Was DC's "Crisis on Infinite Earths" really necessary?

In hindsight the concept of parallel earths was pretty neat and allowed for all sorts of alternative story-lines . Why was it so necessary to get rid of the parallel earths? Was it a mistake or for the best? Did the DC universe really need pruning that badly?

Nope. Except as a marketing gimmick that worked spectacularly, no-one I’ve ever met was confused by the multiple earths. (I never met writer Gerry Conway, but apparently he was…on the other hand, he brought us Justice League Detroit and wrote possibly the worst Fantastic Four run in history, so what does he know.)

Yeah, there were tons of alternate earths, but most of them never showed more than once. Earth 2 showed up all the time, but a single paragraph long explaination cleared any confusion up and if you could understand the difference between Earth-2 and Earth-1 (which wasn’t tricky), you were gold.

The others* that showed up from time-to-time were Earth-3 (everyone’s a bad guy. And it only showed up like 5 times in 25 years), Earth-S (where all the Fawcett characters were from–again, not hard to differentiate), and Earth Prime which Gerry Conway hated and kept misusing. We’re Earth-Prime. Conway couldn’t wrap his pea-brain around the idea** but kept using it. That was it. One, Two, (rarely) Three, and S. The others didn’t matter much.

What’s interesting now that I’ve reread Infinite Crisis, is put the situation back to what the authors of Crisis originally intended: all the heroes remember the multiverse even though it’s gone (note that Wildcat remembers fighting alongside the Earth 2 Superman now).

It wasn’t until the last minute that (my memory’s fuzzy on this point) either Byrne threw a tantrum (he didn’t want people to remember Superboy or that there’d been any other Supermen, or some high level editiors didn’t want it. or both. Which is why you have Helena Wayne mourning the Earth-Two Batman at the end of Crisis: they had to change the ending at the last sec and things got messed up.

All that said, an ideal situation would have been lose the “The multiverse is unstable” thing and say “Poof! Now there’s a new Earth, call it “Anchor Earth” that stablizes the multiverse and we’ll be telling stories about it going forward”. The problem would be that Teen Titans was at the time DC’s best selling book by like 2:1. If they started fresh with Superman’s first appearance, Batman wouldn’t come out for like 3 months, Wonder Woman for another few, and so on…so no Teen Titans for about 3 (real) years.

In any case, no. IMO Crisis wasn’t “necessary” (except for the marketing gimmick factor)
*Everyone remembers Earth X as being important, but really, it wasn’t. It only appeared in one two-part story, so it doesn’t count

**It’s not that he thought it was a bad idea, that’s fair. It’s that he didn’t understand how, if it was “our” world, Flash had visited Julius Schwartz once. To which the vast, VAST majority of fans said “Who cares?”

Well, to be fair to him, in the real world Flash actually never visited Julius Schwartz. (He tried, but Schwartz was out).

I don’t think I’m as negative about Crisis as you are. I agree, it probably wasn’t neccesary, but with the multiplicity of titles that had been out and multiple versions of the same character, it could be confusing to new readers and to casual readers, and I understand DC saying, “Ok, let’s dump a lot of our characters, a lot of our titles, and just start over.” (Of course, then they went ahead and reversed all that again with the hypertime thing, but…)

I wonder sometimes: it almost seems as if someone important at DC absolutely fell in love with the movie depiction of Superman (comes from a barren techoplanet, was never Superboy, etc) and was determined to mainstream this version of Superman.

The official explanation was that they didn’t want it to be necessary for readers to be familiar with forty years of backstory; to which I say hogwash, fanboys LOVE citing trivia.

Two other explanations I’ve heard put forth are that they wanted to reconcile multiple incompatable versions of the future (that lasted about 6 months); or that they wanted the new continuity to be clean of the sillier stories from the late-50s to to mid-60s (red kryptonite, Comet the Superhorse, etc.)

Heh–despite how that last post came across, I’m really not all that negative about it either. The problem (IMO) is 1) The (stated) reason for doing it was unnecessary and 2) Janette Kahn and Paul Levitz didn’t have the editorial oomph to force everyone to reboot from square one. What should have happened is every book do a 4 (or 6 or whatever) miniseries and say "It’s now 6 years after Superman appeared. If whatever we want to do going forward isn’t compatible with those 6 “bible” issues, it didn’t/couldn’t/can’t happen. This would have avoided stuff like Superman being rebooted, Batman just suddenly becoming psycho but with most of his backstory intact, Jason (Earth 1) Todd running around in Teen Titans while Jason (Earth-Post Crisis) Todd stealing tires off the batmobile in Batman, and would have avoided about 6 attempts at rebooting Hawkman.

That was certainly DC’s stated motive, but it really doesn’t hold up though IMO. Of the duplicate characters that I can think of that were appearing with any regularity at the time of the Crisis (and I’ll even include All-Star Squad even though it was set in WWII) there were:
Green Lantern: Different secret identites, different costumes, different weaknesses
Flash; Different ids and different costumes
Atom: WAAAAY different powers, IDs and costumes
Hawkman/Hawkgirl: The most problematic as the IDs and powers were the same (traditionally so were the costumes). The origin was the only thing seperating them. But they got around this by giving Hawkman E2 a different hat/cowl/helmet.

That’s it.

Superman E2, Batman E2, Robin E2 and Wonder Woman E2 rarely appeared in All Star Squad.

And if you take All Star Squad out of the mix, the JSA appeared generally once a year during the annual summer JLA/JSA crossover (which I miss) and pretty much no-where else (there was the occasional appearance, but… And in those crossovers, Batman E2 was dead and I think Superman E2, Wonder Woman E2 and Robin E2 only appeared once each.

The Earth-3 characters didn’t appear all that often and were too different anyway

And I don’t think the Earth Two Green Arrow and Aquaman ever appeared, or if they did, never for more than a panel or two.

So at worst there were like 10 duplicate E2 characters, of whom only 5 appeared regularly and of those five all (except maybe Hawkman) had easily distinguished costumes from their E1 counterparts.

And even earlier, when DC was doing a “Mr. And Mrs. Superman” back-up series about the adventures of the E2 Superman and Lois after they got married, it only took a single, three or four sentence long caption (something like “On Earth-2, a duplicate earth in another dimension, Superman first appeared in public in 1938 married Lois Lane in the 1950s. This is their story.”–and they did it better than I did)

I don’t know, as I can kinda see it. I’ve said before that I’ve never been a big comics fan (there’s something about reading most comics, graphic novels, and manga that just doesn’t work with me) but every once in a while I think about actually reading something I loved watching animated like Batman or X-Men or Spider-Man. But then you have to go deal with decades of backstories and character changes and the like, then learn what happened when they rebooted everything, and figure out what you want from like 15 versions of what would seem to be the same character(s), and so on. And even with the collections out there these days and the Internet, it seems like a daunting task.

I’m with asterion; this argument doesn’t hold water. Yes, fanboys do love citing trivia, but by catering to them DC makes it impossible to grow the market. And as they start to die or have less disposable income with the arrival of children or college tuition, the market inevitably shrinks. Also, sad to say it, most fanboy types will buy the comics they used to love a decade ago even when they hate the way they’re written now. As idiotic as this attitude is, it’s common enough that it offern no incentive for the comic companines to fete their core audiences – because their core audiences will swallow anything you thow at them. So of course you try to structure your line to be new-reader friendly.

–Cliffy

They will? I’m vaguely relieved to hear this; it means I’m not as deeply hooked as I thought I was.

But if this were the case, then wouldn’t the logical course of action be to eschew the notion of ‘continuity’ altogether, and return to the episodic format of the 1950s where only a very limited knowledge of established characters was required, and there was little development from one issue to the next? It seems like ‘comics continuity’ is almost exclusively a concern of the long-term fans, and restructuring the comics to resolve such issues is a poor overall strategy to attract new readers, since it can only be done every so often. In between isolated comic reboots, readers must still have a running knowledge of the character’s history in order to make sense of the stories. In fact I would have thought that events such as Crisis were directed mainly at ‘core audiences’ who could be counted on to reconsider readership in flagging titles. Why would a new reader care if today’s story contradicts a story published forty years ago? Or possibly I’m misunderstanding the distinction between ‘core audiences’ and ‘new readers.’

The problem, Terrifel, is that the creators and much of the editorial staff are themselves fanboys, and are almost as much in love with the heavy continuity format as the most hopeless comic book guy. They want to think they are producing something more artistically important than “Superman v Luthor Round 652”, and that often (but not always) means long story arcs and heavy incorporation of the characters histories.

Also, while a continuity-light series may be a better long-term strategy, a well-written (or hugely hyped) continuity heavy series will see better short-term sales and attention from comics press. And, of course it doesn’t necessarily follow that continuity equals sales death. Daytime soaps have been going on forever with a heavily serialized format. Ditto ER. There’s a market for these things, even if it may be slightly smaller.

I didn’t like the idea – but I liked the execution. You have to remember a few things:

1.) every time a writer included someone from somewhere other than Earth-1, they had to spend at least a page explaining the whole mess.

2.) Wolfman and Perez were the hottest thing going at the time, and they felt they had an interesting idea that could resolve that problem, create a huge crossover event and sell a lot of ancillary books, as well as clean up some of the muddy continuity waters of the DCU.

3.) They also put out a two issue “History of the DC Universe” after the Crisis.

4.)Did it have to be done? Probably not. Were there good reasons for it? From several perspectives, probably yes.

5.) Was it loved/hated and polarizing in the community? Somewhat.

If the approach to comic storytelling was completely devoid of continuity, I’d have no reason to add a series to my pull list, I’d just cherry-pick the individual issues that sounded interesting. Continuity also encourages me to buy crossover books, and appearances of characters I like in other books.

Without continuity, it becomes total guesswork. Am I going to like this writer? Are Captain X’s powers going to be different today?

Plus, you can actually build things - Superman’s relationship with Lois, for instance.

It also showed up in some All-Star Squadron stories.

**
I have to disagree with this point. It was more like a single caption in a single panel.

As a matter of fact:

Flash 129, second Earth 2 crossover: “As Flash readers know, ther is another Earth–almost an exact duplicate of our own*–where The Flash is not Barry Allen, but an older man named Jay Garrick.”

That’s it, except for a (kind cool, in a retro sort of way) technobabble explaination as Jay crosses over to Earth-1 about how the earths are on different vibratory frequencies.

Justice League of America #21: “Unknown to the Justice League, at the same moment on a duplicate earth occupying the same space as our earth, but seperated because it vibrates at a different speed [the JSA is also meeting]”

Again, except for another single techobabble panel about how matter that vibrates at different frequencies can occupy the same space, that’s the whole explaination.

One sentence, one panel.

By the time JLoA #29 rolls around, they just assume you understand about Earth-1 and 2 and spend a page or so explaining Earth-3…but since they were making that one up from scratch, they needed to detail it. But they didn’t have to explain about vibratory frequencies. There’s one half-hearted comment about “…on Earth-3, another in the list of possible alternate worlds”, but that’s about it.

It was like that for decades. And no-one complained about being confused (all I can do to support this is say that every summer when I was working at a comic store, the annual two-part JLA/JSA crossover outsold any other issue of JLA by about 1/3d more). Especially since, excluding Gerry Conway written stories, the concept was pretty easy to grasp, since there were really only two (or three, if you count Earth-S) Earths that appeared more than 3 times.

I grant you that Gerry Conway, who never quite grasped the concept would spend pages trying to explain it, but for roughly 20 years, and about 50-60 crossovers, one panel, one or two sentences was all it took. It’s not that complicated.
*The original idea was that Barry Allen was on “our” world. This was dropped by the third or fourth crossover.

Earth-X was also mentioned (by necessity) in the short-lived Freedom Fighters series.

Only in passing: IIRC The Freedom Fighters series was set on Earth-1.

It certainly was. I think the point is that the Freedom Fighters series required repeated references to their old home on Earth-X, even if that world was never actually seen within the series.

That’s exactly what I do, except it’s more about the creative team. I checked out Checkmate because it was by Greg Rucka, a writer I enjoy, not becuase it tied in with Infinite Crisis.

How is this any different with shared heavy continuity? Writer B can be totally faithful to the history built by previous writer A, and still suck donkey balls. You don’t know until you read it.

Or you could unless based on their past performance. Which is how I choose most of my books. For example, Ion is a character I’ve liked in the past, I like the concept, and it tied in with a series I read. But I don’t like Ron Marz. So I didn’t buy it.

That’s not a continuity issue, per se. Superman remained pretty constant in the fast-and-loose Silver Age, and turned electric in the continuity-concious modern era. If you missed the issues where they explained the switch, you’d be just as confused if they never explained it at all.

That’s a pretty poor example. It took them sixty years to get hitched, and that will remain the status quo (with occasional shakeups never lasting for more than six months real time), unless they reboot the continuity entirely, in which case we’re back to square one.

Hell, over Marvel way most of the Spider-Man crew thinks that marrying Pete and MJ was a mistake, but they can’t think of a way out of it now.

It’s precisely what I don’t want to do. I never suggested it was impossible to do, merely that it was one argument against being continuity free.

Because even if the quality temporarily dips, it’s still a chapter in the life of a continuous character.

It is a continuity issue, of the most basic kind. Without continuity, who’s to say anything is the same between Captain X #1 and Captain X #2, other than the name of the title character?

Nonsense. It’s a perfect example. As you say, it took them sixty years to get hitched. They worked with the tension between the two, there was the revelation of the secret identity, the marriage… these stories lose a lot of their power without what has come before.

I agree with them. But this has nothing to do with my point.

Crisis basically drove me away from being a regular comic book reader. I thought it was completely unnecessary. It also, temporarily it now seems, eliminated a good many characters and storylines from my childhood that I liked. It has never seemed important to me that comic books have realistic timelines or that character histories must be flawlessly self-consistent. The comic heroes are sort of our modern folk heroes; so there is no reason that there cannot be many legends about them.

My memory may be off (probably is, 'cause I haven’t read those issues since they were new on the stand) but I thought they were brought over from Earth-X in the first issue (and somehow falsely accused of murder?!) and then Earth-X was never mentioned again. I remember being disappointed at the time 'cause I wanted more of the parallel earth stuff.