Any character who is a Fiery Redhead in Wonder Woman stories tend to be treated negatively and poorly and could certainly use more love. That goes for Orana, Artemis, and Aleka.
Oh, Equestria, we stand on guard for thee!Kid Devil/Red Devil/Eddie Bloomberg to the fullest. He is such an amazingly good character and DC didn't know what they had when they killed him off. I have never identified with any fictional character more than him. He's deceptively complex if you take the time to really analyze his history and personality. I am praying to God and Satan that he either shows up in the reboot sometime and that he gets to be in Young Justice. I was so pissed off when he never showed up in Batman The Brave And The Bold. He would have fit in that cartoon SO PERFECTLY and they completely passed him up! They even passed up Blue Devil. he better show up in YJ, or there will be HELL to pay.
How about White Canary? You know, the Evil Counterpart to Black Canary? The one who is Chinese, wears white, looks like a Highly Visible Ninja, and supposedly could make Lady Shiva her b1+c#? It just seems weird that the Sister of Silk has not made any appearances post-Flashpoint.
Oh, Equestria, we stand on guard for thee!What with the DC reboot and all, I'd say that perhaps there is a possibility to re-introduce Jean-Paul Valley's Azrael in a good way. I'm sure that a seasoned writer like Jim Lee or Grant Morrison or even Tony S. Daniel could do something useful, entertaining, and meaningful with him.
I mean seriously, JPV has had to deal with a lot of crap from the fanbase and in comics. Lots of people hate him because "Oh noez he was Batman in a suit of armor, he killed somebody, aaaahh." Look, people, if anyone is to blame for Az Bats (in-story, that is), it's Bruce-Batman himself. He put JPV in the batsuit, even though he knew perfectly well that JPV didn't exactly have his head screwed on right, and look what happened.
As for in-comics crap, JPV spent his entire comic run trying to redeem himself for killing somebody while under the influence of "the System" at the time, some sort of Technobabble subliminal messages gobbly gook that causes his violent Azrael persona to take over for the Jean-Paul Valley personality when he puts on the Azrael mask. In other words, Look, Batman, it's not the kid's fault. You're rich, get him a therapist already.
Anyhow, what I'm saying is that JPV, if done right, could be a wonderful new addition to the post-Flashpoint DC Universe.
Oh, and there's also Tim Drake, Stephanie Brown, and Cassandra Cain. These Bat-kids all got really screwed over. Tim's stuck in Teen Titans with the same lame code name ("Hmmm, I can't be Robin anymore. Should I be Nightwing? Naaahh. Red Bat? That sounds stupid. Oh! I know! I'll be Red Robin! Yay!), and Steph and Cass are nowhere to be seen.
And then we've got Beast Boy and Raven. I really think that Gar should be taken in a new direction. When the old Teen Titans title closed it's doors, he was like the superhero equivalent of a twenty-one year old, unemployed frat boy who was couch surfing with his cousins. I'd like to see Gar get a job, apply to a community college or online college and try to major in Zoology or something, and then join a team like, say, the JSA or somebody. I don't know.
Raven's in almost the same situation. She apparently goes to high school, but little actual progress is shown there. I wonder how she would develop if stuck in an environment other than Titans Tower or her posh school, like, say, I dunno, ordering fast food? Going to church (ironic, isn't it), going to a tanning salon maybe? (Okay, low blow there)
I think that these characters definitely "need more love."
X
edited 10th Feb '12 10:47:52 AM by XRay
Care to critique my villain's prison escape plan?
You know what? You're right! Having read the first two parts of Knightfall myself, I have to say that for someone as smart as Batman, he was really holding the Idiot Ball for too long! I mean, he used I Work Alone to an unreasonable degree, he refused to actually rest, and he also had the flu at the time! He could have saved himself a lot of grief and a broken back if he just called in people for help! Really, he deserved getting a What the Hell, Hero? speech from Nightwing for his idiocy!
Speaking of Batman, there's a character who really needs love and his name is: Mr Freeze! Why? Well, you should read this article
on him.
The fact is this character doesn't get a lot of backstory! It was funny how one cartoon series portrayed him as a bank robber who stole diamonds, causing fans to cry foul, when they clearly Did Not Do The Research, when that was exactly what he did before he got the origin of Nora in another cartoon series!
Also, Batman Arkham City also adds in how he froze his neighbour's pets as a child. He got sent to reform school for that. However, his explanation for this was that he couldn't understand why pets had to die, and he thought he could save them by freezing them! I get the impression that this was put in to show that he's a Well-Intentioned Extremist, one who has some good intentions but has some disturbing ways to achieve them!
Nora ended up becoming Lazara (sounds like a feminine form of Lazarus, you know, the one from The Bible?) in one story. I wonder if that really stuck?
Still, it's going to be interesting to see how he's going to be scarier in the New 52 relaunch!
Oh, Equestria, we stand on guard for thee!Right now I'd say that all DC characters need more love, seeing as the current administration has no respect for them and is willing to kill them /make them miserable/turn them into sluts or such to get them to sell.
But to go with the thread's premise, I'd love to see Dial H for Hero done right (think Ben10, except they did it first.)
Btw, Amethyst is coming back in the DC Nation shorts, apparently as a kiddified version but hey, anything is better than what DC did with her in the past.
It's been an issue since BEFORE Identity Crisis. That just slapped a dung cherry on top of the crap sundae.
DC lost its way about the time they ran Crisis on Infinite Earths, and they've been floundering ever since. They had a perfectly serviceable Multiverse that allowed the telling of nearly any story they wanted, but the DC staff (not the fans, no matter how often that bogus legend is repeated) couldn't keep track of who was supposed to be on which Earth and didn't want to bother. So they destroyed it all, jammed their characters onto one Earth, and summarily got rid of any that didn't fit their new "improved" vision. In the process they screwed over and alienated some of their best people - and a lot more fans than they realized.
They didn't even do the job right, because they were so obsessed with making everything All-New, All-Now. They thought they could just sweep fifty years of DC history under the rug and start over, but they didn't have the balls to really do it (because it would have impacted their $ale$ much too dramatically). So they did a half-ass job, and some characters were brand-new and some weren't (and some were Ret-Gone, even though showing them struggling to make a place for themselves in a world where they had never existed could have been far more interesting).
And then they plunged whole-hog into the Dark Age of the Nineties, from which they have never really emerged.
One thing DC will never permit, no matter how much violence they have to do to their uni/multiverse and their publishing line, is for the JSA to become more popular than the JLA. It's come close to happening once or twice, and the JSA have invariably been sabotaged to prevent it. It's no accident that they were taken off-line before Flashpoint and not reintroduced until the "New 52" lines - including of course the JLA book - have had a chance to get thoroughly established. (DC did the same thing to them over the Colliding Crises - and for the same reason. JLA first, JSA later if at all.)
edited 13th Feb '12 9:10:13 AM by Maven
Why should they care if the JSA is more popular than the JLA? It's all their stuff, and they reap the rewards either way.
I'd agree that DC's character stable is as a whole in need of some TLC. Dan Didio seems to have the attention span of a squirrel on crack, as given as he is to doing massive, company-wide events that change the status quo every couple of years or so. We'll get used to the changes of "The New 52" and then watch, he'll hit us with "Multiversity" which will change up everything again.
edited 13th Feb '12 11:31:40 AM by Gray64
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Yeah, I've grown to dislike Didio, Lee, and Johns' stewardship of this shared universe. I'm betting on another continuity-changing event in a couple of years. With some more characters killed off. I also expect there to be some holes in DC continuity in the meantime, because they can't coordinate a timeline and nobody seems to know what's still canon.
edited 13th Feb '12 1:48:14 PM by PennyDreadful
Gray 64: DC cares because Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman are associated with the JLA (even when they're not currently active members). That makes JLA "THE" team book in their small minds, and all the other teamup books are secondary and derivative. (Of the Big Three, only Wonder Woman has ever had any significant association with the JSA - and there was a stretch of years in which the association was Ret-Gone because she "hadn't existed" back then. Oh how DC floundered trying to fill that hole!)
C0mraid: There was also a time when DC could have bought out Marvel. It goes back and forth.
Penny Dreadful: Bet on it. Screwing around with characters and continuity, and wantonly killing off characters, seem to be the ONLY things DC wants to write any longer. That's why I haven't wasted my money on their product for years now.
Will be keeping a watchful eye out for "Earth-2", but I fully expect them to screw that up too.
Word of God is that Identity Crisis is still canon.
"DC confirmed that stories like Blackest Night, Brightest Day, Identity Crisis, Death in the Family, and Killing Joke are still part of the DCU history." - from here.
OP: I'll love to see more of Jay and Joan Garrick. (Hopefully, they'll show up on Earth-2.)
edited 14th Feb '12 11:46:16 AM by LadyMomus
Maven: Back in the '80's, the New Teen Titans was DC's top selling team book, and it didn't have the big three in it. DC editorial didn't seem to mind, or is this a recent development?
I was about to make an argument about how I can't believe a business entity like DC would deliberately sabotage something successful because it didn't fit Chief Editorial's notion of how the fictional shared universe should work, but then I remembered multiple instances where this very thing has happened. So never mind.
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Gray64: The Titans of that era did include derivatives (teen sidekicks and other teen relatives) of two of the Big Three and of several closely associated (i.e., JLA) adults. Then they were never allowed to equal or surpass their elders, and were sabotaged (including by being killed and rebooted) every time they started to get too close.
It's the same thing from both sides: DC has canonized the JLA, and no one else is allowed to get too close to their stature. Not the JSA, not the Titans, not the Legion of Superheroes - nobody.
Wonder Girl is a particularly interesting case, as she was originally a literal derivative - she was "Wonder Woman as a teenage girl". Then somebody realized this didn't work in the "present", and she was rewritten to give her a separate identity and origin. (And then rewritten again after Crisis destroyed her origin, and again, and again, and....)
The Titans, the Legion, and Infinity Inc. were "exempted" from the effects of Crisis, because they were all among DC's top sellers and were the objects of DC's experimentation with new high-quality "Baxter" paper. DC didn't want to foul that up. But the side-effects of Crisis ruined them all anyway.
InfInc was first to fall, because it had been tied so closely to the JSA's history and the JSA had been summarily disposed of (banished to a pocket hell dimension "for all time"). Without that historical tie, it had no purpose and no focus, and struggled for another twenty issues or so to find one before cancellation.
The Legion had its history ripped out from under it by the decree that there had never been a Superboy. This led to various substitutions, including a "Pocket Dimension Superboy" which worked as a temporary patch until DC Editorial negated that too, then to the shattering of the fan base with the attempt to "grow them up" into dark and gritty, bitter and jaded antiheroes, then into reboot after reboot as DC flailed about trying to find some way to please its by-now unpleasable Broken Base.
The Titans managed to survive...just. But they were never the same, and never again one of DC's top sellers. And they too were the toys of constant rewriting and rebooting.
edited 15th Feb '12 7:53:11 AM by Maven
Well the Titans have never been the same since because they've never had a creative team of the same quality since, there's been very little in the way of active sabotage. They even sacrificed Young Justice for another volume of Titans.
Maven, you are right that the JSA have been sabotaged more than once to keep the Justice League more popular. That said there it's not like comics don't fail for other reasons, or that the Justice League always needs help to be DC's premier team book.
Am I a good man or a bad man?DC also seems to have canonized certain characters: Batman, Supes, and Wonder Woman (of course), but also the Barbara Gordon Batgirl and the Barry Allen Flash. The latter two present problems, as there were other characters who succeeded Babs and Barry. These characters have since been tossed into comic book limbo, regardless of their popularity. DC treats these characters as interlopers, and likes to ignore the fan followings they have.
And don't get me started on the way they basically trashed Flash history so they could have Silver/Bronze Age Barry back.
Anyhow, some good news: one of my favorite DC characters is coming back. Said character has a cameo in a book next month. /sarcasm
Well, some things that need to be pointed out about Ralph Dibny and Sue Dibny:
- Ralph Dibny was the Elongated Man for a long time, and he had powers similar to Plastic Man's. Dan Didio most likely felt that DC Comics already had a character who can stretch himself and that there was no room for another guy like that!
- Ralph and Sue had a marriage and relationship that actually averted Soap Opera levels! That was great, because that shows that there are relationships and marriages that can actually work, like in Real Life! Didio most likely thought that this was boring, so he decided to make it Darker and Edgier by having both of them killed off!
I guess what I'm trying to say here is that the Dibnys had some features that the higher-ups did not approve of, and served as strikes against them. That's a damn shame, really, because DC Comics needs characters like the Dibnys to bring in Lighter and Softer and balance out Darker and Edgier!
edited 15th Feb '12 12:47:24 PM by TiggersAreGreat
Oh, Equestria, we stand on guard for thee!Yeah, it's too bad Ralph and Sue's marriage got mucked up. I always liked the old Silver Age iteration of Hawkman and Hawkwoman as an example of a good portrayal of a strong marriage; I really enjoyed the brief Tony Isabella/Richard Howell series from the 80's that really did a good job of, among other things, depicting them as effective partners and loving spouses. Not enough conflict, I suppose.
edited 15th Feb '12 10:01:37 PM by Gray64

Pre Flashpoint Anarky had become completely paralysed and helped Red Robin. Can't remember how it happened though. The Batman family obviously like their crippled support team.