While I was preoccupied the past few weeks, DC Entertainment made the announcement about their new line-up. I heard some rumblings about it, but thanks to the weekly Bleeding Cool e-mail and this post, I got to catch the announcement.
To recap: DC Comics reinvented itself, possibly due to Marvel having their own big company backer. DC had Time Warner and now Marvel had Disney. The newly rechristened DC Entertainment announced their “High Five”, the five head honchos at the company. There is good news and bad news.
Diane Nelson took over for Paul Levitz, who took the opportunity of the restructure to return to the rank of writer rather than take on the new role of..well, whatever Nelson’s title is. As for the publisher position, Diane split the duties between two “co-publishers”.
Co-Publisher #1 is Jim Lee. Lee was one of the Marvel creators who formed Image Comics, with his own “Wildstorm” imprint, which recently broke away from Image and is now part of the DC juggernaut. His biggest claim to fame was the creation of WildC.A.T.S., his signature title. Wildstorm hasn’t done to well lately, actually, from what I hear, and some fans and bloggers have noted that Wildstorm seems to be more interested in licensed properties. On the other hand, I’m looking at their list, and they still have titles like Kurt Busiek’s Astro City, which is highly praised, but there do seem to be a lot more video game titles, like Free Realms and God Of War.
The other co-publisher is Dan Didio. I think he’s been discussed at length on most comic blogs, but I would note here that, as mentioned in Linkara’s reviews of the Countdown event, that Didio was responsible for the thought that stories should be driven by the editorial team rather than the writer/artist team, unlike the breakout 52 series. He also is responsible for the return of Barry Allen (unnecessary) and Hal Jordan (your mileage may vary) from death, and has done nothing to reign in the blood bath that is the current Teen Titans series. He’s often accused of being a “Silver Age Fanboy”, but considering the poor treatment of the Silver Age characters I tend to disagree with that assessment.
Geoff Johns will take on the new role of “Chief Creative Officer”. What does that even mean? Johns seems to be bipolar. Some of his stuff is really good and fan-approved, like Sinestro Corps, and some of it is just plain stupid, like this article on the Flash that was going to be my target, and I may yet get into the whole “the Speed Force is generated by Barry Allen because he’s the greatest Flash ever and ever and ever” nonsense in the future. Not to mention turning Captain Boomerang and his son into baby killers thanks in part to the Black Lantern pseudo-zombie rampage.
But then we get into the “Executive Partners”, John Rood and Patrick Caldon.
…
Never heard of them.
The real issue I have here (besides giving Didio more power; I wonder when we get publisher-driven stories, thus making matters worse than the editorial-driven stuff) is what the heck are “Executive Partners”, and what is their function? At least I can hazzard a guess as to what the Chief Creative Officer does, and it worries me, but Executive Partners? Why does DC Entertainment need all these titles and what do they do? Isn’t one of the problems in business today how many executives officers, CEOs, CFOs, and other undefined executive titles are in charge of decision making? This doesn’t make any sense to me at all.
Any hope of the restructure leading to better comics and a more productive DC seems to be fleeting.
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