Why did DC throw the whole continuity away after Brightest Day?

Everything was perfectly in place after that event, and they just shit all over it with Flashpoint and the New 52.

The storylines that were teased looked to be promising as well.

New president Diane Nelson got hired.

What was her problem?

I don't know why a lot of people are so hung up on continuity.

The character names may stay the same, but if they're done by different writers then they're different characters.

I feel this insistence of having different writers for different arcs for a series is a huge weakness for DC and Marvel. I find myself enjoying a series and suddenly the entire tone changes and I'm reading a different book.

It's possible to have good worldbuilding, but keep characters with their writers!

What about characters where people other then the original creators do the character way better?

>Alan Moore Swamp Thing
>Grant Morrison Doom Patrol
>Denny O'Neil The Question
>Tim Truman Hawkman

Those writers would have written great characters regardless.

I loved Neil Gaiman's Sandman. But even if he didn't work with that character he would still be a great writer.

What bothers me most is when I'm enjoying a spectacular arc with a lot of insight on a character, and on the next arc they take out everything that made the series good. If quality can't be maintained, let the series end.

Rumors I heard where that she demanded Senior Editorial do something to start beating Marvel in the market share or all of them would be fired. They had Flashpoint all ready coming down the pike so they used it to do a hard reboot of the line, which, to their credit, created a bunch of buzz and a bunch of sales...which then fizzled out because the stories were all about SHOCK value and pointless cliffhangers, and so they're now trying to backpedal with "Rebirth"

Superman was in the toilet. That's what makes them reboot.

Do you realise how terrible Superman Grounded was?

>her
Come on son.

The funny thing is, if I remember correctly, DC was doing pretty well at the time. Blackest Night sold like hot cakes and they had some very good storylines going on.

>reverse-flash family
still angry this didn't happen

Grounded was shit, but they didn't need to reboot the whole DCU just to sort out Straczynski's mess.

That's what DC does though.

Most characters are written better by someone other than the original creator, including both Superman and Batman. Thor, X-men, Hulk, Iron Man, Captain America etc. were written much better later on.

So was Wonder Woman and Teen Titans

Forget grounded; Johns was running Superman sales into the ground earlier too. Superman titles were hovering in 30K.

New Krypton dragged on for way too long, that's for sure.

I thought Superman reboot was good, but that was solely because it got Morrison back on the title. He's one of the three active writers who can actually write Superman.

All-Star Superman is probably the best storyline ever written about the character, but Morrison's New 52 reboot was shit.

Agreed. The JLA and JSA lines were a mess, but on the whole the DC Universe hadn't ever been in that good of a shape. The final retcons from Brightest Day had things going juuust right for future stories.

Nah, it was the best Superman run of all time since Byrne 's run.

It's only fault was being a pleb filter for what was supposed to be a lot of people's introduction to Superman.

It was a perfect opportunity to bring back the original 7 with Aquaman and MM being alive once more. They even managed to fuck that one up with shoehorning one of their blandest, most uninspired character into the JL instead of based J'onn.

What does that even mean?

>Aquaman being alive once more
This will never not piss me off. Aquaman was never dead editorial just had no idea what was going on and made assumptions. He was in coma like state while transforming from a cursed half squid man into a magical healing water being (yes comic books are fucking weird) and then suddenly blackest night was like "here's his perfectly normal but rotting corpse!"

They understood Cereal Lord was a stupid writer just ripping off crappy ideas?

>Cereal Lord
Who is he?

The problem is that literally zero of the stories told by "The New 52" required a reboot in order to be told.

When all seven were just back I asked Johns at NYCC if there were plans. He kind of nodded and said soon.

This was in line to get books signed, so a quick word was it. He seemed earnest and excited. And it all fit his sensibilities.

Shit like the n52 is not for him, as we clearly all saw.

What a stupid thing to say.

And none of them will be on 1000.

>I don't understand why humans require the gradual accumulation of familiarity over the passage of linear time in order to build up an emotional investment in things

...

He wrote good shit tho.

>New 52 reboot was shit

(A) it wasn't a reboot. The only significant changes from the pre-FP reality was the death of BOTH his parents and the lack of relationship with Lois; however, since it was supposedly a younger universe, this all made sense; he had yet to meet, much less marry Lois and, as far as all the references to the first arc, of making Clark edgy, this was a portrait of an underpowered Clark, very different from say Byrne's first appearance, where he could already fly. And it was well in keeping with the OG Classic Superman from 1938 through the early 1940s.

There was no reason to reboot the universe in the first place.

Lol

Retards. Ignore them.

Well the Swamp Thing stuff picked up right where Brightest Day left off, so that story arc still got to happen.

At least Green Lantern survived a bit longer.

I thought the Doomsdays event was fun enough. Then again, it's hard to imagine where you go from there.

I get your point. You are reading a cómic and sudently the arte changes the characters change personalities and you loose interestelar because of that.

really it all boiled down to Warner Bros were afraid of losing the Superman IP and all related shit would be sucked out with it so they freaked and a temporary event (Flashpoint) became a sledgehammer to the face to reboot everything.

After they already had committed to rebooting everything the shit about the Superman IP got settled but by that time they'd went to far to stop and just doubled down.
From what I remember scripts and shit for series that were already in various stages of completion upto a year ahead of time were all scrapped and the writers/artists were told to start over.

It was just short of impossible to slap a reboot of such proportions together in such a short amount of time and try to keep any kind of continuity stable, and it certainly didn't help that much of the editorial staff went full retard dictating changes for the sake of changes and crossovers for the sake of crossovers.

also
>reboot everything
>but green lantern and batman
>everything ever thats happened in GL and batman happened within a 5 to 10 year period
>trying to make sense of this madness

The best stuff to come outta the reboot were fringe titles using characters with little to no changes that could have easily fit in with the previous continuity (Demon Knights, All Star Western, I, Vampire)

>Jade as a GL

fucking dammit, now we're stuck with Gay Alan

Not getting Jade as GL sucked ass, but I was even more pissed about not getting Justice League International after the fantastic Generation Lost 24-parter.

Brightest Day didn't do that well, and all recent creative changes with the Superman line had been big commercial flops. Green Lantern was still doing decently and Batman well, but not as well as in the New 52. Flash's revamp also had failed sales-wise. Basically, outside of Batman, a bunch of editorial initiatives and Johns non-GL books were doing badly, so they shoved everything aside to save their own staff with a big relaunch sales boost.

The most stupid part though is that initially they tried to minimize how much of a reboot it was, even including reference to previous teams and such in the first N52 issues, but as soon as they saw the high numbers they decided to just break away completely from the old continuity, even though those connections and their denials about N52 being a reboot clearly hadn't hurt the first issues.

Still doesn't justify what they did.

Only people who smoke joints and inexperienced smokers hold a cigarette like that.

>The most stupid part though is that initially they tried to minimize how much of a reboot it was, even including reference to previous teams and such in the first N52 issues
Wasn't that just miscommunication? I remember a lot of writers and artits getting pissed and leaving because they didn't know wtf was going on until the last minute, because like, morrison was doing whatever shit he wanted and not telling anyone.

is that supposed to be swamp thing taking off his skin? or like swamp thing was just a rubber mask all along?

We'll never know.

It was a huge mistake, but both companies fucked up at the same time. I basically stopped buying Marvel after Siege and DC after Flashpoint.

It's funny because both Blackest Night and Dark Reign were fresh and cool storylines, but then they went fucking nowhere with them.

That's how European's hold their smokes. King of the Hill even made a joke about that when Bobby got caught smoking.

This. She wanted to make the comics easier for new readers to get into and thus sell better. There was a perception that the backstory was "baggage" with the ongoing continuities and that it intimidated potential readers, so they basically started over. But to stop the existing readership from bailing out, they retained some of the major aspects for characters as well, so they sort of tried to have their cake and eat it too in that regard.

Personally I haven't touched anything post-N52 because it's offensive to the stories I've come to love over the years. I was kind of behind and making my way through Brightest Day when Flashpoint had ended, and when I heard they were rebooting everything I stopped without touching Flashpoint.

The sales say otherwise.