Quote Originally Posted by marhawkman View Post
Part of me thinks that the DC editors and publishers want to functionally kill off all the old-gen characters so they don't have royalties to pay. I don't know if it's TRUE though. It would imply they're going to stop using the old characters, not sure if they actually will. I mean, the OLD OLD characters(like Alan Scott) are sorta still around.
Well, there's been some talk about DC wanting to distance themselves from the Golden Age roster because those guys will be entering the public domain in the next 5-10 years. But I'm not sure how much stock I put in that. Someone like Clark or Bruce entering the domain doesn't mean that anybody could use the characters as we currently recognize and understand them, and other considerations like film rights and trademarks means it'd be hard as hell to use a public domain DC character anyway.

I'm more inclined to think that DC was looking for a permanent Super replacement when the heirs were suing the crap out of them. I can believe that DC was going to put Kara or Conner at the head of the franchise just to avoid the heirs' legal entanglements (if that would've even worked), but all of that was settled years ago, and as far as I'm aware DC doesn't have to pay royalties for any of these guys. They had to pay, I believe, to use Milestone's characters, and maybe Black Lightning, but the OG big names? No royalties at all, that I've heard.

It's probably as simple as Didio and the other higher up's at DC/WB thinking that Clark himself was a broken character without value. Just like our fellow poster manwhohaseverything. I find it much more likely that those guys couldn't understand the problem was never Clark, and was instead their inability to understand the fundamental appeals of the IP. So in classic corporate style, they figured the best course of action was to burn everything to the ground.