DC Comics and I have had a rather complicated relationship over the past few years.
...
You know, I just typed that sentence and now I immediately regret it. It makes it seem like DC Comics and I had a romantic thing going on and that just isn't the case. DC is a comics publisher and I am a person. It's not like we can date or get married. So saying that our relationship is complicated implies that there was something romantic between us and that just isn't possible.
The better thing to write would be that I have had complicated feelings about DC Comics over the past ten or so years. See, I started collecting comics back in 1987 but until the summer of 1994 I mainly stuck to the Superman titles. I would pick up the odd book here and there and follow the Batman books or Flash (especially when the first television series hit in 1990) and I went through my obligatory X-Men phase in 1991, which lasted about a year, but for the most part I stuck with the Man of Steel. That changed in the summer of 1994. I had just graduated high school and Zero Hour: Crisis in Time led me down the path of buying a bunch of different titles. I jumped feet first into the DC Universe and stayed there for well over a decade. At one point I was buying all of the Superman books, Flash, Green Lantern, most of the Batman titles, Aquaman, Wonder Woman, JLA, JSA, Martian Manhunter and a handful of other random books.
To be fair I would take day trips and weekend hikes into the Marvel Universe and even take a peek at what Image and other publishers were up to but at the end of the day I was a DC guy.
Things started to change at the beginning of the twenty-first century, which strikes me as another overly dramatic way of beginning of sentence but that doesn't make it any less accurate. Around 2000/2001 the party seemed to be ending. I wasn't connecting with the books like I used to and slowly I started culling titles from my pull list. It was weird to suddenly feel like I was losing touch with the comics I was reading. Looking back this was a very natural thing but I didn't have that perspective at the time.
My mood picked up around 2003, which was weird because DC was going through some significant changes both editorially and creatively at that time. Titles I still loved like Young Justice and Supergirl were being cancelled, so on one hand it seemed like the end of an era. On the other hand I rather enjoyed Geoff Johns' Teen Titans and Judd Winick's Outsiders. Winick also began writing Green Arrow and Greg Rucka started his run on Wonder Woman. Then the build-up to Infinite Crisis began in earnest and I was completely on board. Suddenly I was buying all the titles again and while things were different I was enjoying myself and felt part of that world.
