All-Star Batman & Robin, the Boy Wonder: The lead character is a murderous Sociopathic Hero who insults and attacks everyone around him, including Alfred and Dick Grayson (age twelve), while almost everyone else is stupid, ineffectual, or in the case of Black Canary, as mad and violent as Batman.
The Batman story "When is A Door?," penned by Neil Gaiman, discusses this trope In-Universe. The Riddler gives an interview in a vacant lot filled with relics from The Silver Age of Comic Books, happily reminiscing about the "good old days" which featured colorful villains like Egghead and Bookworm committing elaborate, but ultimately harmless, crimes. As the story progresses, Riddler laments how much things are changing and wonders if there is even a place for such lightheartedness anymore:
Riddler: Nobody ever really hurt anybody. Not really. Nobody died... You look around these days and it's all different. It's all changed. The Joker's killing people, for God's sake! Did I miss something? Was I away when they changed the rules?...
DC Rebirth was supposed to mark a shift away from the grimdark that had become (rightly or wrongly) associated with the New 52 era. Instead, it's seen a number of high profile, very dark series, notably Tom King's ongoing Batman (Tom King); the introduction of the Dark Multiverse in the Dark Nights: Metal crossover and its fallout in the current Justice League series and elsewhere; the Heroes in Crisis crossover (in which a hero goes mad and kills a bunch of other heroes); the Event Leviathan crossover (also in which a hero goes mad and kills a bunch of other heroes); the Year of the Villain storyline. Doomsday Clock seemingly finally makes things right, but not before putting the heroes through absolute hell.
Batman (Tom King) is often-cited as a lowlight of Tom King's run. After the failed Batman/Catwoman wedding, the run saw Bruce take a majorlevel in jerkass that sees him alienate and abuse several members of the Bat-Family, with every patch excuse for his behavior (the aforementioned failed wedding and the manipulations of a Big Bad Duumvirate composed of Bane and Flashpoint Thomas Wayne) either falling flat or making him even more Unintentionally Unsympathetic. Without a likable protagonist, the run fell into the same pitfall as All-Star Batman and Robin, in that there isn't anyone to root for and thus no reason to appreciate any eventual triumphs the characters get.
The 2016 Deathstroke series is much bleaker than any other DC Rebirth book, despite its critical acclaim. The plots are complex, but basically they can be boiled down to “Slade manipulates and betrays everyone he comes across, while showing what a terrible father he is”. Rooting for the Empire is out of the question, as a lot of the time, the people who Slade clashes with are just as bad as he is, if not actively worse, except for the superheroes. It’s been called the Breaking Bad or The Sopranos of comic book titles for a reason.
DC Future State is seen as excessively bleak by a lot of DC fans, with the planned supplementations of many big supers in the verse (including Batman, Superman and Wonder Woman), widely disliked status quos for characters and teams (such as Gotham turning into a giant futuristic police state, Wally West supposedly being doomed to be possessed by an evil spirit that makes him into a killer or Jon Kent being seen as a jerkass anti-hero) among many others.
The Flash miniseries, especially, due it to being yet another story that demonizes the aforementioned Wally West and tries to turn him into a murderer. This time, the reasoning is that Wally's been possessed by the Horseman of Famine so he's technically not to blame for his actions. That hasn't changed fans being sick of Wally again being thrust into the role of the bad guy while Barry Allen is left to agonize over stopping Wally while the rest of the Flashes suffer. It's rather painfully clear this story's another holdover of Dan Didio's reign, due to Didio's infamous dislike of Wally and repeated attempts to destroy him. Notably, while most of Future State's creative teams have been revealed as continuing their work in some form in DC Infinite Frontier, The Flash creative team is not returning (outside of the cover artist), indicating that even DC didn't want to continue this trend any further.
The ending doesn't make things that much better. With every Flash but Barry either dying or leaving and Iris leaving and never coming back Barry assembles an arsenal of weaponry derived from his Rogues Gallery. Transmitting a recording of everything he has ever discovered (which fails, meaning that none of his discoveries reach the wider world) he confronts Famine and, by extension, Wally. Famine then reveals during their fight that it feeds on hope, is basically using Barry as a hope battery due to his connection to Wally and then, somehow, shifts Barry out of phase with reality and forces him to become a ghost as he watches Famine take over Wally's body. Again. Cybeast finding Barry's ring, which still contains all of the information he tried and failed to broadcast, and realizing the Titans can use the info to help their mission is the only thing stopping it from being a complete downer, not that the Flash story technically not even finishing within the actual comic is something to write home about.
Teen Titans is not much better on that front. The storyline finds most of the team wiped out in a tragedy, again. Because the Titans were often used for shocking and graphic deaths in the past, this felt like beating a dead horse.
Flashpoint is very often criticised for this. After Barry Allen saves his mother from the time-travelling murderer Eobard Thawne, the world is somehow changed so that literally every single thing in the DCU is Darker and Edgier, whether or not it makes sense. E.g., Superman's shuttle now landed in Metropolis and killed thousands, Wonder Woman and the Amazons are now an army of bloodthirsty assholes, Aquaman and the Atlanteans are no better, and the world is on the brink of World War III. Thomas Wayne, the Batman of this universe, outright tells Barry that he doesn't mind his world being destroyed because he knows a better one will replace it once Barry stops his past self from altering the timeline.
"I mean, how much killing does it really take to underscore the point that Earth-Flashpoint is a horrible place? At a certain point it all just fades into meaninglessness, a body count for the sake of a body count, all of it entirely without heft or import because it’s effectively an "imaginary story" giving the serial reader no point at which to sympathize or otherwise care about the dead bodies left in its wake. For a comics company that has predicated its existence on the idea of stories that "matter" to create an enormous MacGuffin of a story that only exists to propel the company into its reboot is shocking for all the wrong reasons."
Hardware is a deconstruction of the '90s Anti-Hero, in which the titular anti-hero pursues a vendetta against a racist white Corrupt Corporate Executive named Alva, causing all manner of havoc along the way, only to discover that Alva is the only one preventing even worse things from happening, forcing him to work for the villain instead. It's a great treatise on the futile nature of vendettas and anti-heroism, but that doesn't make it a fun read.
The Injustice: Gods Among Us prequel comic gets hit with a lot of this to the point where many just skip out on it and enjoy the game. A major criticism is that it tends to rely too much on killing off characters for shock value, or as plot devices, rather than take time for character or story development. For example, it isn’t enough for the Joker to brutally murder Lois Lane, but she was also pregnant with Superman’s child AND her death triggered a nuke that destroyed Metropolis and killed millions of people. Every superhero winds up stabbing another superhero in the back, with Batman even disowning Damian Wayne, his biological son, after Damian accidentallykilled Nightwing. It’s the villains who actually seem to be the most trustworthy characters. And, of course, the massive amounts of Doomed by Canon, which means that the Regime is gonna massacre a hell of a lot of people (including the aforementioned Joker and Nightwing, the Martian Manhunter, Green Arrow, a huge chunk of the Green Lantern Corps, Klarion, Huntress, Hercules, and many, many more) and the audience is gonna have to be satisfied with only putting them in jail.
Justice League: The Rise of Arsenal was responsible for destroying Roy Harper's character following his dismemberment at the hands of Prometheus and the death of his daughter in Justice League: Cry for Justice. On the one side there is Roy, reeling from the loss of his only child, grappling with the fact that he may no longer be able to use a bow and arrow, and suffering from impotency and hallucinations (whose source was not clarified as stemming from grief, pain medication, or his infected right arm). He lashes out at his friends and family for trying to help, begins stealing pain killers from Dr. Mid-Nite, goes back on heroin, and turns into a murderous anti-hero after being goaded into killing Prometheus's ally the Electrocutioner (by a hallucination of Lian) then burning down his home. However, on the other side, his friends and family truly don't help the situation that much. They don't seem to have fully understood just what Roy has lost. Dr. Mid-Nite was completely oblivious to the fact that Roy was stealing pain killers, quite easily in fact. Cyborg designed him a shoddy mechanical arm meant to work around the infected nerve endings in Roy's arm, while simultaneously enhancing his pain and limiting whatever abilities as an archer he had left. Wally West does absolutely nothing to help, Donna Troy stops after Roy accuses her of "whoring around in space with Kyle Rayner" while her husband, stepdaughter, and son died in a car crash. Though, someone who's gone through everything Donna has should've understood Roy's suffering a little easier. And Dick Grayson consigns to have Roy locked in a substance abuse center for super villains after he has a vivid hallucination while on heroin. Dick does so with the consent of Black Canary, who washes her hands of Roy and considers him a lost cause. It's hard to root for Roy when he's acting like such an asshole, but given that his family and friends treat his loss with such negligence, it's hard to side with anyone in this comic. Good thing Convergence undid most of the damage.
The New 52 often teeters right on the edge of being unpalatably dark. As an example, the Futures End maxi-series (which showcases two increasingly Darker and EdgierBad Futures and starts with the Terminator Twosomeundershooting the mark - so the fight to Set Right What Once Went Wrong is even harder because one Bad Future already happened - and plenty of evidence that the "lesser" and closer of the Bad Futures - if not both of them - cannot be stopped from happening) and Earth 2's "World's End" (Earth-2 is gonna get blasted so thoroughly to Hell by Apokolips that people will escape from that to another dimension - "Futures End" shows this, amongst other From Bad to Worse things for the Earth-2 heroes once they arrive to Earth-1, like Apokolips chasing after them to finish the job, "World's End" sees the events leading to them).
Omega Men (2015) is a self-contained Space Opera war story starring Green Lantern Kyle Rayner in an alien galaxy far away from Earth. On one side is a vast, corrupt, galactic empire that subjugates planets, oppresses its citizens, will murder everyone on a planet for profit, and commit mass murder to keep dissenters in line. On the other side are a bunch of very self-righteous terrorists who feel okay with letting thousands of people get killed if it furthers their goals and kidnap Kyle Rayner to make him into a living bomb. At first you want Kyle Rayner to escape, but then he joins the terrorists side and it's hard to like anybody until the story ends dismally.
about Flashpoint: