Examples of characterization changing dramatically Depending on the Writer in The DCU.
The following have their own pages:
In General:
- Characters' dietary habits are rarely kept consistent. Wonder Woman and Zatanna have been written as vegetarian but often aren't.
- Poison Ivy's eating habits are not set in stone. Despite fanon, it's never been implied that Ivy doesn't need to eat due to her plant hybrid nature. One comic depicts her as near always having an empty plate, but an issue of the comic clearly shows her eating soup. Sometimes Poison Ivy is a vegan but sometimes she refuses to eat plants because she considers it murder. And other times, Ivy is depicted as a "fruitarian," and having a diet solely consisting of fruits, berries, and nuts.
- How strict most of the DCU's Thou Shalt Not Kill rule is. You've obviously have Batman, Superman and Cassandra Cain, who unflinchingly refuse to kill, but that's about it. Wonder Woman and Aquaman have been written from pacifists who value life (Which would make sense, since they're both very tied to nature Gods) to violent barbarians. The Green Lanterns post-Sinestro Corps War lost their no-kill policy but if they still follow it or if they're trigger happy cops also fluctuates. The Flash canonically killed the Reverse-Flash, but otherwise he is a firm believer in letting criminals live... Unless he's applying A Fate Worse Than Death to Inertia. It gets even muddier when dealing with beings such as Parademons, who sometimes the League treats as just drones to be killed and other times they just reduce them non-lethaly
- How the general superhero community views characters who do kill also varies: It would be a bit bizarre if the JSA heroes who did fight in the war didn't kill Nazis, but they're seen as living legends. When Wonder Woman killed Maxwell Lord, however, she was instantly hated on and viewed as a disappointment. More militaristic heroes like Hawkman, Azrael or Red Hood, who all have killed, have been treated with respect, pity, contempt or even hatred depending on who and when you ask.
By Character/Series:
- Is Black Canary a genuine, butt-kicking, Action Girl? Or is she a Faux Action Girl who, as Green Arrow's love interest, needs Green Arrow to get her out of trouble? Depends on who's writing her, and what comic it is. If it's Birds of Prey, expect the former. If it's anything with "Green Arrow" in the title (or if Judd Winick is at the helm), expect the latter. Strangely enough, if it's Justice League where she would be more likely to find herself out of her depth, she, like Batman, kicks all kinds of ass, probably for the same reason Batman does, because writers always feel the need to justify the Badass Normal and low power characters on the team.
- Is Captain Atom a god, as much more powerful than, say, Superman, as Superman is compared to a normal human, or is he of mid-level power by the standards of the DCU? Does he like having power over other people, even to a pathological extent, or does he see leadership as a burden that he'll take up only because he's the only one who can? Does he have problems with authority, or is he a stereotypical military man who will salute and say yes sir? Is he stuck as Captain Atom, losing his connection to humanity, or is he able to transform back and forth at will, facing him with the dilemma that he can always just walk away from being a superhero? Much of this is down to the fact that in the 80s, his solo series established that he would act like a flag-saluting soldier boy despite having mixed-at-best feelings about his job, which led to his appearances in team books taking the cover persona at face value.
- Kimiyo Hoshi, the female Doctor Light, was initially written as an Alpha Bitch. When she joined the JLE, her personality was softened and it was explained that her earlier behavior was the result of drinking too much soda (no, really). Later writers ignored this development and brought her back to said Alpha Bitch personality, with Kimiyo fluctuating between these characterizations ever since. Judd Winick had Kimiyo lose her powers. Gail Simone (possibly erroneously) then had her using her powers when she guest-starred in Birds of Prey. Dwayne McDuffie ended up splitting the difference via a retcon establishing that her powers had returned, but were now wildly unstable.
- Green Arrow suffered from this a fair bit in the 21st century. Kevin Smith wrote Oliver Queen as a sadder but wiser version of Dennis O'Neil's wise-cracking swashbuckling Genius Bruiser. In the first half of his Green Arrow run, Judd Winick wrote him as an unrepentant dirty old man who could barely tie his shoes unaided and was only good at shooting arrows. In the far superior second half of Winick's run Ollie became a hypercompetent mayor and Arrow-family leader who only had eyes for Black Canary. Mark Waid and Joe Kelly were little better, with the former making references to Ollie chasing after teenage girls in The Brave and the Bold and the later depicting Ollie having an affair with the wife of Manitou Raven. Most of this characterization of Ollie as a womanizer seems to have been based on the portrayal of the character in flashbacks written by Chuck Dixon, where Ollie talked about all the women he slept with in the early days of his hero career and on misinterpretation of the Mike Grell run of Green Arrow where Ollie unknowingly fathered a child with the assassin Shado. This is doubly vexing for fans of the classic Green Arrow, as Oliver Queen was usually depicted as being overprotective and jealous of his girlfriend Black Canary and was once depicted as being so devoted to Dinah Lance that his love and willpower allowed him to overcome both Zatanna's magic and Poison Ivy's pheromones.
- In general, much of this owes to the fact that Oliver has two "classic" interpretations: his iconic Bronze Age reworking at the hands of Denny O'Neal and Neal Adams, where he was a wisecracking adventurer with a strong liberal bent who hung out with the Justice League, and his acclaimed second retool under Mike Grell, where he was a more somber and withdrawn huntsman with few superhero trappings. This creates writers attempting to seesaw between the two, usually without success.
- The disagreement about whether or not Oliver Queen was a cheating jackass became so great, in fact, that it caused a Retcon during Blackest Night where Black Lantern Ollie claimed that his rape at the hands of the assassin Shado during the Mike Grell run wasn't really a rape, so that all of his previous out-of-character womanizing could be justified.
- Ollie hasn't fared much better in The New 52. His creative team changed three times in the first year, with the first two teams writing him as a generic action hero with none of the personality of the classic Oliver Queen. Ann Nocenti wrote him as a womanizing beatnik, who spouted free-verse poetry while wandering the rooftops. Jeff Lemire improved things somewhat, making Ollie a competent hero if not a particularly memorable one. And a fill-in arc by Arrow Executive Producer Andrew Kreisberg and writer Ben Sokolowski - portrayed Green Arrow like Oliver Queen on the TV series. Eventually, Benjamin Percy and DC Rebirth came along and did a good job of merging Ollie's disparate characterizations.
- Green Lantern: Are the Green Lantern rings self-protecting from thieves, or can Batman slip off the ring without Lanterns even noticing?
- The second female Hawk of Hawk and Dove named Holly Granger was a case of this in her tenure in the comics. Was she a bad-tempered bratty younger sister with a punk edge? Or was she more of a promiscuous seductress? Did she speak in a phony British accent with slang or not? And was she Dawn's younger or older sister (the latter which would technically make her a case of Mrs. Robinson when she slept with Power Boy in that Squick-inducing scene, thank you very much, Judd Winick.). Is it any wonder she became Blackest Night cannon fodder?
- Sister Dawn doesn't fare much better, either being portrayed as younger naive sheltered college girl who is introverted and can't hold her liquor when around the more popular seasoned heroines or is she more of a proper peer and experienced heroine who has lots of living behind her. Hell, Whether or not she is romantically interested in Hank goes back and forth depending on the writer.
- The New Gods. Oh boy, the New Gods. You have some names and some basic relationships. Nothing else will stay consistent between writers or even in different appearances by the same writer. This falls broadly into two camps: people who never actually read the thing and people who did but changed things they didn't particularly care for. Examples: the nature of the Anti-Life Equation, the nature of the New Gods themselves, whether New Genesis and Apokolips were somewhere in space or another dimension entirely, are the New Genesis gods moral paragons, as bad as Apokolips with better PR or somewhere in-between, and what their actual size is.
- Due to being a less popular character with a lot of appearances and a somewhat complex background, Red Tornado writers have a habit of forgetting aspects of his character. On paper, he's an android that can control wind, which was the case for much of his history. In the 80s, it was added on that he was possessed by an Elemental Embodiment of wind, which acted as his "soul", so to speak, and had lived inside of him since his creation. Owing to its retcon status and it rarely showing up in adaptations, writers have a tendency to forget the second bit (to the point that it may no longer be canon). For instance, some writers claim that the elemental part is the part that makes winds, with the android being, if anything, a Power Limiter, others have it be an independent function of the android that carries over to copies of it. Sometimes, the destruction of the body has resulted in the elemental coming out, but plenty of other writers have had Red be wrecked with no signs of this.
- The legacy of The Sandman (1989); DC editorial has gotten pretty lax from the 2010's onwards about allowing writers to outright contest The Presence's role as the absolute creator of all the DC multiverse/omniverse; new supreme beings were created, old supreme beings rewritten to be all-powerful, etc. The Presence is often reduced as the creator of something, not of absolutely everything, to even being just an avatar of The Source Wall.
- The most consistent part of Power Girl's character is that she must be an empowered woman with her own unique identity, a grown up Supergirl that doesn't want to take her cousin's symbol and legacy, she is her own woman; anything beyond that, however, varies from writer to writer - such as how serious Karen is, from full blown put off by anything she considers nonsense to more an approachable fun girl; to what extent her female empowerment must be part of her character, from little moments where Karen asserts herself as a woman put off by slimy men, and won’t tolerate women being taken advantage of, to a more constant and very outspoken person to point out many faults men have, including her superhero colleagues.
- Shazam!'s personality in comparison to Billy. Traditionally, Shazam is an older, wiser alter ego of Billy Batson thanks to the wisdom of Solomon. However, many incarnations put emphasis on the fact Billy is actually a kid by having Shazam act like a Manchild.
- Teen Titans:
- How evil is Cheshire, and more specifically, how much does she care about her former lover, Roy, and their daughter, Lian? Sometimes they're a case of Morality Pet or Even Evil Has Loved Ones, but other writers go out of their way to portray her as not giving a damn about them.
- Is Deathstroke an honorable Anti-Villain bordering on Anti-Hero who keeps to a strict code and would be a good guy if not for terrible circumstances? Or is he a complete scumbag whose claims of hard circumstances are just blaming other people for things he caused, and who has no problem committing monstrous acts in the name of payment or fun as long as he keeps to his code? Notably, even his creators disagreed; Marv Wolfman saw him as the former, George Perez saw him as the latter, which resulted in Deathstroke suddenly becoming much more of a good guy whenever Wolfman was writing him solo. This has also led to some very different takes over the years on, for instance, his relationship with Terra—either Terra was far worse than him, and Deathstroke's responses to her were horror at what she did and what she convinced him to do, or he was the one corrupting and manipulating her, and while she was hardly a good person, sleeping with an emotionally-disturbed teenager isn't something an honorable person does.
- Wonder Woman might as well be the patron saint of this trope. Every writer since the death of her creator in the '40s has wanted to tweak her, changing everything from her powerset to her origin. She was re-created in the 1980s to stabilize the character, but every writer since has wanted to put their own stamp on her to the point where they flat out ignore what the previous writer has done with the character. Her revolving supporting cast and extraordinarily minor Rogues Gallery are testaments to this.
- Post-Crisis, the biggest element to swing back and forth with her is whether she's going to be the man-hating Straw Feminist that makes a little more sense when she first leaves Themyscira, or the more mature, rounded character who actually has a sense of humor and good relationships with several male characters.
- Pretty bad in the New 52: Azzarello's Wonder Woman in her own book is a completely different person from Geoff Johns' Wonder Woman in Justice League. This gets lampshaded and justified when Greg Rucka returns to her in DC Rebirth, with Diana realizing the contradictions in her life, and setting out to discover the truth of herself.
- One of the other big differences is her attitude regarding killing. In some portrayals she's as much or more Thou Shalt Not Kill as Batman or Superman (with those two characters on their own sliding scale). In others where she's seen more as a warrior hero, she feels no guilt over killing her enemies when she feels it necessary, to a degree that can shock the other two members of the Trinity. Basically, if she's carrying a sword, it's not good to be a bad guy facing her.
- Does she has a Secret Identity as “Diana Prince” or a public identity of Diana of Themyscira?
- Cassandra Sandsmark (the second Wonder Girl): Is she a confident Cute Bruiser? Is she filled with Wangst and ill-tempered at the level of the Alpha Bitch? Has she gotten over her boyfriend's (temporary) death or not? And is she the Tomboy or a Girly Girl? Such writing inconsistencies have derailed her character since she became a Teen Titan, though she originally started out as The Scrappy when written by John Byrne. It took Peter David to deliver the first "fix" on her character, though Byrne decried it, along with the very idea that Cassie would ever join a superhero team. According to Byrne, she was not supposed to be "unique". Byrne would later become incensed by the revelation that Cassie's father was Zeus, as well as the idea that she would lose her virginity to Superboy.
- Does Hippolyta encourage her daughter to go to Man's World or is she (sometimes violently) opposed to it?
- Cheetah has basically never been written consistently in the modern era. This is not helped by the fact that she's a Legacy Character whose various incarnations aren't too similar, leading to frequent intermixing of their traits until basically anything apart from "antagonist with a cheetah theme" is up in the air. Her level of strength is particularly variable—since the Barbara Minerva Cheetah, it's considered normal for her to be strong enough to fight Wonder Woman toe-to-toe, but she's also lost to Badass Normal-level characters in straight physical fights.
- Post-Crisis, the biggest element to swing back and forth with her is whether she's going to be the man-hating Straw Feminist that makes a little more sense when she first leaves Themyscira, or the more mature, rounded character who actually has a sense of humor and good relationships with several male characters.
- Zatanna speaking backwards to cast her spells. Sometimes she has to do it, to the point that she's effectively powerless if rendered mute. Other times, it's merely a focusing technique and she can very much cast magic without speaking backwards, or in some cases, speaking at all.
