Tom DeFalco said that about Image Comics in 1984?
I pretty much agree with this.
Wow you had an interview with a guy who worked in comics two who years before ANY of the things I put in my post started to take place, and EVERYTHING he and you said turned out no to be true and absolutely wrong. Bra-fucking-vo to you sir…
The guys who started Image were in no sense of the word “kids” they were all 21 years old or older.
But please do go ahead and post some more truths about the comic book industry so I can point and chortle at said post by you.
He said he didn’t expect comics to be around much longer. I didn’t attribute the other opinions to him.
Some of them were in their late thirties, like Valentino and Portacio. Liefeld made that embarrassing Nike commercial and drew like a teenager on the margins of his history homework, so “kid” is a pretty fair assessment. The other guys fell somewhere in between.
You apparently think I’m pulling the Image Comics stuff out of my ass, so I refer you to Sean Howe’s Marvel Comics: The Untold Story. He details the circumstances of the rise of Liefeld, McFarlane and Nicieza, the abrupt departure of the former two (Nicieza wasn’t part of the Image crowd), and the marketing games that left a lot of people holding lots of polybagged comics with gimmick covers, un-resellable at any price.“Destroying fans’ goodwill” was an understatement.
[Moderating]
Dial it back, Textual Assault. This isn’t the Pit.
I’m willing to recognize the limitations of describing DC and Marvel as the comics industry “as a whole”, as I did earlier. During the period in question (1985-1995), though, their joint market share in North America ranged from 60-90%. Image and Dark Horse jointly peaked at about 20%.
Horatio, then how come the practice of multiple covers still exists nearly 30 years later? How is that not ripping off the fanboys? How is resetting your comic universe every 2-3 years to put out all new #1 issues not ripping off the fanboys? yet they keep on buying.
The difference is, 1990 showed some of the first calculated attempts to get 200 thousand fans to buy a million copies of one comic book, repeatedly (X-Force #1, X-Men #1, Spider-Man #1). By the time the “Heroes Reborn” titles were launched, very few fans wanted to play that game any more and a lot of comic shop owners were stuck with polybagged Liefeld Captain America #1s that nobody wanted to buy and retailers couldn’t return. Today, my understanding is that the top-selling books have a readership of less than 100 thousand, that the popularity of the movies does not result in a bump in sales, and that Marvel and DC are hemorrhaging paying readers.
Books today get renumbered every time a big name writer takes them over. And the threshold for what makes a “big name” has changed. Ta-Nehisi Coates is a big deal in the book publishing world, but I don’t think his Black Panther title sold all that spectacularly. But neither did anybody else’s. They renumbered Captain America for him too, right on the heels of a very well-received run by (I think) Waid and Samnee. Important writers get a contract that guarantees them the same perks as other important writers, and that probably includes renumbering the book for them; essentially, many titles are limited series now, written by one specific writer for the duration of the run.
I don’t know what they’re doing with variant covers; all my comics these days are digital.
Oh, My God. This story. It’s from the one of the last of the annual JLA-JSA crossovers before the book became JLA Detroit. Apparently, someone decided that for a woman fighting crime in the 1940s, Black Canary is too old to be shacking up with Green Arrow. The writer also decided to try to explain how Black Canary somehow got a sonic canary cry after emigrating from Earth-2 to Earth-1.
The solution was that the modern Black Canary was actually the daughter of the the Golden Age Black Canary, but with her mother’s memories overwriting hers. Oh, and she was cursed by the old JSA foe the Wizard as a baby have an uncontrollable hypersonic cry.
This glorious mess of a story also featured the evil Johnny Thunder of Earth-1 as the primary villain, and established that not only Black Canary, but a whole bunch of Golden Age heroes migrated to Earth-1. The writer pulled Sargon the Sorcerer out of mothballs to illustrate the point. (There should probably be a customs & immigration checkpoint in. Inter dimensional space).
Not too long after this story, Earth-2 guru/scribe Roy Thomas wrote “Crisis on Earth X” in All-Star Squadron. Roy established that The Freedom Fighters (ie. Quality Comics superheroes not named Plastic Man or the Blackhawks) were originally from Earth-2. When baddie Baron Blitzkrieg discovered he could make dimensional vortexes to travel back and forth between Earth-2 and Earth-X (a dimension where the Axis won the war because there were no superheroes and the Japanese never attacked Pearl Harbor), the Specter told the heroes that any dimensional imbalance caused by people migrating from one Earth to another would cause both worlds to phase into each other and be destroyed, so when a couple of Nazis from Earth-X died on Earth-2, Uncle Sam and the Freedom Fighters opted to stay on Earth-X.
In my junior high school comics-nerd circle, I was acknowledged as the DC-minutiae guy, and I had a hard time explaining some of this to more casual readers. I always hear people on forums say things like,“How can anyone be confused by this? The old Golden Age heroes are on Earth-2 and the new Silver Age heroes are on Earth-1! It’s easy-peasy lemon squeezy!”
I vaguely recall that story from All-Star Squadron. More vivid in my memory is the new costume they gave Black Canary after recasting her as her own daughter.
See 1985 version — Black Canary Costume Chronology by Femmes-Fatales on DeviantArt
Seriously, costume redesigns in the 1980s and 1990s were so atrocious.
There were a lot of ambiguities in the DCU, especially when looking at lesser-known and less-used characters. Superman was supposed to be the first super-hero on Earth-1, an inspiration to those who followed, but that created some problems. For example, you have cases like Zatanna, the Sliver Age magician hero and JLA member. She was obviously from Earth-1, but she was the daughter of the Golden Age magician hero Zatara. Or Air Wave, who was established as being Green Lantern’s younger cousin (just because they both had the last name Jordan). But Air Wave was the son of the Golden Age Air Wave.
Sometimes the PTB said that Golden Age heroes had “migrated”. from Earth2 to Earth-1. Other times, they said there were Earth-1 counterparts of Earth-2 characters. DC dug the Seven Soldiers of Victory out of mothballs in one of the big JLA/JSA annual crossovers, saying they had been lost in the timestream in the 40s, and established them on Earth-2, having the Star-Spangled Kid get promoted to the JSA. But you had Vigilante running around playing modern-day cowboy on Earth-1 before that story was published. Heck, Wildcat was a card-carrying member of the JSA, but somehow shown to be on Earth-1 in a Brave & The Bold teamup with Batman.
And then you had to remember that there were differences between the Earth-2 and Earth-1 versions. The Manhunter that rebelled against the evil Council and had to fight a small army of clones of himself was the Earth-1 Paul Kirk. The Specter in that run of stories where he would magically transform crooks into, say, wax figures, and then melt them to death was obviously the Earth-1 Specter, because the JSA would kind of frown on their buddy the Earth-2 Specter doing stuff like that.
Also, you have to remember that back in the day, DC was less a big unified company than a bunch of semi-independent writer/editor-run fiefdoms with different standards. On one end, you had Roy Thomas, who cared about continuity issues and the multiverse more than all but the most devoted fanboys. On the other end, you had guys like Bob Haney, who put JSAer Wildcat on Earth-1 and threw Wonder Girl into the Teen Titans without realizing that she was Wonder Woman as a teenager and NOT Wonder Woman’s teen sidekick.
Getting back to the OP’s question: I will posit that Crisis On Infinite Earths was necessary for DC.
However, despite the examples I gave above, I don’t think the confusing multiverse minutiae and continuity are the reason why they had to do this.
I posit that the biggest problem with the multiverse is how it limits character exposure, character usage, and character cross-pollination.
The comic book industry has been based on booms and busts, and expansions and contractions, since the end of the Golden Age. During expansionary periods, publishers are more likely to give marginal or limited-appeal titles a shot, and titles set on alternate Earths would qualify here. Thus, you had the DC Explosion in the mid-70s, which gave us Shazam on Earth-S, Freedom Fighters on Earth-X, and the JSA-revival on Earth-2 with All-Star Comics. However, when the industry hit a downturn and the Explosion turned into the Implosion, all those titles were canceled and all those characters went back into storage.
Sure, Roy Thomas had his Earth-2 fiefdom for a few years in the 80s with All-Star Squadron and Infinity Inc, but for a good chunk of the multiverse’s existence at DC, the only indication you had it existed was the annual JLA-JSA team-ups. By having dozens, if not hundreds characters sealed off from the main part of their line, the only way DC could use these characters was in a sink-or-swim way to see if they could carry their own titles (which couldn’t get sales boosts by having DC’s big guns gust-star), or go through some sort of cumbersome storytelling device involving inter-dimensional travel.
DC couldn’t really get non-Earth-1 characters exposure by traditional methods such as guest-spots, team-ups, cameos, crossovers, or superteam recruitment. That’s all of the Earth-2 characters, the Quality characters, the Fawcett characters, and the Charlton characters (Yes, I know the Charlton characters first appeared in the DCU post-crisis and never on a separate Earth, but they were originally slated to appear as the leads in Watchmen, which was on a separate Earth. Only when DC brass realized that Moore’s dark tone for the story would damage the characters for further use did they tell him to switch to ersatz Charlton characters.
Crisis makes sense from this viewpoint. Post Crisis DC was able to integrate a lot of there characters into the DCU proper (Captain Marvel and Blue Beetle in the DCU, solo titles for Captain Atom, Question, The Ray, and many others, and so on).
Excellent analysis from bmoak, and I agree completely. One possible (and exceedingly nerdy on my part) nitpick, though – weren’t the Freedom Fighters on Earth-1 in their own DC Explosion comic book? I think their having migrated over somehow may have been the premise of the title.
I never read the 70’s Freedom Fighters book. Roy Thomas said they were from Earth-2 in All-Star Squadron and who am I to quarrel with Roy?
Gosh, I made lot of errors in my long posts. I meant to say that Blue Beetle and Captain Marvel were bright in the Justice League, along with Captain Atom. Nightshade was recruited into the Suicide Squad. I’m pretty sure that each of the Charlton characters either got a solo title, a mini-series, or a team spot post-Crisis.
As a minor note, although the first appearance of the Barry Allen version of the Flash is considered an “Earth-1” / Silver-Age benchmark, it has a number of precursors (from wiki):
[ul]
[li]More Fun Comics #101 (1944): the first appearance of Superboy. According to canon, the Superman of Earth-Two did not fight crime until reaching Metropolis as an adult, therefore this is the first appearance of Earth-One in comics.[/li][li]Superman #47 (1947): an adventure of Superman that mentions his time as Superboy, which means that it is unofficially the first story written about the Earth-One Superman.[/li][li]Superman #76 (1952): the first appearance of the Earth-One Batman, teaming up with what must be Earth-One Superman. The two crime fighters meet for the first time in this story. Their Earth-Two counterparts knew each other from their time in the Justice Society of America in the 1940s.[/li]li: Superman and Batman books unofficially make the switch from the Earth-Two characters to the Earth-One characters, though it wasn’t apparent at the time.[/li][li]Superman’s Pal Jimmy Olsen #1 (1954): debut issue of spinoff title for supporting character from the Superman series.[/li][li]Detective Comics #225 (1955): the first appearance of J’onn J’onzz, the Martian Manhunter.[/li][li]Showcase #4 (1956): popularly the first Earth-One comic (though not mentioned in text as such), featuring the introduction of Barry Allen as The Flash.[/ul][/li]
Of course, continuity and a shared fictional universe for the characters was apparantly of no concern early on, even for characters that were ostensibly the same character, specifically Superman and Superboy. Superman #53 (July–August 1948, billed inaccurately as a “10th Anniversary Issue!”) is an early version of a complete original story for Superman and it has him starting his costumed career as an adult, even though Superboy stories had by that point been running for four years. I don’t even think the writers of Superboy stories made an effort to set them in the past (as they would have to be, if the adult version of the same character was active in the present) until the 1980s or so. Superman and Superboy may as well be (and for legal reasons are considered to be) entirely distinct characters.
A costumed juvenile version of Wonder Woman (a proto Wonder-Girl, years before the introduction of Donna Troy) similarly muddies the waters, though to a much lesser extent, as does a Batman story that has him fighting crime as a teenager, wearing an early version of the Robin costume.
Comics is fun.
I’m pretty sure that the Superboy comics had him meet almost everyone significant in his adult life as Superman while still a teenager in Smallville.
Sure, eventually. He even met pre-Batman Bruce Wayne at least twice despite the cruise-ship story that for a long time was their official first encounter as adults.
Amusing note, I found this cite for When BATMAN Met SUPERMAN: Their 10 BEST First Meetings, suggesting both characters suffer from short-term memory loss or face blindness.