Comic books are starting to regain some footing in popular culture. They'll never quite be at the news stand heights of the Golden Age, but things are steadily improving thanks to the readership being coaxed in by film and TV adaptations. DC cottoned onto that early, and decided to make their entire line of comics far easier to get into for new readers be jettisoning their 70+ years of continuity and backstory, rebooting their entire fictional universe. Sounds like a good idea on paper, but in the execution, it was a very different story. Not only did the New 52 summarily fail in its main task, but it's started more scandals than you'd think possible. There was a rough start, as DC was firing and rehiring creators before their respective series had even begun. There was the time they considered getting sci-fi author Orson Scott Card to write a superhero story, ignoring the fact that he's a card-carrying homophobe and bigot. They lost phenomenally popular writer Gail Simone due to editorial interference. They made Catwoman a ridiculously sexist book. They had a big PR disaster recently with the new Wonder Woman team insisting the character wouldn't be a feminist. Oh, and they poisoned the water supply of half of Ohio by accident.
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/
