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Robbie Parry
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Joined: 17 June 2007
Location: United Kingdom
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| Posted: 31 August 2017 at 8:25am | IP Logged | 1
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So those anal fanboys started asking where the "break" occurred.
***
What a way to spend one's life. What a way to exist. I would love a psychologist to tell me how there can possibly be people like that.
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Brian O'Neill
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| Posted: 31 August 2017 at 10:04am | IP Logged | 2
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One of the JLA-JSA stories in the mid-70s explicitly said that Earth-2 was 'twenty years behind' Earth-1, and used a caption to that effect to explain why someone had saved a passenger jet on Earth-1, but the equivalent plane on Earth-2 had propellers!
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Eric Jansen
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 27 October 2013
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| Posted: 31 August 2017 at 11:16am | IP Logged | 3
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See, I like that idea. And it could have continued (and been adjusted as needed--like Cap getting frozen for 20, then 50, years). Instead of wiping away Earth 2 (note: the merging in no way solved the Golden Age characters' aging!), I would have liked it to continue on a "sliding scale"--Earth 2 could still exist, but it should be no farther along than the 1980's. Most of the original characters would be in the 60's (we liked a mature Jay Garrick!) and their children, like the Huntress or Jade and Obsidian, could be in their 20's.
It's only slightly confusing, a confusion that could be cleared up in one concise caption on the splash page. Certainly NOT more confusing than making Power Girl a descendant of Arion and Huntress suddenly a mafia princess (and then both fugitives from a different Earth 2--and now what are they?!?)--or what happened with Donna Troy, Supergirl, and the Legion. Those were swaths of confusion that could NOT be cleared up in a single caption.
And, again, if you didn't want to read about the Batman's daughter, you could just not buy that series. The way they did it instead forced everyone into the same boat--only to soon realize that that boat was sinking.
Edited by Eric Jansen on 31 August 2017 at 11:18am
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Adam Schulman
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 22 July 2017
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| Posted: 31 August 2017 at 1:01pm | IP Logged | 4
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A big problem for DC in setting up CRISIS, of course, was that some Golden Age characters had unbroken runs since their first appearances in the Thirties and Forties. Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, and even Green Arrow and Aquaman, had not "gone away" like the Golden Age versions of the Flash, Green Lantern, the Atom, Hawkman, etc. So those anal fanboys started asking where the "break" occurred. Which adventures belonged to the Golden Age Superman, and which to the Silver Age. My response, all along, was to assume (and later to say) they'd both had the same adventures, just at different times. Ditto for the rest.
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For Superman I thought of it this way (well, I admit I came up with it later):
Everything before the Mort Weisinger years: Earth 2
Everything since: Earth 1
Exception: Superboy is Earth 1, not Earth 2
Still pretty simple. Explains the discrepancies (when did Superman discover he was Kryptonian? When did he first discover Kryptonite? Did Luthor grow up in Smallville or not?) easily.
Other characters (Wonder Woman, Green Arrow, Aquaman) had more than one version of their origin stories anyway, so it's very clear where the "break" occurred there.
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Brian O'Neill
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| Posted: 31 August 2017 at 1:27pm | IP Logged | 5
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Bob Rozakis once claimed that the story in which the Arctic Fortress of Solitude first appeared, in the late '50s, was as good a place as any to put at least an approximate date on the 'switch'(since Superman had previously been shown to have a 'hideaway', as opposed to a 'fortress', which was carved from a non-Arctic mountainside, and presumably located on the outskirts of Metropolis, earlier in that decade).
Edited by Brian O'Neill on 31 August 2017 at 1:29pm
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John Byrne
Grumpy Old Guy
Joined: 11 May 2005
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| Posted: 31 August 2017 at 1:29pm | IP Logged | 6
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Bob Rozakis.......... I shall bite my tongue.
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Robbie Parry
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 17 June 2007
Location: United Kingdom
Posts: 12186
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| Posted: 31 August 2017 at 2:36pm | IP Logged | 7
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This is NOT an attack on anyone here (merely making conversation) but there have been posts asking about certain aspects of certain earths; there have been posts where folk have tried to fit "square pegs in round holes"; and there have been posts where folk have asked "Should we do this?" or "Is this a solution?".
No offense to anyone, but isn't that PART of the problem? Isn't the fact that we're all trying to "square that circle" 30+ years later a clue that maybe that's part of the problem, too?
I'm not singling out individuals. Or trying to restrict anyone's free speech (it's a forum after all), but it does feel like fandom, for 30+ years, has become bogged down in semantics rather than just enjoying things on their own merits.
Personally, and I'm not saying the topic is wrong to exist, I'd much rather DC focused on great new stories (and creating new villains) than dicking around with a storyline, and its ramifications, years later. I have friends who weren't even born when CRISIS came out (one online friend was born in 1987!).
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Andrew W. Farago
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Joined: 19 July 2005
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| Posted: 31 August 2017 at 3:25pm | IP Logged | 8
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Where is DC in 1987 without Crisis, though? Maybe Frank Miller doesn't do Dark Knight and doesn't get tapped for Batman: Year One with David Mazzuchelli, who maybe never draws a DC book. Maybe George Perez goes back to Teen Titans again, maybe he drifts back over to Marvel. Maybe Justice League Detroit hangs on another year. Maybe JB sticks with Fantastic Four another year or five. Jason Todd doesn't get reinvented as a total jerk and has a long, uneventful run as a Dick Grayson knockoff.
The big upside to all of that is maybe we don't get The Killing Joke, but DC got a much-needed revitalization with Crisis.
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Warren Scott
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 09 July 2016
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| Posted: 31 August 2017 at 8:15pm | IP Logged | 9
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Robbie has a point about us falling into the same trap of trying to sort DC's history into Earth 1 and Earth 2 timelines. I actually remember comic price guides that listed issues as being the first appearance of this or that Silver Age hero or villain. For some fans, it can be a fun thing to do, but you also have to be able to step back and look at it realistically. After more than 50 years of stories, not everything is going to fit together.
Andrew, DC didn't really need Crisis to revitalize Batman, Wonder Woman and company. They could have just signed those creators on, let them tweak their origins and apply their styles. Crisis served as a way to get the media's attention but it left more questions than it answered. Another way would be just to announce,"Starting this year we're giving our comics a new look." It worked for Superman and Batman in the early 70s.
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Adam Schulman
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| Posted: 31 August 2017 at 10:43pm | IP Logged | 10
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Warren -- I don't completely disagree with you. But the "new look" had already started before CRISIS. I remember "The New DC -- There's No Stopping Us Now."
(Maybe someone should've stopped them?)
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Andrew W. Farago
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| Posted: 01 September 2017 at 12:16am | IP Logged | 11
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DC didn't really need Crisis to revitalize Batman, Wonder Woman and company. They could have just signed those creators on, let them tweak their origins and apply their styles. Crisis served as a way to get the media's attention but it left more questions than it answered. Another way would be just to announce,"Starting this year we're giving our comics a new look." It worked for Superman and Batman in the early 70s.
Sure, but the "new" Superman became the old Superman again pretty quickly, minus the change that Clark Kent was now a TV anchorman. If DC at the time had been willing to do whatever it took to get Miller, Byrne, and Perez on for the Big Three characters, all at the same time, that would have been an attention-grabber, but Crisis made those into a can't-miss proposition for readers at the time.
It's all hypothetical, though. Crisis was really successful in getting the Marvel kids to check out DC books again (or for the first time), and I can't see luring one big name to the company every couple of years having the same impact as getting everyone all at once.
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Adam Schulman
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| Posted: 01 September 2017 at 12:27am | IP Logged | 12
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To their credit, at least where the character's personality is concerned, the current Superman is very much the John Byrne Superman. He's not a "stranger in a strange land." In one comic he even told Lois "you know I think of myself as human."
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