Creators' Pest: Characters that TPTB hate or don't care for.

[Gray Lensman]

Part of the problem with the JSA is that the people in charge of DC are Silver Age fan boys in the worst way. Acknowledging that there is history before that seems anathema to most of them and other interpretations are retconned in order to push those characters.

[godisawesome]

I feel like Wally West should definitely be a front-runner for this in comics, because Ben though Didio sabotaged or allowed to be sabotaged several characters, Wally was arguably the single highest profile and most successful character he did it to, and at a certain point, it started to feel like it went beyond his usual stubborn apathy and insistence characters fit into new roles, but started seeming like deliberately trying to tick off fans of the character for being positive about the character upon his return.

It also seemed exceptionally odd when you realize how successful Didio had to realize the Green Lantern books had been in nit burying Kyle but instead just deploying him as one among many GLs.

It feels a bit like he feared the character being exposed too long because he’d be a guaranteed success if left unsabotaged.

For Star Wars, Finn. Seriously, Rian Johnson clearly feared the characters connection to Rey and spent an entire movie trying to degrade him into a supporting role as far away from Rey as possible so that Kylo aren’t could take his place... than LFL followed in his wake and clearly tried to enforce that idea even when Abrams was trying to work against it in TROS, likely for the same reason they ordered Palpatine back - so that Kylo could be the male lead even though he suited at it.

[Bruce Wayne]

It's because Didio was a Barry fanboy in the worst sort of way. He's pretty much said that he wanted to bring back Barry from day one and that Infinite Crisis and Lightning Saga were two of his previous aborted attempts. DC Editorial under Didio pretty much screwed Waid when he returned to the Flash book to write Wally and that apparently lead to the permanent rift between Mark Waid and DC. So the man was willing to burn bridges with the talent to get what he wanted (as we also saw with the firings that occurred apparently because of 5G). I think it's just more evidence that he really didn't care about DC as a business, but rather only saw DC as a sandbox to fulfill his fanboy fantasies (which also included using books to attack a certain Newsarama/CBR poster who was a constant internet critic of his actions at DC).

[CaptainEurope]

I'd imagine it's because a lot of the books in the past have been set in that WWII era/mindset and that doesn't appeal to a wide audience. Think it probably hurt Captain America's popularity back in the day. Like, oh great another Nazi villain/sleeper robot. And that's with Kirby in his prime writing/drawing. Also most of the people who enjoyed the JSA comics originally are dead, and I doubt very many went on to read comics for decades after, so there's not a lot of built-in nostalgia aside from the newer takes. In my opinion they did a smart thing when Johns rebooted the franchise by focusing on legacy characters and grounding it in the now, while also appealing to nostalgia for people who wanted that.

Yet all JSA series in recent years had a decent sized audience.

[CSTowle]

Part of the problem with the JSA is that the people in charge of DC are Silver Age fan boys in the worst way. Acknowledging that there is history before that seems anathema to most of them and other interpretations are retconned in order to push those characters.

I've seen it before when discussions about legacy characters come up and many folk say that Hal Jordan and Barry Allen don't count despite having the same name and basic power-set as the original Green Lantern and Flash.

Nothing wrong with favorites, I love me some Thanos but accept fully he's a Darkseid knockoff. Everything's a copy of or owes something to something else. It's the stories that count.

[achilles]

I'd imagine it's because a lot of the books in the past have been set in that WWII era/mindset and that doesn't appeal to a wide audience. Think it probably hurt Captain America's popularity back in the day. Like, oh great another Nazi villain/sleeper robot. And that's with Kirby in his prime writing/drawing. Also most of the people who enjoyed the JSA comics originally are dead, and I doubt very many went on to read comics for decades after, so there's not a lot of built-in nostalgia aside from the newer takes. In my opinion they did a smart thing when Johns rebooted the franchise by focusing on legacy characters and grounding it in the now, while also appealing to nostalgia for people who wanted that.

Yes, but most people would be very happy with a Johns style JSA title. So the WWII version is not likely to be the one they'd do anyway, except possibly as a mini.

[CSTowle]

Oh sure, I actually bought the title all the way up through, and several related minis, as well as the Hawkman series related to it. Good stuff. Just explaining why I thought JSA books hadn't been a staple of DC publishing, unlike a million variants of the JLA.