Yes, in a preview that was written by Johns.
Okay, didn't know he wrote it. But your quote was, "then came IC," and in fact that title begins after Ted's death. Speaking of which, if Geoff wrote the scene where Ted's head gets ventilated, I'm inching even further away from the pro-Johns camp.
I suppose I agree with you somewhat. It is...unnerving...to hear about characters dying because what that means is, if they can kill characters you don't like, sooner or later they're going to get to somebody you DO.
No, that's not it, actually. Frankly, death means absolutely squat in comics. If they want a character back from the dead, they'll bring him back from the dead, no matter how many pieces we saw him torn into. So the minute a publisher says, "we're killing a prominent character!" my immediate response is, "So what?" It's like soap operas where they expect me to get upset that the girl is marrying the wrong guy. I'm supposed to sit there and say, "No, don't ruin your life by marrying that cad!" but instead I'm thinking, "Knock yourself out, no marriage on this show lasts longer than 6 months, anyway."
No, what bothers me is that killing characters is such a cheap thrill, or rather was a cheap thrill the first thousand times it was done. Now it's not even interesting. It's the first resort of an unimaginative mind. Sure, nobody ever did anything interesting with the Freedom Fighters, but who's to say nobody ever could? Marvelman was a dumb rip-off of another character until Alan Moore got hold of him. Animal Man was a total loss until his series in the 90s. The X-Men were one of Stan's few failures until Wein and Cockrum retooled them in the 70s. To me it's a total cop-out to kill a character because he "never worked anyway" when history shows a talented writer can make anything work.
Which is not to defend or eulogize any of the victims of Superboy's bloodbath...I don't recognize a single one of them and I'll never miss them. They're just ciphers...people in costumes with one purpose in life and that is to be cannon fodder. If Johns didn't murder them for a cheap thrill, some other hack would have soon enough. But let's not kid ourselves; ripping people to pieces is something that happens in comic books (not horror movies, mind you...not military fiction...a comic book) for one reason and one reason only, and that is to appeal to the lowest common denominator, the bloodthirsty fanboys. I'm not one of them.
I was horrified by the death of the Freedom Fighters at first. But the more I think about it, the better a choice it was. For one thing, unfortunately, no great writer saw their potential and did a really fantastic Freedom Fighters series. They were just sort of...THERE, the superhero equivalent of the guy that shows up at a party, never talks to anybody, and just sits in a corner. And perhaps this fits in with a greater plan for the DC-Multiverse that is being restored; note, for instance, that Earth-2 was recently restored, and the Freedom Fighters were all from Earth-X.
Again, the fact that they'd never been done well yet doesn't mean they couldn't have been. Now there's no chance for that. And let's be honest here; what we have seen is not the end of the Freedom Fighters as a concept. What we have seen is the door opening for the next generation of also-rans: a new Phantom Lady, a new Ray (this one was already the second), a new Black Condor (also up to Mark II and counting) and so on. Only this time they'll be Puerto Rican or women or both, and their book will be canceled in less than a year.
And not to nit-pick, but the Freedom Fighters were actually from Earth-2. They travelled to Earth-X in order to fight Nazis, as Earth-X was a world with no resident superheroes. Reading a caption on that scanned page of IC 4 at Dial B for Blog, I think this is a detail that escaped Johns as well.