>>103733782The difference between is that those were just bad story-lines that the biggest heroes had over a brief period of time. These same characters still had a huge backlog of good stories to back them up.
Meanwhile the New 52 was a bunch of different takes built on shaky grounds that couldn't even remain worthwhile for long, with the stories over time - it was very fast, it didn't survive one single writer change - getting worse and pretty much salting the earth over any good it had.
Like, i can overlook New Krypton, War of Supermen, and Grounded, because it's just a phase. Superman is still that guy from Superman: Secret Origin, 'Up, Up, and Away!', and so on. We still have Supergil, Mon-El, Superboy, and so on. Only really Chris suffered as a character because of these stupid storylines.
Now, take Superbro, for example. For a time it seemed DC had no idea what the fuck to do with the character. Every new cross-over had a radical new change. Be it him becoming Doomsday, be him losing his powers, be him getting super-cancer. They did that because they knew readers weren't happy with the status quo. Instead of giving what the readers wanted, they just doubled down on the weird. Because of that the only good material i can look back at is the Morrison run. Not even Pak run can be recommended outside of some small arcs, because he was hit hard by the constant cross-overs.
Characters need a good foundation to weather bad story-lines. The New 52 versions, the good ones that is, didn't had that. Whatever good they had was quickly done away at the first writer change. The only character that i can point out and say: This one at least had it good!, is Animal Man. Even then at the tail end there they tried to kill his family for some dumb reason and have his wife divorce him.
