Chris Roberson Opens Up on DC Termination

Apr 26, 2012

Writer Chris Roberson provides more details on his decision to leave DC Comics, as well as the company following up and terminating him within hours of his Tweets, in an in depth interview with The Comics Journal. I strongly urge you to read the entire interview but here are a few of the highlights:

“Over the course of the last few months, I have been reining myself in from complaining too vocally and publicly about things like Before Watchmen. I couldn’t completely restrain myself so if you go through my Twitter feed or my Tumblr posts back through February there are an awful lot of quotes from Alan Moore from interviews and panel descriptions dating back to 1987 about what the terms of that deal were. But then I was very much trying to bite my tongue and not be too vocal about it. I had literally mailed in my last script and had that morning read David Brothers’ essay on Comics Alliance, which I thought was a very concise and thorough examination of all the problems I had with DC and also that I had with Marvel. Those kind of collided in a very unscripted unplanned declaration of my feelings on the matter, and to be quite honest I thought that that would be read by the few thousand people who follow me on Twitter, who would then shrug and it would be no big deal. I’m not walking back from those statements in the slightest, but I was in no way prepared for the kind of response it got.”

“…at DC over the course of paying attention as a reader over the course of the last decade, and then definitely as someone employed by them over the course of the last few years, a culture has arisen which seems to devalue the role of the creator and prize the creation. The most telling examples I could point to are things like if you go to the DC website, there are categories for titles, there are categories for characters, and there are categories for movies or films. There is no category for creator. If you go to the listings for Superman or Batman or Wonder Woman, there is no mention of the people who created them.”

“…anyone who uses past injustices against creators to justify new injustices against creators is beneath contempt. I think that that is despicable and abhorrent. “

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Greg McAleer

Hailing from the Chicagoland area, Greg brings over three decades of comic book fandom to the fore as TGG’s resident comics expert. From tackling Golden and Silver Age titles to the latest projects on the horizon, he provides an “every fan’s” look at the industry; be it from the reader or publisher’s perspective.