Geoff Johns

[Johnny P. Sartre]

Nope, it has everything to do with him as a writer. He doesn't know how to be subtle. He explains everything in cheesy dialogue instead of showing anything. His characters are one dimensional. He takes them, decides on a very singular characteristic, and emphasizes that about the character in every way. His dialogue is cheesy. Stories are predictable and cliche. Your "He broke my toy" strawman is condescending and an inaccurate representation of why people dislike his writing.

This.

He's masterful at pacing and setting up action but there's just no layer or multilayer to his work or much depth to it; his early work had that, now it's all shazzle and show.

And I don't care if they "break my toys" as long as when they're reconstructing it, they reconstructing it in a way thats new, exciting, and smart.

[vicvega]

I'm on issue 40 of JSA so far now. I don't see the problem with his dialogue here it's pretty good. It's mostly in Justice League where he has trouble finding the right voice for everyone. Even though he's improving slowly on Wonder Woman and flash, the rest of them feel like one note personalities. His Aquaman book is good so far. I see him compared to Bendis a lot but Bendis is a better dialogue writer while Johns comes up with better stories. Maybe they should team up on justice league and let bendis do the dialogue

[Raker616]

I have a question for both fans and detractors of Johns (whose comics I don't know too well).

I read Flashpoint while we were well into the New 52, just to have a taste of the event in which the DCU culminated. I enjoyed it decently, but it's not something that I plan to reread often. I got the "what you see is what you get" feeling.

I don't want to hold FP as THE supreme example of Johns' writing -- I guess most feel it's not in the top tier of his work --, but it got me thinking about his work's "rereadability". I understand that the "reread factor" isn't important for everyone. But it's an important factor for me, and it's one of the reasons why I enjoy Morrison's work, among others': the world they create is vast and intricate enough that subsequent go throughs bring something new. (I could say the same about many of my favorite films and novels.)

Do you feel Johns' work dishes those kinds of "rewards" when we reread it?

Green Lantern has tons of rereadability, i've gone back several times over the last volume and I find new things everytime.

[Raker616]

So the question really is: Why is Johns targeted for so much hate?

Going by online fandom, it has very little to do with his abilities as a writer. Most of the complaining is about a single thing: "He broke my favorite toy." Whether it was Katar Hol, or the Earth 2 Superman, Bart Allen, the Teen Titans, Wally West, etc.

Which is more a reality of the late 90s/early 00s DCU being dumped by DC than a reflection of any of DC's writers. But Johns wrote a lot of the stories that killed that version of the DCU, so he's one of the pillagers and plunderers. (Basically.)

Well said, most of the hate for Johns isn't even about the stories it's about him replacing Kyle or Wally, etc. Most of the time these people can't seperate their own personal dislike of the guy with the quality of the stories. I mean the hate for books like GL Rebirth from a certain section of fanboys is laughable when you look back on it now and how many of these people opinons tuned when they realise that Johns actually liked Kyle. Me no matter how much I may dislike a guy, that won't get in the way of judging their work because above all I love comics and enjoy reading great work regardless of who is doing it. For example you'll see my rip Morrison's work these past few years to shreads along with other things but I love his JLA run and will praise it to the moon. If he were to come back and write JLA again i'd buy it just to see if he could recapture that magic sadly most people can't do that.

[AstroShark]

Im actually reading everything Johns is puting out right now and have been since the new 52 started..i like the guy!

[InfamousBG]

I am a huge Johns fan. Do I like what he did with Wally? Nope. I would also like to some how see him bring back the JSA in the 52.
I do like what he is doing with Green Lantern. JLA is ok.

[paulski]

From that year forth those retcons were forever known as a GeoffCon

Mostly by those who forgot Brad Meltzer actually wrote that story, not Johns.

[Charlimnar]

jumping in late on this discussion and I appear to be in the minority, but Geoff Johns work is just plain fun. Personally, I like change in comic books. I like epic, flip the universe on its head, rewrite history stuff. I even liked the horribly written zero hour by jurgens because it was so everything I like. But back to Johns. His does tend to telegraph his punch alot of the time, and I can understand the point about his dialogue, but there is nobody better at the cliffhanger on a consistant basis. There is nobody better at reworking villains and making you have some empathy for them. Morrison is better at creating new villains and his stories are more complex. But maybe I'm simple minded. I like trying to guess where the story is going and occassionally getting it right. Johns is like that. Trying to predict a Morrison storyline...probably not gonna happen very often.
Final thought. Geoff Johns Justice society stuff is still probably his best work. And Justice League HAS been a let down, but nobody does Justice Leage like Morrison did.

[DebkoX]

Geoff's one of the world's greatest writers.

[Whip Whirlwind]

In my opinion, Geoff Johns is becoming a caricature of himself, going from a writer who was really good with the action and cheesy awesome one liners to a writer who's all about the action and cheesy (overused and thus not as awesome) one liners. . He's a good writer, and I'm certainly enjoying Aquaman, but he used to be great.

[PennyDreadful]

This is probably my exact thoughts. The guy is a pale shadow of his former self, more concerned with big events and twists, rather then decent characterisation that isn't just big broad strokes that leave his characters as cliches and stock archetypes.

Like Brian Bendis, he's been given too much power and it's led to his work being much poorer quality. The editors, instead of doing their jobs, would rather brown nose him and let him do whatever the hell he wants. He has no one above him to focus him and say "You know Geoff, this idea might not work, try something else".

Thank you! I think that the lack of editorial restraint was very apparent in the year before the reboot. It seems DC's editors either micro-manage the books or simply give superstar writers carte blanche.

Someone definitely should've stepped in when Johns' projects began running behind.