I did bail on Judd Winick’s work and haven’t picked his stuff up, but he’s not a dealbreaker. He just needs to write stuff that would draw me in, like Joe Kelly has been doing with I Kill Giants, Four Eyes, Bad Dog and Bang Tango. I reckon Kelly works better away from the mainstream, and that applies to Winick as well. He wouldn’t even have to do Barry Ween stuff . . . just something cool enough so that “Winick” is no longer a four-letter word.

1. Chuck Austen . . . is he still writing? Watching him hack through Exiles, and then realizing he probably looked over Judd Winick’s scripts, the ones that would later see print? Ugh. And then I looked through Action Comics and cringed. Nothing says “awesome” like Superman quoting Hillary Duff.

2. Jim Lee . . . why? Two stupid reasons. One, he relaunched Gen13 with Clare Claremont as the writer. I can understand bringing in new blood as Adam Warren’s run failed to generate huge numbers, as awesome as it was. But Claremont? For real? Then there was the time I saw him with a Royals cap, and he admitted to me that he have one favorite MLB team per each division. That’s what Bill Simmons of ESPN.com would call “sports bigamy,” which is a huge no-no. That, and the garish art, got me buying George Perez’s Final Crisis covers. Now, getting the Heroes hardcover with Alex Ross’s art on the cover instead of Lee’s? That was just common sense.

The rather raw deal he got in being shoehorned into the Kid Flash role. At first I was iffy and really didn’t like the way it was going, but I kept my eyes open to see if/when it would change. It didn’t.

And then the doubly bad squeezing him into the Flash suit and his death. At that point, it was clear things were going in directions I very much did not want so I stopped buying comics at that point.

He’s alive again, yes, but DC still hasn’t be able to convince me that he’s actually back. And since that seems ever unlikely now, I probably won’t go back to buying any time soon.

I think Sterling Gates is a good writer, but that book meant something to me. To see her so crassly exterminated and referred to as “trash” just to throw cheap heat on your pet character?

THIS is why I hate Geoff Johns so much. He created this environment. DiDio forces everyone at DC to imitate it. And blames the fans when sales continue to plummet. Never once thinking that hey, maybe, they should try harder to offer a more varied product.

So forget it, DC. call me when Geoffy Boy takes a vacation.