Let's Talk About Geoff Johns

Hi, I'm David Harth, and this week, we aren't going to be trashing Marvel like it's going out of style. Of course, it's not because it's going out of style. Oh no, for me, trashing Marvel never goes out of style. There's just so much you can say about Disney's little prison bitch publishing company, you guys.

But yeah, other than calling them Disney's prison bitch publishing company, we won't be badmouthing Marvel anymore. We will bring up Marvel but just in a matter-of-fact way. No, this week, we're going to be talking about DC and Geoff Johns.

Let's do this.

I love DC. Marvel may have been my first comic love, but DC was always there as well. I'm an '80s baby. I watched SuperFriends as a child and had the toys. Superman and Batman were part of the cultural lexicon, and I watched reruns of both of their TV series from the '50s and '60s, respectively. The Max Fleischer Superman cartoon shorts? Oh fuck yeah. When I got into comics, "The Death Of Superman" was about to happen, and I always picked up Batman and Superman comics off the spinner racks. I watched Batman: The Animated Series after school

I wasn't a DC fan yet, though. That wouldn't come until 1996's Kingdom Come. I knew a lot about DC because I read Wizard religiously, and so when they started hyping Kingdom Come, I was ready for it. My working knowledge of the DC Universe was just enough to help me understand the comic, but I was so intrigued by everything else. I started reading Morrison's JLA, and it all just snowballed from there. In 1999, I finally read The Dark Knight Returns, Watchmen, and Crisis On Infinite Earths. In 2000, The Sandman. I took a break from new comics for a bit, but in 2002 came back, and eventually, Wizard would lead me to JSA.

JSA is the most DC book of them all in a lot of ways. The Justice Society is one of comics' oldest superteams, and the modern incarnations of the team combines the heroes of yesteryear with their heroic descendants. DC has been about legacy for a long time, and the Justice Society is the perfect place for that. JSA was all about that, as the older heroes trained the younger ones. It's legitimately one of the best team books ever, and it's also where I was introduced to Geoff Johns, a man who would become a huge part of DC and my fandom for DC.

Johns was the next big thing. Wizard was always talking about him, everybody loved JSA, and he was even doing Avengers at Marvel. His run on Avengers was right before Chuck Austen got the book. It was already falling from the lofty position it held in the Busiek years, but Johns did a good job. DC snatched him up, though, and gave him an exclusive contract. I'm going to pause the history lesson for a bit of foreshadowing- we all should have known what kind of writer would become from that Avengers run, when he had a shrunken Hank Pym walk out from between the Wasp's legs while they were on a Vegas vacation, all wet.

I get ahead of myself.

I don't think I really have to go over everything Johns did. Everyone knows it. Dude wrote everything at DC at some point or another. Along with DiDio, Rucka, Loeb, Winnick, and Meltzer, he was the brain trust at DC for the majority of the 2000s. Sure, people like Morrison and Waid were still around in some capacity, but they were untouchable, and for some reason, DiDio wasn't exactly down with them. Waid left, but Morrison stayed around, doing whatever they wanted because they sold the most books, and everyone knew it. However, everything Morrison did was kind of pushed to the side. They weren't a team player; they were Michael Jordan after the Bulls- the best ever and still selling shoes to prove it. Johns was the new hotness, and he was part of the” re-Silver Age-ification" of the DC Universe. Now, at the time, I was all in.

DC's history is so fascinating. Sure, Marvel played the "world outside your window" game, but DC was like high fantasy with superheroes. It was off-the-wall sci-fi. It was crazy and fun in a way that Marvel just wasn't, no matter how much alliteration or how many corny jokes Stan Lee crammed in there. To me, someone who didn't experience the pre-Crisis DCU, it was a magical place, and getting it back seemed great. Johns was at the forefront of that, but he and the other DC writers of the time were also about taking the whimsy of the Silver Age and giving it a sharper edge to fit the new comics landscape of the 21st century.

One thing that I loved at the time but looking back turned out to be pretty sus was how Johns always wrote stories about hope returning. A lot of Johns stories were about how dark things were and that the only way to fix them was to go back to a simpler time. Here's the thing, though: Johns wrote a lot of dark stories. In fact, Johns seemed to be all about the violence and being an edgelord. At the time, though, I fell for the whole thing, hook, line, and sinker. I wasn't thinking about it critically because I liked the violence, if I'm being honest. I liked the darkness. Not to put too fine a point on it but being a comic fan in the '90s, especially a Marvel one, was all about the darkness and the violence. So, seeing DC's big heroes in these "cool" violent stories, well, was pretty cool. I loved Infinite Crisis. I still do. However, now I'm not exactly a fan of Johns anymore.

Let's look at Blackest Night.

I was a fan of Johns's Green Lantern, and so Blackest Night was my shit. Looking back, though, it's such an edgelord comic. Dark and violent and, okay, fun, but Jesus. It definitely fits the title. That was Johns's style, especially as time went on. JSA could be hard-edged, but it wasn't that bad. He went a little crazy with some of the Rogues during his Flash run, but he wasn't grimdark. As time went on, he got grimdark.

Dude was the big Barry Allen proponent, and that led to Flashpoint. Flashpoint is a comic where we, as the reader, follow the villain of the story. Barry Allen is the villain of Flashpoint. Not Aquaman or Wonder Woman, and definitely not Reverse-Flash. Barry Allen caused the whole thing, and readers are led to believe he was the hero. I'd like to say I noticed this back then, but I didn't. Then the New 52 happened.

Johns wrote Justice League, Aquaman, Green Lantern, and eventually, Justice League Of America. Aquaman is amazing. The other three? I noped out on the New 52 and didn't end up reading a lot of it until years later, but it's safe to say none of them are JSA quality. Green Lantern had its moments, but Johns probably should have left after Blackest Night or at least when the New 52 began. I mean, we got Sinestro apologism. You know, the explicitly fascist villain who believes in order through fear. You know, Geoff Johns and Ethan Van Sciver’s working relationship makes a lot of sense, looking back, especially seeing what thye both became. The Justice League books were… dude, they aren't good. Forever Evil was pretty good, but Johns didn't do a great job. The stories were nothing like his old ones, and one can't really blame the New 52 for that. He had carte blanche.

I loved DC Rebirth #1, and I still do, but it's yet another return of hope Geoff Johns story. It led to Doomsday Clock and Batman: Three Jokers. Johns seemed like he was trying to do Alan Moore with both of those books. I defended Doomsday Clock for a long time, but Jesus Christ is that book disjointed. The first six issues don't feel like the last six, and while I loved the last issue, it's not a good book. Geoff Johns doing Alan Moore just didn't work. He could replicate the panel layout and the language, but the artistry wasn't there. And then there's Batman: Three Jokers. It's a very bad comic. Like, sure, Jason Fabok's art is amazing, but so is Gary Frank's on Doomsday Clock. The story is just kind of ridiculous. One gets the feeling that DC didn't want to make the whole three Jokers thing canon because the book went out of its way to kill two of them and make sure the only one left was the Alan Moore The Killing Joke Joker. The ending of it, with Batman revealing that he knew the identity of The Killing Joke Joker, completely invalidates Batman asking the Mobius chair who the Joker was. Maybe it was no longer canon because of DC Rebirth #1, but it's still a weird choice. Oh, and Babs and Jason? No, dude, no.

Looking back on all of the Geoff Johns stuff I loved back in the '00s, I can see the cracks in so much of it. I don't know if I can say that Johns is a bad writer. Going back and reading JSA, it's plain to see that he's good. However, things get weirder as time goes on. He starts to fall back on things that his stories actively decry, and he takes a lot of ideas from other places, especially Alan Moore. Most of his New 52 work just isn't good, and while I've never read any Batman: Earth One, because when it comes to Earth One GNs I'm a Wonder Woman: Earth One dude and that's the only Earth One graphic novel I'll read. His two big post-New 52 stories, the ones that were supposed to fix everything, weren't.

The more I look back, the more I see all of the problems with his work. Johns did a lot for DC, but not all of it was good. Is there a problem with getting more Silver Age with things? Not at all. The problem is both the slavish devotion that Johns showed to the whole thing while also ripping it all down. Post-Crisis DC was great. It took what came before, modernized it, and did bold new things. They may not have always worked, but there was a lot of great stuff that happened. Johns and company paying lip service to the Silver Age while injecting a massive dose of grimdark into the whole thing was kind of terrible.

Beyond all of that, Johns doesn't exactly seem to be the best person. Dude worked with Ethan Van Sciver a lot, and we all know what kind of person he is. Ray Fisher, the guy who played Cyborg in Justice League, said many bad things about Johns. I can't really say much more about him than that. I don't know Geoff Johns. I just know what we all know.

It's safe to say that I've rethought a lot about what I thought about Geoff Johns. There are some Johns stories that I will always love. It's hard to deny that he did a lot for DC, and there's a good chance that I may not have ever loved DC as much without him. The problem comes in that looking at his body of work, he did a lot of damage to DC as well. DC is a lot of things, but people like Geoff Johns held it back for a long time.

The '90s were a magical time for DC. There were a lot of new ideas floating around, and the idea of legacy was wonderful. Creators like Waid, Morrison, Marz, Abnett, Lanning, and Robinson, among others, were doing amazing things with the legacy of the Silver Age while bringing it all into the future. Geoff Johns went the opposite way. He brought the Silver Age into modern times, but his idea of the future was making it more violent. Johns and DiDio tried to pull the DC Universe back into the past when they were young. In the long run, they did more damage than good.

I can admit when I'm wrong and when I'm fooled. Johns had me fooled. He had a lot of us fooled. There's still some great stories out there by him- I swear by JSA: Black Reign, "The Sinestro Corps War", Infinite Crisis, DC: Rebirth #1, even Forever Evil. But now, I can't say he did anything good for DC as a whole. The publisher seems to be finding their way again, and that's a great thing for me. They're putting out excellent comics and looking towards the future in many ways. Johns is gone, and at this point, it doesn't seem like he's coming back. That's not a bad thing. He had his time, but it's long been over.

So, that's all. I was way nicer about DC than I would have been with Marvel, but that's because DC just doesn't piss me off as much. Anyway, follow me on Twitter or something. I think next week, I'm going to ramble about Alan Moore for a while. See ya then.