Oh yeah, Geoff Johns, that writer I've learned to avoid.
In a reply to an s_d post, batcookies suggests that the thing with Geoff Johns is that he's a Silver Age fanboy who doesn't deal well with characters that are too different from the versions he knew from when.
So when he tries to write "modern" Batman or Wonder Woman, he screws them up somehow.
as batcookies put it:
The modern Batman is more of a loner, grimmer, less able to trust others. Johns makes those traits the defining ones. It's almost like he thinks that's all there is to the modern Batman. It's almost like he's going "See? See how bad this is? You all think this is a bad take on Batman, right? I do too!"
And Wonder Woman, oy... she kills, she doesn't have a secret identity. Well that's just as bad and wrong as anything can be, and he beats us over the head with how she can't connect with "mere humans" due to the lack of a secret identity, and how wrong it is for her to kill. As far as he's concerned, Perez got things wrong from the word go, and everything written since then is flawed as a result.
Huh. This is interesting to me. I'm the same age as Geoff. I think we share some "childhood influences" (especially Roy Thomas & some odd things like Alan Moore Green Lantern Corps stories).
I feel about Batman since some point in the 1990's the way batcookies supposes Geoff feels. If I were writing Batman, there would be a choice between running the post-Denny/Gorf-Starlin/Grant/Dixon character further into the ground (weirdly enough, I don't think Starlin & Dixon got Batman that wrong, but somehow it went weird anyway) or trying to write him as I think he should be--more a mix of Denny's stint as writer & the slightly dickish but more hedonic Mike Barr character. I think wossname, the guy who married Zatanna (Dini?), & Morrison are trying to get a transition back to that guy, & that's a good answer.
But yeah, I'd be tempted to write Batman that way, but that's part of the problem, innit?
On the other hand, I am totally a volume II Wonder Woman fan, & while I would tweak Pérez's version around the edges (drop the Aegis Effect & play Ares less as the devil; probably dump any idea that Paradise Island was totally isolated for millennia; restore the crazy mind-over-matter Amazon training & make it explicit that most of the adult Amazons have some of that mojo), I think most of Pérez's dozen-plus changes to the character were for the good.
I just think it would have nice if Pérez's Wondy had been named something different from Diana so we could better differentiate, as we do between, say, Alan Scott & John Stewart.
So when he tries to write "modern" Batman or Wonder Woman, he screws them up somehow.
as batcookies put it:
The modern Batman is more of a loner, grimmer, less able to trust others. Johns makes those traits the defining ones. It's almost like he thinks that's all there is to the modern Batman. It's almost like he's going "See? See how bad this is? You all think this is a bad take on Batman, right? I do too!"
And Wonder Woman, oy... she kills, she doesn't have a secret identity. Well that's just as bad and wrong as anything can be, and he beats us over the head with how she can't connect with "mere humans" due to the lack of a secret identity, and how wrong it is for her to kill. As far as he's concerned, Perez got things wrong from the word go, and everything written since then is flawed as a result.
Huh. This is interesting to me. I'm the same age as Geoff. I think we share some "childhood influences" (especially Roy Thomas & some odd things like Alan Moore Green Lantern Corps stories).
I feel about Batman since some point in the 1990's the way batcookies supposes Geoff feels. If I were writing Batman, there would be a choice between running the post-Denny/Gorf-Starlin/Grant/Dixon character further into the ground (weirdly enough, I don't think Starlin & Dixon got Batman that wrong, but somehow it went weird anyway) or trying to write him as I think he should be--more a mix of Denny's stint as writer & the slightly dickish but more hedonic Mike Barr character. I think wossname, the guy who married Zatanna (Dini?), & Morrison are trying to get a transition back to that guy, & that's a good answer.
But yeah, I'd be tempted to write Batman that way, but that's part of the problem, innit?
On the other hand, I am totally a volume II Wonder Woman fan, & while I would tweak Pérez's version around the edges (drop the Aegis Effect & play Ares less as the devil; probably dump any idea that Paradise Island was totally isolated for millennia; restore the crazy mind-over-matter Amazon training & make it explicit that most of the adult Amazons have some of that mojo), I think most of Pérez's dozen-plus changes to the character were for the good.
I just think it would have nice if Pérez's Wondy had been named something different from Diana so we could better differentiate, as we do between, say, Alan Scott & John Stewart.