#I'm pretty sure that interview with DiDio is quite easy to find but somehow I'm not managing

[zeroducks-2]

“Judging by how the sales of comicbooks dropped from post reboot onwards” does this refer to N52 or Rebirth or the former but keeps declining even with the latter? I’m curious bcs 👀 like, well, it should be obvious the reason why but ig it’s true that many execs/marketing team in that huge kind of company do not have the biggest brain 🤷🏽‍♂️

I don't actually have official sources on hand, sorry about that! I remember reading an interview with Dan DiDio saying that in the past 10 years or so "they lost an entire generation of readers", which leads me to assume there has been a consistent drop in comicbook sales after Flash Point Paradox -ish. Not sure if precisely with Rebirth of N52. Which doesn't surprise me given that they butchered entire decades of worldbuilding, character building and established dynamics for a half assed parody of what they had before.

To expand a little on that. When the reboot happened, despite being hella pissed, lots of fans (me included) thought it was a way to set in stone some key events of what we can call the "main comicbook continuity" because a lot of things concerning New Earth (which is the "main continuity" going from the early '80s to 2010ish) made absolutely no sense, temporally and logically and what have you. For example, when exactly Dick had worn the Batman mantle. Or, that bullshit with Joker being ambassador of Iran. Or the ages of the characters, when they started wearing their mantles etc. Nothing of this happened. Instead they got rid of a number of characters that they didn't really want in their stories anymore (like Cass and Steph who literally disappeared despite having had successful and beloved runs as Batgirls), and they cherrypicked what to keep as canon (Joker shot Barbara and rendered her paralyzed BUT she can walk thanks to an implant, so she's Batgirl now and also she looks and acts as if she was 20 despite she should be in her late 30s. It's unclear if everything she did as Oracle and with the Birds of Prey happened or not).

As you can imagine, that didn't sit well with a lot of pre-existing fans, but also made it extremely confusing for new fans. Things make even less sense than before and it's even more intimidating to approach the comics since to understand a shred of what's happening you should read 30+ volumes of the New Earth continuity AND ALSO everything that happened post reboot and probably you still would have zero idea tf is going on. I don't most of the time to be honest.

This is also why people tend to be weirdly attached to stuff that happened in one single comic even if it was never brought up again, imo. For example Dick, Cass, Jason and Tim having been legally adopted by Bruce. I don't believe there is one single mention of that in any comic except the one comic where it happens - kinda like the writer who wrote it wanted it to be like this, but then the one who came after them pretended it never happened, and nobody brought it up again. So is that canon? It surely was at some point but how about now, is Dick "legally a Wayne"? As far as I know the answer is no, but again, nothing makes sense so people keep on cherrypicking what they like about canon.

Sorry I went on a tangent but yeah they made a mess. Toss in the mix the fact that many of the writers that handled these characters post reboot really hated them (and to this day I cannot understand for the love of me WHY they gave them to writers that hated them. Just see what happened with the whole disgrace that was the Ric Grayson situation), and you have barely readable storylines that contradict previous canon, make no sense and are boring and uninspired as fuck, trying to bank on cheap tricks like "let's pretend these people love each other and are a big happy family because that's what the public wants to read, right?? The Batfamily sells!". That's the extent of their effort to make a story good.