The Didio thing...

[Lee Stone]

So...

what was Dan Didio doing before he became head honcho of DC and second, how did Jim Lee get so much power there???

I believe Didio was working on a cartoon, aptly named 'Reboot'.

For Lee...
It's a combination of several things...

1. the removal of Chris Claremont from X-Men (displays his determination in climbing up)
2. the rallying of Marvel's hot artists to up and quit and form Image (displays his influence over others)
3. DC wanted Wildstorm
4. Jim Lee's art sells and DC needed a high profile artist to pull $
5. Bob Harras (buddy from Marvel)

[Lee Stone]

I wonder if that’s why there’s been such an effort in recent years to characterize Deathstroke as a Batman villain when up until the last few years, he’s been mostly, well...a Titans villain and is still probably best known for that.

Pretty much.
Deathstroke was one of DC's best villain creations and has been shuffled to Batman (and the JLA in Identity Crisis).

Some people (generally those that don't like Titans) see it as a 'step up' for the character.
I see it as being the same as if Magneto went to become a Spider-Man villain and never mentioned his ties to the X-Men ever again.

All of Deathstroke's character development under Wolfman, which is what made him popular, involved the Titans. And that history has been removed.
And I'm talking the real history, including Grant, HIVE, Terra, Joe, Adeline and 'Judas' Contract (not 'Lazarus' Contract).
So they positioned him to be a generic DCU-wide merceneary/hitman.

[Green Goblin of Sector 2814]

Pretty much.
Deathstroke was one of DC's best villain creations and has been shuffled to Batman (and the JLA in Identity Crisis).

Some people (generally those that don't like Titans) see it as a 'step up' for the character.
I see it as being the same as if Magneto went to become a Spider-Man villain and never mentioned his ties to the X-Men ever again.

All of Deathstroke's character development under Wolfman, which is what made him popular, involved the Titans. And that history has been removed.
And I'm talking the real history, including Grant, HIVE, Terra, Joe, Adeline and 'Judas' Contract (not 'Lazarus' Contract).
So they positioned him to be a generic DCU-wide merceneary/hitman.

I agree with pretty much everything you said here. And I think the analogy is very appropriate. Don't get me wrong, I don't mind (and even sometimes like) Deathstroke fighting Batman (or Magneto fighting Spider-Man) from time to time, but like you said, the characters' backstory and ties to the Titans and history with them was what made him an interesting villain. At least Priest seems to be aware of that.

[DrNewGod]

Pretty much.
Deathstroke was one of DC's best villain creations and has been shuffled to Batman (and the JLA in Identity Crisis).

Some people (generally those that don't like Titans) see it as a 'step up' for the character.
I see it as being the same as if Magneto went to become a Spider-Man villain and never mentioned his ties to the X-Men ever again.

All of Deathstroke's character development under Wolfman, which is what made him popular, involved the Titans. And that history has been removed.
And I'm talking the real history, including Grant, HIVE, Terra, Joe, Adeline and 'Judas' Contract (not 'Lazarus' Contract).
So they positioned him to be a generic DCU-wide merceneary/hitman.

Rather Cheshire's fate too, no?

[Godlike13]

To be fair though, Deathstoke is currently involved in his current series’ second crossover with Teen Titans.

[EsotericFailures]

With a lot of stuff Didio does I wonder how much of it is stuff that is bad for DC or just something I don't like.

Bringing back both Barry Allen and Barbara Gordon Batgirl were moves that were regressive moves and bad for the storytelling of their respective franchises and I'm still sort of bitter about both. The end of Oracle was especially terrible because she was one of the few major disabled characters DC had. But at the same time Barry Allen is now the star of a moderately successful TV show and the DCEU, and his simple origin story makes him easier to adapt than Wally's legacy orientated one. Barbara Gordon is the most well known Batgirl by far so having comics about her does make sense.

Somethings he does like trying to kill Dick Grayson are bad for business (at least if that got carried out) but a lot of the most controversial decisions like The New 52 were very good for DC commercially. (though in that case I stand by the idea being good and much of the execution botched)

[WallyWestFlash]

So...

what was Dan Didio doing before he became head honcho of DC and second, how did Jim Lee get so much power there???

He was listed in the credits as VP of marketing at about 2002.

Then just about a few months to a year later he suddenly appeared at the top. Editor in cheif I think it was.

How he got to the top over night I don't know. Probably that was the time he found those compromising photos of one of the heads of Warner bros. Thats been keeping him at the top all these years despite his constant driving DC into the ground with his personal, bias decisions.

[DetectiveStrange]

If you're curious about the kinds of ideas he goes for, here's his first major pitch at DC before he was put in charge.

Screen Shot 2019-04-19 at 2.43.30 PM.jpg

https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?f...type=1&theater

(DiDio publicly posted this on FaceBook.)

[king81992]

I believe Didio was working on a cartoon, aptly named 'Reboot'.

For Lee...
It's a combination of several things...

1. the removal of Chris Claremont from X-Men (displays his determination in climbing up)
2. the rallying of Marvel's hot artists to up and quit and form Image (displays his influence over others)
3. DC wanted Wildstorm
4. Jim Lee's art sells and DC needed a high profile artist to pull $
5. Bob Harras (buddy from Marvel)

The same Reboot cartoon from the 90s about the virtual world and the villain Megabyte? If that's the Reboot Didio worked on, what went wrong? He went from making a pretty good cartoon to making nothing but sketchy decisions.

[Spider-Ham]

But at the same time Barry Allen is now the star of a moderately successful TV show and the DCEU, and his simple origin story makes him easier to adapt than Wally's legacy orientated one.

It’s not difficult to adapt Wally’s story. If Marvel was able to make a Legacy character movie with Ant Man, Warner should be able to do the same thing with a character like Wally/The Flash.

[Restingvoice]

If you're curious about the kinds of ideas he goes for, here's his first major pitch at DC before he was put in charge.

Screen Shot 2019-04-19 at 2.43.30 PM.jpg

https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?f...type=1&theater

(DiDio publicly posted this on FaceBook.)

That! That's the post I was talking about. Although I think my copy's different because they only list the bottom part, which gives the impression that all the changes like evil Dick Grayson and Lois and Clark marriage dissolving happened in the present instead of possible futures.

"The future is being destroyed" so that's the origin of Futures End.

[Dred]

Yeah, it's no secret that Futures End is a Didio brainchild. Says plenty, too.

[Robanker]

Those bottom two points make me think he loved Dark Knight Strikes Again. Yeah. Definitely not a fan of that pitch. Glad it didn't take.

[Comic-Reader Lad]

This is nonsense. There were fleshed out characters before Crisis. NTT is synonymous with pushing the character driven story and it came out years before. Wally never even had his own comic book -- he was literally Barry's sidekick and took all his queues from Barry. Saying Wally was "just like Barry" beforehand is because Barry was the way he was. He stopped being like Barry when he left The Flash for NTT and his own comic. The second Wally was given his chance they distanced him from Barry in an innumerable list of ways. They even redid the origin of his powers so as not to be the little Barry clone he was imagined as.

When Barry came back they did the opposite. They took and stripped every single little thing they could get away with from Wally's era and then attributed it to Barry. And they never even pretended to pay respect, unlike Wally's run which is saturated with respect for Barry. To compare the two like it's the same thing is preposterous and disingenuous. Barry's run did everything it could to erase the idea or memory of Wally from the minds of anyone reading it -- it was literally an editorial edict that no mention or allusion to Wally could ever be made (Manapul said as much). Wally's run was just short of deifying Barry, giving him as much credit as humanly possible.

And let me set this straight, Barry wouldn't have gotten just the same kind of comics if he survived Crisis and lived through the 90s. Wally is who he is, fundamentally, because of Mark Waid. And we saw Mark Waid write Barry Allen -- pretty darn well, too, in JLA Year One, Brave and The Bold, and The Life Story of The Flash -- and he was a significantly differently written and handled character. Mark Waid, despite writing the aforementioned love letter "The Life Story of The Flash" about Barry Allen, talked about how he couldn't write the stories he wrote with Wally, with Barry, for obvious reasons. Waid put himself into Wally, something he could not do with Barry -- a fully developed, matured character from the outset. As opposed to Wally, who needed to and did grow over the course of years. To pretend that the only difference between Wally and Barry is when they were being written is also disingenuous, because Barry was being written into the 90s as well. They had different character premises. You weren't getting the best Flash story ever, The Return of Barry Allen, in a world where Barry lives and Wally spends his days calling himself Mr. Zip. Or just never becoming a hero because Barry's death is what brought him back from giving up the hero life.

If you want Wally to "Get his own name" then you better think up one for Barry. Because Barry took his name from someone else, too.

Saying one character gets The Flash name over the other is intrinsically saying one character is better and more deserving than the other. Because no name you will ever come up with will be as popular or ingrained in the mind of the public as The Flash. You are dooming the other to obscurity in favor of the other one getting to be a bit more special and unique. And whenever you say Barry should be The Flash and Wally should be something else you are saying nuts to Wally, he can die in obscurity so long as Barry is special and unique. "It pleases no one " -- what is this? Who are you speaking for besides Barry fans? Because the list of people who want Wally to get a new name is also the list of people who do not care about Wally.

Not nonsense, but it's clear you misunderstood what I was saying. I mentioned Marv Wolfman in my post. It had somewhat more depth than the Silver Age Wally, but other Titans were fleshed out better. Also Wolfman's Wally was different than the Wally Baron wrote or Waid wrote.

If Barry had survived Crisis, he could have been written "cooler," too. He never got the opportunity to be written as anything but in flashback stories, so they were all somewhat done in a Silver Age homage style as compared to the main DC comics Post-Crisis.

[Dred]

Wally changed from writer to writer in an intentional way. Wally was also very different from 62 to 100, despite being the same writer. He grew. This is what makes Wally great, a character arc instead of a repetition.

Waid wrote him in chain lightning too. It wasn't about being cooler. Barry does not have Wally's character premise. If you want me to list the differences that define wally from Barry I'd be happy to when I get home.

Regardless, we've gotten over a hundred Barry comics in the modern day and every point stands.