Go, Read: The Case Against Dan DiDio

By Abhay Kosla, here.

That's a brutal assessment of DiDio's career-to-date. I don't understand corporate culture, but as an observer of comics more generally it has always seemed to me that a whole lot of people could be held more accountable for the performance of their companies, and for the culture they foster in which others have to operate. (My performance since mid-2014 hasn't been great, either, but I own the joint.) It's not like with DC I can point to a lot of awesome publishing positives there, more like a scattering of decent-selling series, but maybe a few more will come to mind when I re-read Abhay's article. I'm happy to give space here and if it's of a high quality pay for the rights to anyone who would like to write a rousing, thorough defense of the arguments presented in that article; that would be interesting to read.

As far as DiDio goes, I've always thought if his job wasn't even close to being in danger in May 2008 when the first issue of the we-are-all-in Final Crisis somehow wasn't that month's #1 comic, he was going to be a really difficult fire. The nature of the success enjoyed by the New 52 publishing initiative seemed then and seems now like the kind of thing that keeps people in jobs, too, despite any number of caveats. People still remember the publicity-generating editorial tweaks and the lines outside of the NYC comic shops with that one. They don't remember it was a move that was self-correcting a couple of years of near free-fall, that Bob Wayne secured a lot of the retailer confidence involved, that the sales bumps enjoyed on certain books went away quickly, that the line once again became bottom heavy even more quickly than that, and that at best three or four characters were developed in an interesting way that might have other-media payoffs.

Anyway, that's a fun article; you should read it if you're a deep-diver when it comes to comic-book industry watching or if you ever want to work here. I've benefited greatly by comics' low standards, but we're at a point that's not good enough anymore -- doubly, triply, infinitely, finally so for the people whose performances have a drastic impact on a significant number of people's lives.
 
posted 5:25 pm PST | Permalink
 

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