First of all, I am comparing the actions, not the situations. Two people came in here to post grievances about alleged unprofessional behavior. One has as much right to do so as the other.

Second, do we even know that "escaping contractual obligations" is the case here?

On the first page of this thread, someone asked;



Unless I missed it, Mr. Broderick hasn't answered that question, so how "screwed" was he in this situation?

Look, I don't doubt DC has screwed creators in the past. But do we know enough to say this particular creator was in this particular situation? Mr. Broderick has come in here to say he was screwed by DC but seems to be a bit tightlipped regarding the details.

We also know little about this commission either other than it was apparently paid for and not delivered.





You've been on these boards a long time Joe. Surely thread drifts can't bother you that much. I'm only surprised someone hasn't found a way to bring John Byrne into this.



I don't know about you Joe, but I work hard to earn my money. If I paid for something that is either not delivered, or chronically late, I would have as much right to crow about it publicly as Broderick has had to crow about DC. You don't know how much Michael paid for this thing or how important it was or wasn't to him. You don't know if it was commissioned for a purpose that involved a specific timeframe. If you want to trivialize it simply because it doesn't involve some big evil corporation, then I guess you don't value your hard earned money the way I value mine.



How is his credibility is being undermined? Unless I am reading this wrong, Michael came in to take Mr. Broderick to task for a service that was paid for and apparently not delivered. How is that undermining anything Broderick has said about the DC deal (which again has been very little)?

I had forgotten until just now that Pat was the artist on the storyline that turned Hal Jordan into an alcoholic. I blame that mess on editor (and former Fantagraphics employee) Kevin Dooley, but that really was the end of my love for superhero comics.

If you call someone a hypocrite, you are pretty much by definition undermining their credibility.

Unless I'm wrong, both Hal and Green Arrow turned out to be alcoholics (Mike Grell did a whole GREEN ARROW story arc about Ollie falling off the wagon), and Speedy is famously a heroin addict. I also hear rumors that Black Canary sniffed glue. "Hard Traveling Heroes" indeed!

None of the others were chosen by the Guardians of Oa from billions of other humans to weild the greatest weapon in the universe.

The Guardians said they needed someone without fear. Turns out Hal got his courage from a bottle. Next time, they should do a little better research.

I remember that one of those Green Lantern ret-cons from around 1990 not only made Hal a drunk, it made him a drunk driver, and a drunk driver who caused a crash that killed or seriously hurt somebody (I forget which). And this wasn't a secret from his distant past, this was supposed to be after he had the Green Lantern power ring. Ugh! During Hal's jail sentence, he kept breaking out every night for his official Green Lantern training.

I understand not wanting all your heroes to be goodie-goodies, but somebody at DC started to go off the rail with this one.

That's the one Pat drew. I had forgotten why I also stay away from Gerard Jones, but it's because he wrote it. Ron Marz and Darryl Banks barely came on in time for the Parallax thing — that was also Dooley's idea — but I pass on anything with their names on it because of that.


The next time (Kyle Rayner), they didn't do any research.

For all the fuss made about Hal Jordan's abrupt dismissal from the DC Universe, in favor of Kyle Rayner, it's pretty clear that DC had made a mess of him in his final years.

I actually didn't mind Hal's hair turning gray and him -- and Ollie, for that matter -- being established as older heroes, with 20-plus years of masked adventuring under their belts. I guess it didn't mesh with Superman and Batman always being 29 years old, but screw it, it was interesting.

But a drunk-driving, felony-conviction Green Lantern? Eh, no thanks. After CRISIS, DC didn't really know what to do with Hal anymore. Suddenly there wasn't a formal Green Lantern Corps like there used to be, but there were a dozen GLs on Earth -- Hal, John, Guy, Hal's underage girlfriend with pointy ears, the talking squirrel and all the rest.

So... DC's been pretty much screwing the pooch since Crisis on Infinite Earths?

Nah, not at all.

I liked the post-CRISIS revamps of Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman by John Byrne, Frank Miller and George Perez, respectively. I liked the way Wally West was allowed to become the Flash, and Mike Baron and the writers who followed him on that title for a decade did a nice job. (Up until Geoff Johns, I'd say.) I liked the light-hearted Justice League International, although I eventually did miss having a team of DC's mightiest heroes. I liked John Ostrander's unusual take on the Suicide Squad, which was consistently great for its long run. I liked Mike Grell's Green Arrow mini-series and ongoing monthly.

But there were some losers at DC in the late 1980s -- some of them, like the Justice Society, swept aside because of the confusing new continuity -- and Hal Jordan was one such loser. While I liked the early issues of the new GREEN LANTERN series that Pat Broderick was involved with, which had an older Hal on the road again, eventually there wasn't a clear idea of who this character was or why he mattered anymore, since DC had multiple Green Lanterns on Earth. And turning him into a dirt-bag was a mistake.