But yeah, turning the JSA - comics' elder statesmen and link (both literal and metaphoric) to the Silver Age - into a glorified DC version of an teeny X-Men origin comic was one of the final straws to my giving up 99% of my comic reading. Alan was maybe the most obvious - he wasn't even a bad character, necessarily; he just had nothing at all in common with his namesake...it was copy/pasting a name onto a new character. But really, the whole team got butchered.
Just typing that now got me thinking, how much of the outrage over re-branded characters is basically the same thing? Sure, it's usually under the pretense of diversity - which is a largely neutral trend as it pertains to good storytelling - but railing against diversity misses the point. It's a rushed job of trying to co-opt a brand - in this case, a character's name, history and legacy - and copy/pasting it onto someone else, but without doing due diligence on what those mantles actually mean.
If Marvel or DC actually wanted to do new characters with the same names, but do it well, they'd actually be smart to follow the (pre-Flashpoint) JSA's lead, who handled that exact thing in an elegant way. Hell, was the female Star Spangled Kid an attempt to cram diversity down our throats? No, of course not. Courtney was an amazing character who inherited and eventually embodied a legacy of her predecessor, making it her own in the process. Same with Jakeem, and likely others I'm forgetting off the top of my head.
So heck, thanks for riling me up, Bentley. That was a revelatory rant.
👆
