Everything Johns did in GL should be dumped

[Trey Strain Guardian of the Universe Find all posts View Profile Close Trey Strain]

Part of the problem is that the message boards are dominated by old farts who are invested in every detail of the past and will throw wild fits if any of it gets dumped. And when they yell, DC jumps. But that's absurd. Old people shouldn't be the target market for anything except products like Life Alert. There's no future in catering to them. Dan DiDio realizes that, but many writers don't.

[Mister Ed Horse of a Different Color Find all posts View Profile Close Mister Ed]

Part of the problem is that the message boards are dominated by old farts who are invested in every detail of the past and will throw wild fits if any of it gets dumped. And when they yell, DC jumps. But that's absurd. Old people shouldn't be the target market for anything except products like Life Alert. There's no future in catering to them. Dan DiDio realizes that, but many writers don't.

Well, the problem is that "old farts" make up a large percentage of DC's audience at this point, due to them failing to offer much of anything for younger audiences for quite some time. So if they decide to crap on what those folks want NOW, then they better hope they guess right about what their prospective new audiences want, because otherwise they'll be shooting themselves in the foot.

I don't think all the old stuff has to be "shoveled down the throats" of anybody, though. I think they can feel free to not reference a whole TON of it, without explicitly throwing it out the window. If there is some old villain that seems hopelessly lame by today's standards, just don't use him. No need to explicitly cancel out his existence, or (dumber yet, IMHO) "update" him into something completely unlike the original character. Don't get me wrong, I don't mind updating a character to some degree, but if you are going to do it so drastically that the only recognizable thing is the name, what's the point? The only people for whom that "name recognition" will mean anything are the ones who remember that the character is supposed to be totally different.

You don't generally NEED to toss out older stories to tell new ones, unless you insist on covering the same ground, which seems a bit lazy.

[Trey Strain Guardian of the Universe Find all posts View Profile Close Trey Strain]

There is just no need to keep that stuff.

Yes, old farts make up a lot of the audience, but that's simply because DC keeps catering to them and doesn't move forward. The old farts are always threatening to stop buying comics, but they never do. They're not going away before they die of old age, but even if they did, that certainly wouldn't be a tragedy.

A friend of mine's wife kept threatening to leave him, until finally one day he opened the front door and said, "Go ahead." She didn't leave, and the old farts who read comics won't leave either. DC needs to stop worrying about their threats to leave.

[Mister Ed Horse of a Different Color Find all posts View Profile Close Mister Ed]

There is just no need to keep that stuff.

Yes, old farts make up a lot of the audience, but that's simply because DC keeps catering to them and doesn't move forward. The old farts are always threatening to stop buying comics, but they never do. They're not going away before they die of old age, but even if they did, that certainly wouldn't be a tragedy.

A friend of mine's wife kept threatening to leave him, until finally one day he opened the front door and said, "Go ahead." She didn't leave, and the old farts who read comics won't leave either. DC needs to stop worrying about their threats to leave.

But where exactly is the benefit from explicitly dumping old stuff vs. just not using it? If you do the latter you can still do new stuff without antagonizing the "old farts", and I can't imagine new readers will care whether the old stuff is thrown away or simply not the focus. It sounds like you think there is some benefit in deliberately burning those bridges, but I can't figure out what it is...

[Mister Ed Horse of a Different Color Find all posts View Profile Close Mister Ed]

Just to be clear, I know the appeal of "forgetting" some of the old stuff. During Gerard Jones' later run on GL, I got annoyed that he seemed to be constantly dredging up old, obscure storylines and making them the linchpin of some new plotline. You DON'T want to write stories that make new readers feel like they need to dive deep into the back-issue bins to understand what's going on, or get why they should care that some character or other has shown up. (It didn't help that he kept pulling up stuff that I thought was horrible the FIRST time I read it, like "The Predator")

But he didn't ALWAYS do that. At the beginning of his run, the whole deal with the mad Guardian and the Mosiac, I LOVED that stuff, and I'd never read the stories it referred to at that point. It IS possible to use old stuff effectively without alienating new readers. And it is also possible to just leave a lot of it in the past without explicitly burning it to the ground.

[jhpace1 Green Lantern Initiate Find all posts View Profile Close jhpace1]

Okay, my $0.02 worth. There is a certain older generation with money and fandom that is driving Hal Jordan as "the" Green Lantern. It's not my generation (I came in at the end of the Hal-Stewart-Gardner-GLC & the beginning of Kyle), but it is pretty much the most power-wielding generation (they buy the comics).

The Kyle generation had it's run, it was called the 1990s. But the older fans demanded Hal Jordan back, and not as Parallax. So we got the Johns reboot, the Emotional Spectrum, etc. I personally liked the Emotional Spectrum, but there is something in the halls of DC in NYC that takes a concept when it is 75% done, or reaches a certain monetary level, and then screws with it so badly the entire run becomes a dumpster fire. Half the time it is the cyclical decade reboot to keep Superman and Batman alive and in their prime, rather than age normally and move on to the next generation. Some of it is the Marvel-DC rivalry that equals greed for money at the box office with movies. The rest of it is editors and writers of different comics in DC that apparently never go to the same weekly meeting and end up twisting the DC timeline in knots with the Flash in every comic, or two Hawkmans, or plots that could have been solved just by reading a certain comic book from the 1970s, etc.

So GL readers got back their GLC, got back the Hal-Sinestro war between heroism and evil, but in order to keep selling comics each year had to have something nearly destroy the GLC, only for it to come back in the last issue. That got really old really quick, so the writers borrowed from the Legion of Super-Heroes and stuck the GLC in the past. In a different universe. Korna came back. The Guardians raised a Third Army of mindless clones. And more dumpster-fires ignited. Add in a very obvious Muslim GL rescued by a power ring from Guantanamo Bay and a female human GL with willpower issues, making a grog cocktail big enough to make any fan puke.

Would a reboot help at this point? Can you isolate or kill off enough human GLs to both bring back the old, money-rich fans as well as get new fans interested for the next 20 years? The GL movie was a fantastic money pit. Especially when the DCU rebooted at the same time, and for 7 months all you heard from the DC offices was "please keep buying our comics until we reboot!" It's uncertain. They permanently killed off Jade Scott, daughter of Alan Scott, and I mean good and dead, by changing Alan Scott into a homosexual. That's another mistake never corrected for fear of retribution by the homosexual community.

DC went politically correct years ago, and that's at the heart of the problem. The only thing worse than a "hidden clone for all these years" Spiderman was a half-black, half-Hispanic homosexual Spiderman, and now we even have alternate Gwen Stacy Spiderman, so unless Baz and Jessica disappear into alternate universes forever, Hal goes back on Earth, John Stewart finds Fatality again, and Kyle becomes the White Lantern once more, with Guy Gardner as his familiar loose cannon, nothing is going to change at DC headquarters. That's the problem we're facing.

Because, ultimately, it is about the money, not what fans want. And there are far more children/teens/adults buying Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman than Green Lantern.

[Trey Strain Guardian of the Universe Find all posts View Profile Close Trey Strain]

But where exactly is the benefit from explicitly dumping old stuff vs. just not using it? If you do the latter you can still do new stuff without antagonizing the "old farts", and I can't imagine new readers will care whether the old stuff is thrown away or simply not the focus. It sounds like you think there is some benefit in deliberately burning those bridges, but I can't figure out what it is...

Well, how about this:

Everything that has ever made Hal, Guy, John or Kyle look bad needs to go.

That's actually a lot of stuff, and there's no way to get rid of it except with a reboot.

Just say that NOTHING from the past has ever happened. But if there's any of it you decide to keep, then you bring it up again, and it did happen.

That's a piece of cake to do.

[Michael Heide Heide Finition Find all posts View Profile Close Michael Heide]

In all this discussion about what DC thinks old farts could want, you fail to mention that DC's writers are 92% old farts themselves. Except for Tynion and Orlando, who are exactly my age and keep bringing back 90s concepts like Azrael, Aztek and Artemis.

[Trey Strain Guardian of the Universe Find all posts View Profile Close Trey Strain]

In all this discussion about what DC thinks old farts could want, you fail to mention that DC's writers are 92% old farts themselves. Except for Tynion and Orlando, who are exactly my age and keep bringing back 90s concepts like Azrael, Aztek and Artemis.

The problem isn't being an old fart. The problem is catering to old farts. No industry does that so doggedly as the comics industry does.

[Mister Ed Horse of a Different Color Find all posts View Profile Close Mister Ed]

Well, how about this:

Everything that has ever made Hal, Guy, John or Kyle look bad needs to go.

That's actually a lot of stuff, and there's no way to get rid of it except with a reboot.

Just say that NOTHING from the past has ever happened. But if there's any of it you decide to keep, then you bring it up again, and it did happen.

That's a piece of cake to do.

That actually sounds just about functionally equivalent to what I'm proposing (since in order to have the option to bring stuff up again you'd have to not explicitly contradict it in the first place). Either way, the stuff you want to ignore from the past gets ignored, and you can still use stuff that you thought was worth bringing up again.

I just don't get the advantage of explicitly dumping the entire past over just not mentioning the stuff you don't want to use. For a new reader, what's the difference between something in the past that made Hal look bad never being mentioned, and that same thing being explicitly done away with? Completely rebooting something just always strikes me as the lazy way out.

[Ωmega Man Guardian of the Universe Find all posts View Profile Close Ωmega Man]

Kyle is in the best place he could possibly be. Take him out of Titans and watch him crash, then listen to his cheering section -- what's left of it -- blame it on the writer. That's exactly what would happen. Leave him alone. He's fine. More people are seeing him every month now than have seen him in 25 years. There's not a bigger stage for him that won't collapse.

Where do you get your facts from again?

Titans sales for the month of September for issue #26 put them in at just over 28K in sales. While that's nothing to bat an eyelash at....

Back in 2013 Kyle's New Guardians series shifted focus and rather than be just a story about the rainbow brigade Kyle took center stage as the White Lantern about halfway through the series. Issue #23 in the month of August had Kyle selling right around 34.5K (I would've used September here too but Forever Evil was happening).

Fairly certain Kyle has a larger fanbase and more staying power than a B list Titans team. Even one coming off the heels of an event.

To get on topic though, I don't think everything Johns did should be dumped. There's still some value in some of it with potential to be explored. I may not want to see more of the Red Lanterns, but I'd be game for seeing Atrocitus bring about a new Empire of Tears. I'd still be a fan of Larfleeze if he was presented in the same fashion as his original appearances before he was turned into a thieving Gonzo from the Muppets. The main thing is to not focus on the spectrum stuff in every single issue and arc. Now Snyder has the idea he's going to dive into an Invisible Spectrum?! DC just needs to stop worrying about gimmicks and get back to what sold the characters at their peak... and that was actual characterization and progression in the comics that was less plot driven and more about the characters themselves.

[Star-Lantern Weaponer of Qward Find all posts View Profile Close Star-Lantern]

Where do you get your facts from again?

Titans sales for the month of September for issue #26 put them in at just over 28K in sales. While that's nothing to bat an eyelash at....

Back in 2013 Kyle's New Guardians series shifted focus and rather than be just a story about the rainbow brigade Kyle took center stage as the White Lantern about halfway through the series. Issue #23 in the month of August had Kyle selling right around 34.5K (I would've used September here too but Forever Evil was happening).

To be fair, I think those numbers were due to stores not knowing how to order the books after Geoff Johns' departure. People were leaving the Green Lantern books in droves, and it took more than two or three issues (Johns left when the New 52 GL books hit #20) for the stores to get an idea of how many people were actually buying the books.

Moving on, DC and Marvel often cater to the people who buy their comics, which tends to be "old farts." One would have to do more than change the comics creatively to get new audiences involved. You would have to radically change the distribution model, which I think DC is trying to make an effort at doing, but I'm not sure it is enough. But, really, I think everyone already knows all of that by now. Younger people, or new people, aren't going to suddenly take an interest in Green Lantern comics if you change a few things. At best, you would just get other old fart comic fans who just weren't reading Green Lantern.

[Space Cop The Dandy Find all posts View Profile Close Space Cop]

One thing to remember about the sales numbers is that they don't include digital sales. As far as I know, nobody is really releasing that info (if they're even tracking it). Since there are several digital readers even here, on a site full of Trey's "old farts," I suspect the numbers are much higher (easily making up for any returns and oversales). It's not really a dying industry; it's just that sales are shifting to digital and trades (again, I know several fans who wait for TPBs and just shop at B&N or Amazon) with floppies being a smaller chunk.

[Big Blue Lantern Corps Honor Guard Find all posts View Profile Close Big Blue Lantern]

Part of the problem is that the message boards are dominated by old farts who are invested in every detail of the past and will throw wild fits if any of it gets dumped. And when they yell, DC jumps. But that's absurd. Old people shouldn't be the target market for anything except products like Life Alert. There's no future in catering to them. Dan DiDio realizes that, but many writers don't.

Part of the reason that Larfleeze, Saint Walker, Atrocitus, etc will stick around is kids/teens and their introduction to those characters outside of print. They know those characters through video games and animation, so they're more likely to pick up comics later on if those characters are on the cover. The undeniable fact is that the creations of Geoff Johns have left a larger cultural imprint than other Green Lantern eras. As I stated with the GL-GA pairing, it's something that worked so well at one point that it's indelibly fused with the public's concept of Green Lantern.

[Star-Lantern Weaponer of Qward Find all posts View Profile Close Star-Lantern]

One thing to remember about the sales numbers is that they don't include digital sales. As far as I know, nobody is really releasing that info (if they're even tracking it). Since there are several digital readers even here, on a site full of Trey's "old farts," I suspect the numbers are much higher (easily making up for any returns and oversales). It's not really a dying industry; it's just that sales are shifting to digital and trades (again, I know several fans who wait for TPBs and just shop at B&N or Amazon) with floppies being a smaller chunk.

Well, speaking for myself, I don't buy floppies anymore. I only buy digital and trades because they are more convenient for me. Unless I am buying back issues. I tend to get those in floppies because they often aren't in digital format. At least not the ones I want.

As for the state of the industry, I really couldn't say because I don't have access to everyone's financial records, but it is disconcerting that these big line wide relaunches are happening about every couple years these days. I think that is the sign of a very small audience, or one with a very short attention span, or both. Then there is the price factor, which suggests comics are so expensive per unit because not that many people are buying them.