7 DC Experiments That Went Horribly Awry

DC Comics has always been about pushing the boundaries of what the superhero comic could be, in a way that Marvel really isn’t. Over the years, the original superhero publisher has tried numerous times to change the way the medium is perceived. So many of the things that modern fans love about indie comics, for example, came from Vertigo and DC’s British Revolution creators. They were the first publisher to give villains their own ongoing titles in the late ’70s. They brought the multiverse concept to comics. They created the super team and the teen team. DC’s experiments with superhero comics have made the entire industry better.

However, not every experiment can be a success. Sometimes, they just don’t really work for creators or readers and the publisher eventually has to back pedal and abandon them as failures. These seven DC experiments went awry, causing more problems than they solved.

7) Azrael as Batman

DC Comics has went in some very dark directions over the years. Sometimes, it’s successful but other times it isn’t. The case of Azrael taking over as Batman is one of the latter. After the success of “Death of Superman”, the company decided to break the Bat and replace him with Azrael. The whole point of this change was to show that the more violent, extreme ’90s heroes wouldn’t actually be all that great and it worked way too well. Readers didn’t care about the subtext, they just hated Azrael. DC proved their point with the character, but it did damage to the Batman brand overall in the ’90s.

6) The Flash: Rebirth

Barry Allen’s return ended up as a failure, but it was honestly always going to be and the proof was in The Flash: Rebirth, by Geoff Johns and Ethan Van Sciver. The two of them basically copied their earlier Green Lantern: Rebirth and the story was mid, at best. It was made all the worse by the fact that Van Sciver inked his own pencils; GL:R inker Moose Baumann made his pencils look great, and without him, his deficiencies as an artist shone through, hurting the book even more. Making Barry the source of the Speed Force was dumb and no one really did all that much with the Negative Speed Force, unlike Emotional Electromagnetic Spectrum that GL:R birthed. DC took a gamble with bringing Barry back and it botched it almost from the start.

5) Integrated Hawkman

Hawkman is one of the most complicated characters in comics, thanks to Crisis on Infinite Earths. There was the Golden Age reincarnated Egyptian pharaoh Carter Hall and the Silver Age introduced Thanagarian policeman Katar Hol. When there were infinite Earths this was fine, but making it all one Earth wreaked havoc on the character’s origin. Zero Hour: A Crisis in Time was meant to smooth out the problems caused by Crisis and the story tried with Hawkman by integrating his various versions into one. This was a composite character with the memories of Carter, Katar, and the Hawkgod, but that just made it more confusing it didn’t make any sense to smush it all together the way they did. The integrated Hawkman faded away, with DC trying again successfully to fix the character in the early ’00s.

4) Ric Grayson

Nightwing is one of DC’s greatest icons and DC has taken some chances with him before, but the worst of them was easily the Ric Grayson years, which ran through Nightwing (Vol. 4) #50-74. Basically, then-DC head honcho Dan DiDio hated Dick Grayson and did everything he could to sabotage the character, but still couldn’t stop fans from loving him (why else do you think they did Grayson? DiDio was hoping the spy book wouldn’t work for fans). This included shooting him in the head and changing his personality from the one that fans loved into one they hated. The saddest part is that the creative team on the book was pretty good for a while, with DC legend Dan Jurgens and artist Chris Mooneyham doing their best to make it all work. They couldn’t, because it was a terrible idea, and it was ended after two years, which was about a year and 11 months too long.

3) Bendis at DC

Brian Michael Bendis was the most popular writer of the ’00s (unfortunately, in my opinion). His popularity would fade in the ’10s, when Marvel fans started to get tired of his writing style. The dawn of 2018 would see it announced that he was going to DC, with advertisements reminiscent of the old “Kirby is Coming!” ads of 1970. However, Bendis’s time at DC was mostly a failure, unlike the King’s. His runs on Superman, Action Comics, and Justice League didn’t set the world on fire (I liked Justice League, if I’m being honest), Event Leviathan and its sequel Checkmate weren’t as popular as his Marvel events, and the Wonder Comics line he curated wasn’t as popular as expected. Batman Universe was amazing, but other than that, bringing him to DC didn’t pay off in the slightest.

2) DC Rebirth

DC Rebirth started out perfectly, but it couldn’t hold up. The New 52 had stalled completely and the publisher decided to make things more like the pre-Flashpoint universe, bringing back the old Superman and Lois Lane (along with their son Jon, who was born during the Convergence event) and Wally West. It was a new dawn and a lot of the books were amazing, but there was a problem – this was still the New 52 universe. This limited what the books could do and as time went on, the whole thing fell apart. Much like the New 52, it only lasted about five years, when the end of Dark Knights: Death Metal changed the DC Multiverse once again.

1) The New 52

The New 52 has become a legendary failure. After the success of the ’00s, sales went down and Dan DiDio decided that the best thing to do would be to drop a surprise total reboot on readers. Flashpoint led to an all-new DC Multiverse and at first, it was rather popular. However, everything was a mess behind the scenes, creators left books and were replaced by worse creators, and new books didn’t always find an audience. Things stabilized but so many of the books failed that it went into a nosedive it could never pull out of. While there are still good stories from this period, it’s not looked back upon fondly.

What DC experiments do you think went wrong? Leave a comment in the comment section below and join the conversation on the ComicBook Forums!

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