shaxper
CCF Site Custodian
Posts: 22,871
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Post by shaxper on Mar 22, 2016 9:35:51 GMT -5
Yes. The term "Post-Crisis" is a bit of a misnomer, as none of the reboots occurred until the publication of Legends a year later. Superman did. October 1986. That was one month before Legends #1, if you want to be that technical. |
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Post by dupersuper on Mar 22, 2016 10:55:17 GMT -5
The first real attempt to codify what changed and what didn't in the wake of Crisis was the 2 issue History of the DC Universe by Wolfman and Perez. Giordano and Khan were smart enough to realize (unlike today's folks at DC or Marvel) that if you try to relaunch too much at the same tiome it all gets lost in the shuffle. By staggering the relaunches/revamps you gave each one time in the sun and the attention it needed to get off the ground and build an audience before the next new/shiny thing distracted fans and bled off audience. Too much at the same time and nothing really gains an audience/traction. So Crisis hit and in the immediate aftermath they looked to redo Superman and it took time to get all the ducks in the row-find the right creative team (and hire Byrne away from Marvel) settle on direction/tone etc. and such, and they decided (based comments by Giordano in the fan press and his presentation at a shop appearance I met him at in June of 1986-the week Watchmen #1 went on sale) their plan was to address the big iconic characters one at a time and do their due diligence to get it right rather than try to do everything at once and slapdash it all to get it all done as a monolithic change. He called it their five year plan with History of the DCU and Legends being the cornerstones of the foundation of the new DCU they were building. So while some of the changes were not immediate, pretty much everything DC was doing in the period from 1986-1991 was part of that 5 year plan to remake the DCU in the wake of Crisis aftermath. Giordano and Khan did not see Crisis as the beginning of a cycle of reboots, their vision was to do it once and set up DC for the next 50 years-didn't work out that way, but the Post-Crisis DCU was an emerging process that took them several years to implement, they didn't have it all set to go as one monolithic entity as soon as the 12 issue mini was done. The transition period was messy as they were still figuring some of the things out, they were considering multiple pitches on some of the character reboots (Supes, Wonder Woman, etc. and some characters were backburnered (like Hawkman) until they had the iconic foundations set up. Some books (like JLof A) were real messy in that transition period because they had elements both of what was and looking to try to figure out what would be coming as they moved forward and then ended up getting cancelled and relaunched as plans for Legends solidified in the first year after the Crisis mini and Wolfman and Perez started to codify the new history in History of the DCU which was to serve a bit as a "series bible" for the new DCU taking shape. Even books like Power of the Atom in 1988 were part of the post-Crisis makeover as they got around to defing Ray Palmer's place in the new DCU even though they had continued to do Sword of the Atom specials for a few years after the Crisis maxi was published. It was a process, one with starts and stops, missteps and changes midstream, and it is hard to pin down exactly what was part of the plan moving forward and what was leftovers that were already in motion and needed to keep the publishing slate full as they worked through their plan to reshape things. Things did not goes monthly and plans went awry at times, which lead to things like Zero Hour a few years after the "5 year plan" (and the year after Giordano left leaving someone else trying to put their stamp on things)because so much had been changed, rethought, or just plain had too many loose ends and false starts. So if you go strictly by publication dates for series as to what was pre-and Post-Crisis, you get a fractured picture because the intent was to use Crisis to inform changes and rethinking of characters for a number of years after the series concluded until a new foundation was set up. So if anyone is right or wrong here, I would look to the people enacting the changes (and not fan perceptions) to determine what was considered a post-Crisis change or a change resulting from Crisis, and Giordano was pretty clear how he saw what was happening in the years after the maxi-series. -M Why would they publish titles during this 5 year plan that they knew they'd have to clumsily and unsatisfactorily retcon? |
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Post by Deleted on Mar 22, 2016 11:29:47 GMT -5
Why would they publish titles during this 5 year plan that they knew they'd have to clumsily and unsatisfactorily retcon? Because they are publishers and a for-profit company, not a priesthood devoted to keeping the sacred stories for "true believers" who consider canon vs. non-canon the epitome of their enjoyment factor for stories. They have to meet a bottom line and if they spent money preparing a book for publication, they aren't going to throw that away because something changed in the "mythos" elsewhere, as long as it sells and makes the company a profit, they are going to publish and sell it. -M |
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Post by dupersuper on Mar 22, 2016 11:46:17 GMT -5
Why would they publish titles during this 5 year plan that they knew they'd have to clumsily and unsatisfactorily retcon? Because they are publishers and a for-profit company, not a priesthood devoted to keeping the sacred stories for "true believers" who consider canon vs. non-canon the epitome of their enjoyment factor for stories. They have to meet a bottom line and if they spent money preparing a book for publication, they aren't going to throw that away because something changed in the "mythos" elsewhere, as long as it sells and makes the company a profit, they are going to publish and sell it. -M So they went with the cash windfall of planning a slow, contradictory, 5 year long reboot? |
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Post by Ish Kabbible on Mar 22, 2016 13:52:01 GMT -5
Because they are publishers and a for-profit company, not a priesthood devoted to keeping the sacred stories for "true believers" who consider canon vs. non-canon the epitome of their enjoyment factor for stories. They have to meet a bottom line and if they spent money preparing a book for publication, they aren't going to throw that away because something changed in the "mythos" elsewhere, as long as it sells and makes the company a profit, they are going to publish and sell it. -M So they went with the cash windfall of planning a slow, contradictory, 5 year long reboot? There was no big, long term plan. Some aspects Post-Crisis were immediately in the works and many others were not. It was nothing like the recent Nu52 immediate turn around. Hawkman was supposed to remain essentially untouched after Crisis, then it went in new directions, then Tim Truman gave them a proposal the editors liked and it was completely revamped. It was all being predicted as mrp said by sales and new creators and editors hoping on board with new ideas. As I mentioned way back, some properties got extremely messed up, like the Legion since Superboy now no longer existed,. Since he was the raison d'etre of the legion's formation, the whole backstory of the Legion had to be rejiggered. And don't even think about what happened to Mon-El. Roy Thomas was not a happy camper with what the Crisis meant to the future of All-Star Squadron. He always complained about the necessity DC felt had to be done to their old continuity. He always claimed that the Young All-Stars was the best he could do given the circumstances that were presented to him but all the plans he had for All Star Squadron had to be jettisoned |
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Post by Deleted on Mar 22, 2016 14:42:40 GMT -5
Because they are publishers and a for-profit company, not a priesthood devoted to keeping the sacred stories for "true believers" who consider canon vs. non-canon the epitome of their enjoyment factor for stories. They have to meet a bottom line and if they spent money preparing a book for publication, they aren't going to throw that away because something changed in the "mythos" elsewhere, as long as it sells and makes the company a profit, they are going to publish and sell it. -M So they went with the cash windfall of planning a slow, contradictory, 5 year long reboot? DC sales in '86-91 were higher than they had been since the early-mid-70s, and sales on Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman nearly doubled from the first half of the decade, so yes, it was a cash windfall for their 5 year plan. On top of that, they were revolutionizing the industry with new formats and features that had nothing to do with their shared sandbox universe (things like Dark Knight and Watchmen, or only tangentially related, like Sandman) and selling more books than they had in a long, long time, so even though continuity may have been messed up and ruffling some fanboy feathers, what they were doing was working in terms of building audience, increasing sales, and carving a new place for DC as a market leader and innovator. It was only after Giordano left and DC tried to make continuity king and fix things with reboots and retcons like Zero Hour that they started shedding readers and sales again leading to the endless cycle of soft and hard reboots to try to recapture what they had lost instead of looking at what had gotten them there in the first place-bold innovative stories and experimentation breaking new ground instead of catering to a small niche part of the audience with what some here call continuity porn. Unfortunately, now that small hardcore niche is really all that is left of the mainstream comic audience so the big2 have little choice but to cater to it, because they're the only ones buying big2 books anymore and all they do is shift marketshare back and forth with each other and form book to book without actually growing the potential audience or attracting new readers. The audience with growth potential and the segment of the market that is growing is the indy market spearheaded by Image, who is doing a lot of the things DC did in the mid-80s, experimenting with format and story, and letting creators tell the stories they want to tell, that DC did under Giordano which brought them increases in revenue and audience. So if given the choice between a messy contradictory reboot within a 5 year period of growing sales and expanding audience and a period with clean continuity and 5 years of steadily dropping sales with an attrition rate that makes books non-viable long before the 5 year period is up, they're going to choose the messy contradictory continuity every damn time, and rightfully so. -M |
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Post by tingramretro on Mar 22, 2016 16:18:57 GMT -5
Sorry, but this is not correct. Following Crisis, both the Golden Age and Silver Age Hawks were still in continuity, though Carter and Shiera were quickly shuffled off to Limbo with the JSA. When the Hawkworld reboot occurred, Carter and Shiera had been gone for over two years, there was never any question of their having been in JLI. The continuity implant Hawks from JLI were Fel Andar and Sharon Parker, posing as Carter Hall Junior and Sharon Hall, they were never intended to be the original Carter and Shiera. And yet, for some reason, people are turned off by DC's entirely straightforward continuity It all made sense at the time, to me, anyway. |
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Post by Deleted on Mar 23, 2016 2:05:15 GMT -5
I think that's half the problem with the incredibly convoluted continuity at the big 2 - if you live through it, you can (kind of) make sense of it, but if you come to it fresh as a new or intermittent reader, you read something like the above and your reaction is just "wait... what?"
It's kind of inevitable, I suppose, with 70+ years of publishing the same characters, that the back-stories will become just incredibly fractally complicated, but I generally feel that Marvel, while far from perfect, just handle this much better than DC do - they let stuff just kind of fade out of memory, or slide in time, with a retelling of a past story replacing it as a soft retcon, whereas DC make a huge song & dance about rebooting their universe over and over again, where the fact of the reboot is the story rather than being an aspect of the story.
Maybe that perception is because I follow Marvel much more closely than I follow DC (it's literally decades since DC was publishing anything that I wanted to follow as an ongoing series), but every time I've dipped into DC, I've either found the quality really poor (eg, the New 52 relaunch) or just couldn't understand what stuff I previously knew about the characters was still true
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Post by tingramretro on Mar 23, 2016 2:28:25 GMT -5
I think that's half the problem with the incredibly convoluted continuity at the big 2 - if you live through it, you can (kind of) make sense of it, but if you come to it fresh as a new or intermittent reader, you read something like the above and your reaction is just "wait... what?" It's kind of inevitable, I suppose, with 70+ years of publishing the same characters, that the back-stories will become just incredibly fractally complicated, but I generally feel that Marvel, while far from perfect, just handle this much better than DC do - they let stuff just kind of fade out of memory, or slide in time, with a retelling of a past story replacing it as a soft retcon, whereas DC make a huge song & dance about rebooting their universe over and over again, where the fact of the reboot is the story rather than being an aspect of the story. Maybe that perception is because I follow Marvel much more closely than I follow DC (it's literally decades since DC was publishing anything that I wanted to follow as an ongoing series), but every time I've dipped into DC, I've either found the quality really poor (eg, the New 52 relaunch) or just couldn't understand what stuff I previously knew about the characters was still true Thing is, I've always been heavily into continuity, it's what drew me to Marvel and DC in the first place, so my attitude is rather different. In the 70s and 80s, I loved the fact that Marvel had this huge, complex, but generally near seamlessly interconnected universe; these days, that's no longer the case, so those soft recons you mention just irritate me endlessly. I need an in-story, stated reason why something has changed, and Marvel frequently no longer provide that. I still read Marvel, but it annoys me that writers can't be bothered to keep details straight when basic research takes no more than a two minute Google search. DC's post Crisis resets generally (excepting Hawkworld) were each given a reason so I was fine with them. What drove me away, finally, was when they abandoned past continuity completely with the new 52, and in particular their shameful airbrushing out of the Golden Age heroes. |
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Post by String on Mar 23, 2016 21:57:00 GMT -5
I think DC's Golden Age characters are part of their problem. Ever since the re-appearance of Jay Garrick in Flash #123, DC has felt the need (and yes, I'm sure fans want to read of them, there's nothing wrong with that) to keep these versions up front and center in the best possible fashion.
But you're limited in how to portray such classic characters in any 'current' era. Having them populate their own version of Earth seems like a rather simple elegant solution and it is to a degree but by doing so, DC opened the multiverse floodgates for every such property they later acquired. Multiple Earths eventually contribute to convoluted continuity.
After Crisis, the idea became that they served back then in the Golden Age and then in some crazy comic way, managed to survive (and in some cases stay young) to the modern day. Don't get me wrong, I love the JSA comic but the focus later shifted to them training the younger generation of heroes, not a bad idea at all for the elderly experienced heroes. But that ties back into the idea of legacy which sadly is a notion that DC now seems intent of moving away from. So for a promising reason for having their Golden Age characters present, they've ripped the rug right from underneath themselves.
Marvel doesn't have this problem. Most of their Golden Age characters like Cap and Namor, they've been able to weave seamlessly back into their modern mythos without having to resort to multiple Earths or any such notion.
Because of the importance of their rich Golden Age characters, DC has to factor them into any plans for any reboots of any type and that's one inherent flaw and problem right from the start.
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Post by Deleted on Mar 24, 2016 10:50:34 GMT -5
Thing is, I've always been heavily into continuity, it's what drew me to Marvel and DC in the first place, so my attitude is rather different. In the 70s and 80s, I loved the fact that Marvel had this huge, complex, but generally near seamlessly interconnected universe; these days, that's no longer the case, so those soft recons you mention just irritate me endlessly. I need an in-story, stated reason why something has changed, and Marvel frequently no longer provide that. I still read Marvel, but it annoys me that writers can't be bothered to keep details straight when basic research takes no more than a two minute Google search. DC's post Crisis resets generally (excepting Hawkworld) were each given a reason so I was fine with them. What drove me away, finally, was when they abandoned past continuity completely with the new 52, and in particular their shameful airbrushing out of the Golden Age heroes. As of this week, Marvel now has an in-continuity explanation for its sliding continuity timescale, all suitably cosmic in the mighty Marvel manner - see Ultimates #5 for the details |
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Post by dupersuper on Mar 24, 2016 21:04:29 GMT -5
Thing is, I've always been heavily into continuity, it's what drew me to Marvel and DC in the first place, so my attitude is rather different. In the 70s and 80s, I loved the fact that Marvel had this huge, complex, but generally near seamlessly interconnected universe; these days, that's no longer the case, so those soft recons you mention just irritate me endlessly. I need an in-story, stated reason why something has changed, and Marvel frequently no longer provide that. I still read Marvel, but it annoys me that writers can't be bothered to keep details straight when basic research takes no more than a two minute Google search. DC's post Crisis resets generally (excepting Hawkworld) were each given a reason so I was fine with them. What drove me away, finally, was when they abandoned past continuity completely with the new 52, and in particular their shameful airbrushing out of the Golden Age heroes. As of this week, Marvel now has an in-continuity explanation for its sliding continuity timescale, all suitably cosmic in the mighty Marvel manner - see Ultimates #5 for the details Dare I ask? |
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Post by hondobrode on Mar 24, 2016 23:14:36 GMT -5
I don't understand why DC doesn't just fully embrace their beautiful multiverse as the answer to all these questions.
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Post by Deleted on Mar 25, 2016 5:02:15 GMT -5
I thought it was actually pretty clever (though with a bit of a caveat, based on what happens in later pages, that it might be a bit smoke & mirrors): basically the theory is that past/future are continually affecting each other and that as events move forward through the timestream they drag signifant past events with them, altering them as they go to fit into the new place. Or something like that - it seemed to make sense when Galactus: The Lifebringer, Seeder of Worlds* was saying it (* and if your response to that name was "wait... what??!", then you really should be reading Ultimates  ) |
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Post by Dizzy D on Mar 25, 2016 5:13:48 GMT -5
I thought it was actually pretty clever (though with a bit of a caveat, based on what happens in later pages, that it might be a bit smoke & mirrors): basically the theory is that past/future are continually affecting each other and that as events move forward through the timestream they drag signifant past events with them, altering them as they go to fit into the new place. Or something like that - it seemed to make sense when Galactus: The Lifebringer, Seeder of Worlds* was saying it (* and if your response to that name was "wait... what??!", then you really should be reading Ultimates ) I really want Ultimates and New Avengers (Al Ewing is one of the best writers at Marvel these days), but there is so much good stuff coming out these days. |
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