Is Mark Waid now the official go-to guy for redeeming characters after other writers drag them through the mud?

(Thinking of Shadowland and the related mess for Daredevil.)

Only at Marvel. At DC, they have to use Geoff Johns (Green Lantern (Hal Jordan), for example, not to mention the entire friggin' DC universe with Rebirth).

I don't know about that - Geoff Johns does his fair share of creating the mud in the first place.

I remember Grant Morrison setting us up for the long-awaited return of Aquaman in his Final Crisis story, and DC actively avoided following up on that so that Geoff Johns could utiilze a zombie Aquaman in his overrated Black Lantern storyline. Aquaman's true return was delayed by a couple of years because of that.

Johns gets some credit from me for doing some of the heavy lifting kicking Aquaman into gear once they did commit to his return, but for me that will always be tempered by the fact that he was a significant force holding down the character when plenty of other great writers and artists were more than ready to get him going.

Johns can do incredible work with d listers, even. Buuuut he was a spearhead for nu52 in the first place

I've enjoyed a lot of Johns work over the year, but sometimes I think he's a bit trigger happy about killing secondary character and he doesn't pay a lot of attention to character personalities if he has a story to tell.

Is there a current comic book writer who doesn't have this quality?

Geoff Johns does have a lot of flaws in his writing. I don't like the way he ignores great chunks of past continuity just to make his job easier (that of course would be pre-nu52, back when there was any sort of continuity).

For example, his much loved "Return of Hawkman" storyline... well, sure, it's easy to make Hawkman into a simple, easy to understand character if you ignore great chunks of his continuity and introduce more craziness.

And his constant rewriting of Hal Jordan's past irked me, even if it often was in the service of making a more unified, coherent story out of a bunch of disparate stories (and I'm not sure who's to blame for the evil murderous Carol Ferris version of Star Sapphire being treated as a superhero).

And I really hate what he did to Kon-El (Superboy II). Superboy didn't need to be half Lex Luthor when that half of his genetics was already accounted for. But that was a pet plot-idea that he had even written about in a fan letter to DC, hoping that they would make it happen. They didn't, so he had to wait till he became a writer at DC in order to make it happen.

But with all these unforgivable flaws, he's still one of the best writers DC has and certainly the one that they *think* can fix any character. He still couldn't make Vibe popular though.

Your right, but I think it's a matter of quality. When some barely competent writer massively changes a characters personality or continuity to facilitate their story that maybe the best they can do.

When Johns does it you know he could do better, his greatest weakness ( in my opinion ) is that he makes characters fit his stories rather than stories that fit the characters he's writing.

Also he's pretty damn cavalier about murdering/destroying secondary characters and that's just short sighted.

Remember the '90s when the art trumped the writing? The last 10 years it's been plot trumping character.

In the land of the no-editors, the PiS is king

The real problem is that a lot of characters have way more past than they need, and a lot of that past doesn't co-exist easily with other parts of that past. You have to make choices about what you're going to put emphasis on.

Are you and me remembering the same 90's? The era of Liefeld and McFarlane being more popular than ever?

On the subject of writers being true to characters, it's completely hit or miss, and a lot of it has to do with the interpretation of the character. This conflict between each writer's idea of a character can be seen best with Batman: Is Batman some lunatic jerk who regularly sends children to fight a war that is far too dangerous for them? Or is he a well-meaning symbol of hope with some paranoia issues? Is Bruce a good team player? Or is he a lone wolf? Does Batman enjoy hurting the mentally ill? Or is he a kind soul who only uses physical harm as a last resort?

Mind you, Nazi Cap will never be a particularly valid interpretation, but for characters with decades upon decades of history, it's almost impossible to write them 100% accurately in respect to the past, and honestly most of the time it's a bad idea to even try; sometimes you have to write how you feel about the character, not what someone did before you. Being beholden to a long legacy is what drags down Marvel more often than not, and usually comes off as "Remember this old issue you've probably never read? We sure do!" more often than not. I felt this way about Grant Morrison's Batman run, just before the New 52, and it's how I feel about way too many of Marvel's comics. If you spend all your time looking backwards, you aren't going to make much progress forwards.

But you can't move forward without knowing where you are

I love those sorts of comics.

It's why I loved Roy Thomas' work on All-Star Squadron. It's why I loved a lot of stories in West Coast Avengers enough to keep reading even though I really hated the art at one point. I've always liked it when the writers knew more about the characters than I did; I've always hated it when the writers knew way less about the characters than I do.

Which generally doesn't involve staring at your past.

Unless you're the main character of Momento, you really don't need to obsess about the things you've done in your past like Marvel does. They're flat out unwilling to move forward, even when readers want them to. They pointed to the 'minority' characters like Ms. Marvel and Miles Morales as the reason for flagging sales, when it's the total opposite.

You can certainly learn from the past, but that isn't what Marvel is doing (or DC for that matter) which is what hurts them. They want to fall into comfortable niches and preserve a status quo that nobody actually cares about.

I'm not saying you can't have callbacks or nods to continuity and such, or even outright throwback type stories, but outright pandering to fans that were reading in the 80's and 90's is disastrous when it comes to actually getting new blood into reading comics. One of the major complaints from new readers is that it's difficult to find a good place to start, and referencing decades old plot threads is, uh, not helping, at all.

Like I said, this stuff can be fine in moderation, but that isn't what Marvel is doing.

Forward is not where Marvel and DC want their major characters to go.
Stuck in place with at best an illusion of change is what traditionally is aimed at.

It's funny that this thread went in this direction when it seems like many in the thread also want the entire NaziCap storyline wiped from existence.