2014 has, in many ways, been a year when the comics industry tries to move forward from its roots, and from a lot of its more troubling, ingrained prejudices and old-fashioned attitudes. That hasn't always been successful, and they've certainly made their fair share of mistakes along the way, but ultimately things are looking up. So, to cap off the year in comic book controversies, here's a story that hasn't been reported on quite nearly as much as it should've been especially considering it sounds like a supervillain's scheme. Whilst it has being very much looking forward to the future, 2014 also saw DC leaning on some wonderfully old-school gimmicks to try and boost sales, including falling back into the nineties speculator boom trope of providing shiny covers to try and entice people into buying flagging books. They planned to provide 3D variant covers for climactic final issues of their year-long crossover event Future's End, a process which apparently requires certain special chemicals. One of which is called microcystin, and is highly toxic. Exactly the sort of thing you wouldn't want to, say, get into a municipal water supply. Woops, that's exactly what happened though! Some sort of spill at the printing plant were the books were being published caused the deadly toxin to end up in Lake Eerie, which provides the water supply of eleven million coastal inhabitants in Northwestern Ohio. Yes, DC poisoned the water supply of eleven million people. Lex Luthor would be proud. It's going to be tough to top that in 2015! And please, Dan DiDio, don't take that as a challenge.
Tom Baker is the Comics Editor at WhatCulture! He's heard all the Doctor Who jokes, but not many about Randall and Hopkirk. He also blogs at http://communibearsilostate.wordpress.com/
