Batman, at the time, was nowhere near as screwed up as he is today. Remember, Frank was only just starting on DARK KNIGHT. (The project was so new that you can clearly see the impact of WATCHMEN about halfway thru, which is when Frank, like me, would have seen the xerox copies floating around the DC Offices.) The ripples of Frank's (logical in context) "dark" vision of Batman had not yet begun to flow out into the DCU. Then, as now, however, I would have resisted a Batman assignment, at least where I was called upon to write the character on a monthly basis. That's just not the way my head works.

Before Crisis I was reading Swamp Thing, the odd individual issue of Action, and Green Lantern (Engelhart/Staton). Crisis started me on the back catalogue, including All-Star Squadron, and JB took me to Superman, Frank Miller to Batman. Each of these ceased to be interesting soon after these creators left, and I started to follow creators rather than characters. So I don't know when I might have discovered things like ASS without Crisis, but the rest of it would have happened anyway (if JB had gone to Superman without Crisis, and so on).

IMP.

What JB said about his Superman revamp is very interesting.

I remember reading a while back that Cary Bates had a proposal to revamp Superman in the wake of Crisis and still tie it in to existing continuity without doing a fullscale reboot.