The Four Color Media Monitor

I almost forgot about this news from at least a week ago (via Batman News), which reveals DC's hired Dixon again after more than a decade, to write a Bane maxi-series:

In “Bane: Conquest,” the title villain will reunite with Bird, Trogg and Zombie, his henchmen that have been mostly missing in action since their introduction in the 1993-1993 “Batman: Knightfall” arc, but who re-surfaced as part of the “I Am Bane” storyline. According to DC’s official description of the series, Bane will take his criminal ambitious out of Gotham, in search of “new cities to conquer and new enemies to crush.”

“Always happy to be reunited with Graham and this is an especially heady experience returning to our most significant contribution to the Batman mythos,” Dixon, who created Bane with Nolan and Doug Moench, said in a statement. “The best aspect of this project is that it’s not a cameo or nostalgia tour for Graham and I. It’s more like we’re back after all this time to work on a truly epic story about Bane and we haven’t lost a step.”

If they don't go by the awful path DC set in the mid-2000s, which also saw Spoiler being killed as a spiteful publicity stunt before being reversed, then they may have a good direction in store. The 4 dollar price, however, isn't very encouraging (and if memory serves, DC did boomerang back on those more costly sums just shortly after lowering them). CBR even noted:

“Bane: Conquest” also marks the highest-profile superhero comic book work from Dixon or Nolan in recent years, though the two have collaborated with each other as recently as 2015’s “Shadow Tiger” from Graphic India. Dixon has stated in the past, including in the 2014 Wall Street Journal op-ed “How Liberalism Became Kryptonite for Superman” that he wrote with artist Paul Rivoche, that his position as a conservative comics creator (which has included writing the 2016 graphic novel adaptation of “Clinton Cash,” a book highly critical of Bill and Hillary Clinton) has at times made it difficult for him to get work in the comics industry.

At the time Dan DiDio originally had him fired, yes, I'm sure his politics could've been one of the reasons why DiDio got rid of him. Another is surely because he viewed Dixon as part of an "old guard" that didn't suit DiDio's reprehensible ideas for what the DCU should be. It could be that, after Donald Trump's election last year, the higher echelons at DC finally came to terms with how their leftism had failed and become a problem, just like it's been with Marvel, and, just like at Marvel, DC may have decided to take certain steps to prove they're willing to apologize for all the serious errors they made. But no doubt, they've still got a long way to go, and it'd be ill-advised to think they've abandoned their own ultra-leftism any more than Marvel has.

For now, their reconciliation with Dixon is a positive step in the right direction. It's a terrible shame and disgrace, however, that it's taken DC over a decade to recognize any of their past mistakes and try to reverse them.

Labels: Batman, dc comics, good writers, politics