| Posted: 25 January 2014 at 3:25pm | IP Logged | 6
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At the time, I was ready to leave comics behind altogether. Two of my favorite DC Characters were the Earth-2 Superman and Flash. Clearly, I thought, these two were going to be the first to go. "Earth-2" and "Golden Age" were practically part of their names! That they did not actually kill either of them helped a great deal in my getting past the overall destructive nature of this series. Parallel Earths were never a problem for readers in general. Fans, yes, because fans would go back and try to figure out if there really was an Earth-1 Wildcat or not (I'd say, based on his team-up with the Creeper is Super-Team Family, there was, but since DC editorial never outrightly said there was, well, then it was all just Bob Haney not giving a damn about the continuity-obsessed fans, I mean, ahem, the readers... The readers, of course. Y'know, really, the readers don't care what Earth Wildcat is from and just want a good story this month. Can you do that? No? More pointless speculation on whether the Spectre somehow changed Earths during his time in that crypt instead? O-kay... The continuity obsessive fans-turned-writers didn't understand parallel Earths, and so made Crisis "necessary." Readers were not confused, but the writers, all laughing hysterically over what the old-timers had wrought, those guys needed a new starting point. After all, there were, like, a half-dozen characters whose histories were contradictory or stretched across two or more Earths. THIS, they decided, needed repair. And once they were "done," to the extent that Crisis was ever "done," (Like road repair, there was always more work to be done, either down the road, or back in same spot we'd dug up last week) we had far more than a half-dozen anomalies. Every single character was up for grabs as far as their history went. What happened? What didn't? What was real? What wasn't? Nobody knew!! How exciting!! Post-Crisis, now THAT was confusing. Over and over again, repaving the same streets, digging them back up, paving over them again... Digging them up... Paving them over... Just the very idea that you had the same character, but now with completely different parents, history, and motivations should be a tip off that you're off-base, but no. DC saw these as good things. After all, it's never been done before! How do we know it won't work? If you liked Helena Wayne, daughter of the Batman, you'll love Helena Bertenelli, Christianity-obsessed, criminal-killing daughter of a mob boss. Same, same, but different! Pre-Crisis, a great many stories no longer "meant" anything, because current continuity no longer allowed for them. Time to clean house! Post-Crisis, nothing meant anything, because continuity was no longer "set" and anything and everything could happen to wipe it all away again. And it did. Cool! Superman teamed up with Hawkman this month! Except... that Hawkman never existed, so this month's story... didn't really happen? Well, maybe it kind of did. Some other issue will come along shortly and explain HOW it could have happened... Who knows? We may even decide to keep that explanation later. No promises, though! We've always got something better coming along right behind it! Reading the Legion was just a damned headache. Hawkman, now a drug-addicted prettyboy whose wife was his commanding officer, was just dreary. Power Girl was from Atlantis, but not Aquaman's Atlantis. See, there are different Alantises in different eras, all tying in together, but different too. See? Not confusing like parallel Earths at all, is it? Crisis was a complete cluster****. The series itself, just those twelve issues, was a creative disaster as well. First off, flexographic printing, filling with garish new colors, giving everyone the ben-day measles, and no real ability to hold a black line. All that lovely Perez detail... Gone. They kept it up for two whole issues and then went back to regular presses for the third, a bit too late. As for the story, remember all of that time spent recruiting individual team members for the Crisis, a uniquely qualified team who were to be at the center of the series... All those crossovers we bought to watch the team be assembled, and then by issue two, they lost, failed to stop the big tuning-fork thingies, and no more team! 'Bye, guys! Back to wallpaper with you! Lots of BIG emergencies arising and then coming to pass, but not really affecting anything. All of existence faded to a blank white page... TWICE! Way to milk it, Marv! Tell the truth, you don't really have a plan for even these twelve issues, do you, never mind what comes after...? Supergirl! Her big death scene! So, she's how big a part of this series? Right. She appears in the issue where's she's killed, and that's about it... Um, maybe we shouldn't have kidnapped the Flash in issue one, since we really didn't anything for him to do until issue eight, except crawl around on the floor and cower in helpless fear of the Psycho-Pirate. Eight issues of the cringing, cowering, gibbering Flash. A fine tribute to a proud character. Issue after issue, there's panel after panel of heroes facing the reader with looks of absolute astonishment on their faces and they Just... Can't... Believe... What... They're... Seeing!! Wow... it must be impressive if it puts that stupid look on Superman's face every Rao-damned issue... And at the end, we're told it all happened, but no one remembers it. Supergirl did exist, but now, in this new world, she didn't. Her sacrifice still took place though. That's where Crisis left it. Her body was brought back to her parents in Kandor... And as it turns out, that wasn't honest either. Shortly after, a new Superman, with no knowledge of Supergirl, Kandor, or even how to tie his shoelaces shows up with a big ol' perpetual grin and we're left wondering what happened to previous one? He got an imaginary story send-off, but that was clearly set in the Pre-Crisis universe some time in the future, years after things calmed down there... What happened to the guy we've been reading about since the close of Crisis? Did Supergirl's death happen or not? Well, as Mark Waid and Alan Brennert who foolishly played by the rules as they were given at the end of Crisis will tell you, apparently not! The Crisis all still happened we were assured, but not exactly as it was shown! After all, there was no Supergirl in it! No Golden Age Superman! These characters NEVER existed, so how could they have been there? Stick around, kids, and maybe someday we'll fill you in on what REALLY went down! Really? Crisis, the series that erased fifty years of storytelling was itself almost instantly erased as well, a happening that would be the norm in the new, Post-Crisis, "We have nothing figured out" DCU...
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