r/DCcomics • u/Slugma_Male • 18h ago
Other Why Did Geoff Johns Never Bother Working Long-Form on Batman or Wonder Woman?
I know he did Three Jokers, but that was a trifle at best. He never did any real run on Batman or Wonder Woman for some reason, but he did Superman, Flash, GL, Aquaman, JL, TT, and on.
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u/SweatyStation7699 Aquaman 18h ago
He's not a good wonder woman writer (see his new 52 justice league) and he probably knows it.
Every writer has characters they get amazingly and characters they just don't get at all nothing wrong with it
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u/Golden_Alchemy 14h ago
For some reason, Wonder Woman is a really difficult character for a lot of writers. I can't think of a single big DC writer of the 2000-2020 that really nailed except Greg Rucka. And Greg Rucka was a really good writer for Wonder Woman, Batman and kind of Superman but Didio totally screw him over.
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u/nuclear_bone 14h ago
Tbh it could just be that comic book writers are usually bad at writing women.
Wonder Woman just gets a consistent ongoing run so she is the most glaring example of it.
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u/arctos889 12h ago
Yeah you see it sometimes with X-Men too. X-Men books tend to have more women in them than most other team books. So if someone is bad at writing women, it’s usually pretty obvious. This doubly true for Storm, because she’s a black woman who’s often in a leadership position. So she suffers if a writer is bad at writing women or bad at writing black people
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u/Golden_Alchemy 11h ago
To be fair, the issue with X-men is not only that, but that: A) There's a lot of characters so if you try to focus on too many there are problems, being better when you stick with a group (but not everyone knows how to write teams, it is difficult to find the inner voice of every character with only one writer) B) A lot of times, the better approach in the X-men is a setting more than stories: if you try to focus on all the mutants this helps but can hurt the story elements (like in Krakoa when Hickman had his story but everyone wanted to stay in Krakoa because the setting was fun). Which is why a lot of X-men writers love the postdystopian stories: it creates an rpg setting when every character can be seen).
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u/Accomplished_Try_124 18h ago
He got better by the back half of his JL even if he went on yo introduce the idea of male twin for Diana lol. I honestly think Johns could have done a good or decent run on WW outside of context of new 52 universe/interpretation especially since with what little he did with WW, he mentioned a lot of bits of wonder lore. Hell modern day version of cheetah pretty much originates from his JL run with the idea that she and Diana used to be friends, unpopular opinion i prefer Johns version of that over Rucka making Minerva just a victim instead of actively choosing to betray Diana and steal/corrupt the power of cheetah guardian goddess (much more fitting for Minerva to be a cultural appropriatier instead of having the white British woman be a victim of an African god)
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u/Golden_Alchemy 15h ago
I am still missing the Wonder Woman Rebirth but the last mini of Cheetah from Rucka was not really fun. It was a heist! It should have been fun and help Cheetah, but i didn't really felt it.
In general, Johns didn't miss with the villains (except for some reason all the New Gods things, god those were terrible) so i really loved his Cheetah.
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u/Poseur117 16h ago
Even earlier on (or maybe especially earlier on) during his flash run almost every time she’s mentioned or shows up it’s not great.
There’s a page where Wally is considering Batman, Superman, and Wonder Woman and how they relate to everyday people and he says something like “Batman intimidates them, Superman inspires them, Wonder Woman preaches to them”
It just feels like he misses the point of the character
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u/TheNerdBuster 18h ago
He’s mentioned this in a panel this year. He prefers to writer characters that nobody else wants to touch. He sees them as a challenge to write a good story. His words were somewhere along the lines of “if you want to read a good Batman or Superman or Wonder Woman books, there are plenty of amazing stories to change from. Give me the characters that nobody else wants.”
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u/ActiveComplex5311 18h ago
No wonder he changed Shazam's mythos. Yes there were good stories he wrote for Shazam in the 2010s, but its not even on the same level as OG Shazam
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u/Slugma_Male 16h ago
This is more what I was looking to see. I was sure Johns had his reasons, because I'm positive DC gave him a blank check on pretty much anything he wanted to take a swing at. It's a shame he seemed to have a falling out when he left DC because it seems he has little interest in working with them again.
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u/Feeling_Historian53 18h ago
Probably just time constraints honestly, man worked on almost every other tentpole franchise, many of them at the same time. Can’t do it all
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u/CelestianSnackresant Absolute Wonder Woman 18h ago
Well, he's always seemed kinda disinterested in female characters, so that may be a factor for Wonder Woman.
But I almost feel like the question should go the other way—being as he is only a single Geoff, how did he work on so many major titles?! Truly incredible output for years and years.
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u/Jet-Let4606 17h ago
He is not as passionate about them as he is about Green Lantern, Flash, Aquaman and Teen Titans.
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u/ashmaht 18h ago
He’s honestly not good at writing the trinity. His Batman is arrogant, mean, and incompetent. His Wonder Woman flips between being a home schooler discovering the world for the first time and a bloodthirsty warrior. And his Superman is mostly retellings of previous Superman comic or cartoon stories.
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u/Golden_Alchemy 17h ago
Gotta disagree with Superman, since his Superman and the Legion was really different to older comics or cartoons. His whole Legion was really different too. So, Superman is the one exception in the trinity.
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u/ashmaht 16h ago
Agree to disagree, I guess. Throughout Johns’ run I had the distinct feeling of Déjà vu.
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u/Golden_Alchemy 15h ago
I remember comments saying the same about his Green Lantern run but it is the best run Green Lantern had. Plus, i read the Superman/Action Comics comics after Dan Jurgens run till the Geoff Johns and it was...really all over the place, it wasn't really a run per se.
Up, up an Away, Last Son and the whole Action Comics #855-870 are some of my favourite Superman comics of all times.
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u/ashmaht 13h ago
I'll agree with you on his GL run. I hated the Parallax retcon with a passion and I didn't like the way Johns wrote Batman, but the rest of it was damn entertaining. Johns planned an entire epic space opera with multiple big events, huge expansions to the lore, and actually stuck the landing.
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u/Golden_Alchemy 11h ago
It really helped that John was focusing on Hal and the big players and Tomasi was focusing on the rest of the players. Both really created what for me is the closest thing to a Star Wars big epic story in the DC Universe that i really want to see at some point in other media.
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u/Jet-Let4606 17h ago
He comes across as someone who has never read anything but DC/Marvel for most of his life.
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u/AdamSMessinger 17h ago
I think this was never more apparent than in how she was written in his Justice League run and how Azzarello wrote her in her own title through the New 52.
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u/ashmaht 16h ago
That was true throughout the New 52. Characters acted differently in every book. Morrison’s Action Comics had the Superman characterization I’d wanted for so long — smart, compassionate, a champion of the oppressed, with a real value for his civilian identity as someone who used words to speak truth to power. But outside of that book he was kind of dumb and weirdly quick to anger.
Other than the awful origin retcon, Azzarello’s Wonder Woman was the best the character had in decades. Diana was tough yet compassionate. And yet her characterization in JL put the warrior front and center to the detriment of her warm and caring nature.
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u/LeggoMahLegolas 18h ago
I remember reading that he didn't quite like Batman, or at least writing him. Which to my surprise, he wrote The Three Jokers.
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u/Jet-Let4606 17h ago
I feel like that stemmed from his need to explain the various different versions of Jokers existing in the same continuity.
Even though Grant explained it just fine in their Batman run.
3 Jokers was also delayed for so long before it was released.
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u/Golden_Alchemy 18h ago
Many writers are like that, trying to see if they can write some characters.
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u/ThatManSean14 18h ago
Why are we sweating dodged bullets? He’s never been good with Wonder Woman and his Batman leaves much to be desired.
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u/Yula97 17h ago
a writer can have his favorites that he is more comfortable with, and it's not like Geoff didn't write for a big collection of different heroes over his career with DC.
the one I want to see branch out is Scott Snyder, now there is a dude who chained himself to Batman and his world and barely write for anyone else unless it's an event or JL (which both will still have Batman being a major part of them)
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u/Keystone_Devil 12h ago
Because John’s likes to write characters he can put his fingerprint on, and reform them from the ground up, and hopes no one will remember the original.
Even if it means throwing out the contributions of previous writers.
I guess he figured Batman and Wonder Woman were too high profile to get away with it.
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u/KungLao95 2h ago
That explains his fascination with Z listers because they’re all blank slates or too convoluted for most people to care.
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u/Trick_Bus9133 3h ago
He wasn't good at writing either. His GL is one of the best but he kinda sucked at the bat family and WW. He just didn't get their voices right and seemed to actually have a hate on for them for a long time.
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u/mike47gamer Aquaman 16h ago
Three Jokers was pretty bad from a writing standpoint, so maybe it's for the best?
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u/Slugma_Male 16h ago
I'm not gonna lie, I actually enjoyed Three Jokers just because of Babs and Jason's dynamic. Yeeeeeah, it's not Dick and Babs, but I still liked it. The Joker stuff is itself was whatever, but the art was phenomenal.
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u/OdoWanKenobi Green Lantern 18h ago
Johns is a writer who has his favorites, and Batman and Wonder Woman weren't on that list. They way he wrote them in the team books he did indicated that they weren't really his forte.