it upsets me that these days Jim Lee is more associated with DC than Marvel.
Kinda like when people say "David Boreanaz, you know from Bones" or "David Duchovny, you know, from Californication"
:(
In all fairness by the time he got to DC his artistic chops & general sensibilities were miles ahead of his heyday. But yeah, he'll always be the X-Men guy to me.
Though he did draw the best Aquaman. The mutton chops should've stuck.
If he wasn't the one making those decisions then he was the one who greenlit them, so he's still responsible as far as I'm concerned.
While I'm sure there's other idiots in DC management/editorial who thought stupid shit like Ric Grayson and bringing Barry Allen back were good ideas, hearing that the head idiot is out is great news. I haven't read comics regularly for years and it'd take a lot to get me back in but I can still remember all the Didio shit I hated. Pushing all the silver age boomer heroes to the forefront while butchering all the 90s heroes I enjoyed. Mocking fans for complaining that their favourite heroes were killed off, retconned or worse. An over reliance on shock value, particularly blood and guts but sometimes far worse. The constant reboots that'd give them a short term boost but they'd inevitably fuck up. Countdown to Final Crisis. And running to Geoff Johns to fix every problem/non-problem they had.
See, the boomer thing I thought was Geoff Johns, he was very vocal about those characters. He was just picking up on the nostalgia train Mark Waid, Alex Ross & Kurt Busiek had started as a reaction against the "every character is dead and replaced by an edgelord" trend of the 90s.
The violence thing...it felt like people above Didio thought DC should be churning out Dark Knight & Watchmen type IP: movie & prestige TV-ready concepts. So they hired legit novelists & screenwriters like Meltzer to try & create serious-business our-characters-are-adults stories around their main properties.
The shock value thing felt like an inevitable reaction to the fact that every series that didn't have a long established track record sank like a stone, and they kept doing event books because however much they grumbled, that was what the fans turned out for. Comics were in a bad place before the MCU broke out, and both Marvel & DC had higher-ups & investors to answer to.
Not that I'm defending any of this stuff. Barry Allen coming back made zero sense to me. He had an iconic ending, no particularly well-defined or unique personality traits, and a replacement who was well liked and just come off Mark Waid & Grant Morrison runs that after a billion years had actually given the Flash a mythos.
Same with Ray Palmer. In Ryan Choi they actually had a Grant Morrison created Asian hero with his own title who wasn't a martial arts stereotype and...they killed him off to bring back another silver ager nobody had any particularly strong feelings for.
The blood & guts thing felt all wrong, Johns had really nailed what was great about the core of DC with JSA, unironically embracing its heroism, while updating them in a way that felt true to the characters. To then try and shoehorn in the stuff from the blood & guts 90s that everyone was sick of seemed tacky and unnecessary.
And the endless events and shocks...that actually burned me out in the end. I haven't really been back to comics since Metal, which I know some people liked but I found too goofy for words.