I read my Aquaman HC The Trench and admit that you guys were right: Aquaman is cooler than I thought he was, if for no other reason than he's nailing Mera. Seriously, I thought it was a solid book and liked how they acknowledged and had fun with the Aqua-hate.

Agreed Aquaman is my favorite book out of the 52. Eagerly awaiting the crossover with Justice League.

Fucking sigh.

I've written an open letter to DC Comics re: Gail Simone on my personal blog.

The short version is that I'll continue to buy the book through the end of her run and then I'm done, not only with Batgirl but with DC entirely for the foreseeable future. It's a sad decision to make, but an easy one.

Tony Daniel wasn't "let go" from Detective. He left to pursue other work at DC.


As for Simone, I've never been a fan. The only book I enjoyed of hers was the Villains United mini-series a few years back. Everything else always (to me) felt lacking - Wonder Woman being the biggest disappointment. I picked up the first story arc of her New 52 Batgirl and thought it was okay at best.

The way DC let her go was pretty cold, tho. It's like breaking up with someone via text. I'm sure she'll find work quickly as she does have a lot of fans who follow her.

Thanks for the correction. The business with Amy Reeder had just gone down before Daniel left Detective Comics and when I looked for an explanation, I managed to not find the announcement you quoted. Let's not tell my former professors I did such a terrible job conducting research, shall we?

As I indicated elsewhere, I was absent from the medium when Simone debuted as a writer so I can't comment on her other works. I obviously adore Batgirl, but that's just me.

Yeah I've followed Simone since Bird of Prey and she was a natural for Batgirl. I'm not dropping the title obviously, but a rather shitty move by DC.

Just read Batgirl 14 and I swear...

You may be onto something there...

That would have been brilliant on a meta level I can't even quite comprehend.

I really wanted to like Simone's Batgirl. I mean, come on - Barbara Gordon out of the wheelchair and swooping through Gotham again as Batgirl and the woman who defined her character as Oracle at the helm? It writes itself!

But I barely made it through the first arc before dropping the book. The writing just didn't gel with me. It felt fan fictiony. I recently picked up the Death of the Family tie-ins but haven't read the latest issue yet.

The weird thing is that, according to that article, Batgirl was doing decently. I wonder if there's some kind of big editorial plan for Batgirl coming up or something.

Even if there was, you'd wonder why you wouldn't keep that writer on the book. Personally, I've thought that she's done a really good job with the book, and I was hoping she'd get moved to Worlds' Finest because, even though Paul Levitz created the character of Huntress, that book's really not very good. For some reason, I trust a female writer to do a much better job with a story about two females than I trust some guy to write that story.

I'm bummed that Simone is off the book, and DC hasn't released their solicits for Batman yet, either. Maybe a month or two of fill-ins until they find someone, and that might be enough time for me to drop it altogether.

Oh, Batgirl has been selling very well. So well in fact that I actually had to join my LCS's holds program recently just to ensure I could snag a copy before it sold out. This wasn't just because of "Death of the Family", either. I missed out on the Annual, which was not connected to any other arc and priced $2.00 above the cover price of a regular issue. (I did later find a copy of the Annual at another comic shop.)

It's also worth noting that, to date, there hasn't been a single variant cover for any Batgirl issues. There have been reprints, of course, with differently colored covers. Issue #13 did have the wraparound cutout cover for the direct market and the newsstand edition (sold at Barnes and Noble) didn't have that, but that's the closest to a variant there's been. That means not one single Batgirl comic has been bought because it was inherently considered to be "more valuable" than any other copy. Surely, there have been some copies bought by speculators but there haven't been any gimmicks to artificially drive up the sales figures.

I'll be going Wednesday to buy the new issue and I'm committed to finishing out Simone's run. What I won't be doing is buying any other DC new release. It may not be fair to the other creators that I'm punishing them for what DC has done re: Simone, but it's my only meaningful recourse. I thought about continuing with the rest of my reading until the last of her Batgirl issues is published, but I'd rather bail now than later.

And maybe putting some pressure on other creators isn't such a bad thing. Every other advancement in creator rights so far has come when creators collectively felt so threatened by something that they banded together. Seeing a decline in overall sales might send a meaningful message. I know my one copy apiece of just a few books isn't going to be a make or break point for DC; I'm not delusional. But I'll withhold my money and on the off chance others also abstain, I'll know I was part of things. Even if I'm the only one who drops DC titles over this, at least I'll feel okay about it.

A shame, too, because I'd really enjoyed The New 52 so far - especially Batgirl, which was the one book that made me come back to comics after nearly a decade away. Maybe I'll find something else new to start reading, or maybe I'll start rummaging through the back issues with my comic book budget. It's not like there's a shortage of comic books I've been meaning to read!

I do feel that the book improved from issue to issue. Not dramatically between issues X and Y, mind you, but contrasting issues W and Z showed the improvements more clearly. I think it was more a matter of Simone finding and establishing the right tone for the book and becoming more comfortable writing it than anything to do with her technical skill.

As for the "Death of the Family" tie-ins, that first issue branded as a "prologue" was nothing more than old school shameless marketing. 99% of that issue is the wrap-up to the preceding Batgirl arc. Only one page even connects at all with DotF and to be honest, you can glean what happened on that one page just from starting with the most recent issue.

Also, while I was typing this, Gail Simone just tweeted that apparently Ray Fawkes will be doing issues #17 and #18 and that she's "heard NOTHING BUT GREAT things about" him and that she "wish[es] him every possible success." Guess that means I'm done with issue #16.

Well, selling out these days does not necessarily mean that it's selling well... it could be that the margins are tight enough that the comic book store doesn't order very many rack copies. I'm sure Vibe will be mostly a sell out, but that'll probably be because nobody orders it in sufficient numbers anyway, unless there's some kind of incentive DC puts out.

I'm not sure this is where to take a stand on this. The writer in this case doesn't seem to have any ill will towards DC. This is all work for hire, on characters that they don't own, and they know it. The new 52 itself showed that they don't care about writers or storylines or what have you, they care about sales and making their characters viable. I guess I made my stand then by slowly dropping titles, but I know that it's their property and there are really no creator rights here, especially when the next writer can basically just instantly retcon whatever the previous writer did, no matter how beloved or how long that continuity lasted.

After waiting for a Barbara Gordon Batgirl ongoing since this:



I'm not going anywhere. I'm going to support the character first and foremost.

That is a really cool cover. My favorite Batgirl image.

That theory is certainly plausible, but the Diamond sales figures make it pretty clear that this isn't just a case of under-ordered stock at my LCS. Plus, I've been there when the place has opened on Batgirl's publication days. They start with as much stock of that book as they do any other, but that's the one that's been selling out by lunch time while the others can still be found weeks later.

This isn't about a dispute over ownership of work. And yes, DC is perfectly free to hire and fire at will. What upsets me is that there's no obvious business reason for this move. The sales have been among the New 52's strongest and praise has been consistent. By itself, it's a perplexing situation.

In the context of other things DC has done throughout this past year or so, though, it seems like one more indication that someone at the top at DC is absolutely opposed to having to live in a world where the relationship between women and comics is anything other than what he imagined it should be when he was 12. Female characters, fans and creators alike have been exploited, marginalized and/or dismissed entirely.

Maybe the reason for this has nothing to do with any of that. If the sales had dropped on the book, I wouldn't think much of it. If she had said or done something controversial to embarrass DC, that would make sense.

Again, this isn't about the stories for me. Simone didn't create Batgirl, has no claim on her, and surely she wasn't going to write the book forever anyway. That's not relevant here.

I'm not upset as a reader about what this means for the storytelling. I'm upset on a personal interest level. DC has conspicuously antagonized a lot of people this past year. The whole thing just feels tainted to me because right now all I can envision when I see the DC logo is Dan DiDio, Jim Lee and Geoff Johns in some kind of treehouse circle jerk going on about how they can make girls do or be whatever they want 'cause now they're the boss. They've done absolutely nothing to dispute the accusations of misogyny or to assuage anyone's frustrations and I'm at a point in my life where things like that mean a lot more to me than continuing to consume a specific form of entertainment.

I know I'm all soap boxy about this and I don't mean to be. I'm not trying to recruit anyone into a boycott or anything else and I don't have anything to say about how anyone else reacts to this, or whether they react at all. But one point that I made in my open letter to DC is that, unlike the last time I bailed on comics because I felt alienated, I have more access to people via the Internet than I ever had through the potential of a letters column. I shared my thoughts in this thread because it's a New 52 thread.

I'm also a reader of forum threads and I'm sure most of you would just as soon get back to discussing the books you're reading, so unless someone specifically addresses me about the Simone/Batgirl matter, I think I've said all there is for me to say about my take on it.

Gail was solicited through 17 and Fawkes is "guest writing" for a 2 issue arc for 18 and 19 (18 was just solicited as the start of the 2 issue arc). Gail may have misspoke about what number is her last. it should be 17 unless DC doesn't want to use whatever she wrote for that issue. And that would mean they'd have to find someone to fill in for issue 17 - why not use Fawkes in that case? Unless some other writer is going to tweak Gail's script for 17 and change it for this new editor's mandate. Gail staying on through 17 then Fawkes doing 18 and 19 also leaves DC with 6 issues to collect for the third trade volume, which is a standard amount. If Fawkes isn't writing the book going forward, that leaves the fourth trade volume to be that of the new writer, which has some marketing advantages.

Out of all my complaints towards Didio, Lee, and Johns, I never had that impression of them that you describe.

I never felt that DC was exploiting female creators but maybe you know more about the situation than I do. I liked Gail Simone's Villains United. A surprisingly fun book that made Catman cool. Her run on Wonder Woman started out strong but quickly became average.

If she's getting taken off Batgirl, despite high sales, I'm a bit skeptical that it's because the guys in charge wouldn't stand for one of their best selling titles to be written by a gal.

Anyways, I give you props for lasting it out this long. DC got me back into buying their comics when Jim Lee came on to draw Batman regularly. Finally a fantastic artist, doing a monthly comic, with no gimmicks. It wasn't a bi-monthly thing, or a one-shot, or a graphic novel. And Lee really tried to give the fans some quality comics every month by incorporating water color panels to represent Bruce's memories.

Then, some high profile comics writers tried to write like 1980s Alan Moore. No B-lister was safe. The bootleg Plastic Man's wife was raped which caused Batman to snap, which caused the JLA to brainwash, which somehow explained why writers in the 90s wrote Batman as an asshole. Then Blue Beetle was shot in the head by Max Lord. Then Wonder Woman broke Max Lord's neck. Then Superboy Prime started acting like Kid Miracleman. Then Frank Miller wrote a heavily promoted Batman comic where Robin is slapped by the title character, while being asked if he's retarted and subsequently forced to eat rats. The questionable material affects Miller's collaborator, artist Jim Lee, so much that it takes him between half a year to a year to pencil each 2 page issue. This inspired the artists at DC, and also Marvel, to break the shackles of "deadlines" that once hampered the creative process.

It seemed like alot of stories from that time could only be told with a minimum of 33 issues not including tie-ins.

The final straw for me was when they raised the price of there comics to 3.99 but then switched it back to 2.99 with advertisements announcing "drawing the line at 2.99" except failing to mention that they cut the page count from 22 to now 21.

I just got up and haven't checked Twitter yet to see if she's corrected her tweet, but what's interesting is that the timing of these issues in question would seem to suggest that DC has decided they want "Death of the Family" to be a major shake-up for the book.

Last night, she made a very clear point that some people have accused Scott Snyder of being part of the decision to remove her and that this was entirely inaccurate. Not only did Snyder fight for Simone to stay, "HE WENT TO WAR" in her words. She also praised everyone who was part of the entire Bat-family creative team as having been supportive.

I suppose it's not as accurate to suggest that DC has been exploiting female creators as it is to say they've been exploiting their female characters and, in a lot of ways, female fans. Good catch on the specificity of my language!

Go through this thread alone for discussions about the portrayal of DC's female characters and the convention panels and appearances that sent a message of disregard for female readers. Then there's DC's unceremonious firing of Amy Reeder off Batwoman and Karen Berger's completely unexpected "stepping down" from Vertigo last week after nearly two decades overseeing the imprint. As with Simone, no explanations for either Reeder or Berger have been offered.

Someone signed off on all of the comic book content and the firings, and DiDio himself has been front and center in the antagonism between female readers and The New 52/DC Comics in general.

I may very well be connecting dots that don't connect; I can admit that. I'm not prone to conspiracy theories. But even if there's not a malicious agenda behind these things, they're troubling in themselves at face value.

I had bailed long before those things happened, and hearing about them were all good reasons I continued to stay away from comics. It was the idea of Barbara Gordon being Batgirl again, in a book written by someone of Gail Simone's reputation, that lured me back. Month in, month out, I've had an absolute ball reading that book.

From Simone's Twitter, about an hour ago:

Evidently there is some confusion...my last issue of Batgirl is actually issue 16, not 17. Fortunately it is the last issue in that arc!

— GailSimone (@GailSimone) December 11, 2012

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She goes on to say in a follow-up tweet that the decision to remove her was made after the issue #17 solicits were sent.

I don't have a problem with female characters drawn sexy in a fan service way, and I don't believe it's the reason why more women don't read comics. Manga is full of fan service and yet has a much much larger female readership.

It seems like DC has tried to promote female characters but they just don't sell as good as they should. Wonder Woman, Catwoman, Power Girl, Terra, Manhunter, Vixen, Huntress, and Batgirl III and IV come to mind.

As far as misogyny, it seems like during the 00s everyone started being butchered. There was even an issue where Speedy or Red Arrow has his arm ripped off by Captain Marvel Jr. On another issue he's depicted flailing his bloody stump on the cover. A lot of characters were treated pretty poorly, male and female.


That's cool to hear that it was good. It didn't jump out at me at the time, but the art looked pretty solid, and each issue didn't look decompressed. Lots of panels per page, and some nice AH! covers.

I don't think you can compare manga. While there is certainly a ton of fan service and misogyny in manga, there is also a lot of diversity (including romance), and fan service that's focused towards females (like yaoi). While one could argue that comics are pretty diverse, we're mainly talking here about DC superheroes. And then you have the catch 22: not even female readers to really make it worth having a female-focused comic, but not enough female focused comics to attract female readers.

I don't think Lee/Johns/the powers that be in charge of the actual creative vision for DC are anti-female... Johns in particular has written very diverse team books, and one of his favorite creations is Stargirl. I do think corporate mandate created this whole need for a new 52 and is probably causing some of the odd editorial decisions and focuses, but who knows? Lots of creators are kinda fed up at DC, and in general I kinda feel like Marvel is more creator-centric while DC is more plug and play with their creators. I mean criticize Marvel all you want, but they've had some great creator-driven runs of books that they've just recently shaken up.