Dwayne McDuffie hasn’t written a solitary good word since he’s been on that title. With him off it, maybe it will improve.

Oh, and if you bitch about your boss in public to the customers? Your ass should be fired. Maybe you should have been thankful to have a job in this economy at all, McDuffie. You don’t bite the hand that feeds you.

JLA hasn’t been readable since BEFORE “Obsidian Age”. And how long ago was THAT??!!

It’s a miserable, corporate, place-holder title.

..

But watching most of you suddenly become Didio apologists when I think it’s safe to say most of you were cursing his name over the lack of continuity between Final Crisis and 52….I now remember why most creators hate fandom.

Thank you for reminding me.

@ James Trapp:
“Go to a farm, ask for a ton of crap, and try to see if you can sell at a newstand. Seriously? You admit to him having been handed a ton of crap and them criticize him for not being able to spin gold out of it. Do you hear yourself? That’s ridiculous. I just had to comment on that bit of backwards logic.”

But the thing is, McDuffie wasn’t given crap, he was given good heros! He had to deal with the company making alot of changes on him, and thats the crap I was talking about. but he still had great characters to work with. I don’t think he has any excuse for making poor storylines.

And with meltzer having the big three, he still would have done a good job without them, thats the type of writer he is!

The other thing is, we as a society are fascinated by what happens behind the scenes. They have behind the scenes shows on the cable networks for upcoming movies, tv shows, etc. You can’t tell me that nobody who read The Avengers/Justice League of America mini-series didn’t know anything about all the heartache and years it took before it was actually published. CBR gives us the lowdown on many upcoming series and one of the things sometimes asked, is why did it take so long for this to occur. I don’t think Dan has an easy job and you have to find a balance. With that said, I don’t like the direction that DC has taken in the last few years has been the best. I didn’t like the bringing back of the multiple earths or Infinite Crisis (and I have heard there were issues with that series) but not everything either Marvel, DC, Image, Darkhorse or any other comic company is going to appeal to everyone.

Dwayne’s firing may be the best for him. He has many projects that will keep him going creatively. I think it would have been better if DC announced he was taking a sabbatical but would be back. I think Dwayne has many Justice League stories to tell, it’s just the environment within the DC Universe right now isn’t conducive to the stories he has in mind. Maybe he can get the powers that be to bring back the JL cartoon series because that would be cool. And might be able to tell them then. I think it ended to soon.

Sales and time will tell the tale of the future of the Justice League.

Yes, McDuffie posted all that awhile ago, but the fact is it wasn’t made aware to teyh larger comic public until it was compiled and also linked to by Rich Johnson. And don’t blame Rich because I saw links to the compiled complaints in many different comic forums even before LiTG went live, and don’t blame the compiler because he was just sorting through info McDuffie willingly put out.

So what you now have is very public knowledge of McDuffie’s situation i dealing ith his job, and even though he was very civil about explaining it, it was still dissatisfaction towards DC. Like I said before, everyone was at least somewhat sur ethat editorial was very much messing with McDuffie’s run, but now everyone knows exactly how far they’re going and what they’re doing.

It’s bad PR, for DC’s image not only to teh comic buying fans, some of whom may not feel like boycotting JLA or other DC books or at the very least, badmouth the company for giving McDuffie such a hard time, but also to other creators who are potential employees. McDuffie’s cas emay be unique, or it may be the norm, but for now, all writers will be aware that his case did exist, and that editorial management under DC did exist to the extent that he described. less people willing to work for a company is bad.

Now Didio can just ignore all this and just give McDuffie a slap on the wrist. But then, not only does that excuse McDuffie, but ti sends a message to EVERYONE that it’s ok to do what he did, and who knows how far someone else would take it if a sense of consequence did not exist? Didio had to fire McDuffie, not only to be fair to everyone, but who knows what kind of other polcies he was held under. And again, if he didn’t fire him, he would have completely lost face, I mean this isn’t just an issue of a creator not being able to tell stories to his fans anymore, it’s an employee talking negatively about the company he’s supposed to represent.

Also, alot of you are not looking at the silver cloud in this situation: McDuffie is not fired from DC, just JLA, he STILL WORKS FOR DC.

This means he’s still in relatively good standing with the company, and that no one felt this was serious enough to fire him from all his DC projects. And therefore, the firing was more of a public formality than anything else. I mean really, if it wasn’t, than why would they announce it to the public? Plenty of creators leave books all the time and usually we just assume it’s because they don’t want to work on it anymore.

It is one thing for a lawyer to reveal confidential information about his client. It is one thing for a doctor to reveal confidential information about his patient. But ti is quite another thing for a comics writer to give vague generalized information about how problems with available characters and the smoothness of his company’s editorial team. that is like a soldier griping about setting up a bivouac or a postman griping about his knees. It is expected. It is normal.

This kind of paranoia- especially from an editorial team that has given us what is probably the worst set of storylines in the past decade (52? Final Crisis? Countdown to Final Crisis? Countdown to Infinity Crisis?)- says far more about them than it says about the man they fired.

“Most popular GL?” Yes, so popular his book was tanking in sales and they had to bring in Kyle Rayner to try to boost sales. Fans have very short memories and forget how they said Hal was boring before they said Kyle was no good as GL. John Stewart has gotten a raw deal from most writers and most fans. That “black lantern” reference didn’t come out of thin air, you know.

Fans DIDN’T complain when Kyle popped up on an episode of Superman to fight Sinestro. They actually liked it. Why? Because he was the current GL AND they made a reference to Hal in the episode.

Milestone characters being boring (to you, or others) is subjective, but I find it interesting that fans feel they are being forced on them, when writers ALWAYS, always bring in characters they’ve created or have an affinity for. I don’t care so much about Karate Kid or Red Tornado, but if writers choose to focus on them, so be it. There’s no such thing as a boring character, just bad writing.

Marx is very disappointed in all of you.

In that sense, McDuffie’s behavior is hardly different from other “freelancers” like professional athletes who are not necessarily renowned for their ability to keep their opinions of their employers “behind closed doors.”

Regardless, the employer (or presumably a representative of management) is entitled to address such behavior however they see fit (within the bounds of law, of course). So you might trade your star player if he were too much of a headache.

In the same manner, although I loathe Didio as much as many who’ve posted apparently do, he was well within his rights to let McDuffie go, in the same way any employer might want to let an employee who divulged “trade secrets” (in this case the “secret interference” of editorial in setting the direction of JLA). As others who’ve posted on this topic have pointed out, management can fire an employee for pretty much any reason, although an employee is also within his rights to contest his dismissal if he feels he has a legitimate grievance.

All that said, I’d hardly qualify what McDuffie did as particularly egregious; certainly not something he should’ve been fired for. If anything, if you’re any kind of manager worth your salt, you want the sort of thoughtful, insightful employee/freelancer that McDuffie obviously was at DC.

It seems to me that the general outrage over this is the fact that Didio is generally regarded as terrible at his job; the sort of unknowledgeable tyrant you’d rather not work with or for. In a way, it appears that Didio’s actions were as much to protect his reputation (although he’s deluded if he thinks it’s all that good) than anything else. After all, if he wants to look good to his bosses, maybe he should concentrate on hiring and keeping the sort of talent that will enable DC to wrangle market share away from Marvel.

After all, business is all about the numbers and judging from that alone, Didio has done a piss-poor job — and, no, Didio can’t be credited for DC’s lead in trade paperback sales since the bulk of best-sellers were for products that were done before his run.