do you like real world disasters showing up in superhero comics?

It seems Geoff Johns does. And he seems to prefer using Aquaman for it. Back during Brightest Day, Aquaman and Mera dealt with a disaster on an oil rig right around the time of the BP spill. Flash forward to today, Geoff Johns is in the middle of the "Throne of Atlantis" crossover between Aquaman and Justice League, which features Atlantis using massive tidal storms to attack the east coast of the United States...just a couple months after the non-scifi version of this happened here in real life. I'm really enjoying the story, but reading it makes me kind of uncomfortable. And I have to think that the way he has characters openly acknowledging the fact that there's a high civilian body count is a direct result of this story referencing the real event. Is it too soon? Should comics embrace the monthly format, and their ability to use it to stay current with world events?

You can give him this. He wrote those before the disasters. He is the Nostradamus of comics!

A lot of times when something happens, like a shooting or a natural disaster, most other types of media have this knee jerk response to pull it automatically. Sometimes indefinitely, sometimes temporarily. Now, when the media is really specific, like say there's a shooting in a mall and a movie comes out about a mall shooting, then I understand trying to be a little sensitive and delay the movie a bit. The thing that always pissed me off was when the things are unrelated. Like there's a shooting in a mall and the pull a movie set in a jungle because it has guns in it.

I think there's a time to be sensitive and a time to say "hey, these things are pretty unrelated". If you had a movie where someone dies, would you pull it every time someone died? No. You can't take it to a ridiculous level.

That said, DC featuring a story about the decimation of the East Coast right after Sandy? Yeah, that's pretty shitty. But then again, what could they do? I mean aside from having a story about raining destruction down on the town DC used to be primarily in before moving to the West Coast? Oh yeah, didn't catch that part? The majority of DC's goings on happen on the West Coast now. So what do they care about the East Coast anymore. The story is more symbolic than you thought.

Bottom line, DC is trying really hard apparently to just flush any sort of goodwill towards them, so stories like this will only help that. The New 52 is like that foreclosed house you buy cheap only to realize the former residents hid dead fish everywhere so that over time the stink becomes more apparent until it becomes completely unbearable. But don't worry! They're going to rearrange the "talent" on their books to make them better. Which is pretty much exactly like rearranging the chairs on the Titanic.

Most of their books take place on the West Coast?

Most of the company moved to the West Coast. I wasn't talking about in the comics.

And if you look at it the last big crossovers of Blackest Night and Brightest day took place in Coast City over on the West Coast. The are taking turns destroying the coastlines in the DCU. That being said they did have this planned out long in advance, they didn't do this because of the disaster and while they should have done something like not publish Aquaman and JL or somethign for a month in honor to it that would have just drawn more attention to it and make it look more on purpose. I'm sure John's had this planed out months ago if not longer and has been working up to it.