Sometimes a corporation will bring more people in to replace one because the way it was being done was antiquated and inefficient. They may also bring in additional people when the company is ready to evolve into something that will hopefully be bigger and have a wider reach. In other words they want to accomplish more than was being accomplished before.

Many Hollywood studios have had co-Presidents head their production divisions in that last 15 years or so. Warners may have even been the first studio to do it with Billy Gerber and Lorenzo di Bonaventura.

But seriously, it looks like DC spent 5 months looking for somebody and couldn’t find anybody they fully trusted to do the job, so they hired a number of potential candidates to do certain tasks.

“First reaction is that this is the end of my DC reading”

please go to dictionary.com and look up “solipsism.”

please.

Second, I’m sure Mr. Didio, Geoff Johns, and Jim Lee are all very nice people, so I have nothing against them personally.

But in the last decade, I believe the only DC comics that I’ve bought have been the various books that Darwyn Cooke has done for them, plus a few reprint editions of much older material from the 1980s and early 1990s (the hardcover “Killing Joke,” and “Absolute Ronin,” the hardcover of “Worlds’ Finest” by Steve Rude). I don’t care about the interlocking continuity of the DC Universe. I detest crossovers. I can’t stand the Image-influence “house style” of art that dominates most of DC’s books today.

What I do like are good stories. I like self-contained stories. I like stories that are drawn with a classic sense of draftsmanship and design. I like Darwyn Cooke and Steve Rude and Bruce Timm and Alex Toth.

These appointments today celebrate everything that I dislike about 99% of the comics that DC publishes. It’s rewarding ineptly-made comix and the people who made them. With the exceptions that I listed above, the books that they publish don’t appeal to me at all. I do buy a lot of indie comix and art comix and classic comic strip reprints, but I’m not a snob about it. I willingly admit to having great affection for DC’s characters (even though I can’t stand the comix they publish today, I very much liked the recent versions of Superman and Batman, and really enjoyed Bruce Timm’s DC Animated Universe), so I want to give them my money if only they would publish stories for someone like me: someone who wants self-contained stories with beautiful artwork (Mark Chiarello has said in numerous interviews that he has lobbied for DC to publish a book of all the comix that Alex Toth did for them, but they refuse to do so). But they don’t publish books like that. And this appointment suggests to me that they’re even less likely to do so in the immediate future.

I wish them well. I hope they prove me wrong.

Sometimes I wonder, would it be such a bad thing if the fans stopped reading DC comics? Might that just cause DCE to completely revamp and retool and rethink the stories they tell?

Here’s what I think:
The responsibilities of running DC Comics is too complicated for one person. DiDio manages the comics side of the business, while Lee handles the digital initiatives and other opportunities. Neither affects the creative or editorial aspects directly (that is the responsibility of each group editor or VP).

It will be interesting to see who fills the executive editor position, and if the DCU is spun off as a separate imprint. What of the Zuda and .com staff when DC goes digital?

Exciting times…

Let us remind the Court of Public Opinion that The Office is fiction. It’s a story. Made up. Not real. Doesn’t pertain to reality.

As opposed to the current status quo, where Didio gets the blame at DC and Quesada gets the blame at Marvel…

Actually, though, I don’t think that’s completely right. It sounds more like if an event is badly designed Johns gets the blame, but if the problem is on the issue publishing side, Didio still gets the blame. Jim Lee’s just going to have to find some way to acquire blame from somewhere else, I guess.

Ari = Avi

So maybe think of Johns’ role as similar to the one Ari Arad had with Marvel for many years….as the Marvel representative who’d shepherd various properties through Hollywood.

Should be interesting, to say the least.

“Chief creative officer” is whatever they define it to be.

Yes, but unless he’s credited as the CCO with respect to a particular series, event, or other DC product, who will know what he’s doing? Remember that one of the tactics a CEO uses to pare down levels of management is to bring in executives and demand that they justify their roles at the corporation. If someone can’t say what his day-to-day responsibilities are, if he’s just used for certain projects, he’ll be canned, the corporation will eliminate that position, and they’ll use consultants in the future. Since Johns is DC’s star writer, the title might be more of an honorific than a position. People will have to see how often the chief creative officer is mentioned in PR.

SRS