An Open Letter

Dear DC Comics,

It's a long, strange trip we've been on, you and I.  How long has it been since One More Day drove me into your waiting arms--five years?  Already?  Damn.  Maybe by your standards it's not that long, but I've read enough of your back catalog to know just how many ups and downs you've had.  And holy hell have there been a lot of downs.  Sometimes I think it's a miracle you've lasted 78 years.

But still, I've stuck by you.  Even if it seems like the screwups have been increasing of late.  I'm not even talking about the relaunch--that's not an out-and-out fuckup, just unnecessary.  You don't seem to have done anything that required such a massive shake-up.  If you wanted to bring in new creative teams to rejuvenate the line, why didn't you just, you know, do that?  It's like buying a new car because you're tired of the current one's bumper stickers--you're paying thousands of dollars to solve a problem a bit of peeling would fix.  Your "fresh new start" has proven neither fresh, nor new, nor even a start.  (Meaning, in fact, the relaunch IS a fuckup.  Oh well, at least we got Jeff Lemire writing Animal Man out of it.)

Indeed, the goofs have been coming thicker and faster than before, but I am a patient and forgiving god, willing to overlook and forgive...up to a point.

Look.  Let me put it this way.  In the past six months, I've watched you turn a character best known from a children's cartoon into a sex drone.  I've seen you turn Harley Quinn into a juggalo AND take a great big runny shit on one of your most fondly-remembered series in one whack.  I've seen you cancel one Rob Liefeld series, only to give him three more (which is at least four too many).  I've seen you change your logo to something resembling a kangaroo getting an abortion (which, strangely, is growing on me--I guess my commitment to reproductive rights just runs that deep).  I've seen you not fire Judd Winick.

Spreading the net a little, I have in my studies found evidence of greater chicanery.  I speak of such incidents as turning a lighthearted fantasy comic aimed at young girls into a horror series, rife with gory deaths and butt-babies.  I've seen you try to turn the JLA into 24.  I've seen you call Countdown "52 done right" with a straight face.  I've seen you take the concept of an elderly Superman fighting twin clones of Hitler in a post-apocalyptic future and make it suck.  And in the face of all this...

THIS is the worst idea you've ever had.

Fuck, I'll go one further.  Not only is this the worst idea you've ever had, it's arguably the worst idea anyone has ever had.  Yes, worse than Comic Sans.  I am so willing to go there.  Yeah yeah, I know, just another case of nerd rage, right?  By tomorrow I'll have forgotten all about it and moved on to the next "worst thing ever".  That's how jaded I am--I don't expect worse, I know worse is coming.  But you know what?  When you get down to it, right now is all you have.  And holy hell am I pissed about this right now.

And don't think a positively dynamite creative team is going to help matters.  Credit where it's due, you've gotten some of the finest talent in the industry (and J. Michael Straczynski, durr-hurr-hurr) in on this mortifying prolapse.  If you got these people together on any, and I do mean any other project, I'd be sprinting to Floating World Comics right now, jizzing all the way, to carve my preorder into Jason's forehead backwards.  As it stands, however, these folks' involvement is just twisting the knife more.  Not even Darwyn Cooke can polish a turd.  It's like if  Pope Julius II got fucked in the ass (little known fact: Julius II--total bottom), then Jules got horrible gas and expelled santorum all over the walls of the papal apartments, then called Michelangelo, Botticelli and Ghirlandaio in and said "there's this old chapel I've been meaning to spruce up and I think this pattern would look really nice on the walls and ceiling".  Those three eminent men of Renaissance art notwithstanding, the end result would still be the Sistine Chapel's interior looking like a frothy shart-splosion.

So no, I won't be buying your stupid Watchmen prequel.  Anyone who does is part of the problem.  Are we really that jaded?  Will we happily slurp down whatever obvious cash-in that gets held in front of our collective face while a reassurance voice warns us of an incoming airplane?

I'm beginning to understand just why Alan Moore is such a cranky old bastard.  With tributes like this, who needs denunciations?