What happened with Geoff Johns? *shameless gossip*

[Bored at 3:00AM]

It seems like every few weeks, there's another story that doesn't paint him in the best of light. I was always under the impression that Johns was not only highly regarded for his work in comics and the Wonder Woman, Aquaman and Shazam movies, but also considered a pretty nice guy who had worked hard to mend fences with creators whose relationships with DC had soured, finally got Bill Finger co-credit for Batman, and generally seemed to comport himself with a healthy degree of humility.

However, in the time since his short-lived promotion to head of DC, then falling on his sword following the disastrous Justice League movie debacle, it seems like he's made more than a few enemies. Former DC head honcho Diane Nelson, who was reportedly quite close with Johns back in the day, outright said Johns "was no friend of mine" last year, which struck me as odd. Then, Jerry Ordway mentioned that Johns specifically omitted his work on Shazam when he gave Zachary Levi comics to read for his role as Captain Marvel, which feels like a shabby thing to do given how well-regarded that initial Power of Shazam story is. Also, there was a lot of grumbling among other comics creators that Johns didn't actually tell anyone what the plan for Rebirth was, leaving everyone confused about the endgame of it all was. And, now, with the whole Snyder Cut train finally getting the green light, David Ayer singled out Johns for re-editing Suicide Squad into the half-assed Guardians of the Galaxy knock-off it was and broke the timeline of his movie in a way that made Harley Quinn guilty of helping murder Robin, which was never Ayer's intention. And now Ray Fisher has specifically called out Johns was enabling whatever "gross, disrespectful, and unprofessional behavior" Joss Whedon reportedly engaged in during the extensive Justice League reshoots.

Maybe I'm reading to much into this, but there's a line in Doomsday Clock from after Johns was fired as DC's top dog in which Dr. Manhattan, who had become exhilarated with tinkering with the very nature of the DCU, realizes that he has become the villain of the story. Perhaps this was a bit more autobiographical than I originally thought it was.

Whatever the truth of the situation, I hope Johns demotion within the corporate pecking order was a learning experience for him and made him better as managing these types of things. I've been really enjoying the Stargirl TV show and look forward to seeing what they come up with for the GL miniseries on HBO Max.

[sifighter]

Normally I’d try to stay out of threads like this but I’m just going to say my peace and get out. We do not know what exactly is going on, to me personally this all just sounds like complaining about the top guy in charge now that the DC movies are in a bit of a messy state. Now, for all I know while Johns is a good writer, he may be a bad leader and these complaints are warranted, but I honestly wonder in these complaints if they should be against Warner executives who are above Johns who have to approve everything with things like editing Suicide Squad. Not to mention the Snydercut had its own mess of troubles before Johns was around, from Snyder’s terrible personal tragedy to the movies that came before and the expense of making the movie/reshoots that all throw a lot into the turmoil that was the Justice League movie.

I have no problem divorcing my enjoyment of ones work over from the person, and I will continue to do so as I read more comics, I’m just not necessarily sure if Johns is the actual problem or if he’s just catching heat because of the job title he holds.

[Johnny]

It's interesting how noone ever said a bad word about him prior to his work on the movie slate, yet immediately after his demotion following the JL fiasco he became the antichrist. If Johns was this awful person to be around, we'd have heard stories about it years ago, similar to how there were often stories floating around about people like DiDio and co for years, but never about Johns, at least to the best of my knowledge. How come he gets demoted and suddenly all of this comes out of nowhere, especially from some random people with no real facts or credibility to their name(Fisher and Nelson at least worked with him). Not suggesting it was some coordinated attack against him and Johns could very well not be a saint at all, but it does feel kind of odd.

[Jim Kelly]

It's the Peter Principle at work.

[kjn]

I don't know anything about Geoff Johns, so I can't say anything about those rumours as they pertain to him. But I do think that there are a couple of general psychological mechanisms at play here.

The first is that you won't reach the level in a corporate (or other bureaucratic) environment that Johns reached without stepping on a few toes—rather a lot of toes. And once you reach that level, part of your job is stepping on toes.

Another is that someone can be a really nice and well-liked person, but still shield abusers or harassers. In fact, abusers and harassers depend on the nice people around them to help vouch for them and get the network they need. So I'm not surprised at all with Ray Fisher's comments here.

Third, Johns is part of the "old guard" at DC, but he's also on his way out from the comics side. That makes him a nice safe target to jab for anyone up and coming who wants to get noticed and people to pay attention to them.

And last there is a herd mentality to these things. Once someone speaks negatively about another person, it's much easier for people to join in with this stuff.

[Sutekh]

Everybody gets a villain turn, in this industry.

[Frontier]

Exactly what comics did Johns give to Levi? I just assumed it was the New 52 run since that was 99% of what the movie was based on.

I don't know about Johns not telling anyone what the plan for Rebirth was given he was involved with each creative team for their first arc, so you'd think he'd have laid out the groundwork from there. It always seemed like the issue with Rebirth came from miscommunication or disagreement from Didio about what the story was about, or Johns was too busy to be involved on the comics-side.

[Jim Kelly]

Like I said, I think it's the Peter Principle--being promoted to ones level of incompetence. Just because someone has a set of creative skills doesn't mean they have a set of management skills. It's ridiculous that Johns got promoted to this position that was completely different from what he was good at before. Maybe he should have done training courses, shadowed executives in those areas, had to complete an apprenticeship, before he was put in that top level position. Or maybe it's just not something that he's suited to doing and he should put his energies in the direction of what he does well--writing stories. Sitting in a room on ones own and writing a story is entirely different from having to collaborate with hundreds of people and support them in completing a massive project.

[superduperman]

It would be interesting to know what the showrunners on Stargirl think of him given that it's his baby and that show is currently hitting it out of the park as far as super-hero shows go. If he was a bad manager of the movies, it might be because he tried his management style from comics out in Hollywood and they are two different animals. The whole JL thing sounds like it would have been a mess regardless. You've got too many creative people wanting to inject their "vision" into it and personalities are going to clash. Without Fisher going into detail about what Johns did, other than enable Whedon, we have no way of knowing what he did wrong. Johns may not have known about Whedon's behavior on set. We simply don't know until someone comes forward with details.

I have mixed feelings about Johns. I like a lot of his ideas; I hate a lot of his ideas. This may just be a case where Harvey Dent was right: You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain.

[Frontier]

It would be interesting to know what the showrunners on Stargirl think of him given that it's his baby and that show is currently hitting it out of the park as far as super-hero shows go. If he was a bad manager of the movies, it might be because he tried his management style from comics out in Hollywood and they are two different animals. The whole JL thing sounds like it would have been a mess regardless. You've got too many creative people wanting to inject their "vision" into it and personalities are going to clash. Without Fisher going into detail about what Johns did, other than enable Whedon, we have no way of knowing what he did wrong. Johns may not have known about Whedon's behavior on set. We simply don't know until someone comes forward with details.

I have mixed feelings about Johns. I like a lot of his ideas; I hate a lot of his ideas. This may just be a case where Harvey Dent was right: You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain.

From all accounts I've heard, everyone on Stargirl loves working with Johns.

[Ra-El]

From all accounts I've heard, everyone on Stargirl loves working with Johns.

Aparently the people involved on the projects that worked don't have much against Geoff Johns, but the people on the projects that kind of failed don't like him. Now it could be that the failed projects was more interfered by him while the successful one wasn't, but it also could be that people on the faliled ones are just looking for a scape goat?

[Frontier]

Aparently the people involved on the projects that worked don't have much against Geoff Johns, but the people on the projects that kind of failed don't like him. Now it could be that the failed projects was more interfered by him while the successful one wasn't, but it also could be that people on the faliled ones are just looking for a scape goat?

Well, I think he's pretty heavily involved in Stargirl, but there were a lot of other factors going on with the other productions.

[skyvolt2000]

Normally I’d try to stay out of threads like this but I’m just going to say my peace and get out. We do not know what exactly is going on, to me personally this all just sounds like complaining about the top guy in charge now that the DC movies are in a bit of a messy state. Now, for all I know while Johns is a good writer, he may be a bad leader and these complaints are warranted, but I honestly wonder in these complaints if they should be against Warner executives who are above Johns who have to approve everything with things like editing Suicide Squad. Not to mention the Snydercut had its own mess of troubles before Johns was around, from Snyder’s terrible personal tragedy to the movies that came before and the expense of making the movie/reshoots that all throw a lot into the turmoil that was the Justice League movie.

I have no problem divorcing my enjoyment of ones work over from the person, and I will continue to do so as I read more comics, I’m just not necessarily sure if Johns is the actual problem or if he’s just catching heat because of the job title he holds.

Yes that is where it should start.

But like the Dallas ********* Jerry the owner can't fire Jerry the GM-so Garrett and the coaching staff gets the ax.

Johns might be a symptom but you haven't gotten to the ROOT.

[Vordan]

Exactly what comics did Johns give to Levi? I just assumed it was the New 52 run since that was 99% of what the movie was based on.

I don't know about Johns not telling anyone what the plan for Rebirth was given he was involved with each creative team for their first arc, so you'd think he'd have laid out the groundwork from there. It always seemed like the issue with Rebirth came from miscommunication or disagreement from Didio about what the story was about, or Johns was too busy to be involved on the comics-side.

Johns didn’t even have a plan for what he was going to do with the Watchman tease, he didn’t even know if he was actually going to follow up on it. He’s talked about it, it wasn’t until after the election that he decided that he would actually follow up on that. There was no real long term plan for the line unlike say, Death Metal, where that was always a planned follow up if Metal did well.

[Sacred Knight]

I dunno, the only things I've seen about him thus far are Ray Fisher's claim, which is extraordinarily vague, and that complaint on Twitter about him flirting. Neither of which offer much in the way of explanations. Definitely nothing has been provided though that promotes judging him yet. Unless anyone offers something more of substance, or I'm not aware of a particular accusation that's detailed, then he's still okay in my book. I'm not about tarnishing someone's representation based on peanuts.