Hawkman’s history has been a mess, but that has nothing to do with it’s current quality; dreadful. 2nd rate talent & a lack of understanding did for it. Green Arrow? The same.

Bearing in mind the rumours of editorial interference, I would like to know, just what do they do? I have seen typos, plotting errors & at times, such poor quality within the New52, they might well be sacked, if working in any other kind of publishing house.

Better use of talent is required. By that I mean, better writers.

Why is Gail Simone writing only 1 of the new52 titles?

Why is Tony Daniel being let write any?

Why did DC under-appreciate the likes of Greg Rucka & Mark Waid?

DC genuinely deserve props for their enterprise with the new52. I just think it’s a shame that a fair chunk of it was so hastily & poorly executed.

Even if the stuff I cared about was still intact, DC’s casual attitude towards continuity is a turn-off; they’ve made it clear they’ll wipe away anything, and what’s the point in reading if the characters and stories you enjoyed may be scrapped next year?

Everything you say has an element of truth, except I’m the paying customer. I don’t want to pay for stories where Cliff Steel is a robot detective, Madame Rouge is his secretary, and the Doom Patrol never happened. I don’t think anyone is saying encase these characters in amber, because I loved Grant Morrison’s take on the Doom Patrol and he killed off Tempest and made the Chief a psychotic scumbag, without invalidating the prior stories. I don’t mind tweaking Supes’ origins, I mind that he’s an emo and that Lex Luthor is now a corwardly wimp. You have bad storytelling that in many cases makes the Ultimates seem like Shakespeare meets Mamet, and invalidating what has come prior. Why did the Spider Clone fail? Because all the stories you read, and got emotionally invested in, and paid money for, were not about the real Peter Parker. Fans felt ripped off financially and emotionally. And that’s how I feel about the nu 52. Don’t tell me to pay for something that insults me and doesn’t appeal to me. Go get your money from the plethora of new readers you’re bringing in. Marvel doesn’t seem to have a problem with creating the Ultimates and generally speaking, preserving past stories so that your patronage of their comics “counted.”

The larger problem is that nothing new and interesting is really happening at either comics company, superhero comics are in the crapper, and save for maybe Batman Inc. (portions of which are now invalidated by the nu 52), there’s no fresh heroes, villains, stories, or concepts being brought to the fore. Nu 52 or no, all DC is offering is lather, rinse, repeat.

The fact that they are talking about continuity shows they are missing the point.

No one’s talking about little gaffes, we’re talking about sloppy disregard for your audience and their intelligence. You, as a reader, deserve to be treated better. You deserve to have the time you spent on a story validated by having the previous chapter mean something.

There will always be people that buy whatever crap DC churns out…even the worst comic has 10,000 readers.

I’m happy that you are enjoying DC’s new, rebooted universe. I will never begrudge anyone’s reading habits, even if I personally disagree with them.

You make very valid points about DC not catering to longtime fans. At the end of the day, it is a business, isn’t it? This is why I am no longer a paying DC customer, because the tide seems to be turning towards the so-called newer generation of DC fans and away from those of us who have an affinity for the older characters and histories.I have exorcised my choice to NOT buy comics that I find no bond or connection to. Finding a lot more money now for books from other companies and back issues, so it’s a sad thank you and a tip of the hat I leave DC with.

Second, I have been steadily decreasing my Marvel books for years now. It seems like Marvel caught up to the old DCU book with having a seperate Avengers book for every season, storylines that don’t ever end, and hey, didn’t the X-Men just restructure thier team again?! Seriously, if there isn’t a month where there is a HUGE change to Spiderman, the X-Men battling one another or a meaningless Avengers shake up that would truly be a Marvel event.

I find it amazing that DC throws its history away yet Marvel seems to embrace their history much more.

No attempt at “fix” the continuity of the New 52 can undo this mess.

I keep hoping for a return to the universe and characters that I know and care about, but they seem to be committed to this new direction. It looks like this will be the event that finally gets me to stop reading comics altogether.

I know a lot of new readers that have been really pleased with the nu52 because they feel they find it more accessible. I also know some that are looking forward to the 0 issues. As far as attracting new readers, I think the nu52 as been successful.

It’s the longtime readers that have been hurt. It can be hard for us to read a new story when we don’t know where it fits with the old ones. Our minds just explode!

Personally, I’m not concerned with continuity; I’m more concerned with how continuity is used. If it is used to tell a good story, great. If it limits the stories that can be told, that’s bad. There are plenty of examples where both of these things have happened.

You’re the one fooling yourself here . Of Course Marvel Now is a marketing retooling and rebranding …

But there is no indication of an kind of reboot and history erasing .

You wont see any shenanigans here like The avengers meeting each other for the first time .

If anything , we knows the real business reasons for the new teams , but plot wise , everything keeps coming from arcs and events branching out of its other for a while .

I wont naively pretend they had it planned since Bendid took the Avengers over , but they did keep building events and important issues from one brick to the next . THAT’s continuity and having a tighly woven and shared universe .

I dunno why they belittle their own genre and market and decide arbitrarily that people reading comics dont want continuity .

If you can’t deal with having a rich history and needing to have a permanent and ever lasting setting , going through mandatory motions and cycle … then as a publisher switch model already and frickin’ ape Mangas and other finite stories .

Same goes for readers , if you can’t deal with it , dont bother with the genre .

A rich history can be frightening to newcomers , but as long as you try those jumping point the right way , fine .

I can convince any friend to go over the hurdle of 700 batman and spiderman books , by helping him navigate aound the keys plot points and arcs .

But i certainly wont convince him to do so , if he gotta relearn everything about the universe every new volume , because of reboots .

I mean come on “remember that time when i hooked you into reading about the JLA ? Well turns out in 2012 they just met for the first time ” doesnt sounds good at all and scares people off from even trying

Geoff Johns obviously didn’t totally agree with it, Aquaman remains mostly unchanged from how he was depicted in Brightest Day, Green Lanterns mythology is intact. Johns was able to keep the characters he was working on untouched, same for Morrison’s Batman.

The rest of thse are not the characters I know, DC made a huge error here. Like others posters have said, many of the changes that work could have been done without a reboot. You want to slap a #1 on a title, go ahead, but changing everything about a character, forcing the Wildstorm characters into the origins of DC Characters? I see a lot of backpedaling coming, too much change, too quick was not the way to go.