Letter to the Editor or the downfall of comics...part one of ?

*Spoilers Ahead!!!*

I'm about ready to send a letter to Dan Didio and tell him to shove it up his ass. What in the ever loving hell has happened to DC Comics. What started as a great storyline has slowly spiraled down to possibly one of the worst piles of garbage I've read in a medium EVER. But I'm getting ahead of myself. Let's start this shabang from the beginning...

DC started publishing comics in the 1930s; starting the careers of Batman and Superman, and spending the next eight decades creating and maintaining their complicated lives along with Wonder Woman, four different Flash, and several fistfuls of Green Lanterns. As you can imagine, eighty years worth of history might prove problematic to someone writing today, trying to maintain continuity. Earths have been split off, characters have been re-written or have disappeared altogether, mass chaos otherwise known as the DC multiverse.

So DC designed Crisis on Infinite Earths, a story arc designed to fold the mulitverse into one single universe. Published in 1985, Crisis on Infinite Earths served its purpose, and also killed off about a dozen characters including Supergirl and Flash II Barry Allen. (Here he is decomposing away like that dude at the end of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. What? Too on the nose?)

DC then rewrote the origins for pretty much every superhero in their current line up; I won't bore you with details. Everything continued on in relative normalcy for the next 20 years.

In 2004, the editors at DC decided to blow apart the universe and recreate the multiverse. They spent the next several years building up to the main event with multiple story arcs and character developments designed to set up the Infinite Crisis arc. DC was able to get some of the best writers in the biz to help helm their colossal effort, with pretty good success. Again, here comes the destruction of several B level characters...blah blah blah...and all of the main titles jumped a year a head, a move titled One Year Later. Wow. Consider me blown away with their staggering creativity.

Anyways...to cover the events that were missed by everything jumping a year ahead, DC came out with the title 52, a weekly comic that focused on DC's minor characters. It was a really good series, and did a solid job of making what have been completely forgettable characters actually interesting. We got a new Batwoman, and new Question. Probably one of my favorite things that came out of this whole thing is that we finally got to see Booster Gold as a likable character. Up until now he's been kind of a whiny jerk, but they finally showed why Ted Kord actually liked this guy. Kudos.

Once all of these series came to their natural conclusion something happened in the editors' room at DC. I have no proof of what actually transpired, but here's my educated guess.

Editor1 : "Hey, that worked out great. We should do this again."

Editor2 : "That's a great idea. What ideas do you have for another story line?"

Editor1 : "None. I was thinking of doing pretty much the same thing, but with different characters."

Editor2 : "Sounds good. Let's go with a deadly virus theme. That's topical right? What characters do we have left?"

Editor1 : "Let's see...we got that second Robin, that other Wonder Woman, and one of the 50 green lanterns."

Editor2 : "Sweet. And they say you can't be productive after two six packs and a dime bag of weed. We are the exception to the rule!"

What followers of DC were then subjected to was an absolute pile of garbage. One 52 was over, we then got Countdown, which became Countdown to Final Crisis. Fucking terrible. I happened to stumble on this guys blog, Aaron Poehler, who very nicely sums up why Countdown should be thrown into the bottom of a deep pit so I'll let him explain. http://aaronpoehler.com/2008/04/02/dc-comics-countdown-to-final-crisis-is-consistently-terrible/

This concludes part one. To be continued...