The new 52... minus 6

Not true. How well did Grant Morrison's Doom Patrol sell? Or his Seven Soldiers? His last issues of Batman Inc were starting to slip, slaeswise, too. I also mentioned Gail Simone earlier and how horrid her Wonder Woman run was.

Then, there's logistics. It's not at all plausible for Geoff Johns to write every character at DC nor can Jim Lee draw every book. They DO have a staple of very good writers (Fraction, Brubaker, Johns, Azzarello, etc) but the problem is that:

1. Writing/art is subjective. Look at James Robinson. His Starman series was well recieved but his Justice League was considered horrible by most and sales reflected this.

2. Jim Lee created Wildstorm and that universe folded. He's not the Second Coming and anything he touches most certainly doesn't turn to gold.

It's really not anywhere as simple as we fans would like to make it. Saying all they need is "good writing and good art" doesn't cut it. Secret Six is another book with a loyal fanbase, great writing and art. But it was selling lower than the lowest of the new 52 titles.

Each writer and artist has like 2 or 3 books and at least 1 colorist is on several books and he's one of the better colorists.

Speaking from experience and knowledge that's just insane, at least for art. 8 hours per page is what a good page generally takes for good artists (although it should be noticed that a majority of artists in the comic industry are not "good" they are terrible to average for the most part) 8 hours, 20 pages... that's 160 hours per issue and these guys are doing 40-60 pages if not more... 480 hours of work per month. That's 120 hours of work a week. Now, the reason they may be able to work on so many pages may be due to the fact that there are so many people working on each pages

penciler, inker, letterer, colorist... It really is a bit much... colorist is perhaps the most time intensive of those jobs.

So either these people are either extremely fast, not putting as much effort as they should, and/or burning out.

Here's what gets me... I can get over the art most times, but the writing, which is the least time intensive, but also the most important... has been **** for the most part in the new 52. This has to do partially with the fact the writers don't care about the characters they are writing for, but that's not the whole of it I don't think because a good professional writer can write for anything... It's that there is no clear concise vision of, no long term vision for, and no idea what to do with most of these characters... and on top of that anything they may think up can't be the same thing as the characters already knew in most cases...

For example, Batgirl. It's a terrible book... you can see Gail Simone struggling... It's not because she's a bad writer or what she is doing necessarily bad, but also because of the back drop she's writing against which is "Let's give Barbara her legs back" ok... we can do that. That could be an interesting story for the pre-flashpoint Barbara Gordon. There is so much to work with in that back drop... now erase 20 years of history and compress the other 30 years that was compressed to 10 into 3 or erase parts of it and you have a new character virtually that is walking around with a name that has a lot of baggage and a "interesting story" that's been thrown onto this new character that really doesn't work so you have to come up with a new story while putting this new character that is somewhat like this other character she is supposed be and not retread any ground

Imagine if when they made Bruce Batman again what they did was go "Ok Bruce is going to come back as Batman... but now we're going to erase everything after 1970... but we still want a Red Hood story and we still want the death of Jason Todd so we're going to make Dick Grayson be the Robin that died, and then come back as Red Hood and then Tim Drake was Robin at some point, but now He's Nightwing because we want Damian still as Robin"

Imagine how awful that would be for the readers but even more so for the writers that would have to try to make Tim Drake this new character that isn't Dick as Nightwing or Tim as Red Robin... There's no where new for that character to go as it is because now you have to retread that old territory to make this new character work, but you're not going to make anyone happy doing that.

Does that make sense? Basically you got those titles... and then you got these other new titles that are aren't being given time or effort nor should they be when your stars are all messed up...

You also have these other titles that are not "new" but people either don't know them or in the case of Static know them, sorta, but not that version, but they're trying to use the known version to try to get people to read this new version but then they're not explaining how this new version is... so new readers are confused there too.

Good writing is not subjective. Whether you like something or not is subjective.

There is technical good writing and art
There is technical bad writing and art
You can objectively say that the art and writing is good or bad

However whether it's good or bad doesn't mean you like it or hate it.

You can demonstrate this fact by picking something that you hate, forcing yourself to take part in 5 to 10 different variations of this thing you hate and then rank them from what you think is good and what you think is bad. The closer in similarity they are the better this works because there are number of variables that are at work and thus more likely that something that is something you like seeps into it and throws it off.

You can also look at things like does this make sense, is it communicating the message it's meaning to, are the proportions right, is this stylistic or is this just showing that this guy doesn't know what he's doing.

It's hard to describe, but the rule for writing that I'm sure everyone has heard (but teachers will never let you get away with) is that you have to learn how to do things right so that you can break the rules and it's well done. Every great writer, poet, lyricist breaks the rules, but they know the rules and where they do break them they convey a meaning or have a greater impact. And this can be seen by most people, not consciously, but more intuitively because when we look at someone breaking rules randomly and we see them not understanding the rules of the language it fails to make the impact desired and often time causes distaste for that particular person for most people.

I think a perfect example of this is...if i remember the names right... Roland Emerich and Micheal Bay. Bay is a moron. Emerich is a genius. They do things that are similar but the artistry of most of what Emerich does is apparent even in movies that people might call schlock where as Bay's movies are schlock and have no artistry. The Nostalgia Chick actually explains this quite well in one of her videos



Also... another thing... You can't just have any artist/writer on any book, film, whatever. Some people are just good at certain styles and horrible at others. giving Johns a series which has to run 6 issues and contains characters he tries to dis every time they appear in something he writes...probably a dumb move. For him, he should probably doing one shots of things he likes and letting him roll with ideas... perhaps give him DC presents and tell him to go wild. That would likely be his best work ever.

Unfortunately, while everyone can judge good writing objectively, they don't all judge it the same way.

I thought Wildstorm folded because they gave up on the universe myself.

Why not call it Gen 13. They already introduced some of the Gen 13 cast in Superboy.

So far I'm not impressed with the DC relaunch. Honestly it should just be called 'The DC Universe according to Jim Lee.'

The dark ages of comics. There were a few gems . . . that I can count on one hand.

The talent's not spread thin. Liefeld will be on THREE DCnU books here shortly, aaannnddd in theory, all at the same time. That's just... an inexplicably bad creative and business decision on so many levels it's frightening.

You're thinking too narrowly. You could even ask what the last new character was that the Big 2 introduced that was successful. Which would probably be Deadpool, back in 1991. And really, he only "hit it big" in the last few years. The Big 2 have enough trouble introducing ANY new characters, let alone minority ones. One could probably argue that Marvel isn't even really trying to introduce new characters anymore, they're building themselves around Spider-Man, the X-Men and the Avengers. DC has Batman, but at least they're kinda sorta trying with books like Mister Terrific, Static Shock, Men of War, whatever the new Firestorm book is called, and the new Ray mini.

Neither title was written to be a best seller. They were both opportunities for Morrison to indulge in his wacked-out Morrisson-ness. Vanity projects, if you will.

Are we talking par for the course comic sales drop-off? Like what's expected from 98% of the titles out there? Or something excessive? Two other things to note about Batman Inc were the fill-in artists and the delays on the issues.

Simone seems to have finally fallen from the zomgshesthebestestwriterevereverever pedestal some fans put her on. From what I gather, she found her consistent niche in Secret Six, but her work on solo books (Wonder Woman) and team books (Birds of Prey) doesn't get anywhere near the night universal praise it used to.

King Shark was awsome. I say make King Shark a red latern!

Frankly, I think DC 52 has much bigger gender issues it has to deal with.