I said it a little over a year ago when all of this was announced that Winnick should have gotten
Justice League International, and I say that as someone who, in general, is not a huge Winnick fan. I read
Justice League: Generations Lost because it started out as a Keith Giffen book (with help from Winnick), but somewhere along the line, Giffen seemingly dropped out and Winnick took over. Aside from what he did with Ice's origin, I loved the rest of the series and was really hoping to see him pen these characters in another (hopefully on-going) title.
I loved Jurgens back in the mid-90's, but felt his writing started to wear thin in the late 90's (around the time I gave up comics for 2 years). I read his run on
Booster Gold and never really loved it, it felt like he was still stuck in the 90's.
I feel as if there has been a shift in the way comics are written now than in the 1990's, just as the comics in the 90's felt different than in the 80's and so on. The 90's stories were very character driven (to the point where some issues of say,
Superman felt like the focused more on the staff of the Planet, Jimmy's mother, Clark's parents, Lois' parents, etc. more than on Superman). They also had some fairly straightforward plots and the science fiction was also rather straightforward. Lastly, they seemed to work really hard to take Silver Age concepts and explain them in a more rational way. I felt like Karl Kessel really did a great job of this (such as when, in
Superboy, he played with the Kamandi concept by having Superboy end up in a world like Kamandi's with his memory wiped, only to slowly regain his memories and figure out he was just on an uncharted island). As another example, compare the pre-Crisis Comet the Super-Horse to the
post-Crisis version.
Now, I feel as if the supporting cast is pared down and we rarely see the soap-opera like plots involving them. They are used as a part of the main narrative. The stories nowadays are less straightforward and science-fiction involves brain-twisting concepts. They also boldly accept the Silver Age concepts, using some super-science fiction to explain them, but keeping them as close to their original forms as possible.
However, Jurgens continues to write as if it were the 90's and the narrative structure has not changed at all. As an example, his run on
Booster Gold had Booster dealing with the return of his sister, Goldstar, confronting the New Teen Titans, teaming up with Batgirl, and running across the Cyborg Superman shortly before he destroyed Coast City.
