I agree with Eric's point about the popularity of Earth-2. Those summer crossovers were greatly anticipated by my younger self and I eagerly pored over every square inch of the art looking for favorite characters and items of interest.

The great thing about having the older generation in a separate location was that visits were fewer, making it an event whenever one occured. Also, the younger heroes could still be credited with original thinking in coming up with their superheroic identities rather than what came to be the norm, the idea that nearly everyone was a "legacy character," carrying on a proud tradition and training the next generation to take over for them... You know, like Nite Owl was in Watchmen....

This took de-uniquing to an entirely new level. We weren't reading about the Flash, Hawkman, Dr. Fate, or Blue Beetle any more. We were reading about one of many, all of whom hung out together and routinely consulted one another on cases. You might be a Barry fan, you might be a Wally fan, but neither of those characters was simply the Flash. He was a link in a chain, a very visible chain of which we were constantly reminded. It made for a certain level of drama, but suddenly every title was the Marvel Family.

Seeing the older and younger versions interact was like a favorite song in my youth. Something to look forward to and enjoy. Post-Crisis, the song just kept playing in constant rotation, again and again... And the continuity patches and repair work were truly numbing... "Oh, right, we did say Hawkman was there at the early part of the JLA's history... Umm... That was the Golden Age Hawkman, y'see... still running around years after the war, leading the heroes like that Captain Metropolis guy from Watchmen did... So, um, that's why there's a Hawkman there... We good? What's that? Why does the new one look so much like the old one? Uh... Yeah, well, y'see, his, um, grandfather travelled to Earth...? And kind of met the Golden Age one, um, back a long time ago, and, uh, copied him... As an idea for an entire police force... Yeah. That's was it. The Hawkman from Action Comics with the Thanagarian Spaceship...? Uh, hey, look at the time... Sorry. No more questions just now... We'll get back to you on this stuff, okay...?"

Oy. All the painful, idiotic tap-dancing that took place back then... All in the name of establishing a new continuity that Crisis itself made impossible.

More and more, I appreciate the simple, direct beauty of the splash page to The Daring New Adventures of Supergirl #1. It told us Supergirl was 19 and had just moved to Chicago. And we were off, telling stories forward rather than contorting ourselves into knots to fill in everything behind us as we stumbled into every rabbit hole and cow pie in our path.

"B-But she can't be 19..." folks would complain. "She graduated high school and then college. She worked at a TV station as a reporter and then as a soap opera actress... She was a counselor at the New Athens school in Florida. She's had lots of jobs... She can't just be young again..."

"Y'know what? She's 19 and lives in Chicago. You want to smash your head against a wall wondering whatever happened to evil camera operator Nasthalia Luthor and alien roommate Wanda Five, be our guest. You want to write a treatise on how she could possibly have teamed up with Prez? Go for it. We're writing a comic, and in this comic, she's 19 and lives in Chicago."

Dave, I disagree that the "legacy" element of the Post-Crisis DC Universe was as limited as you would have it. Alan Scott pre-dated Hal Jordan as Green Lantern as was still around on the same earth. Issue #19 as I recall put forth the "fix" that Scott's Green Flame was the undying spirit of a GL Corps member from centuries past who looked like a Chinese dragon and died here on Earth, thus "explaining" how Scott could come first and yet still not pre-date the Corps.

The Helmet of Nabu became a hot potato being thrown from one creative team to the next, each new iteration fading from view faster than the last, each one "new" yet tied to same ongoing storyline involving the Mouths of Order and the Lips of Chaos.

Complicated backwards handsprings were turned to put Wonder Woman back into the JSA during WW II so that Diana herself was both the start of the Wonder Woman dynasty in the 80's and at the same time, the second heroine chronologically to bear the name after her time-travelling mother. A de-uniquing legacy in the making...

Rather late in the game, yet still before the Nu52, we had a new Aquaman taking up the mantle from the now-tentacle-faced Arthur, carrying on the... (yawn)... legacy of our Atlantean hero...

Roy Thomas had already done much with the concept of young heroes stepping into the shoes of their elders, but Crisis gave him the impetus to bring in a number of new, second-generation JSA members such as the new Wildcat, Doctor Midnight, and Hourman. James Robinson's Starman book was all about the problem of being a legacy hero not only to Dad but to an older brother as well. Alan Moore's Parlaiment of Trees, introduced around the same time Crisis was happening, fit in nicely with the overall prevailing theme. Black Orchid was killed and a new Black Orchid sprouted up in her place, tied to her "mother's" newly discovered origins.

Everyone was becoming simply a link in a chain. No one came first. Everyone came second. "Legacies" became the watchword for DC and the very idea that a hero could stand alone without an established predecessor and/or an imminent successor seemed alien to folks in editorial. What had once been a theme specific to the JSA's titles became the theme of the DCU itself once the elderly JSA moved in with their kids and took over the place.

Granted, Pre-Crisis DC did much with the idea of earlier versions of the heroes as well, but with their done-in-one, move-on philosophy, such predecessors were usually historical curiosities and didn't become the albatrosses around the necks of our heroes that so many of the Post-Crisis, One-Earth JSA became.

The Nu52 "Earth 2" book read pretty much like an Elseworlds title to me from day one, but I could see what they were going for originally. The book lost me pretty early, however, with the introduction of Diana's daughter, Fury. I wasn't all that sanguine with the overall Fourth Worldliness of the book to begin with and the tone just got uglier as it went on. It was the "Super Powers" mini-series done by today's more bloodthirsty creators rather than any sort of look at the JSA.

A book about veterans, decades home from the conflict, is very different than a book about civilians caught up in a long war. Nothing about the characters seemed reminiscent of the originals. They could have been anybody, and might have done better had they done so. Coming up with new heroes for the audience to enjoy rather than reshaping Jay Garrick, Alan Scott, and company into modern teen and twenty-somethings might have given the book more traction and less of a wonky, conceptually blinkered start.

Still, all in all, I was glad to have the similarly-named doppelgangers back on their own world, doing their own thing again.