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Adam Schulman
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 22 July 2017
Posts: 1717
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| Posted: 26 August 2017 at 12:32am | IP Logged | 1
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The stupid part was that the HAWKWORLD limited series was supposed to have taken place in the past. It was the (new) backstory for the Hawkman and Hawkwoman of Thanagar who'd already been seen, repeatedly, after CRISIS. The story before they came to Earth.
The powers-that-were ignored all that, or forgot about it, and after that "nobody understood Hawkman's history" (until Geoff Johns did his best to make sense of it).
Things at DC are increasingly back to what they were before the New 52 reboot, a result of the "Superman Reborn" storyline. So all that matters is that (a) Katar Hol is dead, and (b) Carter Hall (the one who keeps getting reincarnated) still exists and was in the JLA at some point (and also the JSA, though almost no one remembers the JSA existed -- yet).
The Legion are coming back, that much I'm sure of, we just don't know when. And I agree that JB's Superman reboot could've been done while keeping Clark's past as Superboy -- all that was needed was some tweaking of the details.
Power Girl could've thought she was related to Superman but discovered she was the descendant of some other Golden Age superhero. The whole "granddaughter of Orion" thing was an error (to be honest, I thought it was a boring error, which might be the worst kind!)
NEW TEEN TITANS...well, yeah. But NTT never sold that well once George Perez was gone, did it?
And Doug -- I'm glad you liked CRISIS, but aside from the art, I can't stand it. Very sloppy writing.
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Brian O'Neill
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 13 November 2013
Location: United States
Posts: 1964
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| Posted: 26 August 2017 at 12:48am | IP Logged | 2
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I loved Earth-2, but the 'multiverse' could have stopped after the first JLA-JSA team ups.Earth 3 was virtually ignored for years after its first appearance(in the second team-up), and having to come up with separate Earths for the Quality and Fawcett characters was overkill. And don't even bring up 'Earth-B', otherwise known as 'Earth-Everything We Don't Want To Talk About Ever Again'. I would have preferrred keeping Earth-2 as 'the second of two Earths', rather than the screw-job DC gave the Justice Society(and essentially forcing Roy Thomas to write the group's farewell story).
DC was starting to 'soft reboot' characters as long ago as 1983 (when the then-'forthcoming History of the DC Universe' was announced by managing editor Dick Giordano, in his 'Meanwhile' column(DC's equivalent of Shooter-era 'Bullpen Bulletins'. This resulted in such lasting changes as Batman quitting the JLA(followed by about half the remaining members over the next year); Flash's murder trial; and a number of significant changes in Superman's supporting cast('Battle Armor Luthor', 'Scary Brainiac', the cooling-off of the Superman-Lois romance, and Clark Kent dating Lana Lang); and the first major rift in the 'Superman-Batman' team, which was repaired in WORLD'S FINEST # 300, late in 1983, just so Batman could overreact to a minor disagreement two years later, in the final issue of WORLD'S FINEST...a premise repeated when he told off the Outsiders,in '86).
The 'big finish' in the last panel of CRISIS # 10 was supposed to be the end of that series, with the two-volume 'History' closing out 1985, and supposedly everything was going to start fresh in January of '86...but that didn't even come close to happening. BATMAN # 400 was arguably a better sendoff for the 'Earth-1' character than 'Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?' was for Superman...but the timing of the changeover was FUBAR.
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Matt Reed
Byrne Robotics Security
Robotmod
Joined: 16 April 2004
Posts: 35786
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| Posted: 26 August 2017 at 2:15am | IP Logged | 3
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Adam Schulman wrote:
| By the way, the series that really ruined the industry was the one that instigated the whole BIG EVENT SERIES idea:
SECRET WARS. |
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I'd argue that SECRET WARS wasn't the first full line event series. Its precursor was CONTEST OF CHAMPIONS. No, it wasn't line wide insomuch as it affected monthly books on a wide scale, but it was the first series that utilized nearly every popular and not-so-popular superhero in the MU in one mini-series. It was the gateway. It was, in essence, a "proof of concept" if you will that allowed Marvel to open the floodgates that became SECRET WARS.
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Brian Floyd
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 07 July 2006
Location: United States
Posts: 8453
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| Posted: 26 August 2017 at 2:16am | IP Logged | 4
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The biggest problem with CRISIS is that, because of it (in more ways than one), DC keeps doing reboots, and does them way too often.
DC doesn't need to keep rebooting....and Marvel needs to do one asap.
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Eric Sofer
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 31 January 2014
Location: United States
Posts: 4789
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| Posted: 26 August 2017 at 8:53am | IP Logged | 5
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DC and Marvel have long tried tactics to fix faltering sales on this title or that... good grief, Wonder Woman had plenty of changes left and right during the years, and I don't think her sales were ever monstrous post-Golden Age (because if they were, Sensation Comics would never have been cancelled, or at least it would have been revived.)
It also happened that a dark bolt of lightning hit at that time, disguised as The New Teen Titans. Good books, good stories - and it showed that Marv Wolfman and George Perez were super geniuses and super talents, to pull that crap property Teen Ttians into the number one spot.
And some editor thought, "I KNOW! We'll have them work over the ENTIRE DC UNIVERSE! I'm a GENIUS!!!"
The art on Crisis really IS a delight. But the story, for me, is a little too personal-centric, the way that Wolfman did the Titans. But he made them into a family, and that works GREAT for seven characters (and supporting cast.) When it's applied to a couple universes with a couple hundred heroes... it can't work. Gardner Fox or Cary Bates might have made it work... but I think Wolfman's work didn't succeed when writ large.
And I still think it was the crossover gimmick that they thought would help sales, moreso than clearing up confusion. What confusion? Just establish that the duplicate heroes were on their own Earths, and don't recreate 'em again. It was simplicity to identify these heroes... they were ones who were still appearing in comic books after All-Star Comics #57. Superman, Batman and Robin, Wonder Woman, Superboy, Green Arrow, and Aquaman. There were others who did appear that didn't make the transition (Johnny Quick, Tomahawk, probably a few others I can't remember right now), but eponymously titled heroes were the characters who might have caused confusion.
And how often did they appear with their Earth-1 counterparts once that occurred? The costumes were sufficiently different that they could be discerned (well, until after the crisis, when editors started letting artists take unreasonable violations.)
Hawkman? What the hell could be confusing about the two Hawkmen?
Power Girl? Superman of Earth-2's cousin.. Basically Supergirl, and filling a role to carry on a tradition that Superman and Batman just didn't appear with the JSA much at all.
Crisis seemed to be a great big gimmick with practically no forethought... and THAT was what caused the problems. Every creator was allowed to say, "Hey, it's brand new, so I can do it the way I want, no matter how someone else has done it!"
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John Byrne
Grumpy Old Guy
Joined: 11 May 2005
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| Posted: 26 August 2017 at 8:59am | IP Logged | 6
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Fanboys ruined the industry. And I use "fanboy" in its original sense, to mean those who are so anal, so intense, they are an embarrassment to the more normal fans. Fanboys demand ironclad continuity, they demand constant references to previous stories -- and they make something like CRISIS "necessary". Before their rise to power, as "professionals" and comic shop owners/managers, as well as very loud voices within the constantly shrinking circles of fandom, writers and editors solved problems by simply ignoring them. If some old plot point no longer worked, don't mention it any more. There was an elitism, too. How many times after I entered the Biz professionally, did I hear complaints that DC had become "too confusing" with its multiple Earths and infinite iterations of of the characters. "Oh, WE understand it all, but the steaming masses are too dumb to get it." And how many times did I say "Just stop mentioning the 'confusing' stuff!" only to be met with "We can't do that!" And so, eventually, CRISIS, the "Big Fix" that DC has been struggling to fix ever since.
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Brian O'Neill
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 13 November 2013
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Posts: 1964
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| Posted: 26 August 2017 at 10:38am | IP Logged | 7
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"FIX" being DC's acronym for such yearly events: F***ups of Infinite Excrement
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Brian Floyd
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 07 July 2006
Location: United States
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| Posted: 26 August 2017 at 12:26pm | IP Logged | 8
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I like that one, Mr. O'Neill. Sums up things quite nicely.
And JB is on point about fanboys and elitism. Question is, can those problems ever be solved?
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John Byrne
Grumpy Old Guy
Joined: 11 May 2005
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| Posted: 26 August 2017 at 12:29pm | IP Logged | 9
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Not as long as the companies are effectively in the control of elitist fanboys.
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Adam Schulman
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Joined: 22 July 2017
Posts: 1717
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| Posted: 26 August 2017 at 12:37pm | IP Logged | 10
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JB -- is it fair to say that DC writers, not readers, were really the ones who got confused about who belonged on which Earth?
Over the years, different "Golden Age" characters ended up on Earth-One (the Guardian, Air Wave, Sargon the Sorcerer, some others I can't remember) when they should've been only on Earth-Two. Superboy was supposed to be the first superhero on Earth-One...but then we discovered he wasn't.
I mean, it shouldn't have been that hard to remember "Every version of a character that appeared before 1955 belongs on Earth-Two; every version after that belongs on Earth-One. Exception: Superboy."
And yet writers ranging from Dennis O'Neil to Jack Kirby forgot this simple rule. And editors didn't do their job.
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John Byrne
Grumpy Old Guy
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| Posted: 26 August 2017 at 1:09pm | IP Logged | 11
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Important to remember that those writers had themselves been readers just a few years earlier. The "generation" that came in before me (or of which I was among the last) -- which included the likes of Denny, Roy Thomas, Len Wein, Marv Wolfman, Gerry Conway -- did not come in "blank". Unlike the previous generation, they came in after years of being fans. Which meant they all (me included) had lesser or greater agendas. (Remember, after the "Golden Age" there was a fairly prolonged interregnum during which almost no new talent came in. The "Silver Age" was not launched by a wave of young Turks!)
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Brian O'Neill
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| Posted: 26 August 2017 at 6:15pm | IP Logged | 12
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If I remember right, the 'exception' to the 'Superboy was first' rule was Captain Comet, since he had been published from 1951 to '54, but was much later confirmed to be an Earth-1 character. The fact that Superboy, also clearly retconned as an Earth-1 character, had first appeared in 1945, in MORE FUN COMICS, was swept under the rug once the 'Earth-2 Superman' was first seen as a distinct character from the Earth-1 version, in 1969.
And, around that time, the 'Superboy' series had established the '13 years in the past' rule. I think there was an unwritten rule that SUPERBOY # 1, from 1949, was the first story that 'really counted', since the MORE FUN series, initially written by Jerry Siegel, sometimes had Superboy acting rather 'out of character'.
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