Amen, Eric.

It's only when fans or creators overthink these "problems" that they become problems. To those suggesting that Gardner Fox and Julius Schwartz should simply have told fans that the Golden Age characters "didn't exist," how many stories do you suppose arise from the concept "They Didn't Exist?" Conversely, how many stories arise from what was created? Are we here to read stories, or to play overseers to the writers and editors and insist, INSIST, that every jot and tittle ever written jibe with one another to form a perfectly cohesive, harmonious, and oh, by the way, utterly unimaginative, risk-free Continuity?

I never suffered a moment's confusion from the parallel worlds concept as a kid, although I was later troubled by the lack of imagination that came to be associated with it. The original idea was great. The idea of an Earth-3 as well was sharp and fun. At that point, Fox and Schwartz called a halt to the runaway train, and their next "parallel world" was actually a magically created alternate timeline which went away at the end of the story. For a while, that was it as far parallel worlds went. Wonder Woman had earlier journeyed to one. It was never mentioned. Flash went to a "mirror universe" at one point, but that was not tallied alongside the others, being another dimension rather than a parallel universe, much like Green Lantern's Qward.

Sadly, Schwartz allowed an "Earth-Prime" to come into being in response to readers' letters to explain which Earth we lived on. Once in place, characters and creators could interact in-story in a way that "made sense" in context. Again, a springboard for story ideas, but one more parallel world...

The late 60's and early 70's saw a massive influx of fans-turned-creators and they brought with them all of their fannish desires and impulses. Why did the old pros stop creating parallel worlds, they seemed to ask. Why, we could create a hundred more! A thousand! No... An INFINITE number...!! Each new raft of characters were assigned their own parallel world, with its own set of identifying complexities...

The problem with this, the reason the old pros didn't follow this path became clear within a few years when the fans-cum-pros looked upon their castles built on shifting sands and decided it all needed to be torn down. Too complicated... Not "Marvel-ish" enough...

And at the core, not IMAGINATIVE. Fox and Schwartz conceived of a fun, workable solutions to a set of story problems they'd set for themselves. They looked at the challenges involved in revisiting the JSA and invented a clever way around them.

The folks who gave us Earth-X, Earth-S, Earth-B, Earth-C, et al did nothing of the sort. They used an existing idea to concoct a series of unimaginative lookalikes. Cookie cutter thinking led to the Crisis, not the invention of Earth-2.* Should we hold Claremont and Byrne responsible for every bad story done in "homage" to Dark Phoenix and Days of Future Past? Surely they ought to have seen what would happen if they went ahead with these ideas, and put a stop to it before pen ever hit page!!

Those who can genuinely create do. Those who can't... grab the cookie cutter and have at it.

* Cookie-cutter thinking and an over-riding need to "Marvelize" every thing they came across...

Brad, I see what you're saying, and I haven't read many of the Nu52 books, so I honestly don't know. Have they SAID Blackest Night and Brightest Day took place, or are they simply using the characters as they existed at the moment they decided to draw a line in the sand and begin from there?

Going back to answer questions like "why did Kyle break up with so-and-so if Jade didn't exist" is EXACTLY the sort of thinking that torpedoed the Crisis and Zero Hour reboots (not that those were seaworthy to begin with...) Do we REALLY want some sort of Jade analog to be created who can play the part Jade played in that already-over-and-done-with psychodrama, and then have to explain where she is today, and why Kyle and Jade2 aren't together when five years ago we were told they were meant for each other--? Is that why we read comics?

My knocking them aside, Batman and Green Lantern are NOT exactly as they were prior to the Nu52 reboot. The five year timeline alone changes much of what we once knew. Just because Johns and Morrison's mothers wrote them notes excusing them from much of the rethinking being done, the characters are still younger than they were, less comfortable around one another, all of the qualities the other characters have. Concepts such as Batman Inc., Damien, and the Rainbow Brite Corps unfortunately carried over, yes, but we know no more about the origins or backstories of these than we know about...

... Alan Scott.

Neil, the Emma Peel Wonder Woman had nothing really to do with parallel Earths. Paradise Island was fading from our reality and taking with it the magic that gave Wonder Woman her powers and immortality. She was forced to choose between leaving Earth with her mother and fellow amazons or staying in Man's World and making her way on her own without her powers. She elected to stay.

Apparently, no one wanted to continue the idea once the original creative team moved on, and she was back in her star-spangled tap pants lickety-split, just as quickly as DC could do so, creating a number of dangling plot lines in the process. Ye gads, just the sheer number of Steve Trevors that resulted from constantly going back and trying to "fix" all that... Gahh...

Tim, your solution would mean that from day one, Fox and Schwartz "Should Have Intended" there to be two Flashes operating side by side in the pages of their comic. Maybe one's retired... Maybe one lives in an entirely different state, but two operating simultaneously...

Putting them on different Earths explained why there weren't in fact two of every character walking around the pages of DC Comics. Those "doubles" had their own world, where they were respected heroes in their own right.

The Look Magazine idea only looks good in retrospect as it's a better idea than Crisis on Infinite Earths. It's not a better idea, however, than The Flash of Two Worlds.

Glen Keith wrote: "It annoyed me that DC could never commit to just one version of a character..."

Hey, Glen, how did the Spider-Clone Saga and Multiple Hulks storylines work  out for you? :-)

For that matter, how about the slew of Captain Americas, duplicate Torches, Parallel Universe Reeds and Bens, fill-in Green Goblins, and the Gwen Stacy clones? Is Jim Rhodes taking over for Tony really all that different than Hal taking over from Alan? The Hulk stories in Rampaging Hulk were in an entirely separate "continuity" from those in the comics, the discrepancies later explained away as being scenes from an alien movie that was being filmed... Because Krylorians apparently wished to explore the topic of YMCA shower rape, I suppose... But there you had two Hulk titles with two separate Hulks running at the same time...

Marvel's disparate multiple timelines and mutually exclusive future worlds are far more ludicrous in number and logic than DC's parallel Earths, but somehow Marvelites seem to navigate those pretty well... As well as Earth-A (Reed is the Thing!), Earth-S (The Squadron Supreme), Earth-616, Earth-X (Alex Ross World!) ... And on and on and on...

I think such discussions have more to do with picking sports teams to root for than the content of the comics themselves.

Well, Brad, I agree that starting over for one ought to mean starting over for all, but clearly Johns and Morrison decided THEY weren't part of the problem, and thereby created other problems entirely...

Still, if everything in GL is exactly as it was, and you were reading the books in great detail then, why not continue reading them now? Shouldn't the books maintaining story direction and continuity be a good thing for a GL reader?