Harras was hired as EIC, he's strangely all but incognito). According to the info gathered on this page at Comics Beat, JMS said, for example:

When Dan DiDio comes out to the West Coast, we tend to get a bite for dinner to discuss projects, ideas, books and just hang. Dan is a great guy and an energetic speaker, chockful of ideas and aspirations for DC. As part of that, he shared repeatedly on and off for really more than a year his dream of rebooting the DCU and starting over.

Now it's clear: DiDio wanted all these years to write the DCU into a corner in order to justify more stunts sans direction. Identity Crisis was just part of that dismal plan, and come to think of it, so was Geoff Johns.

So I felt confident that it was coming soon (which is one reason why I felt there wouldn’t be a problem in the long run leaving the monthly books, since most of the things done in Superman and Wonder Woman would be erased by the reboot anyway, so ultimately it didn’t matter whether I stayed or left). I just couldn’t say anything at the time because I wanted to respect Dan’s privacy and his desire to do what he thought was right when he thought it was right to do it.

So that's why he cooked up those incredibly dumb stories in both books. It only makes me more skeptical of his defense that he didn't approve of Joe Quesada's mutating Spider-Man's Sins Past into something more diabolical.

To a degree, I think the success of Superman: Earth One was very helpful in showing that you could reboot a major character in a very personal sort of book and have it become a real hit (27 straight weeks and counting on the New York Times Bestseller List for graphic novels).

That's a definite shame if his rendition of Superman's found any success, if his lefty visions overrun it. Though I suspect his mindless fans may have driven some of the sales.

That said: end to end, top to bottom, front to back, this is Dan’s dream, and he’s fought long and hard to make this happen. I think it’s absolutely the right move at the right moment in history. If you think about how well the Flash, Green Lantern and Atom were rebooted during the Silver Age, those books made the characters more contemporary, personal and relevant to the 70s. Imagine how much poorer the comics world would be without those reboots, if there had never been a Hal Jordan, or a Barry Allen.

And just look at how much poorer the comics world is now, thanks to how they repeatedly do these concepts to death with PC tactics like "diversity" and even overly leftist politics, to say nothing of overwrought nostalgia and abuse of characters, despite what he claims.

Taking that approach to rebooting the majority of the DC line is a gutsy move on an unparalleled scale, and I think Dan deserves a massive round of applause for making it. The business part of the comics business has been languishing for the last several years, with decreasing sales and media attention. Something this big, this brave, is exactly the shot in the arm it needed. There’s a saying in some of the British special forces: “Who dares, wins.” I think this was and will be seen in future as a winning move.

And I think in the future, this will be seen as quite a short-term strategy that'll spell the end of DC as we know it. And DiDio doesn't deserve any applause. Not if he and his yes-men staff were going to indulge in drowning the DCU in darkness, which is very likely to continue even after a reboot.

JMS also doesn't seem to realize that there actually has been plenty of attention - even if only selectively - lavished upon the comics biz for a decade now, yet none of it has managed to salvage the industry. How can it, when the publishers keep taking steps that harm it? Even the company-wide crossovers are likely to continue, and I don't think they ever said they'll quit.

Labels: dc comics, dreadful writers, politics, Superman, violence