Originally Posted by
Prisoner 6655321
Oftentimes people go overboard, sometimes ridiculously so. There's no need to take things personal or make them personal. It always seems absurd to me when people try to accuse / call out individuals at DC for having some kinda evil agenda or something along those lines.I also think it's pretty silly when people's “demands” become so specific that if those demands were met it'd essentially reduce professionally done comic books to fan fic or literature by democracy. That said, I still feel that DC is making a lot of “bad choices” (obviously, this is subjective) and has been for some time and that if you, as a sincere enthusiast of the genre / medium feel the urge to spell out what you see as being bad directions taken by DC then by all means, you should spell out those shortcomings.
Some change is good, some is bad, what's important is the nature and reason(s) for those changes. Obviously this is hyperbole but using the sort of logic “those fans hate change” is oversimplifying something to the extreme but there were folks in Germany back in the 1920's that said “Man, I dunno if I should stick around for this Nazi shit” according to some of the logic professed here, these negative Nancies were just holding back progress, right? Obviously not, and to reiterate (not that I should need to), post-Flashpoint is nowhere as bad as the Beer Hall Putsch.
It is not my stance that it was Flashpoint that made dc “bad” nor was it the beginning of DC's “problems”. I don't think they really need another reboot per se but I also don't think Flashpoint made anything better, in fact it only compounded the problem. More than that, I think it kinda represents a point where DC had a marked change in strategy. It's wrong to suggest there haven't been good DC comics after Flashpoint or that any particular era was a paragon of all that was great about DC/ Wildstorm / DCU gone Vertigo but there has been a lot of great material over a large span of time and they're still making things as good as Multiversity (which was pretty amazingly great) in the recent past. That said, while it was floundering before, after Flashpoint things have felt much more limited & constrained, less organic & vast. It has felt very much to me that the comics have essentially become derivatives of thier own derivatives, licensed image-lifestyle products based on properties derived from those same products in a earlier state when they once existed by their own virtue (that last sentence owes its existence to the ashes of the Situationist International). I know this philosophy isn't shared by everyone on here but … Yes, DC is a company and they want to make money. There's nothing wrong with that and more so it's simply the way it is. That said, we as readers don't need to make that our priority, in fact doing so is kinda absurd. Unless you're a shareholder, profits are not your concern, quality is. If you like what you're reading, that's fine and good but if you don't, then by all means, you should speak up.
This time last year I was picking up about 18 DC issues a month, this year the number is 0. That's not to say I'm not reading any DC comics though, I live in an area with a great public library system and I generally follow just as many series as are on my pull list through trades at the library. Buying the series which I am most enthusiastic for and waiting for the library to get the trades for the others. I've been doing this for a number of years now and I suggest it to anyone who lives near a good library system. My point being, it is not so simple as “If you don't think it's great you shouldn't be buying it, if you're not buying it you're not reading it so you shouldn't have an opinion”.
I'm done ranting for now.