Superman made his big debut back in the late 1930s, the first-ever hero of what is now known as the DC Universe. Since then, a lot has happened in the comics, including some pretty dramatic changes to characters and to the world(s) they inhabit.

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Thankfully, since all comics fans are known for their temperate nature, these big changes and dramatic reveals have never really caused much of an emotional reaction. Oh, wait. Never mind. Some big reveals prompted widespread joy from fans everywhere, while others were met with scorn. Here are 5 reveals in DC Comics that paid off and 5 that disappointed fans.

10 Disappointed: Tommy Merlyn In The New 52

Back in 2011, the DC Universe was rebooted, with every title starting over at issue 1 under the new company imprint The New 52. Some titles to come out of this were genuinely amazing. Others were lackluster. A few - like Green Arrow - missed the mark entirely.

At roughly the same time, the new TV show Arrow was in its first season and featured an interpretation of Green Arrow that borrowed as much from The New 52 as from older stories. The comic, in turn, emulated the show, turning the hero's archenemy Merlyn into a spoiled frattish rich boy - a mistake repeated after having already done the exact same thing to the hero!

Red Hood fighting Batman in "Under the Hood"

The story Batman: Under The Hood pitted the Dark Knight against a new foe going by the name Red Hood, an alias previously used by the Joker. Red Hood had been targeting the criminal operations of the villain Black Mask, a Machiavellian sadist running all of Gotham's organized crime. It eventually becomes revealed that this new criminal was actually Jason Todd, the second Robin who Joker killed years before!

This story became a fan-favorite that was turned into the 2010 animated film Batman: Under the Red Hood. Jason Todd's identity is now common knowledge but, at the time, this reveal shocked fans.

8 Disappointed: Identity Crisis

When novelist Brad Meltzer wrote the miniseries Identity Crisis, he introduced a dark gritty realism to the DC Universe. The comic's opening issue showed the Elongated Man, Ralph Dibny, returning home on his birthday when his wife Sue was brutally murdered. A little while later, the Atom's ex-wife was nearly hanged. Heroes and their families were no longer safe at home.

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The controversy around this comic came from revelations that the "heroes" on the Justice League were guilty of some pretty unheroic acts, including memory-wiping Batman. However, what seemed out of character was the revelation that the Atom's ex-wife actually attacked and killed Sue Dibny, then faked the attack on her own life.

Mr. Oz/Jor-El

The New 52 did a lot to change Superman. Grant Morrison returned the character to his quasi-Marxist roots as a hero of the working class, Geoff Johns gave the character the new power of a Solar Flare, and Wonder Woman replaced Lois Lane as his favorite bae! Surprisingly, most of these changes were actually well handled. One of the new characters introduced was a shadowy villain known as Oz, observing Supes from afar.

The 2017 story "The Oz Effect" finally revealed the identity of Oz (over a year after The New 52 ended). While fans speculated that it was Ozymandius from Alan Moore's The Watchmen, the character actually turned out to be Superman's father Jor-El!

6 Disappointed: How "The Button" Ended

DC: Rebirth debuted in the spring of 2016, promising to set to right many of the company's recent mistakes. The fan-favorite character Wally West returned, while a mysterious item appeared in the Bat Cave - the button worn by the Comedian in The Watchmen.

In the Batman/Flash crossover "The Button," Reverse-Flash broke into the Bat Cave, beat up Bruce, then grabbed the Comedian's smiley pin; only to blink out of existence, then reappear charred to the bone, mumbling that he'd just seen God. In story's epilogue, Doctor Manhattan's blue hand picked up the button--which was an anticlimactic end to the story since he'd been foreshadowed the year before in DC Universe: Rebirth.

Once Hal Jordan came back to life, the first big event which the Green Lantern got caught up in was the Sinestro Corps War, a major conflict that ensued when the villain Sinestro raised an army of soldiers wielding yellow rings with the power to harness fear.

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While the characters believed Sinestro intended to attack the planet Oa (the center of the universe), it was revealed that he actually planned to attack Earth (the center of the Multiverse). This raised the stakes even as it put every DC hero onto the frontlines of the fight.

4 Disappointed: Who Attacked Sanctuary

Heroes in Crisis was a miniseries written by Tom King that explored the ways superheroes dealt with trauma. Being an ex-CIA counterterrorism operative, King understood how working in high-risk situations negatively impacted people's mental health. The writer came up with Sanctuary, a place heroes could receive treatment for their trauma with total anonymity.

When Sanctuary was attacked, several heroes were killed, including Wally West and Roy Harper. However, it was later turned out that the killer was actually Wally. Unable to outrun the trauma of truths he'd uncovered, the speedster had psychologically broken and killed everyone at Sanctuary.

This is a small detail, but one that made a lot of sense for fleshing out Wonder Woman's character. She had undergone massive changes during The New 52 and many fans felt they scarcely recognized the character. Writer Greg Rucka was hired to help rewrite Diana's origins for DC: Rebirth, as he'd written one of the best runs of the character back in the 2000s.

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One thing Rucka was adamant about was that Diana could not leave Themyscira just because she met a man. As such, Rucka explored Diana's love life among the Amazons. Living on an island of women, she had quite a few partners over the years. She continued her Sapphic (and non-monogamous) dating habits after departing from her home, though she and Steve Trevor still made for perfect partners.

2 Disappointed: Kyle Rayner's Refrigerator

This scene has become so infamous in comics culture that Gail Simone created the website "Women in Refrigerators" to discuss the problem. The point of controversy emerged when the Green Lantern Kyle Rayner came home to find his girlfriend's corpse stuffed in the fridge.

While killing characters is nothing new, a great romance ended because a villain (and DC editorial) thought it was a good idea to treat Kyle's girlfriend as just a prop to be used and discarded to make him suffer. Thankfully, casual misogyny in comics has chilled a bit since then.

The second issue of Alan Moore's run of Saga of the Swamp Thing, entitled "The Anatomy Lesson," showed the seemingly dead titular character being dissected on an operating table. The Swamp Thing - known also as Alec Holland - had grown organs reminiscent of a human's; however, as they were made from plant tissue, they didn't work. It was revealed that the human scientist Alec Holland had not been transformed into a swamp monster, as was believed. Rather, he'd died and his consciousness was absorbed into the swamp by a plant elemental.

This comic uprooted everything fans knew about the character, but it still somehow felt like an organic revelation. The issue opened with the narrator looking out a window, appropriate for a story that served as a window into the Swamp Thing's inner life.

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