Scans_Daily

Yeah, both Cornell and Morrison are writers who genuinely seem to love the medium that they're working in and the characters and settings that they're working with.

To be honest, Dan Didio... Doesn't. He treats DC as a business, which it is, but it seems that he's going for what he feels would be best for sales or to promote publicity for a comic, even if it's at the detriment of storytelling.

For example, Mark Waid that that Dan hated 52, and would loudly walk around proclaiming as such. Didio would go on to say that Countdown was "52 done right", even though it was a massive critical failure.

I believe that the logic behind this was that since 52 was a pretty insular series (with Infinite Crisis acting as a buffer at the beginning and One Year Later acting as one on the end), people didn't have to buy the series to know what was going on elsewhere in the DCU for the most part.

Having a major event that wasn't a required read could argueably be seen as being part of a bad business plan.

So Countdown, which dipped and weaved into various other series that tied into it's story, for example, Amazons Attack, Death of the New Gods, Salvation Run etc. etc. it made having to buy EVERYTHING a requirement to understand what the heck was going on most of the time. This lead to some really bad storytelling where characters would appear and disappear with no explanation as to WHY.

And also, the fact that the series was being dictated to writers instead of Paul Dini etc. being allowed to create something on their own lead to the storyline dissolving into an incoherent mess as they were being passed snippets of Grant Morrison's plans of Final Crisis without getting the whole picture.

For example, Mary Marvel going evil. In Final Crisis her being possessed by Desaad made sense because Morrison's versions of the New Gods had a history of that kind of thing, and Desaad (the God of Perversion) taking over her brain goes a lot way to explain her sudden inclination for microskirts and get literally getting off of absorbing magic.

In Countdown, they had the note that Mary was going to go evil, but no explaination as to WHY this was. SO they had to make up a reason. A reason that seemed to fit in with the boneheaded idea that having evil powers made you an evil person, and that moral grey was for suckers.

And even when they eventually managed to rescue the storyline with Mary managing to struggle through her own little redemptive arc, the fact that she was redestined to get possessed by Desaad made her sudden and, most offensively, fully concious decision to go evil again after getting her old powers back made the whole plotline completely pointless.

Heck, IF they had had Darkseid forcing the powers on her that would have been in keeping with the following storyline, but Noooo, people who do bad things are automatically EVILLLLL (unless they are Hal Jordan) and even when it looks like they're turned to the lightside, the lure of villainy calls to them like heroin to a character from Trainspotting.

Blech. This has gone on for a long time, but I did my dissertation on the media's coverage of Wonder Woman, Superman and Batman, so I guess this might be force of habit a little.

I'll be quiet now.