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But many -- too many -- of the people who DID think that eventually became pros, at both companies.

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It's a process of attrition. When I got into the Biz, the Old Guard were still in charge. Sure, the Second Generation was there, those who had come in after the interregnum of the Fifties and early Sixties, but the ones holding the reins were still mostly trained in the Golden Age.

Over the next couple of decades, the old hands dropped away, thru death or retirement, and more and more the key positions were held by fans-turned-pro. Still trained by the former generation, but increasingly not so much.

I think the tipping point is well defined by a story Terry Austin tells, of finding himself in an argument with an assistant editor at Marvel who insisted that the lettering was not done on the boards, and never had been.

"No sense of history" is a phrase I have used many times.

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When I joined the industry full time, circa 1975, there had already been for some years grumblings about "continuity." There were two schools of thought, primarily: that "continuity" meant Superman was from Krypton, and would always be from Krypton; that "continuity" meant constant references to the tiniest minutia of a character's history.

I enjoyed the latter, but I leaned more to the former. As I watched, tho, I saw more and more people come in who bordered upon being obsessed with the second definition. Mark was one such. Another writer I saw slip under the spell to the extent that it seemed he could not even come up with a story unless he was "fixing" something.

This is the kind of thinking that led to CRISIS. Since Earth 2 could not longer be simply a fun place to visit from time to time, but must come steeped in ever more complex detail every time it was referenced, it had "obviously" become too much for "new readers" to take in. (The irony here being that the kinds of stories that created the problem were not written with "new readers" in mind. The whole thing had become a kind of circle-jerk, with a handful of hardcore fans-turned-pro writing for themselves and pretty much only themselves.)

In the movie 1776 one character says there is no subject so dangerous that it can't be talked about. In the case of comicbook "continuity" there was no subject so complex it could not simply be ignored. (Like I did on FANTASTIC FOUR, for instance. Five years on the book, and not a single reference to Reed and Ben having been in WW2.) But too many writers and editors couldn't simply ignore the problematic continuity. They had to "fix" it, or, worse, they had to bind themselves to it. And there were plenty of readers prepared to write in complaining if we didn't follow "continuity" to the letter. (A second irony -- so many of the points they wanted staunchly defended would not themselves exist had not attention to "continuity" been so lax in the Past.)

Eventually, patterns lock in, and the industry becomes as we see it today, creatively paralyzed, and able only to repeat the same tropes over and over.