Dan DiDio
DC's current Editor in Chief and counterpart to Joe Quesada. Although they started off pretty much the same, as with everything involving the two companies, they eventually drifted in very different directions. While Quesada continues making or approving decisions that piss off an extremely large majority of Marvel fans, Didio's later changes to The DCU split the fanbase pretty much evenly and he even seems to be undoing his earlier "mistakes", with a hint that this was the intended result all along. One of these "mistakes" is the killing of many characters over the years, often in controversial ways (see: Identity Crisis, Infinite Crisis) many of whom are now returning (as zombies) in the miniseries Blackest Night. It is even rumored that this series will lead to a massive resurrection of said characters. Of course, this might have been planned all along by Geoff Johns, who gets a lot of free rein over the DC Universe from Didio.
Didio's own comments (such as claiming that Captain Marvel "doesn't really fit" in the DC Universe -despite decades of doing so) has led people to think that he intentionally wants the DC Universe to be Darker and Edgier. Fans have noticed that under his reign, nearly every member of the humorous version of the Justice League was killed off or reinvented in a darker way. Certainly, Infinite Crisis was a direct play at fans' hopes that the the DC Universe would be less dark afterwards.
Perhaps the ultimate Scapegoat Creator, Didio has so many people who dislike him that a rumor that he was going to get fired from his position ran like wildfire in 2008, but it turned to be false.
Writer Mark Waid has stated that Didio hated how the series 52 turned out, and that Countdown to Final Crisis was the way it should have been. One of the few cases where Didio was flat-out wrong, as 52 was a hit while Countdown wasn't.
It must be admitted however that DC Comics has sold well a lot of the series he has had developed under his guidance of the company, and many professionals speak well of him personally.
And now there's news that he's going to be Kicked Upstairs, with old Marvel Comics Editor-in-Chief Bob Harras taking over. (The same Bob Harras who oversaw the latter half of The Clone Saga, incidentally.)
While primarily an editor, Didio has done some writing work as well, including the following:
- A run on Superboy (before he became Editor in Chief).
- A number of stories for DC's Christmas and Halloween specials.
- The Metal Men segment of Wednesday Comics.
- A Weird Western Tales special that tied into Blackest Night.
- A run on The Outsiders.
- OMAC with Keith Giffen for DC's "The New 52"; one of the first books cancelled from the relaunch.
Before working at DC Comics, Dan was an executive at Mainframe Entertainment, overseeing the third season of Beast Wars, as well as the entirety of Beast Machines, where he told Marv Wolfman (original series outliner) to do as he pleased with Generation1 continuity, and then told story editors Bob Skir and Marty Isenberg to do ignore everything that came before them as "Beast Wars was too continuity-heavy". Between this and the big DCU reboot, one has to wonder just what continuity did to him as a child.
There are rumors that he was fired from Mainframe after selling their rights to Scary Godmother for one Canadian dollar, but the claim is unsourced and is more than likely false.