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

Cafe Society
21

IIRc, one major fly in the ointment at the time was the (much loved by me) Infinity Inc. on-going. Fairly popular, and included a “Young All-Stars” prequel, but was set on Earth-2 with the children of the current Earth-1 counterparts. It would have, and did, cause confusion with new or casual readers.

I liked the series, mostly because it didn’t throw away a ton of loved characters (we would have never had Blue Beetle and Booster Gold together without it). Marvel could have taken a lesson, as they tossed out great characters like DP7, Mantra, Prime, etc.

22

First there was All-Star Squadron, about the wartime adventures of the Earth-2 JSA and its auxiliary. They spun that off into Infinity Inc, which was the modern (1980’s) adventures of the children of the JSA. Crisis hit - Infinity Inc endured a little while, but All-Star went into a tail-spin. All-Star Squadron was then replaced by Young-All-Stars, which picked up where All-Star Squadron left off, exccept because it was post-Crisis, everything was in World War II on post-Crisis Earth.

23

Roy Thomas had some weird-ass theory at the time that just because the Earths never existed that didn’t mean that the “super-energy” or whatever that created the superheroes of Earth-2 didn’t exist. So when he did YAS he intentionally modelled several of his characters after Crisis-obliterated heroes under the theory that his new characters are where their “super-energy” ended up post-Crisis. Thus we get Arn “Iron” Munroe replacing E2 Superman (drawing upon a supposed Superman source, Philip Wylie’s Gladiator, for his origin), the villainous Great Horned Owl replacing E2 Batman, etc. No idea if he still holds to his goofball theory but it would’ve gotten monkeywrenched pretty badly anyway with the return of E2 Superman anyway.

24

The way Crisis (or rather the aftermath of Crisis) was handled, it made things more complicated, not less. Earth-1 and Earth 2 made a hell of a lot more sense than having to talk about the Pre-Crisis and Post-Crisis histories of a character. Especially since some of the “Post-Crisis” history actually happened before the crisis in the continuity that was retroactively established after the crisis. (See what I mean?) Plus, it totally screwed up the Legion of Superheroes and a bunch of other things whose histories were dependent on pre-crisis characters or events that now never existed or happened. And I’m not even mentioning hypertime.

25

How short is temporarily? Two issues? Four? Sure, I’m in for that. I bought Liefield’s Teen Titans issues, and I still can’t follow them. But I’m talking about a long term run. Six months, a year, maybe more. Are you really saying that you’d continue to read a book after you’re satisfied that the writing and/or art isn’t doing anything for you?

Quality is more important than continuity. I’d rather read a dozen really good stories that don’t reference one another than a mediocre story that lasts five years but is totally self-consistant. Yes, you can have quality comics with some continuity, but if the creative teams before you made some boneheaded narrative moves, it’s often in the best interest of the story if you ignore or contradict them outright.

I think “continuity” may not be the term I want here. Of course I want issue #1 to be consistent with issue #2. It’s of much less importance that it’s consistent with issue #100, and outright impossible with issue #857. I also want the core concepts of the character to remain true. If Superman is a virtuous powerhouse with a weakness to Kryptonite, he ought never to become a amoral low-powered vigilante with a water phobia. But I can’t really care if one story contradicts another about Superboy’s college roommate fifty issues after the first is published. I also think that the continuity megastories, like CoIE or Infinite Crisis (and keep in mind, I liked Infinite Crisis), where you practically had to have a PhD is the DCU to really appreciate what was happening, are intimidating to casual readers and do more harm than good for the artform and industry.

I guess what I’m saying is that I don’t think comics need to be as self-referencial as they’ve become, and that stories should be judged on their own merits, not on how well they mesh with previous materials. Watchmen isn’t harmed by being entirely self-contained. Kingdom Come or All-Star Superman aren’t decreased by being out of canon, and old stories aren’t devalued by being contradicted by newer materials.

26

In the hopes that a good creative team is just around the corner? Can, and have.

The trouble is that in such a situation, you have to introduce an actual retcon to explain the change, or else you’re saying to the reader : “Each and every issue of this title will disregard the things that have come before that we find unappealing or inconvenient. Have fun guessing which ones we’re ignoring!”

Kingdom Come isn’t the canon, but it’s based on the canon. I couldn’t imagine it being successful amongst casual readers. It was a project that screamed to everyone who’d ever been a fan of the DCU : here’s the dark future of that universe you love or used to love.

Yes, you can have self-contained projects, and they can be wonderful. But the main reason I buy comics is to see what Batman’s up to these days. Or Superman. What’s going on in their fictional lives. To reduce them to the stars of a series of completely disconnected miniseries would effectively drive me out of the hobby. I wouldn’t have a reason to keep coming back.

27

tim314:

I have to disagree here. It wasn’t Crisis that screwed up the Legion…it was later editorial idiocy. Immediately after the Crisis, the Superman and Legion teams got together on a story that reconciled the Legion with Superman’s new history. If they’d stuck with it, things would have been just fine. Then three years later, someone in the Superman office gets this bug up his behind that the Pocket-Universe Superboy can’t be allowed to exist, so we get this crazy Valor thing, and everything starts going all to heck.

The same is true of Hawkman. At first, Tim Truman wrote his Hawkworld mini-series with the intention that it was set 10 years in the past, as an origin story for the established characters of the Silver Age Hawkman and Hawkwoman. Then some idiot editor comes up with the idea that that story had to be set in the present of the DCU, and suddenly you’re left with a muddled retcon.

These and other screw-ups had nothing to do directly with the Crisis. At most, it could be said that these editors thought the Crisis gave them license to do these things, but bottom line is that it could have and should have been prevented. POST-Crisis, someone should have said, “We have a Post-Crisis version of that. No further retcon needed or wanted.”

28

Do you have a cite for this? It seems pointless for DC to try and simplify their universe only to have all or a bunch of the characters remembering how complex it used to be, which in turn would further complicate the new universe.

29

Well, the current issue of JSA for one. Jakeem doesn’t recognize the ghost of the E-2 Batman ('cause Jakeem’s not from E2 originally) but the Thunderbolt does. Also in a recent book it did show Wildcat remembering either Superman or Batman E2. (I don’t remember which title though–maybe JSA Classified?)

My understanding of how they’re going to handle it is this: "Yeah, everyone from Earth-2/3/S/X/4/whatever remembers, but they also remember their current continuity and that’s more real to them than the fuzzy Earth 2/3/S/X memories which will be remembered in a dreamlike fashion. The only characters really affected by this on a day-to-day basis would be actual survivors of other Earths like Power Girl (“In another, now destroyed dimension she was the last surviving Daughter of Krypton. She was rescued from that dimension and fights onward for justice here”) and maybe Troia. Otherwise, yeah, the characters can remember their previous existances but generally for storytelling purposes won’t.

30

So are we going to get the parallel earths back or not?

31

Per the EIC (Dan Didio?), nope. Never. One history, one timeline, one continuity. But rather than try to patch, repatch and re-repatch the inevitable Post Crisis/Post Zero Hour/etc holes, they’re just saying “Ok, EVERYTHING happened. Earth 1/2/3/S/X/B/etc? They existed, they happened, people can remember them if needed rather than trying to apply yet another continuity patch.”

32

Thank the gods, no.

There’s enough bitching about how complicated DC is without adding multiple earths so the sort of people who say Ultimate Colossus can’t be gay because 616 Colossus dated Kitty Pryde back in the day can start bitching, too.

33

Colossus is gay? :eek:

34

Wait, now I’m confused. You said that the authors of Crisis intended for the characters to remember everything, but which Crisis are you talking about? COIE or IC?

Also, are you saying that the DC characters, post IC, now remember the multiverse?

35

Check DC’s promotional website for 52. Among other things* it has several references to the general populace encountering sudden continuity changes (which brings up the possibility of two history professors having the same argument that CG and I had above. “What’s to stop Hitler from winning WWII next year?”) and the appearance of alternate versions of family, friends, and large corporations. It’s pretty cool.

*Check out the form from the DEO you can use for turning in your neighbors as an OMAC or a gorilla.

36

Both. But DC only followed through on IC.

And Yes. The multiverse no longer exists, but everyone now knows that it used to. And those from alternate worlds dimly remember their pre-Crisis pasts.

37

You’ve got to be kidding me. Ugh.

38

Like a great man once said, “If I’m going to have a past I prefer it to be multiple choice!”

Really, I like it. We know that these characters had multiple pasts. Why shouldn’t they?

39

Actually, I read a fan theory I like: Only those who were present at the dawn of time in COIE remember the multiverse after Infinite Crisis. Thus, Wildcat, the Thunderbolt, etc do remember various other versions of themselves, but newbies like Booster Gold, Jakeem Thunder and the average everyday joe on the street don’t.

So in other words (if this is true), the whole point of InfCrisis was to “fix” the editoral last-minute screw-ups with COIE. Wolfman’s original idea at the beginning of COIE was that no-one would remember anything, but everything was also supposed to reboot with a #1 issue after Crisis. When economics prevented that and nixed the idea (Teen Titans was DC’s best selling book and if Batman #1 came out, you’d have at least a real-time year before you could even create Robin). they came to a compromise (about 2/3ds of the way through COIE, unfortunately)

The compromise was everyone at the Dawn of Time remembers everything (and apparently they just don’t talk about it), and people who weren’t at the Dawn of Time don’t remember anything(. Which is how Crisis ended (remember Batman, Jason Todd Earth-1 and Alex Luthor talking to Luthor E1 in Crisis (11?)? The heroes remember, the bad-guys don’t. Ditto with Joan and Jay Garrick in the same issue. Jay remembers that he’s from Earth 2 AND he remembers his “Post Crisis” history, Joan doesn’t realize that anything’s up and as far as she’s concerned there’s only been one Earth, Earth Post-Crisis and as far as she’s concerned, she’s always been on there. Superman Earth-2 remembers, Lois, earth Post-Crisis doesn’t.

That was the status quo at the end of Crisis. But over the next year things got messed up. Writers were promised that Crisis was a way to start fresh and how fresh can it be if everyone remembers everything? Byrne in particlar was upset: a big part of his Superman reboot would be that Superman is (and always had been) the last survivor of Krypton. It wouldn’t work if Supes remembered the Bottle City, The Phantom Zone, Argo CIty, Krypto, Beppo, Supergirl, Dev Em, Zor-El and Allura etc. So somewhere between Crisis #12 and Man Of Steel #1 about 1/2 the characters forgot the Crisis entirely.

There was an in-story explaination for this: in All-Star Squad that robot woman (Mechanique?) and (IIRC) Aphrodite (Legends of Wonder Woman, IIRC) were holding back the full effects of the Crisis and when they stopped, everything finally changed.

The big problem with this is that there was little-to-no coordination between the books: Brainiac 5 remembered Supergirl long after Man Of Steel #1 established that she never existed. The Pre-Crisis Jason Todd was in Post-Crisis Teen Titans while the Post-Crisis Jason Todd was just starting to appear in Batman (he hadn’t even gotte the costume yet). Lyta Trevor (Fury) in Infinity Inc. remembered that her mom and dad were the Earth-2 Wonder Woman and Steve Trevor, etc.

Then there was the silly editorial dictate that cmkeller mentioned which
lasted just long enough to hopelessly foul up Hawkman’s history: No more backstory. All stories have to be set in the present. (The idea was that there was too much navel gazing and figuring out how everything fit together and not enough time going forward and telling new stories. Which wasn’t a bad idea, but it messed Hawkman up beyond salvage.)

I think what’ll end up shaking down is this: as far as our heroes are concerned, there’s the “New Earth” history. Sometime about 6 (8?) years before now, there was a big Crisis. There was a multiverse that the New Earth heroes never discovered. During the big Crisis, all the worlds/multiverse got squeezed into New Earth and the memories of the other heroes got squished into the “New Earth” characters. They all know that the history of New Earth is the “real” history, but they have vague, dreamlike memories of their counterparts.

Starting with 52 #2 and going forward (for the rest of the series?), there’s going to be a (10? page) backup in 52 explaining the history of the DC universe, who remembers what and how it all fits together. I’ve heard 5th hand (so take it with a grain of salt) that unlike the (imo very pretty but failed) History of the DC Universe comic, it’s NOT going to spend a bunch of time worrying about the distant past and far future. It’ll deal primarily with what happened in New Earth in the various “Heroic ages” (JSA, JLA, Legion).

If Infinite Crisis’s aftermath is handled correctly, it’ll fix everything: you don’t have a useless Power Girl with at least 3 different non-workable origins(did anyone like the Arion origin?) and random powers-du-jour, you don’t have to spend issues trying to explain Hawkman (so…wait…was it Hawkman Earth-2 in that issue of Justice League or was it the Thanagarian spies?), Troia’s three or four histories all fit: It all happened. Just like we saw it. Now we go foward.

This is what was originally supposed to happen in COIE. Cite: Amazing Heroes #91 in an interview with Marv Wolfman* and the Crisis Compendium in the big fancy 2-book hardcover version of Crisis.

**Heh–they used to have a “Silly Cover” feature. In this special “Crisis” issue, the silly cover was "Identity Crisis"9

40

Somewhere, the DCU is thriving because Alan Moore solved the whole thing 20 years with his idea of The Fluke.

I hate it when elegance loses to committee solutions.