Many of the lasting effects have been undone-There’s a Kandor, Kara Zor-El is back, Luthor is a renegade criminal mastermind, Supe’s powers aren’t psychic, Krypto is back, etc. One of the big changes to Superman that’s still around is that Ma and Pa Kent are still alive. On one hand, I like it–it’s a neat contrast to Batman and I like the characters. On the other hand…it removes one of the truly great tragic elements from Superman’s history: all this power and he couldn’t save his own parents. I’m torn on that one.
Outside of the Super-Books, however other changes are still in effect: Barry (Flash) Allen is still dead, Wonder Woman didn’t show up until late in the game (she wasn’t one of the first wave super-heroes), Hawkman’s continuity still makes no sense (although everyone’s pretty much agreed not to talk about it 
), etc.
The biggest (and to me) worst irreparable damage from the Crisis was that previously, Superman was the first super-hero on Earths 1 and 2 (and first bad-guy on Earth 3) and sorta on Earth Prime (Ultraa). Now that all the worlds have been mooshed together, there’s a pretty continuious string of heroes starting with The Sandman (now the very first) and Superman is just first of a new wave of heroes. To me, this loses something.
I always liked the multiple Earths concept. It wasn’t that hard to keep 'em straight (outside of Earths 1 and 2, frankly, the remainder had nothing in common) and I thought the whole idea of 'em was just neat. *
I like the original idea of Crisis: Moosh all the worlds together, but let everyone remember that there had been multiple worlds. I liked the second idea in Crisis (when it was going to end in issue 10): start everything from scratch–all books get a new number one issue. (That was nixed when someone pointed out that the two best-selling books: Titans and Legion, required some history. If Robin doesn’t show up until Batman: year two or three, how can the titans form? It would have also pared DC’s line down to about four books. It would have been financially impossible). Even the third idea (which never happened) was a good one: Every book starts six(?) years from Superman’s debut, but there’ll be a 6 issue mini dealing with what happened in those missing six years. Superman had “Man of Steel” but the other books never really happened.
The problem, to me, with Crisis, is that the editors didn’t all come to an agreement beforehand about what Crisis acutally meant (and the bigwigs kept changing things) so no two people agreed on what was going on. The Earth-One Jason Todd kept showing up in Titans for about a year after the Earth-Post Crisis Jason Todd (the street punk) debuted in Batman , for example. Hawkman (from Thanagar) showed up and played a crucial part in JLA and Superman even though Hawkman’s first post-Crisis appearance would happen sometime after Invasion. Denny O’Neill kept saying that Batman had never been a member of the JLA, but Keith Giffen and J.M. DeMatthis kept putting him in the book and so on. Byrne decided that there wasn’t only no Superboy, but there shouldn’t be a “Pocket Universe” Superboy, essentially killing Legion and forcing a reboot (Kevin Dooley from Green Lantern certainly helped kill the book too)
Overall, I’m not real fond of the changes made by the Crisis. It seems that too much time is spent trying to fix things that were broken (accidentally or intentionally) by Crisis. For several years, instead of telling stories and going forward, too many books were trying to repair cracks in continuity made by Crisis. That’s mostly done and things are moving forward again, but look at the lost time.
Strange, but the thing I miss the most is that for something like 10-12 years, every summer I looked forward to the annual JLA/JSA summer crossover. That’s one thing that the Crisis permanately killed and the one thing I miss the most.
Fenris
*Of the worlds that appeared with any frequency, there were Earths One and Two (which, I’ll grant were tricky for the newbie to tell apart). Earth S appeared a few dozen times, at the outside, but since it was the Fawcett characters, it wasn’t really a problem. Earth X only appeared like two or three times (and since the Nazis won, it was easy again to tell apart). Earth 3 appeared three(?) times, but again, none of the characters were the same (the heroes were villians and vice versa) so no confusion there and Earth Prime only appeared like 4 times as well (but that was our world, so again no confusion)**.
**Unless you’re Gerry Conway and have a temper tantrum about the idea that Julius Schwartz didn’t really have a cosmic treadmill in his office so we’re on “Earth-Real” and “Earth-Prime” just looks like “Earth-Real” :rolleyes: But then, Conway was the one who said he never understood the multiple earths concept anyway, so…
