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Post by Deleted on Mar 23, 2022 17:19:59 GMT -5
As far as events and reboots go, the Silver and Bronze Age were filled with reboots / retcons of everything from resurrecting Golden Age characters with new histories never intended by the creators, multi-title crossover events ( The Avengers & The Defenders did that in the early 70s), so COIE did not introduce much of that. But it handled it the right way, which has not been seen since, other than non-continuity books. I have to pause on that a bit...let's take the transition from the Golden Age to the Silver Age for example. Jay Garrick last appeared in 1951, the Flash did not reappear until 5 years later when it was reworked into the Barry Allen character. A number of reworked characters were longer (the gap for say GL was from 1951 to 1959). The Golden Age characters were already effectively "cancelled", the readership wasn't there. The kids who WERE reading them at the end were largely too old by the advent of the Silver Age to make up any significant portion of the readership of the new characters. There was no "event" that disrupted the status quo...they floated some stories out there, and a new audience without much in the way of baggage latched on. So much so, they actually found a way to reintroduce the old material and make it all fit together. It felt less like a retcon than an expansion...everything old was still cool, and could add to the new universe versus conveniently be dismissed. Sure, plenty of revisions along the way, but overall, it leaned towards a growing rich history versus a complete teardown and slow rebuild that I think Crisis suffered from. And again, there was no "generational pause" like in the 50's, some of us literally had it all ripped out from under us. It's not what all of us wanted, I know it's not what I wanted, so I don't think a blanket statement can be made on that.
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Post by tarkintino on Mar 23, 2022 17:36:42 GMT -5
I have to pause on that a bit...let's take the transition from the Golden Age to the Silver Age for example. Jay Garrick last appeared in 1951, the Flash did not reappear until 5 years later when it was reworked into the Barry Allen character. A number of reworked characters were longer (the gap for say GL was from 1951 to 1959). The Golden Age characters were already effectively "cancelled", the readership wasn't there. The kids who WERE reading them at the end were largely too old by the advent of the Silver Age to make up any significant portion of the readership of the new characters. Think of Captain America: his resurrection in the Silver Age was a total retcon/reboot; in the Timely/Atlas titles, he did not face a villain named Baron Zemo who rigged a drone plane with explosives, which detonated, killing Bucky and sending Cap into suspended animation. Yet, this entirely new history was supposed to tie into the original Golden Age, which created a number of problems anytime writers had to retcon or re-invent to link Golden to Silver - forward. The same happened when Englehart created a heretofore unknown history of the 50's Cap and Bucky, which is supposed fit somewhere in those late Golden Age stories. Same with Giant Size Avengers #1 (1974) with the retconned plot concerning the Whizzer(and his relation to the Scalet Witch and Quicksliver...until even that was dumped only a few years later). Rarely did such tinkering ever create the fluid history of a universe as intended, and this all pre-dated COIE.
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Post by Deleted on Mar 23, 2022 17:40:22 GMT -5
And this is just a little venting here...
The Huntress...what a wonderful story of how the Earth-2 Batman and Catwoman finally find true love in each other, get married, and have a daughter (Helena Wayne) who carries on their legacy in her own way.
Post-Crisis...let's just rip off Valerie Bertinelli (Helena "Bertinelli"). Oh, uh, and that's like Italian sounding, so she's now from a mafia family.
Seriously...that is exactly what happened.
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Post by Deleted on Mar 23, 2022 18:01:09 GMT -5
I have to pause on that a bit...let's take the transition from the Golden Age to the Silver Age for example. Jay Garrick last appeared in 1951, the Flash did not reappear until 5 years later when it was reworked into the Barry Allen character. A number of reworked characters were longer (the gap for say GL was from 1951 to 1959). The Golden Age characters were already effectively "cancelled", the readership wasn't there. The kids who WERE reading them at the end were largely too old by the advent of the Silver Age to make up any significant portion of the readership of the new characters. Think of Captain America: his resurrection in the Silver Age was a total retcon/reboot; in the Timely/Atlas titles, he did not face a villain named Baron Zemo who rigged a drone plane with explosives, which detonated, killing Bucky and sending Cap into suspended animation. Yet, this entirely new history was supposed to tie into the original Golden Age, which created a number of problems anytime writers had to retcon or re-invent to link Golden to Silver - forward. The same happened when Englehart created a heretofore unknown history of the 50's Cap and Bucky, which is supposed fit somewhere in those late Golden Age stories. Same with Giant Size Avengers #1 (1974) with the retconned plot concerning the Whizzer(and his relation to the Scalet Witch and Quicksliver...until even that was dumped only a few years later). Rarely did such tinkering ever create the fluid history of a universe as intended, and this all pre-dated COIE. I'm with you on those examples, and I can see your points. There was no "Earth-1/Earth-2" reconciliation of the characters per my prior comments in this case, but outright retconning. But having read all of those Silver/Bronze Age stories as a kid with no exposure to Golden Age Cap or Invaders (reprints were not widely available), I didn't make that connection. Again, this is just where I was coming from, but Crisis did some hard retconning that moved my cheese.
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Post by speakerdad on Mar 23, 2022 22:35:37 GMT -5
55 and voted good!
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Post by Deleted on Mar 24, 2022 0:36:02 GMT -5
Late night insomnia musings here, but getting back to the topic of Crisis as a standalone story versus an event, again I originally had the intention of this being more around the ramifications to DC continuity going forward. To me, Dark Knight Returns and Watchmen were much bigger events in terms of standalone stories.
But as also often discussed in the past, that brought me back around to how Crisis really was not nearly as disruptive to Batman's continuity (Earth-2 Helena aside) as it was to the Superman family. Superman was just a gut punch to me, most immediately because of the death of Kara but then an attempt to reboot with a quasi Golden Age approach. Depowered, no Superboy, no Supergirl, etc. And the Legion became this sort of anomaly, clever as the "pocket universe" idea was to keep it alive. Personally, I always liked the more powerful version of Superman because it allowed for more interesting "non-combat" activities like time travel, deep space travel, etc. And even on the creative side, Byrne was all the rage at the time of course, but the loss of Curt Swan never felt right. He simply "was" the Superman artist, I would have loved him on at least one title until he retired.
Dark Knight was not a retcon event in itself obviously, but highly influenced where they took the character next. And when revision activity kicked in with Year One, it wasn't quite as abrupt as the above. Yeah, the Selina Kyle thing was yucky, but if you had been on Miller's ride with Daredevil you knew it was the same playbook. He had trashed Karen Page as well. But otherwise, it was just a grittier version, and David Mazzuccelli's art, holy cow that was great and fit the character so well. And no sad creator dismissal on the level of what happened with Swan. The mainstream Batman titles kind of just continued on, then expanded with the character's popularity, and I feel like DC had a lot more success here in the years that followed.
This is more of an aside, but I wish Byrne had left FF sometime in '84, and come over to DC then and taken on Superman (Swan stays on art on one of the titles). Pre-Crisis continuity, but still heavily injects his creativity (which WAS needed at that point). Plus no "Malice" storyline in '85 in FF (among other things), win-win.
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Confessor
CCF Mod Squad
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Post by Confessor on Mar 24, 2022 4:20:20 GMT -5
I'm in my 40s and voted "Bad", although full disclosure here: I've never actually read it.
Back in the late 70s and early 80s, I was only a casual DC fan, picking up the odd Superman or Batman book; I was much more of a Marvel reader and generally considered DC comics to be inferior. When COIE came out, I remember some of my friends talking about it excitedly, so I was kind of aware of what it was doing to the DC universe.
For me, what I really disliked about COIE was the reboots it ushered in to the Superman and Batman comics. In the former case, I enjoyed John Byrne's art (though he was no Curt Swan), but I really disliked the continuity changes it caused and the re-starting over of Superman's adventures; it just annoyed the hell out of me that this clearly wasn't the same version of Superman that I had been following since the late 70s. I didn't want a new Superman; I wanted the "real" Superman from before (at least, that's how I felt as a kid at the time). And the same goes for Batman.
In more recent years, my opinion of Crisis has sunk even lower, knowing that the changes it caused didn't really stick or weren't always adhered to. And it set a precedent for endless DC reboots that just seem laughable to this non-reader.
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Post by tarkintino on Mar 24, 2022 8:36:25 GMT -5
Think of Captain America: his resurrection in the Silver Age was a total retcon/reboot; in the Timely/Atlas titles, he did not face a villain named Baron Zemo who rigged a drone plane with explosives, which detonated, killing Bucky and sending Cap into suspended animation. Yet, this entirely new history was supposed to tie into the original Golden Age, which created a number of problems anytime writers had to retcon or re-invent to link Golden to Silver - forward. The same happened when Englehart created a heretofore unknown history of the 50's Cap and Bucky, which is supposed fit somewhere in those late Golden Age stories. Same with Giant Size Avengers #1 (1974) with the retconned plot concerning the Whizzer(and his relation to the Scalet Witch and Quicksliver...until even that was dumped only a few years later). Rarely did such tinkering ever create the fluid history of a universe as intended, and this all pre-dated COIE. I'm with you on those examples, and I can see your points. There was no "Earth-1/Earth-2" reconciliation of the characters per my prior comments in this case, but outright retconning. But having read all of those Silver/Bronze Age stories as a kid with no exposure to Golden Age Cap or Invaders (reprints were not widely available), I didn't make that connection. Again, this is just where I was coming from, but Crisis did some hard retconning that moved my cheese. To this day Marvel has never straightened out its retconning / continuity issues, and in some cases instituted more screw ups. As mentioned before, COIE was not only addressing a need for DC (internally), but answering many a reader's requests for years. Letters pages from the 60s and 70s were no strangers to readers complaining about the unwieldy, silly "universe" that rarely allowed continuity (or sense) from one title to the next. Comic readers expected coherence in their "serious" comics, and DC barely had that, save for a few titles. COIE was the long-awaited, logical remedy for a problem DC apparently did not care to address up to a point. The only kind of major comic line that successfully skated around larger continuity / loose history issues sans the need for a housecleaning was Archie, where the characters could be anywhere, do anything throughout the decades (fully embracing era-defining trends), yet would never have readers question the here one year, gone another supporting characters, relatives, relationships, even character names, occupations, or how they were teens during WW2, Vietnam, Desert Storm, etc.
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Post by Deleted on Mar 24, 2022 8:48:37 GMT -5
I have enjoyed the insight of tarkintino in this thread. It has given me food for thought. Tarkintino, in relation to the post you’ve just made, what would be your response to the idea that DC should have ignored (or brushed off) any nit-picking letters about continuity? Is there any compelling reason you think DC couldn’t/shouldn’t have done that?
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Roquefort Raider
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Post by Roquefort Raider on Mar 24, 2022 9:02:13 GMT -5
I'm 57, so get off mah lawn! I wasn't invested in the pre-Crisis DC universe. Like Confessor, I was a Marvel guy. I did know about Earth-2, Earth-W and Earth-S, and thought the concept was pretty cool, allowing different versions of the world to co-exist in one coherent universe; it was in no way the confusing mess that some writers and editors made it to be. When we learned about the possibility of a company-wide reboot (I think it was in Dick Giordano's column, in which a fan letter suggesting the idea was presented), I thought that it might be a good idea, but unnecessary. When Crisis came out, my initial reaction of "Meh, so they did it. All right. As long as Marvel doesn't follow suit..." I voted "bad", but wouldn't say that the Crisis series was Plan 9 from Outer Space bad, especially because of Perez's contribution. It was still pretty nonsensical as a stand-alone story and its repercussions ultimately took away more than they gave. As someone said above, I enjoyed the exposure that several more obscure characters got; at the same time, I regretted that for many of them it only meant appearing in one or two panels in which they say "Ah! I am struck a mortal blow!" ...I had more fun identifying the obscure DC characters in Kingdom Come, many years later. Rebooting the DC universe might have worked, and in all honesty I did enjoy the Man of Steel miniseries and the Wonder Woman re-imagining. However, problems started to crop up almost immediately. How do you retain your Legion of super-heroes continuity if Superboy never existed? Where do the Warlord's adventures occur since our own planet is clearly not hollow? What do you do when the reboot of a character (Truman's Hawkman) clashes with the traditional version that DC also wants to use? What happens when creators still want to use characters who were erased from reality (Supergirl, for example)? A mess of continuity fixes is what happens, that's what, requiring a second Crisis (Zero Hour) a few years down the line... a second fix that made things even more confused. I think DC's strategy with the Crisis failed largely because it tried to have its cake and eat it too. Make something new but still catering to long-time fans (and to the interests of fans turned authors). It was an almost impossible mission. As a story, although I enjoyed seeings things blow up and a gazillion heroes running hither and yon, I was hard-pressed to make heads or tails of what was happening. How does a "wall" of antimatter eat universes at every single point in time? I mean, it's here in the present, it's here in the year 3000, it's here in prehistoric times, but why isn't it also here ten minutes ago or ten minutes from now? And what's the point in attacking all time points if you can just destroy the very distant past so that the future never existed in the first place? How can a wall of antimatter be seen moving across space and be a universal problem? If you can see the wall then it's slower than light, and in a visible universe that's at least 46 billion light years across, it means it might take quite a long while before it's a problem for most of it. Heck, for all we know it might be happening right now! Why do you need to assemble a small team of heroes to fight the threat instead of just recruiting everyone? Why does the bad guy send shadow demons here and there and everywhere instead of just letting worlds be erased by the wave of energy? Why do bad guys like the Anti-monitor need to destroy everything everywhere all at the same time instead of just enjoying a margarita on a beach somewhere?
One thing I,ll give Crisis, is that it certainly boosted my interest in the DC universe for a few years. I was curious to see where things would go. That being said, it might just be a coincidence: my interest for DC books had already been piqued by titles like Arak, Blue Devil, Swamp Thing, Moench's Batman and the like... Things were happening at stodgy ol' DC!
Hard to believe that happened so long ago.
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Post by MDG on Mar 24, 2022 9:07:01 GMT -5
Late night insomnia musings here, but getting back to the topic of Crisis as a standalone story versus an event, again I originally had the intention of this being more around the ramifications to DC continuity going forward. To me, Dark Knight Returns and Watchmen were much bigger events in terms of standalone stories. Crisis was for comic book fans--and by fans, I mean folks who were bothered by "things that didn;t fit continuity." Dark Knight and Watchmen were self-contained and were stories, not "universe maintenance". You didn't need an knowledge of Batman beyond what you'd get from a couple of stories from pretty much any era--including the TV show--to "get it." (The only exception were the references to "Jason.") .... Back in the late 70s and early 80s, I was only a casual DC fan, picking up the odd Superman or Batman book; I was much more of a Marvel reader and generally considered DC comics to be inferior. When COIE came out, I remember some of my friends talking about it excitedly, so I was kind of aware of what it was doing to the DC universe. For me, what I really disliked about COIE was the reboots it ushered in to the Superman and Batman comics. In the former case, I enjoyed John Byrne's art (though he was no Curt Swan), but I really disliked the continuity changes it caused and the re-starting over of Superman's adventures; it just annoyed the hell out of me that this clearly wasn't the same version of Superman that I had been following since the late 70s. I didn't want a new Superman; I wanted the "real" Superman from before (at least, that's how I felt as a kid at the time). And the same goes for Batman. For all the talk about Crisis "cleaning things up," did anyone ask, "Month to month, will this mean better stories in very book? Will this mean that a new or casual reader can pick up any issue of Superman, Batman, or WW and know what's going on?"
Apparently not.
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Post by commond on Mar 24, 2022 9:47:46 GMT -5
It's worth noting that sales-wise, Crisis was a success, as was the revamp. IIRC, sales were up 22% after the revamp. Man of Steel #1 was the best selling issue of 1986, and DC beat Marvel in direct market sales for the first time in the summer of '87.
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Post by Deleted on Mar 24, 2022 10:30:41 GMT -5
It's worth noting that sales-wise, Crisis was a success, as was the revamp. IIRC, sales were up 22% after the revamp. Man of Steel #1 was the best selling issue of 1986, and DC beat Marvel in direct market sales for the first time in the summer of '87. I feel like it was relatively short-lived though. It seems for years to come, it was Marvel Mutants versus Batman, and Marvel winning overall.
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Post by Deleted on Mar 24, 2022 10:35:03 GMT -5
To this day Marvel has never straightened out its retconning / continuity issues, and in some cases instituted more screw ups. I feel like Marvel tried to pull a sort of Crisis with Onslaught, but instead of the "soft reboot" tried to do a full reboot with Heroes Reborn. I forget if they claimed the intention was always to return to the status quo with Heroes Return, but if Reborn had actually been successful, I question if they wouldn't have stuck with it.
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Post by tarkintino on Mar 24, 2022 10:39:06 GMT -5
I have enjoyed the insight of tarkintino in this thread. It has given me food for thought. Tarkintino, in relation to the post you’ve just made, what would be your response to the idea that DC should have ignored (or brushed off) any nit-picking letters about continuity? Is there any compelling reason you think DC couldn’t/shouldn’t have done that? Thank you, driver. About DC's response to readers--they had no choice but to respond / work toward bringing sense to their titles, or face yet another blow to sales thanks to departing readers. The comic book method of creation & culture was rapidly changing in the 60s, where the Weisinger-style of comic (for one example) and/or anything goes from one issue to the next was believed to be ridiculous. Readers' sensibilities were maturing for work across the "serious" comic landscape (including Warren's anthology titles), and for those who were reading Marvel, it was difficult to read a DC comic where one story, history or character behavior contradicted one published only a few issues earlier. That's the kind of plotting one would see on cartoons only tasked with presenting a familiar gimmick or routine week after week, with no sense that anything mattered, since one episode or character experience meant nothing to the next installment. Late 60s Batman (the Novick / Robbins period) moved toward serious, coherent plotting with some characters or situations that would not be forgotten by the time the new issue hit the shelves, and readers really appreciated it, but again, that was not the case for the majority of DC's superhero titles for quite some time. So, for a reader wanting a sense that characters were part of a larger world (expected, since team titles and guest appearances happened), but one where he or she could see Character A not feeling as out of place in Character B's book (with its history, etc.) as Richie Rich would in Creepy (among several problems), that required a major restructuring and housecleaning.
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