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I don't know. I personally like to just blame Didio for all the bad things that happen in the DCU.

Bill Willingham wrote the story, but I believe it was editorially mandated that she would die.

Who?

In this interview, Willingham explains that it seems to be editorial's idea-

"BW: The death of Spoiler was locked in before I was asked to take over the series, but it was my idea to let her become Robin for a short time before that. My thinking is that it would be nice to give her at least one moment of glory, accomplishment and success, before all of those horrible things that were destined to happen to her."

To read the whole interview, click the link: http://www.comicbookresources.com/news/newsitem.cgi?id=6352

It was handled so badly that I think no-one wants to take responsibility for it.

I actually liked the death of Spoiler, though I think that it would have been much more effective had she more time as Robin, which I thought was a great move by Willingham. Using that moment of glory to fuel her own inadequacies, which lead to War Games (which, outside of Tarantula's involvement, I also enjoyed), seemed like a good move.

I tell you though, I'm not surprised that the first poster immediately blamed Didio. I'm not saying the guys is perfect, but its really starting to get annoying how he is blamed for everything that people don't like about DC right now. Yes, he is the man in charge, but there are tons of other people whose input gets taken into account before members of the JLI are killed, before Spoiler dies, or before Sue Dibny is attached by Dr. Light. SEriously people, take a step back and realize that there are several level of editors at DC, the writers and artists, and occasionally even fan input that goes into consideration before a book hits the shelf, not just Dan Didio's ideas.

Spoiler's death wasn't really an isolated event. I get the sense that Didio seemed to think that the large superhero "families" that had sprung up over the past several years threatened the uniqueness of the main characters. Over the past two years DC killed off, changed or removed members of the Superman (Superboy), Wonder Woman (Fury I and II, Artemis), Batman (Spoiler ), Flash (Jesse Quick, Wally), Green Lantern (Kyle), Hawkman (Hawkwoman) and Aquaman (Orin, Tempest)families. Some interesting characters got treated poorly, but there was a lot of redundancy with some of the characters.

That's a really good point Dan, but at the same time, some of those families have also expanded. Grant Morrison seems to like the idea of keeping Damian around as a major player in Batman stories, the entire Green Lantern Corps returned, and Wally's return seems to be hinting that his kids will take up the mantle of the Tornado Twins. So yeah, in a sense, it does look like they are trimming the character families down, but in a lot of ways they have also been expanding them.

I'm more in favor of changing the relationships instead of simply killing of the characters though. I like Artemis's role as simply being a major player in the Amazon community more than I like her having a lot of involvement with Wonder Woman and making Jesse Quick to Liberty Belle adds a lot to the character in my opinion. I think this method should be applied more often than it is, though I've got no problem losing beloved characters like Superboy or less-than-beloved characters like Spoiler when the story works and both of theirs did for me.

Plus, we now have a new Batwoman. And the new, unfortunate Supergirl came along under Didio's watch. I don't think he's thinning the families much.

Yeah, it's not "thinning" so much as "replacing", most of the time. Not against the general idea of having a Supergirl (for example), but they don't want *two* Supergirls, and would rather use the new "hot character" version.

Related to the phenomenon of "let's give the hero an entirely new supporting cast, and ditch the old one" whenever there's a new writer, and then wondering why Superman and Batman are the only characters with strong supporting casts....

Interestingly, I think having these new supporting casts helps make the characters they gravitate around more accessible. Let's look at Superboy. He'd been around 14 years or so, and in that time had gone from being an arrogant snot to more serious and somber. He's got some serious history now. Comics have become notoriously inaccesable in recent year - how do you fix this? You can't just ditch all of Superman's history (again) - instead you make the characters around him have new and interesting stories... and that's easier if the characters are fresh and unstoried.
Just a theory.

Blame the president (ie. Paul Levitz).

That's what I always do, whenever something goes wrong with D.C. or Marvel.

Blame the president!

Me. I hate spoilers!

I love the idea that Dan Didio writes all of DC's books and Joe Quesada writes all of Marvel's. Bless you, internet.

Black Mask or Leslie Thompkins killed her...depending on who you ask.

I love the idea that Dan Didio writes all of DC’s books and Joe Quesada writes all of Marvel’s.

That's a simplification of it, sure, but they're absolutely responsible for what happens in the books while they run them. There's an old phrase-"The buck stops here". That's where it applies.

I love the idea that Dan Didio writes all of DC’s books and Joe Quesada writes all of Marvel’s. Bless you, internet.

To be fair, both do make themselves the frontmen for their company, especially Quesada, and neither have ever really shied away from taking credit, not just for the success of their own company, but for the industry in general, so it's easy to see why people blame them.
And really, it all does come across their desks at the end of the day.

I faithfully read all the Batman books for over 20 years, and the War Games / War Crimes stories were the absolute worst I ever read. The established characters behaved totally wrong (Batman totally disrespects Tim by immediately giving the Robin costume to his girlfriend -- right, that would happen), and the supporting cast brought in to the stories behaved moronically (Batman walks out of the school carrying a wounded/dying student, and the press and the cops immediately conclude that Batman killed her. Right...).

I loved how in John Ostrander's One Year Later, Robin asked Batman (essentially, I'm paraphrasing), "Did the last two years really happen?" Batman confirms, but then, the past is never mentioned and nothing from that time is ever referenced again. As if it never happened. Thank you, John Ostrander, for trying to erase a bad memory!

I faithfully read all the Batman books for over 20 years, and the War Games / War Crimes stories were the absolute worst I ever read. The established characters behaved totally wrong (Batman totally disrespects Tim by immediately giving the Robin costume to his girlfriend — right, that would happen), and the supporting cast brought in to the stories behaved moronically (Batman walks out of the school carrying a wounded/dying student, and the press and the cops immediately conclude that Batman killed her. Right…).

I hope somebody was fired for thát blunder!

I bash Didio a lot, but I honestly have to give him some credit in this case for not throwing in a rape while he was at it. You now given the current state of affairs at DC, SOMEbody had to have put the idea of adding a rape of Spoiler on the table as well.

I liked Spoiler a lot and didn't like that she was killed off, but what really pissed me off about that story was the Leslie Thompkins angle. As far as I can tell, that part of it was Willingham's doing. That aspect made absolutely no sense to me. I'll still buy Willingham's own creations (Fables), but won't buy any work he does on any of the main DCU.

Meh - I don't care much about Spoiler but what they had Leslie do was completely off. Mind you I haven't checked the comics to see if there's a body, but there might still be hope that Leslie faked her death.