It's been ten years since New 52. What went wrong?

[AdamFTF]

Poor planning. Lack of diversity in terms of tone. So many titles that it seemed like they were either going for complete market share domination or were just throwing stuff at the wall to see what stuck. As well as some really strange choices in terms of changes that were made to characters and what could stay or go. Like turning the Creeper into an oni. Or making Bart Allen a criminal from the future. Or keeping Barbara Gordon's injury in "The Killing Joke" but taking away her reinvention into Oracle, despite the fact that the reinvention was pretty much the one reason validating "The Killing Joke" even being canon (even Alan Moore thinks it shouldn't be). Or . . . has anyone figured out what DC at that time had against mothers yet? I mean, between them introducing Zeus as Wonder Woman's father and stealing some of Hippolyta's narrative power in that part of the origin, replacing the younger Black Canary who was inspired by her mother with, well, her mother who was hung up on her dead husband and continuing to treat Barry Allen saving the life of his mother as some horrible selfish thing, it feels like they've got some mommy issues.

If they really wanted to do a reboot, they should just pull the pin and do a complete restart aimed at getting kids interested. Maybe take a few lessons from the manga and kids' graphic novel markets. I'd be a bit put out at first, but I'd respect them more in the long run.

[Batman Begins 2005]

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=VlR0u61vawQ

[failo.legendkiller]

New 52 was started by Didio as an attempt to bring in more readers. Unfortunately as he had stated in interviews at the time, the readers he was looking for were the people who read comics in the 90s. It seemingly never occurred to anyone that those people grew up and changed but the content they produced by and large was almost a replucant of slick, violent 90s content.
As has been said before, after they got the ball rolling there was no clue where it was going as directions changed all the time.
Then fans started asking for their favorites...where's the original Teen Titans, the original Wally West, the JSA...and all we got was mockery from the one driving the ship. Thats not a great way to win friends and influence people.
Then came along Convergence which hinted that those characters were there and gave readers hope they might be integrated into the new DC.
But they didn't.
Then came Rebirth as Geoff John's was promoted to similar status as Didio. People can say what they want, but Geoff knows what sells and how to sell it. Bringing back Wally West and hinting (again) that the JSA were around the corner and going into Doomsday clock it looked like all our favorites were about to be put on the board Then things changed all again and Didio was back in charge of the ship and things were quickly put back thevway he wanted.
Through it all, the common denominator was Dan Didio. Sure editorial re-wrote scripts, moved artists like spastic checkers but all that had to be done with allowance. Very little that happened in the last ten years happened because fans asked for it. The majority happened because Didio wanted it that way.
Thats not to say good didn't happen..there was. The majority of it though was a sabatoge of an enormous ego.

I agree with you for the most.
I disagree on the first sentence. I'm a 90's fan and what Didio set up with N52 is way far from the DC I loved back then.
Many characters of the 90's were wiped away or stripped of their origin and evolution. Wally, Tim, Conner, Bart, Cassie, Stephanie Brown, Connor Hawke, Donna Troy, Argent, Steel and many others.
I don't think the readers he was looking for were the people who read comics in the 90s.

[Fergus]

Johns was one of the key craftsmen for the New52 yet somehow it's all Didio for some.

The new52 was a success. It sold well for a time and DC gained new readers but the comics market just isn't big.

Comic fans are entitled and we all want the comics to feature the same characters we nostalgia for [regardless of how good/profitable the new ones are]

Comics aren't Manga and it's about time fans and Companies stop expecting that what works in one market/medium would work in the other.

The new52 was nothing to do with Didio wanting the 90's back like some seem to think [the opposite infact]

The 90's comics market was booming but the 90's was a **** show and gave us some of the worst comics and characters ever. Crap that we are now stuck with.

The comics markets is too small to maintain the type of money/Market share Dc was hoping for with the new 52. That is the main reason why the new52 was considered a failure.

Other factors that added to it's failure were
-You can't simply dump decades worth of lore just like that.

-The numerous [and very very vocal] fans gained during that booming shitty 90's era.

The new52 cut out a lot of the crap and excess weight gained during the 90's era

They wanted their shitty era and status quo back.

[Fergus]

The new 52 seemed to be by and for the people in charge, if you know what I mean.

No it wasn't. Dc is owned by WB which has Share holders. The people who are charged to run DC answer to the share Holder since they pay their wages and bonus.

Those wages and bonuses are dependent on continued returns/value of the Shares.

The returns/value can only increase if DC/WB makes more money/gains more of the comic market

The new52 was about DC attempting to gain a bigger percentage of the comics market. [Marvel up to that point held a larger percent of the market]

So it was the owners who are blame not those in charge.

[sunofdarkchild]

I agree with you for the most.
I disagree on the first sentence. I'm a 90's fan and what Didio set up with N52 is way far from the DC I loved back then.
Many characters of the 90's were wiped away or stripped of their origin and evolution. Wally, Tim, Conner, Bart, Cassie, Stephanie Brown, Connor Hawke, Donna Troy, Argent, Steel and many others.
I don't think the readers he was looking for were the people who read comics in the 90s.

If anything DC under Didio was chasing the pre-crisis readers. Under his tenure DC started bringing back characters who had been gone since COIE and resetting characters to a status quo that was more like pre-crisis while killing off or sidelining characters who were big successes in the 90s.

The problem is that Didio wanted to be able to reduce every character to a simple phrase which described them and their origins, and these 90s characters were 'too complicated' to explain in five words or less. So Kyle Rayner and Wally West having origins that involved an earlier version of Green Lantern and Flash were deemed too complicated even if you could still market them as 'the last Green Lantern' or 'the fastest man alive.' He supposedly decided to get rid of Linda Danvers because he didn't like the account of her origin in the que line for a Six Flags Superman ride. If the origin required more than a couple of words to explain, it wasn't marketable in Didio's eyes and the character should be thrown out entirely. This is an incredibly myopic view, treats readers as idiots, and ignores the nature of the medium which is that characters grow more complex over time anyway and are usually loved by fans for their complexity. One of the biggest reasons many superhero movies fail is because they take this kind of approach to the characters. That's what New Mutants did last year, reducing extremely complex characters to 1-2 word stereotypes which the audience had no reason to care about.

[godisawesome]

Eh, I think I’d say that Didio felt Pre-Crisis characters and settings were better, but marketing strategies and trends from the 90’s were better.

Variant covers galore, constant crossovers, a growth in the number fo anti-heroes, the general tone of the New 52, even to some extent the “brand new continuity” thing all saw some kind of success in the 90’s.

And some of them, make no mistake, we’re good in the long run. But others were more short-sighted and limited in appeal. It’s a bit like he wanted to make 90’s Marvel’s success with Pre-Crisis DC characters... but ignored where 90’s Marvel eventually fell hard, and how some of the Post-Crisis DC characters and stories were part of that eras success for the brand as well.

Like, you know how the Clone Saga became an infamously bloated, marketing and tie-in driven disaster by the time it was said and done? Does that not sound exactly like what happened to the Teen Titans book with The Culling?

And whenever the New 52 flared out from just messing up fresh new ideas, you could probably apply the Heroes Reborn issues Marvel had.

Now, of course, there were still some bright spots. But they wound up being short lived.