I can certainly understand and sympathize with wanting comics to be a good deal more kid-friendly, Brad. I've been turned off by the violence-porn (and porn-porn) aspects of modern comics for some time now. I'm picking up only a few of the Nu52 offerings and finding them more or less suitable for general readers (Justice League, Action, Batgirl, a few others here and there) despite the occasional serial killer storyline or two.

I am finding the tone of the stories to be different from what I'd seen previously (again, I wasn't buying much) in that the storylines relentlessly plunge ahead rather than stopping to talk things over or, heaven help us, look back to "explain" and "fix" continuity "errors." That may not be enough of a change in direction for everyone, though, and I can see that.

Certainly there is very little available to hand to a nephew anymore.

"Maximum Carnage" sounded like an excellent stepping off point, Glen. Had I continued with the character before, I certainly would have stopped then. I more or less left Spider-Man during the start of the McFarlane run. The mis-steps in characterization, the rise of Venom, and the lack of any writing craft whatsoever ("His web-line? Advantageous!") did me in.

Your characterization of the new creators of DC's Silver Age "pissing on" the older versions is somewhat off, in the sense that Gardner Fox was the writer of the original Flash as well as a contributor to the reinvented version. Robert Kanigher wrote the new origin, but Fox wrote many of the new Flash's adventures. Similarly, Kanigher was a contributor to the Jay Garrick version as well. Julius Schwartz, the editor who commissioned the changes in keeping with a more "science-minded" approach and keeping up with kids' changing tastes, was also around for the Golden Age.

Today's "diva" mentality had little or nothing to do with the decision to update the Golden Age characters for modern readers. The thought process was different altogether. Kids went for the Flash! We'll give them the Flash! New, different, and exciting, because new, different, and exciting are not intrinsically bad things. Any lack of respect for the Jay Garrick version was more or less unfathomable to the pros who wrote these stories. They themselves maintained a certain nostalgia for Jay which manifested itself in his return in The Flash of Two Worlds, literally allowing them to have the Best of Both Worlds, new and old. Once they found that readers liked the original JSA'ers as well, they brought them back, too. Why not? They had nothing against them.

Their only crime here, I think, was in assuming at the outset that readers should be given something new rather than just blowing the dust of something old. No one had more cause to be loyal to the past than they did. They were simply professional enough to set aside such sentiment and, again, INVENT something rather than go back to the well for more of the same.

I'll grant that my examples above are broad, but I think the basic conceit was essentially the same. Keep the trademark, sometimes the suit, but ditch the character or everything we know about the character. It's standard practice in the comics field, going back as far as the Golden Age itself, when characters were routinely retooled to fit editorial standards, whims, or the dictates of sales. The half-mask crime fighting Dr. Fate, Kent Nelson had the same name, and no one ever said the word "reboot," (still a few decades away from being coined) but he was definitely different from the mystical sorceror who fought Cthulu-ish demons early on.

No one saw this as "pissing on" the character or what came before. Simply changing times.

(Hey! Post 3500! I think I'll reward myself with a cookie...)

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DC really thought this thru, didn't they?