To expand on what I said, let me say, "what Bodhi said."  I didn't have a problem following the multiverse concept, I just didn't care about it what went on in any of them.  The only DC book I read at that point had been Teen Titans.  Crisis made the books more like Marvel imo, and that got me interested in DC.  But in hindsight, revamping the books could have easily been done without blowing everything up.  I would have read JB's Superman whether Crisis happened or not.

WO

The fact that Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman continued to be the same folk they were before that signal issue of SHOWCASE -- and the fact that they would later become members of the JLA along with Barry, Hal, Katar and the rest, renders the whole thing a "retcon" wrapped in a reboot.

Was Crisis On Infinite Earths neccessary?

No!

It's all part of the need to address these characters as if they were real -- and therein lies the central problem in all such thinking. Superheroes in the real world would have a profound and wide-reaching impact, merely by existing. They would be, if nothing else, an instant inferiority complex for everyone else in the world. Some of the nonsense, like government registration and whatnot, that ^^***** and DC have played with (and are playing with) would almost certainly happen. But in comics, no. These things do not belong in comics, where superheroes are more like sports celebrities -- only without the feet of clay that reach all the way to their collarbones.

Not true. Altho the term "retcon" did not exist in 1956, that is exactly what happened with the birth of the "Silver Age". Barry Allen is shown reading a FLASH comic in his first story, and in that instant Jay Garrick is retconned into a fictional character in the DC "universe". Alan Scott and the original Carter Hall would soon follow, along with all the members of the JSA whose books had not survived into (or very far into) the 1950s.

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My mistake, made all the worse because you've pointed this out several times in the past.

And yet~ it didn't cause the (irreparable?) damage that Crisis did. It was actually kind of... neat. As a kid, discovering the whole parallel earths idea was really... cool. I had no concept of a "golden age", though~ I thought the Earth-2 characters were all brand new.

That Julius Schwartz. He must have known something.

If anything that doesn't work should just be ignored, then when are people so angry about Crisis?  Just ignore it!  Just act as if the multiverse is still there.  Put Humpty Dumpty back together again.  As JB pointed out, this type of retcon within a reboot has been done before with the Silver Age.  So why fret about all of this?  A better question then whether it was necessary is whether or not it was a good story.  For me, Perez did great work and the story was fun (if confusing at times due to the huge cast of characters).  And it allowed for "real" repercussions which, at the time, were exciting.

Question:  why all the blame on the "fanboys"?  If "fanboys" are the vocal part of the market, shouldn't the companies listen?  Particularily if the market has shrunk so that fanboys are all that remains of the market. 

And in terms of fanboys who get into the industry as being a negative, weren't the creators from the previous generation "fanboys?"  How many times have we heard in interviews how one creator or another was so inspired by X artist or Y story that they had to get involved in the industry? Or in other words, they too were "fanboys" turned professionals.  So why complain about this generation (or the 80's generation, or the Silver Age generation) of "fanboys turned professionals" doing the same thing?

Hell, they could have put him on Atari Force, and I would have bought it.

What the heck was wrong with Atari Force?  I loved that book.  And Garcia-Lopez . . .  great work.  JB would not have made it better.

While I thought it was fun to see so many characters interact in the first Crisis, I thought the art and writing were great, in the final analysis though, it was unecessary and now hopefully post-IC we can all just move on...I hope.

The first Crisis wouldn't have been such a clustercluck if, as JB has stated in other posts on this topic, ALL the DC hero comics ALL started over with clean slates at issue #1 as intended at the end of Crisis. Editorially, they screwed up by not having everone from Superman to Hawkman just STOP and RESTART. The end of the LEGENDS mini-series illustrates that if you are going to do something as big as Crisis you better have a solid hold on the editors to all be on the same page or we end up with the glaring and embarrassing mishandling of Wonder Woman's continuity in LEGENDS #6.

Going forward from Infinite Crisis I hope that DC gets it right this time.