#didiowars

[fredricwertham]

From Bleeding Cool's infamous "DC Editorial List of Shame" thread, circa late 2013

[fredricwertham]

hi! you've talked before about how jason shouldn't have been brought back to life and it made me curious as to what kinds of changes you think that would have brought to dc comics had he stayed dead 👀

(and for an evil related question to balance things out; what do you think would have happened had dick actually been killed off during infinite crisis?)

Sure, though I think I've said all I have to say about why I think that was a poor choice at this point. My issue with the decision to resurrect Jason has more to do with what might not have happened than any real vision of what could have. Some of these things happened in concert with the initial retcon, others emerged through his repositioning as an anti-hero in the reboot. Putting aside all of the terrible discourse that goes on around Jason, here are the keynotes:

Almost all of the women and characters of color who'd accumulated in Gotham were removed through the preceding arc, War Games, in order to set the stage for UtRH, which epitomized the type of grim, macho storytelling that editorial felt Gotham had become 'too crowded' (re: feminized) for. It is a blockbuster arc built to sell the audience on editorial's preferred version of Gotham, and Jason, as the suitably angry and violent white guy, is very much being sold as an alternative to the previous cast.

While Jason wasn't actually reinvented as an anti-hero until N52, editorial had initially intended to move him directly into that role following Dick's planned death in Infinite Crisis, and event which heavily overlapped with UtRH.

When Jason was integrated into the main cast as an anti-hero following the reboot, once prominent characters were all but permanently removed from the core cast to accommodate Jason's sustained incorporation.

The personalities of long-standing characters who weren't pushed out of the cast were warped in order to make room for him.

Established relationships were broken apart and relocated to Jason in order to provide him with a support cast, and the characters who ended up in that role were badly bastardized.

Bringing him back to life eliminated the illusion of consequence that had been created through the permanent death of a major character. While Jason was dead, death was possible (if highly unlikely) for these characters because it had happened to one of them. That's why writers kept using the 'be careful or you could end up like Jason' line, not because everybody at DC had a vendetta against a make-believe child. It creates suspense.

What it comes down to is the he's a purely subtractive character for me, and that leaving him dead could have allowed for further development of the dynamics that were in place prior to the WG/UtRH saga. I don't think that removing UtRH from continuity would actually change the tail end of the post-Crisis universe that much. It never seemed to have much of an impact on Bruce after the fact, and you could easily plug a different villain into Jason's role in the Dickbats era (even if you lose the fun evil double angle) given that it was fairly minor. Sadly somebody else would get to turn into a tentacle monster.

As for your evil followup question, though, that's actually something I've been mulling over a lot recently. I don't think it would have stuck, first of all. Fan backlash against Dick's death started before it had already happened and important figures at DC were against the idea, which is why it was aborted in the first place, so there would have been a lot of pressure to undo it. If you want a guess at how this could have happened in the preboot continuity, Dick is the person who stopped Tim from dunking his lost loved ones in the Lazarus pit, so without Dick there to stop him you can reasonably assume that Tim would have gone through with resurrecting Dick that way. I don't think that this is actually how DC would have written that story given that Jason had just been revived with the pit, but it's the path that slips most neatly into the canon post-Infinite Crisis order of events.

The reboot also undid almost all of the big post-crisis (and pre-crisis) deaths that hadn't already been undone—Barry Allen came back to be the Flash and Ted Kord, as the other major character to die in Infinite Crisis, came back to be Blue Beetle, etc. That being said, though, DC had planned to make Jason Nightwing following Dick's death, and the reboot eliminated the entire generation of characters that Dick is a part of, so it's totally possible that Jason would have been the original Robin in N52 while Dick was struck from the record with Donna Troy and Wally West. Yuck! Perish the thought.

What I’ve really been turning over though is whether or not the story DC had planned would have worked had they gone through with it, and I think the answer to that question is 'no.' My understanding of what went down with Infinite Crisis is that Dick was saved late enough in the game that the story we have is essentially the same as the story he was slated to die in with a few very late page alterations. The problem I have with that is that it doesn't really do anything for his character and is so blatantly not about him, but about Bruce experiencing the tragic and ironic consequences of his actions heading into the crisis. He built a system to protect himself from his metahuman allies, domino, domino, domino, it leads to the death of the person he loves most. Very sad for Bruce, but that's not an especially satisfying way of killing off a character who'd had their own narrative for decades and was snatched out of the middle of an arc in their ongoing solo title. The followup almost inevitably would have been a retread of the fallout from ADitF, too, which, for all it's flaws, at least accomplished the task of being a story about Jason. Even Kon's last-minute swap out death successfully managed to be about him by presenting a compelling conclusion to his character arc, where Dick's presence in the same story mostly amounts to foreshadowing that he's going to die.

In my opinion, if DC really wanted to kill him off at that particular point in time, it ought to have happened when Chemo was dropped on Bludhaven. That way, it would serve his own narrative while maintaining the tie-in to Infinite Crisis. It's the story of someone who stumbled over his inherent vulnerabilities by helping the wrong person, and who wound up engaging in a kind of insane attempt at restructuring his stagnated, corrupt society in order to make it a better, safer place. That's classic hubris—obviously, it didn't work. But you did get to see the forces that arrayed against him, many of which were unseen and out of scope, and how his desire to do good in the world cut against them. In the end, he was able to reprise his once wavering principles.

That's a pretty good story, to me. It would have been messy because it wasn't the intended direction of that arc, but it would be something. Setting up a Greek tragedy only to have him die in Bruce's Shakespearean tragedy? Bad.

[fredricwertham]

I’ve suspected that there were plans to permanently trap Dick in his mediocre James Bond parody era by shoehorning somebody else into the Nightwing mantel for a long time, but I was always under the impression that the character intended to do that was Harper Row because of the obvious similarities between her Bluebird costume and Dick’s most popular suit (from the colors, to the chevron on the chest, to the stripes down the arms). I never guessed that Duke (or any other character) was also floated but it's good to have some confirmation that this is a thing that happened.

(Full article here)

[fredricwertham]

between countdown and new 52 would you say that didio wanted to replace dick with jason?

It isn’t speculation that he did. The plan was for Jason to take up the Nightwing mantel in a ‘One Year Later’ storyline following Dick’s death in Infinite Crisis. DiDio shared his notes on the initial plot, which had Jason being ‘rejected by the Bat-group as a villain and imposter’ and setting out ‘to prove he can be better tan Batman by doing it his own way’ via his Facebook page after he’d lost his job at DC. From the horse’s keyboard:

You can see the set up in Countdown, like you said, and N52 reads to me as an attempt at writing the rest of the plot with Dick still alive.

[fredricwertham]

in the didio days do you think that dc held resentment for ntt’s success in the 80s

Someone sent me a question about this ages ago that I really need to get back to answering. My woo woo red string and bulletin board conspiracy theory is that his issue with seemingly every character associated with that book has more to do with COIE than NTT itself.

[fredricwertham]

[fredricwertham]

[fredricwertham]

Attempting to (re)establish DC’s target audience as (implicitly white, heterosexual) men (who have been alive long enough to miss the comic status quo of the 70s and early 80s btw) by axing characters that appealed to women and snuffing out any lingering gayness around Batman—or at least, any non-villainous gayness—was definitely part of it, or really most of it, but I also think that Wolfman and Didio have some insane beef that we’ll never be privy to. Maybe it’s because Wolfman killed off Barry Allen in COIE.