Yeah, J'onn was one of my favorite DC characters when I first started reading, but he got kind of lame once Infinite Crisis hit. I was not a fan of the new direction at all.
He was pretty poorly served by the two most recent crises. (Actually, on reflection, I don't even remember a single scene with him in it in the first. But then I forget a lot about CoIE, because it is uniformly terrible with the minor exception that Perez sometimes managed to produce a legible page, although I realize it is much-beloved for reasons I do not fully understand, possibly because I was not a child in the 1960s or 70s.)
Let's see. In IC, he was beaten up off-panel and held an unconscious prisoner for nearly the entire series for reasons that fail to entirely make sense*; and then murdered in one or two panels in FC. And then there's Brightest Day, which I have not read because it is forbidden by my religion to give Geoff Johns money.
*Seriously. I just deleted an 200-word explanation as to why this doesn't make sense, because I figured out I might be the dumb one for trying to apply something daft like 'physics' to the DCU.
That said, Kai, you should take a look in my sig. I'm working on building an "Ultimate DC" Fanfiction community. It sounds like you'd be a cool person to have there, especially since you're someone who respects J'onn (who is still available). You should check it out.
One time I was going to rewrite Infinite Crisis, in part because it's disjointed and often nonsense, and in part because despite it all it has the strongest and most sympathetic villain protagonists in comics history. The former fact seems to have escaped anyone involved's attention, but the latter Johns did seem to realize late in the game. True to his creepy idiom, he made them an unfeeling sociopath and a mad murder machine respectively. Because that's what you do when you conceive really interesting characters, you make them one-note and boring.
So I was going to do that, but then I mostly didn't. -_- I think part of the reason was that while the OMAC Project was ugly comics and the Rann-Thanagar War was a crime against trees, Day of Vengeance and Villains United were already basically perfect. Of course, I should be ashamed of myself that I didn't buy Shadowpact.
The other part was because I never finish
anything.
C_Miller said:
Well, I'd argue that Thor and Iron Man are in the same tier as Martian Manhunter and Shazam! And they are hugely successful. You can market anything, it will just take more work than Batman (who can honestly market himself these days). But I still say GL is going to be the make or break here.
That's true enough. Hell, look at Blade. Three reasonably successful movies, and that guy couldn't sell a comic to save his life.
On the other hand, I would argue strongly that Iron Man and Thor have a much higher q-rating than J'onnz, who strikes me as pretty much virtually unknown, and possibly Billy Batson as well, despite the latter being the most popular character in comics for a good five or six years (those years being six decades ago, however). Thor, if nothing else, has the built-in name recognition factor of being a Norse god.
