Storylines That Made A Character Radioactive

[Timothy Hunter]

Storylines and status quo changes that were so controversial that the characters became unusable or at least less popular because of it.

Some examples:

-Hawkworld
-Richard Brunning's Adam Strange
-The Five Years Later Legion of Superheroes
-Emerald Twilight
-Mike Carlin's Metal Men

[HsssH]

How exactly Hawkworld made Hawkman radioactive?

[married guy]

How exactly Hawkworld made Hawkman radioactive?

Here you go (put aside some reading time, it'll take a while..... :
https://www.hawkworld.org/2020/02/th...man-chart.html

[HsssH]

Yes, this does sound terrible:

According to the story, the first version of Hawkman came to exist at the dawn of time, so it appears that Hawkman has lived for millions of years. His name was Ktar Deathbringer. He was the general of the Deathbringers, a winged army who served an evil entity called “The Lord of the Void.” We don’t know where he came from or how he came to exist, but it appears that he was created by this evil entity for the purpose of killing and sacrificing people to this being. Think of Ktar as a "reverse-Lucifer." Venditti has said that this was the pitch he made to DC Comics for Hawkman's origin. The entity desired to enter this reality and gradually gained strength to cross over with the sacrifices offered by Ktar and his army.

[Robanker]

Strange Adventures sure is shaping up to be this.

[married guy]

Countdown to Infinite Crisis - Totally carpet bombed Ted Kord AND Max Lord.
Cry for Justice - What on Earth did Roy Harper do to deserve this ****??

[JackDaw]

How exactly Hawkworld made Hawkman radioactive?

Basically it didn’t.

The Tim Truman mini was best ever re-launch of a mainstream DC character, with both wonderful artwork and story.

The John Ostrander ongoing that followed the Tim Truman mini was fine when set in Thanagar in an indefinite time era…moving action to Earth late on in the series maybe was a mistake and John O…decided on a continuity fix (there was some nit picking from some fans) that probably wasn’t his finest hour as a writer.

But even allowing for the few niggles at the end, still better than 99 percent of DC runs.

[king81992]

Donna Troy's constant string of identity cruises.

[superduperman]

Infinite Crisis and both Superboy Prime and E-2 Superman. Will never forgive Johns for this.

[Citizen Kane]

Infinite Crisis and both Superboy Prime and E-2 Superman. Will never forgive Johns for this.

Maybe I'm in the minority on this one, but I never really had an issue with Superboy Prime or E2 Superman turning "evil". Really, they just wanted to go home. Superboy going full psycho was a little off, but he kinda worked as the "Jason Todd" of the Superman mythos. However, E2 Superman's death was in bad taste.

On another note, I still don't know why Dr. Light or Sue needed to be dragged through the mud in Identity Crisis (or why it needed to have such a controversial plot). They could have used blanks to fill those roles, but they decided on established niche characters—bad move.

[Frontier]

Was Firestorm ever radioactive? And I don't mean literally.

[DrNewGod]

Basically it didn’t.

The Tim Truman mini was best ever re-launch of a mainstream DC character, with both wonderful artwork and story.

The John Ostrander ongoing that followed the Tim Truman mini was fine when set in Thanagar in an indefinite time era…moving action to Earth late on in the series maybe was a mistake and John O…decided on a continuity fix (there was some nit picking from some fans) that probably wasn’t his finest hour as a writer.

But even allowing for the few niggles at the end, still better than 99 percent of DC runs.

Our mileage varies. The ongoing broke up one of the only consistently non-disfunctional couples in comics, and created continuity tangles that DC struggled with all the way through the Nu52 (where he got really awful). The stories were pretty good, if they'd been in a world of their own rather than part of DC's main continuity. I did have some minor quibbles with the Truman revision, slug-thrower technology weapons in an FTL technology culture, the inelegant look of the wing design, Shayera becoming the identical-in-name-and-look daughter of Katar's old, dead squeeze (ick), but on the whole, I liked it. It's the ongoing where things broke down, and every handwave to fix it accelerated the problem.

Is the point of contention with critics of Identity Crisis that the Justice League mind wiped Batman? I don't really see the problem of mind wiping Doctor Light after what he did.

1) Involuntary mindwipes are a cruel violation of a person's autonomy, regardless of what they did. As Diana stated, killing would have been the better option if they were so terrified of him raping Sue or anyone else again.

2) The mindwipe didn't work.

3) Mindwiping Light erased evidence of his crime which made the League guilty of covering up a rape.

First, the Dr. Light IC presented was indeed horrible and deserved horrible things.

However, I wasn't crazy about completely recreating a character to fit a story. Dr. Light was created to be a schmuck, from day one. There were other candidates, like Amos Fortune that might have fit better, but Meltzer wanted maximum shockage, so he elevated the horribleness of both Dr. Light and added horribleness to Jean Loring.

On top of that, the story had characters cross lines they would not have crossed. The JL has consistently been presented as seeing itself as a field-leveler for the authorities, not authorities unto themselves, which is what doling out punishments made of them.

Ultimately, IC is what I most dislike in some of today's writers: the characters become whoever the writer wants for the story the writer wants to tell. That can work in cases where the character comes through a transformative journey and is a more viable IP afterward. Moore's Swamp Thing and Miller's Daredevil are probably the best examples of it on record. However, nobody mis-characterized by IC benefited from it.