lococaca wrote:
Everyone complains about all the characters DD killed off. Who besides Lady Jaye was worth a damn? I think killing off Jaye was a great idea. It gave Flint more character and brought him outta Duke's shadow. If they were given more of a chance I think sometime in the near future Duke would have replaced Hawk and Flint replaced Duke. Of course all the DD haters would have moaned and groaned. God help us if something in a comic book changes once in 25 years.
I'm hoping the future of the book is still up in the air. Covers are made months in advance, maybe DD went ahead with this cover in a just in case scenario.
It's not that it changes, it's that it changed in real arbitrary ways. None of the character deaths were really important to the story, except Lady Jaye. They were very obviously, "Hey, look! We're killing characters! Better buy this issue!" ploys. And I'm going to argue with "gave flint character." Flint already had character, what DD did with Lady Jaye's death turned Flint into some pansy-assed Frank Castle wannabe. And on a tangent, I'm sick of hearing the, "In war people die!" excuse to justify the huge body count in the DD series. Yes, people die in war. And people died in the original series, too. But when they did, it was usually for plot-based reasons, not just, "Hey, our sales are sagging...." And they were able to tell good, engaging stories without killing off named, toy-based characters left and right (seriously, look at how long the original comic went on before a non-comic-exclusive character died). Half of the fun of GI Joe is the expansive cast of characters, even if most of them only get cameo roles. When writers start looking at everyone who isn't a main character as cannon-fodder, they really lose connection to part of what makes people love the Joe franchise.
For the record, though, I have really enjoyed this last leg of America's Elite, and I liked the first few arcs of the original DD version, too. I think that if DD had started with the quality that they are at now, there wouldn't be as many people complaining.