Aaron Smith wrote: "The Phantom Stranger being impaled on some kind of blade but, surprisingly, not spurting any blood!"

Leave it to that guy to buck the trends, betray his fellows, and go his own way. I'm sure it's all part of a larger plan, however... :-)

I look forward to MarvelNow's marketing response: "F*ckin' Assistant Editor's Month, Bitches!"

WTF Certified.

All I can think to say to the DC WTF is GFY.

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I'm reminded of a DC house ad in the mid-Sixties, that featured an explosion of words meant to describe their product. One of those words, in big display lettering, was "HEP" -- a word that had fallen out of any but sarcastic usage at least ten years earlier!

I made a decision the last few weeks to drop all of the DC titles that I was buying except World's Finest. Not a terribly hard decision since I've always preferred Marvel characters but I have some history with DC (Man of Steel, Ostrander's Suicide Squad, Legends, Breyfogle's Detective, Aparo's Batman). The current DC regime seems to be more interested in shocking people. That's fine if you like that sort of thing but I don't.

In the past, I've thought that Didio brought some good and some bad when he joined DC but the more I think about it we have:

- Sue Dibny's rape and murder (while pregnant)

- Elongated Man's death

- Black Adam killing an entire nation

- Blue Beetle getting a hole blown in his head

- Jonathan Kent's death (and in the New 52 Martha and Jonathan)

- The "darkening" of Mary Marvel (Didio's take that the Marvel family "doesn't work" in the DC Universe)

- Joker cutting his face off

- Changing Harley Quinn's look to show alot of skin.

- Speedy's daughter getting killed and Speedy himself getting his arm ripped off.

-"Killing off" KIrby's version of the New God's  

- As well as various dismemberings and deaths that I haven't mentioned. 

I realize that creators (specifically Geoff Johns) did all of this but it was under Didio's watch. I'm not sure who he's appealing to with these kinds of moves.

••

Talk about missing the point!!

When I was preparing to work on CAPTAIN MARVEL, one of the things I had to confront was the fact that the DCU was already deep into its darkening, and that the uninspired editorial staff and narrow thinking readers wanted little else. But how could I "darken" Captain Marvel without destroying the very core of the character?

The answer came to me as something of a epiphany: it was not Cap who needed to be "dark". Rather, I should play off the "grim and gritty" template that had become mandatory at DC, and make Cap's home, Fawcett City, the nastiest place on Earth. Cap, Mary, and anyone else I chose to reintroduce would then stand out against the gloom without being sacrificed to it. This thought immediately gave me a tag line for the series:

IN THE CITY OF ULTIMATE DARKNESS, THERE IS A NEW LIGHT!

As it happened, DC double-crossed me (not for the first time), and reneged on their part of the deal. (They had agreed I could treat Cap as "separate" from the rest of DC, without actually invoking parallel universes. But only two pages into the first issue I was informed Captain Marvel "had to be" in the JLA. So, sadly, I downed tools and walked away.)

Of course, at the Nu Decline of Superstars, being faithful to the core of the characters is not even a consideration.