DC Comics – Announcing open-ended hiatus on blogging the New 52

If you've been reading my increasingly delayed blog posts regarding DC Comics, over the past few months you've doubtless perceived my discontent with the direction the company and its stories have taken. [Last month is here - link.] That discontent really goes back virtually to when I began this blog, which was almost coincident with the announcing of the New 52 at the end of May 2011 [link], only a few months before its actual advent in September of that year. Last year I posted a fairly substantial summation of how I saw the situation a year into what DC insisted was not a line-wide reboot, and yet clearly was – what I sometimes called the “Nottaboot” [link]. While I have changed my mind on certain points (most notably gaining a new respect for Azzarello's Wonder Woman through a complete rereading only a few weeks after posting that review [link]), in general I have come to like much of what I've been reading less and less. In fact, it staggers me to see how many of the points I actually did approve of a year ago that DC seems to have discarded! If they were actively trying to drive me away as a reader they could not do much better.

It occurs to me that the burden I took upon myself in attempting to blog about these comics month after month has perhaps contributed toward my decreasing enjoyment of them. I finished reading September's “Villains' Month” stunt a couple of weeks ago, but although there were individually good issues I disliked the concept so thoroughly that I have been unable to bring myself to the keyboard to compose a post about it. Its cornerstone, Forever Evil #1 kicking off the latest-in-a-series-of-events-collect-them-all, wasn't much better – an okay story but ultimately going forward will depend on a plot device so laughably stupid that I am aghast somebody didn't catch it. Or do they not care? If they do not, it's hard for me. And so I have decided it's time I gave up that blogging commitment. My hope is that by simply reading the comics I am getting – which do look to be fewer in number over the coming months than it has been, given some shifts in story-direction in some titles I've been reading that I really have no desire to continue with [e.g., link] – perhaps I can recover some of that enjoyment. I sincerely hope so. There are some titles I have continued to enjoy and intend to stick with, but I will henceforth only blog about any that strike me as truly worthy of my time and effort to write about. Even among those that I am enjoying, there are frankly not that many.  And given what I perceive, rightly or wrongly, as almost contempt on the part of DC for its readers, especially those like me who have been with the company for decades (45 years in my case), I don't see that situation changing very soon.

So for now, at least, I'm done with blogging the New 52.