Originally Posted by
Myskin
I'd say that in most cases, customers can damage a character as much as bad editors. Maybe even worse. In my experience, relatively few superhero readers are really open-minded. In general, they just want more of the same or they simply don't know what they want. These days we are all "Ohh, if only Mark Waid could write Superman". But we keep forgetting that, when Birthright was published, the fan rage was HUGE. Waid - who at that time was a bit more willing to participate to fan forums - had some personal stalkers who kept demolishing his work whenever possible. It was really weird: at least one of them, the so-called MOTA - Man Of The Atom, was basically in every possible comics forum to speak ill about Waid. I think that he didn't sleep in order to damage Birthright as much as possible. Even the site Superman-The Ages stopped reviewing Birthright halfway, because they thought it wasn't worth it.
And thank God Internet didn't exist when Byrne took over Superman in the 1980s.
This is particularly evident when we talk about Superman and Wonder Woman, that is the characters who had some of the weakest artistic developments in the post-Crisis era (and maybe it is not by coincidence that among Supes and WW readers the fanbase is particularly nitpicky and aggressive). As I said several times, Batman is relatively safe because in the 1980s (that is, when artistic experimentation in the US market reached its climax) lots of writers and artists created very experimental Batman-focused stories and this allowed the character to develop "antibodies", and that's why experimental stories on Bats are still relatively well-received. Just to name an example: we find it acceptable that Dave McKean created a whole painted, eerie graphic novel about Batman, but a comparable experiment, if Superman-based (that is, with a different atmosphere but equally daring), would sound somehow "weird" or "wrong". But McKean's work was of vital importance in developing a new, original atmosphere for Batman comics which - several years later - became extremely profitable (just think of the Arkham videogames).
Superman didn't have anything similar, except for some minor works and just ONE important maxiseries, that is All-Star Superman (the Death of Superman doesn't count: it is just a commercial gimmick). The result: these days, DC wants to appease older readers, which are often very close-minded, and conquer enough new readers to justify the existence of Superman series - even if new readers don't give a damn about Superman.