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Post by Prince Hal on Apr 2, 2015 21:59:17 GMT -5
As I've said numerous times, an issue of All-Star Comics was one of the very first comics I ever bought. As was an issue of JLA with the annual JLA-JSA team-up. I was probably 8 or 9. It took me maybe 10 minutes to figure out the whole "multiple Earths" thing. If a 9 year old who had read maybe a dozen comics could understand it, adult writers and editors sure as Hell should have been able to figure it out. And compare the Multiple Earths to every single damn "reboot" that's occurred since and tell me which DC Universe (aren't there about 600 of them now, or is that Marvel?) is easier to understand. I mean, how the funk does anyone explain the Legion of Super-Heroes? And really, haven't nearly all of these reboots essentially retained the notion of multiple earths without calling it that? Fox (and maybe Schwartz?) came up with as simple and tidy a system as one could imagine. And DC screwed it up. |
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Post by Phil Maurice on Apr 2, 2015 22:09:41 GMT -5
Fox (and maybe Schwartz?) came up with as simple and tidy a system as one could imagine. And DC screwed it up. You mean Gardner Fox obviously, not Victor. For a moment, I thought your "tidy system" consisted of puffing a huge cigar and repeating, "I'm the King of Comics, I'm the King of Comics!"  |
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Post by JKCarrier on Apr 2, 2015 22:18:53 GMT -5
"Simplifying the universe" was trotted out as an excuse, but I suspect DC's real concern was not that their history was complicated, but that so much of it was considered corny and silly. Rebooting the universe was not the only way (or even the best way) to address that, but it was the most attention-grabbing way. And in the short term, at least, it worked -- DC got back some of the market share they'd lost to Marvel. Which is why they keep pulling the same stunt over and over, every time sales start to sag.
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Post by Pharozonk on Apr 2, 2015 23:38:32 GMT -5
Like Cei-U! stated, COIE has great art and some powerful individual moments, but the overall story is pretty mediocre. The writing is the defintion of convoluted and long term effects on DC continuity were too harmful to ever fully give this story a pass in my eyes. Also, I hate the concept of reboots with a passion so that also may have something to do with it. |
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Post by dupersuper on Apr 3, 2015 0:22:45 GMT -5
Maybe not needed, but a fun story for me as a kid reading the back-issues, and - oh - that Perez art...
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Post by Deleted on Apr 3, 2015 4:53:44 GMT -5
Like Cei-U! stated, COIE has great art and some powerful individual moments, but the overall story is pretty mediocre. The writing is the defintion of convoluted and long term effects on DC continuity were too harmful to ever fully give this story a pass in my eyes. Also, I hate the concept of reboots with a passion so that also may have something to do with it. Wow I never knew you hated the DC Silver Age with a passion...since it was a reboot essentially reworking the characters of the Golden Age to start again as something new. The fact they then later added in the concept of Earth 2 and that the Golden Age characters were still around was in essence just another reboot/retcon after introducing the rebooted characters a few years before and starting to tell their stories. As for Crisis itself...I was mostly a Marvel Zombie as a kid, only owning a handful of DC comics, most of my exposure to the DC characters was in other mediums, and I was still buying most of my comics off the newsstand not comics shops and had just begun to explore DC in earnest adding JLA and Flash to what I was reading when I stumbled across an issue of Crisis at a 7-11 (which was issue #9) looking for stuff to read in the aftermath of Hurricane Gloria where we had no power and no school and I was blown away to find old artistic friend George Perez (a favorite of mine from his time on Avengers) drawing all of the DC Universe I was still trying to get a handle on. There was so much history and so many characters I didn't know but the familiarity of Perez's art served as an in for me. I had a couple of issues that features JLA/JSA cross-overs and an odd issue of All Star with the JSA as a kid so I knew the basic concept of the multiple earths, but Crisis just seemed epic and slightly overwhelming to me, and made me really want to know more about the DCU. I made a trip tot he comic shop just to look for the earlier issues I had missed and also discovered Who's Who on that trip which helped me start filling in some of the blanks on DC History. Now in hindsight, the story doesn't stand up and I see all the flaws and foibles of it, but for me it served as a gateway into the DC and made it feel like I was getting in on the ground floor because it was a whole new ballgame afterwards. Legends and the Wolfman/Perez History of the DC Universe mini solidified that feeling for me soon afterwards (as did the Byrne Superman revamp, and Perez Wonder Woman relaunch) and I have been a fan of the DCU since, so in many ways I was exactly the target audience DC wanted to reach and it worked with me. I now much prefer the Pre-Crisis DCU, but if it weren't for Crisis as my gateway, I might never have really dug into the DCU to become the fan of it I am. -M |
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Post by spoon on Apr 3, 2015 8:45:34 GMT -5
It's been a while since I read COIE, but I like it when I read it. I agree with the idea of COIE as a gateway. Crisis was being published when I first started reading comics. Although COIE busted up the multiverse, it (along with Who's Who) exposed me to characters I probably wouldn't have read about otherwise. Everyone was together in one limited series.
Part of this may be generational. Since I was just starting out reading comics in 1985, I didn't have a big emotional investment in the status quo. I read series that resulted from the Crisis (Blue Beetle, Captain Atom). Maybe because the reboot was a fait accompli earlier on in my collecting history, I don't really get a feeling of regret when reading pre-Crisis stories that were disrupted by COIE. It's similar to the discussions I've seen here about the Dark Phoenix Saga and the return of Jean Grey. I wasn't reading the X-books at the time, so I don't have the feeling of disruption that someone who read the original story and the retcon as they were published might.
I agree that it wasn't necessary to "fix" DC continuity. Part of the charm of the DC universe is the messiness. But an interesting series came from that excuse.
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Post by chadwilliam on Apr 3, 2015 9:12:20 GMT -5
and yet twelve issues for you just to understand how those stories were being thrown away? In the hands of the right people, it would have taken just a single issue for each and you'd still have room for a pin-up or two but yeah, great question. And beautifully passive-aggressively phrased.  One thing I should add - although it hasn't been brought up yet - is that I never really found Crisis itself confusing. Questions such as "How could the heroes remember there being a Crisis afterwards", "Why doesn't anyone remember Supergirl", "How could there have been a Crisis in the new timeline", etc. didn't really phase me. In fact, although I'm not a fan of what the series did to DC, I did like the idea of all these superheroes mistakenly thinking that while there were casualties, the Anti-Monitor's attack didn't really have much of an impact on their lives. |
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Post by DE Sinclair on Apr 3, 2015 9:23:41 GMT -5
My thoughts:
I liked that all the characters were on one Earth which made casual team-ups easier. Also that the Justice Society was the old guard everyone looked up to.
Monitor and Anti-Monitor are remarkably stupid names and one-dimensional characters.
I still feel bad for Nighthawk's horse.
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Post by Nowhere Man on Apr 3, 2015 12:42:41 GMT -5
Even as a Marvel kid testing the DC waters for the first time, I never liked the idea that Superman and Wonder Woman weren't founding members of the Justice League in the Post-Crisis universe. That's just all kinds of messed up and wrong.
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Post by Hoosier X on Apr 3, 2015 12:56:44 GMT -5
I read the first five or six issues when it first came out and then lost interest. Partly because I was reading several DC series and I thought that most of the Crisis cross-over issues were really awful. (And I've always been a bit resentful against the Crisis because of how badly it messed up All-Star Squadron, one of the best comics of the early 1980s.)
A year or so ago, I read the whole series in the TPB, and it was a mixed bag. Great art, of course.
One thing that sticks out is how disappointed I was by the characters chosen to be spotlighted in the early issues. There are so many great characters in the DCU, and I was getting way too much Firestorm and Cyborg and other characters I'm fairly indifferent to.
But the issue where the villains take over is great! George Perez just knocks it out of the park in that issue.
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Post by Prince Hal on Apr 3, 2015 12:57:42 GMT -5
Even as a Marvel kid testing the DC waters for the first time, I never liked the idea that Superman and Wonder Woman weren't founding members of the Justice League in the Post-Crisis universe. That's just all kinds of messed up and wrong. Right. they should've/ could've started a new universe with a different spin on everything, just as they had done, essentially in the first years of the Silver Age. They had plenty of parallel universes then and still do, despite the supposed continuity-simplifying of the Crisis, most likely because within moments, the writers realized how much more complicated it was to tell stories in the post-Crisis universe and how much -- dare I say it? -- fun it was to have an unlimited supply of dimensions and universes. |
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Post by earl on Apr 3, 2015 13:29:30 GMT -5
I don't know about where you were getting comics back in the 80s, but where I grew up DC was very marginal. Their comics were just not that popular at all and this even includes Batman with the only exception being New Teen Titans and to a lesser degree the Legion. This series and what DC did to follow up changed this situation. To me, DC in the mid to late 80s is one of the best periods of comics they ever did and it really standing on top of the work that the indies had done in the decade finally cracked open the US comic market for some different things.
As for the Crisis, it's a heck of a comic book doomsday story and the scope of it was beyond what Marvel or DC had done to that point. Bad thing is that success breeds copycats and eventually you end up nearly 30 years later and just the thought of this type of comics seems so passe (and it is).
I can definitely see fans of the Earth 2 titles (All Star Squadron, Infinity Inc.) being sad about it, as it totally screwed up those characters and DC didn't help it or the Legion by flip flopping around on which direction to take those series.
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Post by dupersuper on Apr 3, 2015 19:47:55 GMT -5
Even as a Marvel kid testing the DC waters for the first time, I never liked the idea that Superman and Wonder Woman weren't founding members of the Justice League in the Post-Crisis universe. That's just all kinds of messed up and wrong. Superman was still sometimes depicted as a part-time founder (as was Wonder Woman post-Infinite Crisis). |
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Post by Icctrombone on Apr 3, 2015 20:20:35 GMT -5
I remember talking to Jim Shooter at a con in the early 80's and he told me that the only 2 DC books that would get royalties in Marvel were New Teen Titans and Warlord. He told me those 2 books would have been bottom tier books in Marvel. This is why Crisis was published. Marvel was kicking their buts in sales.
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