Originally Posted by
godisawesome
Didio wouldn’t be so bad if he didn’t combine a marketing first mentality (note: I didn’t say “market” first mentality) with simply bad taste; the Bat books just tend to feel it more by his perplexingly contradictory and just clearly bad decisions.
Like, Nightwing would have been totally safe if Didio realized the monetary value of the character by that point, or had the taste to recognize the quality in the character over the long run. Dick Grayson is in many ways just as much of a standard bearer as many of the JL7 characters. If you were just looking for consistent IPs people would buy, he’d be clocked as one, and there was exactly zero sign that he was cutting into Batman’s market share at all. A cursory glance would show that the Nightwing and Batman IPs are complimentary goods, that assist each other, not hinder each other.
But Didio was convinced that “old” Batman is scary or less interesting to audiences and new readers. This in spite of the fact that since at least the 80’s, Batman was pretty much always portrayed as being in his mid-to-late 30’s in modern times - and that period saw its first real spike around the time Frank Miller produced the first real “Old Man Batman” book , and when Batman managed to eventually surpass Superman in sales, especially once spinoffs were included.
Similarly, Didio seems to have showed that he and DC were heavily interested in a minority Batman character, so he kept pushing for new flavors of Batwing when the first one didn’t take off as he’d hoped, and he clearly wants to break into more niche and mainstream markets. But he allowed both Cassandra Cain and Stephanie Brown’s series to get cancelled, even though Cass was an successful Asian-American character, and Steph was making headway in the TPB lists that were appealing to young adults... and then he exiled both of them because he thought that their mere existence was a threat to Babs returning as Batgirl... which meant that he was also removing *two* characters with disabilities from the Batfamily as well, and right after Morrisonn/Snyder/everyone else had proved that you didn’t have to keep Cassandra in limbo to protect the Batgirl IP.
And I have to say that I think part of his problem isn’t that he hates the 90’s - it’s that he seems to think that Marvel’s artificial and doomed market spike in the 90’s is the way to go, compared to DC’s steady quality at the time. I mean, a lot of his New 52 ideas scream someone who tried to replicate Heroes Reborn, cover gimmicks, editorial-driven and artist-over-writing thinking that crashed the comic market.
Which is part of the reason why the Batman and Flash fans are so easily perturbed and annoyed by him - they were the primary beneficiaries of DC’s writing first focus leading to a string of successful runs that added up as time went on, and both arguably exploded more in the 90’s than other brands.