The Didio thing...

[My Two Cents]

I think Didio is a victim of circumstance
No matter what D C does, Marvel will keep
tossing out tons of material and D C will continue
to fall back after a brief period of selling success.
Sure D C has done things I am not a fan of,
but D C has also tried and done many things that
have kept me focused more on them.
Could they have gotten Hickman? probably not
I have to imagine if he really wanted to come,
Didio and all D C would have moved things to make
it happen.
What I respect about him is he is not pig headed
He may say and try things that some don't like,
but at the end of the day if it is not working or something
better is worth trying he will go forth with it.

[uchihafanboy]

He is the evil of DC. Every company has one, this is ours. I hope, that one day the evil will be expelled.

[Restingvoice]

I don't know if the legacy is unsustainable so much that the way DC works is they look at what sells and repeat it again and again.
Batman appearing everywhere.
The Killing Joke and A Death in The Family, so they make Joker more and more violent.
The New Teen Titans, so most incarnation or adaptation of Titans have the Beast Boy, Raven, Starfire combo and involve either Trigon or Deathstroke.

Those are the old one. The recent ones are
Harley appearing everywhere.
Damian appearing everywhere.
Although the Damian one is also because DC wants to sell BATMAN HAS A SON NOW just look at the titles of his appearance. Robin Son of Batman. Son of Batman. Batman and Son. Batman and Son. Super Sons.

So if one generation of legacy doesn't sell as much or they don't feel like money can't be made from it, they won't invest in it, and if they don't want to invest in it, they won't care if they get good writers or not. They focus on what they know sells, like Batman.

Except for Wally. Now that's just bias, considering he's in a cartoon and The Flash for a generation and they just don't want to use him again now apparently, opting for a Flash who died for a generation and taking advantage of people outside comics who don't know about the difference between Barry and Wally. I included. I didn't know the difference between Wally and Barry, as long as there's Flash and I didn't care.

Where's the logic in exchanging one character with a lot of fan base to the other fanbase just because they have the same superhero identity?

[SiegePerilous02]

Well, Superman post-Crisis was awesome to me. I think the last few years of the Jurgens run lost significant steam but from 1986-1994 still stands as the definitive Superman run for me.

Wonder Woman has gone through one origin change under Didio. Superman has gone through FOUR. And that's just since 2004.

I don't think it's comparable.

Different strokes I guess. I view Byrne's Superman as being pretty awful and one of the trifecta of things (along with TDKR and poor movie showings compared to B89 coming out not long after) that caused him to lose his spot to Batman. As OTT as it is to have four origins for him since 2004, I think Morrison's New 52 run demolishes Byrne's

Wonder Woman has had at least three under Didio: Odyssey was a shake up, then the New 52, and then Rebirth (which is a mix of different eras). Plus OYL incorporated a lot of her pre-Crisis elements into her post-Crisis history, rather sloppily. Hers also tend to be more drastic than his, and looking at the company's overall history, she's worse off than he is.

[Midnight_v]

This thread is kind of crazy from over here. So many people holding grudges, so many "Me" "Me" "MINE" posts...
and thats a little weird for me but the truth is:

Dan Didio is right.

I'm sitting here reading all this comments and trying to get a grasp of this guy, and for all the negative press he gets, even for all the unpopular choices he makes
I've gained nothing but respect for the guy.

Why? He's in a position, making unapologetic, and difficult decisions that if most of us were in we'd probably try to capitulate.
Moreover, its almost as if most of the people in this thread haven't even taken basic leadership classes, much less been in charge of any large organizational hierarchy.
Of course he's abrasive and taking all the heat for the bulk of decisions. I mean the bucks gotta stop somewhere. Its what a good leader does. Stops it "here".

This gentleman is in a top position, huge amounts of money on the line, trying to make his vision come to fruition in an environment where its simply IMPOSSIBLE to please everybody.
Barry/Wally ,Diana/Lois ,Hal/Jon/Kyle/Guy/Simon/Jessica, Babs/Steph/Cas, Jason/Dick/ whoever else....

He's in a situation where he has to levy his every decision against possibly thousands of people down talking him, calling him names, demanding answers, deriding him.

Seriously, he has ZERO reason to think that following ANYONE else's plan will put D.C. ahead for any amount of time. There so much lack of empathy going on here its
laughable.
Every move he makes. "Not enough Black" "Not enough Girl-power" "Too much Change" "Not Enough Change" "I want my Favorite, MOAR!"

PEOPLE, understand this, if you were in the same hot seat? THE SAME PEOPLE here hating would be hating you for every choice you make.

He embraces it. Pushes toward the changes that HE thinks will help his company, financially, which is ultimately his job and he's NOT WRONG. He's right.
He seems to get a lot of unjust criticism.
Hated or no, if it was you, wouldn't you be trying to do the same thing?
Hell yes you would. and this thread would be about you.

[Lee Stone]

When DiDio greenlit the Azzarello Wonder Woman run, he managed to destroy 35+ years of DC readership and fandom in the pages of a single title. Since then, the vandalism has mostly been repaired, but he pretty much ruined my trust in the company and my willingness to trust the good faith of the people who run it. I gave up reading DC for the duration, and I still read way fewer DC books than I used to.

Ironically, the Azzarello Wonder Woman was the only thing I did like about New52, and I read all the titles for the first three months.
Granted, I hear things got better once DC stopped being so heavy-handed with the gore.
But, first impressions and all that.

[Comic-Reader Lad]

This thread is kind of crazy from over here. So many people holding grudges, so many "Me" "Me" "MINE" posts...
and thats a little weird for me but the truth is:

Dan Didio is right.

Dan, I appreciate your coming here to speak to us directly.

OK, in all seriousness, I'm glad that Barry and Hal came back under his watch. Hal has generally been pretty great since Geoff Johns brought him back.

Yes, we do get possessive of our particular favorites. That's to be expected. I started reading DC in the 1970s, so I like Hal Jordan, Barry Allen, Oliver Queen, Ray Palmer, Katar Hol -- all the Silver Agers that were still kicking in the Bronze Age.

I prefer the JSA on its own Earth. I prefer the pre-Crisis Legion continuity. I prefer Marv Wolfman's allowing the Teen Titans to grow up into their own identities rather than having them take over their mentors' -- although he did get the ball rolling with the legacy thing with Wally taking over for Barry in Crisis.

The problem I have with DiDio is that he really doesn't know how to make a plan and see it through. He gives up and upends everything for a new status quo.

I applaud him trying to find new markets and distribution channels, but it seems he's even given up on the Wal-Mart thing. First, we heard it was successful, then we heard there would be titles added, then we heard that the material would no longer be exclusive to Wal-Mart. I have really no idea what's going on with that and if I should care.

I don't know if that was all his doing, but it seems vintage-DiDio to me. You can get whiplash with all the changes he makes that come out of the blue.

[Anthony Shaw]

Maybe he did in the later DK works, but I always wondered if he intended the dead Robin in TDKR to be Dick, and changed it to Jason to be more in line with then-current DC. Especially as it was a response to the campy Adam West series, which obviously had Dick as Robin.
Carrie's arrival occurs while he is thinking about Dick's absence, so she seems to be filling the void Dick specifically left, not Jason. And at the time, I wouldn't think Jason was distinguishable enough from Dick to make him favorable to Miller.

Thanks for the response.

[Ascended]

This thread is kind of crazy from over here. So many people holding grudges, so many "Me" "Me" "MINE" posts...
and thats a little weird for me but the truth is:

Moreover, its almost as if most of the people in this thread haven't even taken basic leadership classes, much less been in charge of any large organizational hierarchy.
Of course he's abrasive and taking all the heat for the bulk of decisions. I mean the bucks gotta stop somewhere. Its what a good leader does. Stops it "here".

PEOPLE, understand this, if you were in the same hot seat? THE SAME PEOPLE here hating would be hating you for every choice you make.

He embraces it. Pushes toward the changes that HE thinks will help his company, financially, which is ultimately his job and he's NOT WRONG. He's right.
He seems to get a lot of unjust criticism.

To a large part I very much agree with you. A lot of fans will take a decision they personally dislike and label it a failure on that merit alone. And no, Im sure most people haven't taken any kind of organizational behavior classes or had any role in major administration, so they'll be unaware of a lot of the business theory that shapes and defines a industry. And even for the posters who are in business, I doubt many work in print, and fewer (if any) are in the business of comic books. So there's certainly a bunch of quirks that are unique to this particular genre, industry, and company that we know nothing about. So in a way it's presumptuous of us to judge; with our limited knowledge we don't have the whole picture and cannot make a informed decision about what is "good" for DC. All we can do is judge our personal enjoyment and look at some limited sales figures.

It is what it is. It's the fan's prerogative to be selfish and biased opinions are why we have market research. Hell, the fact that so many fans are so invested in these characters and fail to separate the creative elements from the business elements is probably a sign of success; at least people care enough to feel this strongly, right?

But I can't agree that Didio is (always) right. Yes, a lot of his choices have turned out well and don't get enough credit. He's not inept. Yes, he's limited in what he can really accomplish because of the basic business realities he's dealing with. And yes, him taking the blame for everything is good leadership (better for fans to hate Didio than the talent). But there are a number of things he's done or supported that indicate he's not (always) making smart business choices.

The New52 for example. That was a financial success and a number of really good books came out of it. We can even discount the slapped together, contradictory continuity and write it off as a result of the whole thing being rushed by WB (as rumors say) and the heavy-handed editorial control (that drove so many creators away) as the company trying to present a unified front even as the editorial groups were trying to figure out what their game plan was. Sometimes sh*t happens in business and these problems were just that (wretched as they were). But that reboot was neck deep in bad 90's troupes, which tells me that Didio doesn't have his fingers on the pulse of the fandom. No one wanted a return of 90's excess. Having Jim Lee design the costumes was a mistake, as the man is not good at design (he does a great pinup but his original designs are deeply flawed), and the short-term spike in attention that announcement got certainly wasn't worth the long-term fallout. And, not to beat a dead horse, but his treatment of IP's that he himself dislikes shows that he's not paying attention to the market research. He's tried to cripple IP's that are quite popular and I still struggle to understand why. You dont have to personally like a IP to recognize it's viable, and he's tried to ruin characters he should have been pushing and investing in. And there's a number of other things that have been equally questionable.

It often seems that Didio is fairly good at the short-term, but horrible at anything long-term, or at recognizing the profit potential of nearly anything he doesn't personally understand. It's to be expected that personal bias will influence a decision here and there; we're only human after all. Didio however, appears to do this constantly, and that's terrible, terrible business.

We fans are usually overly critical of the man, but he's f**ked up more than enough to warrant his reputation even if it is inflated.

[Dr. Ellingham]

This thread is kind of crazy from over here. So many people holding grudges, so many "Me" "Me" "MINE" posts...
and thats a little weird for me but the truth is:

Dan Didio is right.

Moreover, its almost as if most of the people in this thread haven't even taken basic leadership classes, much less been in charge of any large organizational hierarchy.
Of course he's abrasive and taking all the heat for the bulk of decisions.

Every move he makes. "Not enough Black" "Not enough Girl-power" "Too much Change" "Not Enough Change" "I want my Favorite, MOAR!"
.

Brilliant.

There's typically a big disconnect for hardcore fans - whether it's music, books, TV, etc. They think the content is perpetually aimed at them, or should be - but that's not realistic. I also don't like stuff Didio has done, and I haven't bought a comic in 8-9 years. But DC isn't aiming at keeping readers from 20+ years ago around, so that's fine.

For many years I've worked for senior-level folks at successful companies. When executives stand in front of owners, CEO, investors, and say they can't deliver on commitments, they're typically gone quickly. Well - Didio has been running DC editorial since 2003, through significant changes in both the landscape and WB leadership. So it's obvious he knows his role - make comics that appeal to both the DM and bookstores, bring in top talent on their premiere IPs, gear DC for digital and maintain operational costs. If he wasn't doing those things, he'd have been let go in less than 3 months. Instead he's been promoted a few times.

[Frontier]

And you don't need to condemn the character who did so for the twenty years prior. Granted, I don't like NuBarry because he's some weird amalgam of Wally and Barry and just feels like a cynical cashgrab, but I'm fine with Barry in concept. Just wish they'd stop trying so hard to sell me a character I already liked.

I like Barry but am utterly tired of writers writing him interchangeably from Wally or treating him like a sad sack because of his dead mom.

[DetectiveStrange]

Frankly, I don't think DiDio has done a great job overall. It's not simply that I don't agree with his creative choices - which I often don't, but those are his decisions to make - it's that I don't think he always carries them out very well. But that's just my two cents.

Anyway, here's more insight from a comic writer about DiDio's rise to power (quoting Patrick Gerard from another thread):

"- Underpinning a lot of this stuff is, from what I gather, Paul Levitz was trying to choose a successor to run DC. Except what a variety of folks did or did not know was that Dan DiDio had been handpicked by somebody at Warner Bros. to take over DC before he wrote his first comic. The only reason DiDio showed up in the first place was to run the company the way WB wanted. Levitz didn't know or didn't get the full memo and was trying to find alternative candidates to weigh against DiDio. Levitz interviewed Waid. I think he talked to Loeb. Loeb and Waid always got along FAIRLY well.

- But everybody who interviewed for Levitz's job had issues with DiDio. It's hard and probably unfair to assign blame on a message board post without all the facts but DiDio was trying to move into a job he'd been promised maybe 5 years before. Meanwhile, you had competing offers made to other people that upset DiDio, who spent five-plus years of his life turning down other work, planning to take that job. It became hard for some of these people to work together for awhile. So you had a big exodus from DC to Marvel of people who, I think, had awkward relationships with DiDio largely because of conflict between Levitz and Kevin Tsujihara and some other folks. Diane Nelson was brought in, in part, I think, because of how frayed the WB/DC relationships were so she could be a neutral party -- and because she was seen as being able to expand the young girls and Young Adult markets based on her background with Harry Potter and other stuff.

- On top of all of this is that I think there's a lot of folks who misread DiDio in part because, well... He's a troll. A bonafied troll. Yes, he wanted Nightwing dead for years and planned it various ways. But all the stuff about hating Nightwing was playacting. He did it because he thought it would upset the most people. He has a very soap opera/pro-wrestling view and he's more of a Silver-Age/Bronze-Age Marvel guy than DC. So he's always trying to inject that 70s Marvel "Hank Pym becomes a wifebeater" type stuff in. Because he has a view that the more comics upset or provoke people, the more they sell. Honestly, if he wants a character dead, he probably likes that character and is picking on them because he wants to stir up pitchforks and torches. He's backed off that SOME largely because outrage works differently online now. But he operates very much from kind of a Bill Jemas worldview: "If you're happy with what we're doing, our sales will suffer." That's... a difficult thing for some folks IN COMICS to mesh with. Some folks just want a clean and fairly neutral status quo so they can tell clever one off stories kind of like Batman: The Animated Series.

In some ways, Loeb and DiDio got along super-well. DiDio greenlit stuff Levitz probably wouldn't have. He hired Loeb for All-Star Batman. (Frank Miller was a replacement hire. There's a first issue in a drawer somewhere of a Loeb/Art Adams All-Star Batman #1.) But he also made Loeb's job harder and kept wanting to tinker with some things in the opposite direction.

Loeb was always trying to fuse the Byrne continuity with the Silver-Age so that you'd just have one 75 year Superman continuity like what Morrison later did with Batman. DiDio wasn't keen on that and neither was Waid, exactly. Waid loves the Silver Age as a fan but he's the first guy to throw it into the woodchipper if he thinks something is silly, unrealistic, or embarrassing. (Johns shared an office with Loeb.)

The tug of war gave us Superman origin reboots about every 18 months. And Loeb more or less walked from the monthly Superman book at the start of that because he wanted a stable run."

https://community.cbr.com/showthread...ghts-on-hs-run

(Patrick Gerard has some interesting insights to that era of Superman if you read his other posts.)

[skyvolt2000]

But I can't agree that Didio is (always) right. Yes, a lot of his choices have turned out well and don't get enough credit. He's not inept. Yes, he's limited in what he can really accomplish because of the basic business realities he's dealing with. And yes, him taking the blame for everything is good leadership (better for fans to hate Didio than the talent). But there are a number of things he's done or supported that indicate he's not (always) making smart business choices.

The New52 for example. That was a financial success and a number of really good books came out of it. We can even discount the slapped together, contradictory continuity and write it off as a result of the whole thing being rushed by WB (as rumors say) and the heavy-handed editorial control (that drove so many creators away) as the company trying to present a unified front even as the editorial groups were trying to figure out what their game plan was. Sometimes sh*t happens in business and these problems were just that (wretched as they were). But that reboot was neck deep in bad 90's troupes, which tells me that Didio doesn't have his fingers on the pulse of the fandom. No one wanted a return of 90's excess. Having Jim Lee design the costumes was a mistake, as the man is not good at design (he does a great pinup but his original designs are deeply flawed), and the short-term spike in attention that announcement got certainly wasn't worth the long-term fallout. And, not to beat a dead horse, but his treatment of IP's that he himself dislikes shows that he's not paying attention to the market research. He's tried to cripple IP's that are quite popular and I still struggle to understand why. You dont have to personally like a IP to recognize it's viable, and he's tried to ruin characters he should have been pushing and investing in. And there's a number of other things that have been equally questionable.

The BOLD is what fans are upset about and are tired of getting told to accept it.

Fans are getting defensive because they are being told to accept CRAP or you are not a real fan. Barry or Hal fans would be out for blood if that was them in Heroes in Crisis.

Dan put himself in that hot seat with the you are going to like who I like versus what the market might say.

I applaud him trying to find new markets and distribution channels, but it seems he's even given up on the Wal-Mart thing. First, we heard it was successful, then we heard there would be titles added, then we heard that the material would no longer be exclusive to Wal-Mart. I have really no idea what's going on with that and if I should care.

There are some things Dan can't control.
HE can control WHO is in that content. Aside from Comic Book Store troll guy who would buy those majority reprints of stuff already in trade and still in print at the library?
Especially if it's nothing but Batman & Superman and WW crap. Archie could have warned them about that. You can only reprint the same crap so many times before someone notices.

I think that DC app did more to derail that and add in the fact not every Wal-Mart sold those. I found copies at Half Price Books.

[Dred]

We already got Heroes in Crisis with Hal. It was Parallax, and it resulted in a group of fans who organized death threats and harassment campaigns at DC creators.

Fans nowadays aren't a tenth as toxic as HEAT was. But maybe DC will go full Parallax with Wally and things will go further south. The irony is HEAT got exactly what they wanted.

[kingaliencracker]

Different strokes I guess. I view Byrne's Superman as being pretty awful and one of the trifecta of things (along with TDKR and poor movie showings compared to B89 coming out not long after) that caused him to lose his spot to Batman. As OTT as it is to have four origins for him since 2004, I think Morrison's New 52 run demolishes Byrne's

Wonder Woman has had at least three under Didio: Odyssey was a shake up, then the New 52, and then Rebirth (which is a mix of different eras). Plus OYL incorporated a lot of her pre-Crisis elements into her post-Crisis history, rather sloppily. Hers also tend to be more drastic than his, and looking at the company's overall history, she's worse off than he is.

Wonder Woman's history more or less remained in tact from 1986 up to the New 52. I think the most significant change was that she was reestablished as a JLA founder post-Infinits Crisis but that was pretty much it.

Superman has had Birthright, Secret Origin, New 52, and Rebirth, all of which made significant changes to his history.

I really enjoyed Morrison's run, but it was too short and not followed up very well. Even if you didn't like Byrne's revamp, what followed it was Exile, Krisis of the Krimson Kryptonite, Time and Time Again, Panic in the Sky, Death of Superman, Funeral for a Friend, Reign of the Supermen, and The Return of Superman. So yeah, that era definitely stands out to be as the best, at least consistently and in my lifetime.