was the decade of being hunted for sport n52-didio's ousting?
I generally think of it as roughly 2005-2015, so definitely encompassing the New 52 and within the span of DiDio's tenure (as well as that of folks like Eddie Berganza).
And like, this is a very personal timeline based on things happening to specifically to comics and characters I like. Other people may have a bunch of stuff during that window that they love! (And so do I, tbh. Steph's Batgirl series is in there! Jaime's entire solo run!)
But we got Identity Crisis in 2004, and started feeling the impacts immediately afterwards (i.e. everything got darker and rapier and the heroes got worse). Stephanie Brown was killed off at the end of 2004; Ted Kord at the beginning of 2005. DiDio had stated that he wanted "to take the smile out of comics" (insane thing to say) and so characters from funny and/or lighthearted books were very deliberately in his crosshairs. The JLI was decimated (Ted, Ralph and Sue, Scott and Barda and Orion and Lightray, Dmitri, Hugh) as was Young Justice (technically just Kon and Bart but that's a HUGE percentage of a very small team). Cry for Justice happened, Lian Harper's death included. Connor Hawke was shot in the head, stuck in a coma for ages, and awoke with his personality erased before being written off. Jennie-Lynn Hayden was killed; Grant Emerson; Garth. Characters I loved, like Wally and Kyle, were sidelined in favor of their Silver Age predecessors to appease the worst and most regressive part of the fanbase (which included plenty of people within the company). Characters were maimed so frequently, usually by having an arm ripped or cut off, that there was a running joke that DC stood for "Dismemberment Comics." It was an utterly bleak bloodbath.
And then the New 52 happened. And not only were 80% of the characters I liked dead, now they no longer even existed. The misogynistic, racist agenda behind the New 52's architects was blatantly obvious. Besides the number of BIPOC, female, and queer characters who were erased from existence, there's the famous stat that DC's percentage of female creators went from 12% to 1% - literally just two women, Gail Simone and Amy Reeder, both of whom were fired within a year. If you asked DC about this at a convention, Dan DiDio would literally scream at you personally. And if you could get past all of THAT, the comics themselves were utterly joyless exercises in Serious Comics For Serious Men Who Hate Girls And Fun. The atmosphere at DC was so toxic that creators left in droves for reasons like "DC won't allow queer characters to get married" and "my editor refuses to tell me whether Ma and Pa Kent are alive and I'M WRITING SUPERMAN."
I am really struggling to convey just how explicit and unashamed and aggressive the misogyny in comics was, too. This wasn't limited to DC, it was industry-wide, but DC was a major contributor. There was the treatment of female creators, the screaming at women at cons and fantasizing about shooting female fans on panels, the still very widespread use of fridging as a plot device...then there was how women were drawn. Which could be a treatise in and of itself, but I think I'll just show you what Zatanna looked like in Flashpoint:
And then around 2014 or so, things started to change in tone and aesthetic. Female characters started to get cute, comfortable, fashionable outfits. I associate this more with Marvel (Ms. Marvel, Captain Marvel, Spider-Gwen, Spider-Woman, Silk - just amazing costumes all around in like 2014-2015), but the Batgirl of Burnside run also started in 2014.
DC also had two big publishing initiatives in 2015 that were real indicators of change. First, there was Convergence, which brought back tons of pre-Flashpoint versions of DC's characters - only for a couple of issues each, but it was such a breath of fresh air to see them again, and was clearly a test to see how readers would respond to a rolling back of the New 52. And second, there was the now seemingly forgotten DCYou, which was a specific focus on more diverse stories - diversity of tone and aesthetic as well as gender, race, etc. The New52 had been in such grim lockstep and DCYou was so fun and fresh and creative. I absolutely loved it.
Of course Rebirth happened in 2016 and sort of opened the floodgates to undoing the New 52, which was gone entirely by early 2021 (not for nothing, as soon as DiDio was gone). Don't get me wrong - there have definitely been choices by DC that I didn't enjoy or that pissed me off in the past decade. But I no longer feel like DC hates me and everyone like me and is doing everything they can to get me to stop reading comics. It's just an entirely different culture from DC and from the industry as a whole, and it's such a relief.
