Rob Liefeld SAVAGES Former DC Publisher Dan DiDio

Hyper-successful artist Rob Liefeld has a podcast where he talks about the past of comics, and nothing’s been more interesting to watch than the trainwreck of DC Comics which started around the New 52 more than a decade ago, through the present where they are on one of the biggest collapses of history.

On his podcast, he talks about how Dan DiDio took over publishing as Editor in Chief of DC and used a bombastic personality in order to give others the illusion he had “all the answers” as per Liefeld. According to the podcast, DiDio tried to keep the spotlight on him, making himself a personality to swindle the industry into believing he had credibility. It sounds a lot like a current crop of ComicsGaters, and it’s no wonder that Ethan Van Sciver came up under DiDio and is much using the same playbook now.

But Liefeld goes further with DiDio, calling him “a raving lunatic” behind the scenes. The New 52 was an initiative to reboot the DC Universe and pare it down, but it clearly had no plan from a storytelling perspective. It was a mess for most of the line and collapsed rather quickly to force them into another event to reset the universe. Now it seems like DC is doing it every couple of years because they just can’t stick the landing. All of this is brought on by DiDio and we are seeing the fallout of his influence to this day.

Liefeld’s podcast is very interesting and goes into a lot of detail on what happened at this company. You can listen to the full talk about the New 52 and DiDio here.