Okay, I've been threatening to do this for a while now, so here goes: I'm taking on Crisis on Infinite Earths as part of my duties here on the Howling Curmudgeons. Expect it to be a long, long series of posts: if I took 9000 words to talk about Superman, it'll probably take me at least that long to talk about Crisis in anything even remotely like depth. May God or Brahma or Ormazhd or Rao take pity on us all.
Did CRISIS work as a story? Yep! Did it neaten up our universe? You bet! Did it give DC Comics a launch pad to the future? Of course! Did we take advantage of all the opportunities presented by the dramatic conclusion of the landmark series called CRISIS ON INFINITE EARTHS...? Well... yes and no. A full answer would take too much space here, and I don't want to spoil our celebration.
Dick Giordano, September 10, 1998 afterword to the trade paperback collection of Crisis
This is where I lay my prejudices out on the line and explain where I'm coming from with this review/dissection/commemoration of Crisis (I'm not using Dick's all-capitals spelling, sorry) and how it affected me and the comics industry. First up, I'll admit it now: Crisis on Infinite Earths is probably my favorite comic book story ever, and if not, it's certainly in the top ten. It's huge... it has the superheroes of five worlds uniting to combat an evil that's destroying whole universes, the Guardians of the Universe and the weaponeers of Qward, the distant past and the far-flung future, Atlantis and Apokolips. It's the first comic book I remember reading where the true sense of scale of the universe, both historical (heroes from the Golden Age standing shoulder to shoulder with the ones I was familiar with, although I was pretty familiar with the Golden Age or Earth-2 characters as well) and in terms of the breadth and depth of the superheroes involved. I mean, there were two Supermen and a Superboy in this story! I'm incredibly biased here... I love reading Crisis to this day, and that's going to show up in my discussion.
However, I part company with Dick when it comes to considering the effect Crisis had on the comics that followed. Part of this isn't Crisis' fault... clearly, Wolfman had no such intent when he wrote the series, but many writers used Crisis as a convenient 'reboot' excuse, and while in the case of George Perez's Wonder Woman that made a kind of sense (the Anti-Monitor did kill her with some sort of time regression beam at the end of the series, so a revised origin in the new universe could be justified) it wasn't as necessary in other cases. What wasn't a good idea in the hands of John Byrne (the revamp/retooling of Superman that abandoned the charming silver age complexities Weisinger had created for the character) became an absolute hash when it was applied to characters like Hawkman, and led to the character's incoherence and eventual disintegration, only recently returning in a throwback to the original golden age character. This obsession with revision led to a lot of babies being thrown out with the bathwater: worse than that, however, was the sudden explosion of company-wide crossover events that led to such nadirs as Millennium from DC and Secret Wars II from Marvel. (I personally don't think the original Secret Wars series was that bad... certainly it was a thousand times more coherent and readable than its successor.) These crossovers were, by in large, an exercise in trying to force you to read every single comic book put out while the event was going on, and generally don't hold up well today, with some exceptions.
Obviously, I don't agree with Dick that Crisis 'neatened up their universe' at least not in the definition of neat that means 'something cool or interesting'. It may have tidyed the universe up a touch, but it also stripped a lot of the more fascinating elements from characters who'd been around for decades, got rid of the excellent 'parallel worlds' conceit that writers like Broome and Fox had gotten such mileage out of, promoted a cult of redaction that led to muddled, hard to understand comic books and in many ways, instead of promoting a more concise, easier to understand comic book universe for new readers to come on board created a complex, mutually contradictory sea of unclear backstories that only became more confusing as new writers sought to untangle them. While comics like Animal Man got mileage out of the changes, not all comics fared as well.
Those are my biases out of the way. Now, we'll get started on the whys and wherefores of Crisis, and the history it was simultaneously the culmination of and the destroyer of, like Shiva, only with more Supermen.
When I was growing up in the '60's, the super-hero team comic to read was THE JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA, a book featuring seven or eight of DC's super-heroes. Occasionally, the JLA would meet THE JUSTICE SOCIETY OF AMERICA - their 1940's counterparts from Earth-Two, which was in another dimension - and we'd have maybe fifteen or sixteen heroes in a special two-part JLA/JSA story. But, being the greedy fan that I was, I always wanted to see a single story featuring all the DC super-heroes from the past, present and future.
Marv Wolfman, introduction to the trade paperback of Crisis
The DC multiverse (a word coined by Michael Moorcock to describe his own fiction, but applicable here as well) was theoretically infinite. In practice, it mostly focused around a few worlds, but it grew out of a throwaway moment in Showcase #4, the origin of the silver age Flash as created by Kanigher, Broome, Infantino and Kubert. In that story, as a throwaway moment, the Barry Allen character (fresh from his electrified bath in chemicals that gave him superhuman speed... ah, the silver age, when origins were simple and totally insane) decides to take on the name and mantle of the Flash, inspired by a character in a comic book he'd read as a kid. That character? The original golden age Flash, Jay Garrick himself. Now, up until this point, DC had been publishing only the adventures of Superman, Wonder Woman and Batman out of their vast stable of golden age icons... the Justice Society, Green Lantern, the Flash, Hawkman and the others had all discontinued publishing. So, when Julius Schwartz revived the Flash as an entirely new character (and with a great costume design by Infantino, I might add) he inadvertently created an opportunity for writers like Broome and Gardner Fox. Hot on the heels of the return of the Flash came the new Green Lantern, given his power ring by a dying alien rather than by the mystical train lantern of the golden age character. (The Guardians of the Universe would come later.) Hawkman (now an alien policeman come to Earth) and the Atom (now a scientist with a size-changing ray) would be revamped next, in addition to the creation of a Justice League of America to take the place of the now-defunct Justice Society originally written by Gardner Fox in the 40's. Gardner was now writing the successors of his original team. Finally, in 1961, Gardner Fox and Julius Schwartz would bring the golden age Flash face to face with his silver age counterpart in the excellent Flash of Two Worlds story.
From there, Fox quickly twigged to the idea of Justice League/Justice Society team-ups. The excellent Crisis on Earth-1 begins this trend in Justice League #21, and it is in the tradition created by Fox that Crisis on Infinite Earths clearly stands: in essence, it's Marv Wolfman driving a stake into the heart of Fox's concept of parallel worlds separated by 'vibrational barriers' and it has to be considered as such. In essence, while other people consider Dark Knight or Watchmen to be the end of the silver age of comics, for me it's Crisis. I've always been painfully struck by the irony that Gardner Fox and his great creation of Earth-2 both died in 1986.
While writing GREEN LANTERN I received a letter from a fan asking about a mixup in DC continuity. In my reply I said, "One day we (meaning the DC editorial we) will probably straighten up what is in the DC Universe... and what is outside." At this point in its history DC Comics had Earth-One, Earth-Two, Earth-Three, Earth-B, etc. There were super-heroes on each Earth and though old-time readers had no problem understanding DC continuity, it proved off-putting to new readers who suddenly discovered there was not one but three Supermans, Wonder Womans, Batmans, etc.
Marv Wolfman, introduction to the trade paperback of Crisis
I am younger than Marv Wolfman. I came into comic books between 1977 (when I was six years old) and 1986 (when I was fifteen) and I can honestly say that I have no greater disagreement with Marv than this one: everything he seems to have feared was driving new readers away was in fact attractive to them. People were reading comic books in record numbers then. They are not doing so now. This proves little, of course: there are many reasons why there are far fewer kids reading the comic books put out by DC, Marvel, etc than there were while I was a child sneaking comic books into my room to keep my father from finding out about them. (And yes, Manga sales are up.) However, it's simply not true that DC's continuity was a barrier to understanding: most kids who were exposed to Superman didn't know and didn't care about Earth-One, Earth-Two, etc, and wouldn't find out until they were already hooked. When they did find out, it was no more off-putting to the young reader than the exotic costumes, super powers or brawls against criminals. Indeed, it was cool to see a collection of super heroes from two worlds gather together to battle some extraordinary threat. (It was certainly cool enough to draw Marv in, by his own admission.) The original Crime Syndicate story, the JLA/JSA/Legion of Super Heroes team up against Abnegazar, Rath and Ghast, the death of Mister Terrific, the JLA/JSA/All-Star Squadron battle against Per Degaton that included an Earth-Prime (our world, folks) destroyed by nuclear war because Degaton stole the Russian nukes from Cuba during the missile crisis, all of these and more were stories rooted in the essential concept of multiple Earths. They didn't confuse young readers, they delighted them. Perhaps it was Wolfman's roots in the rise of comics fandom that led him to forget his earlier wonder at the cross-dimensional fun to the degree that he seems to have in his desire to 'clean up' what wasn't that complicated to anyone but the obsessive who needs every duck to line up in a row.
Crisis, therefore, is an anomalous story. It's a grand, sweeping epic which was designed to make any such grand, sweeping epic on that scale impossible for DC to ever create again: an all-inclusive story with a catholic breadth and reach that strives to weed out the very characters it intends to include in the first place. Its setting is the infinite worlds it seeks to destroy down to one, like some sort of parody of the ancient algebra Crowley mentioned of the occultists, trying to work the infinite equation of God down into a single number. And characters like Pariah and Krona in the story almost act as an objective correlative to this quixotic intent: they seek to break down all the mystery and wonder in the universe to a single primary access point and know how it all works even if in so doing they'll destroy the very beauty of the creation they're obsessed with unravelling. It may be hubris on my part to consider Wolfman in this case as having these characters as his stand-ins, but there's still a correlation there, if nothing else a strange coincidence of sympathy in goal between Krona, the madman who wants to know how it all fits by going back to the dawn of time and watching it, and Wolfman the author, who intends to make it all fit by going back to the dawn of time and forcing it. Gone the three Supermen, gone the daughter of Batman, gone the Crime Syndicate and all the infinite possibilities of the silver age... and while Wolfman clearly didn't intend for the history of the world that remained to be a radical division from the comic books that were being published at the time (his intent for Supergirl to be remembered and to have existed is made clear in the final pages of Crisis, for example, in the deeply ironic narration over the panels of Batman at a graveside service for the Earth-Two Robin and Huntess, or Superman holding Power Girl: They would not be forgotten, it says, and a few months later they were) the destructive approach of Crisis itself made it inevitable that the revisionists would make sweeping changes. Once Gardner Fox's spirit was finally killed, so to speak, it was time to redecorate the house that Fox built to suit new creators who believed themselves far superior to the generation of writers sent packing by Julius Schwartz because they dared to ask for health insurance.
Well, next time, we'll take a break from lamenting the effects of Crisis and look at it purely as a gripping twelve issue story: how successful was Marv Wolfman at writing that story he'd wanted to do ever since reading Crisis on Earth-One? Well, you already know my opinion of it, but let us see if it still holds up to a thorough reading.
Posted by Matt Rossi at September 23, 2004 5:18 PM
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Are you going to be going through it just based on the Trade Paperback version, or including some, or all, of the crossover books that were running around at the time? (Not to mention the year or so of Monitor foreshadowing...)
I've thought for some time that DC ought to publish at least one Trade worth of "Crisis Companion", with the best-written and/or most essential of the crossovers. Maybe when they run out of 'Multiple' volumes...
Comment on the effects of the Crisis: I think that all of the problems rested in the contradiction of their plan: the claim that the new Earth is simultaneously almost indistinguishable from Earth-1 and also that nearly every aspect of Superman's history has been erased, and the new version doesn't start until 1985. In retrospect, they should either have rebooted the whole damned universe or required the new Superman to be compatible with the assumptions of the rest of the universe [debuting "10 years ago", being a founding member of the league, and having a history with the Legion, at minimum.]
In retrospect, the answer to the kinds of "problems" Crisis was designed to address is blindingly obvious. If they'd merely rebooted all of their flagship titles and set them on a new, previously unknown Earth (Earth-Omega? Earth-0? Who knows?), they could have kept all that glorious breadth and depth to the world while streamlining continuity to suit the perceived needs of the audience. Hell, they could have ended up with something almost identical to the current "Post Crisis" world (and really, the best thing to come out of Crisis was having the Justice League as literal successors to the Justice Society, without which we'd not have had the best moments of Waid's Flash nor Robinson's Starman), while leaving all the glorious Silver Age conceits out there in the Multiverse for later writers to play with. I delight in the fact that people like Morrison, Waid, Busiek and (as evidenced by this week's Teen Titans) Geoff Johns are continually kicking at shins, angling to bring the Multiverse back in, by hook or by crook, by any name necessary (cf. Hypertime, anyone?).
Jeff - I'm not doing the Crossovers because A) the important outside characters appear in Crisis itself, doing Crisis related things and B) I want this to end before I die. I will primarily be using the Trade Paperback and my memories of having read the original series as my guide, because frankly, I don't want to have to go out and buy the series again.
I would buy your proposed Companion, however, even though a lot of them weren't very good.
Me, too.
As I have remarked in my often autoquoted "The Earth-2 version of anything is cooler than any other version", the existence of the multiverse made the DC Universe more interesting, not less.
As you note, Marv Wolfman clearly felt the same way. His DC Comics Presents Annual #1 is a remarkable achievement, simultaneously serving as an audition piece for Crisis and as an exuberant celebration of and extension of the fascinating minutiae that made up DC's multiple earth sturucture.
This is your key insight into Crisis's self-inconsistency:
It's a grand, sweeping epic which was designed to make any such grand, sweeping epic on that scale impossible for DC to ever create again: an all-inclusive story with a catholic breadth and reach that strives to weed out the very characters it intends to include in the first place.
And yet, it's clear that Marv's intent for the series changed throughout--Kevin has commented on the petering out of the mission presented in issue #1--and I seem to recall an interview or some such in which he claimed that at some time in the process, the end goal was going to be reducing the multiple earths to five, not eliminating them altogether.
That would have produced a remarkably different post-Crisis DC Universe. Would it have protected us against the Hawkman reboot, or Zero Hour? That's much more difficult to say.
Matt, if you have any room at all to gloss the Crisis crossovers, I'd be interested to know your thoughts on the strange doings in Green Lantern at the time. To my way of thinking, the whole Corps never really had it as good as those last couple of years under Engelhardt and Staton, and Green Lantern was the only title to make effective use of the events of Crisis (with most falling under the dreaded "red skies" category). And the worst? Probably Thomas' various Earth-2 titles, which went almost immediately from being entertaining and charming in their own way, to almost completely unreadable within the span of months.
Matt, I'm interested to see where you with this, because so far I'm in near-total agreement. A couple notes:
1) I, too, believed at one point that sales were going gangbusters at the time Crisis was launched (DC had several hit titles on their hands at that point and seemed to have earned a place of legitimacy alongside Marvel in the eyes of fandom), but Kevin argued that, in fact, DC's sales were soft and that the company was in a lot of trouble -- that Crisis was indeed necessary, where I had argued that it was not.
I'm not trying to put Kevin on the spot, but he was very persuasive at the time and hopefully he'll shed some more light on this issue (I am roundly known for having a memory that is sometimes aamazing and sometimes non-functional, so I stand to be corrected if need be).
2) I have no idea what goes on in the heads of, well, anyone, but the impression that I have often had is that creators tend to overreact to the Squeaky Wheel 5% (or whatever) of fans who complain about certain things. In this instance, there was, naturally, the "DC continuity is too confuuuuusing" rubbish (rubbish, because you nothing is more confusing than the X-Verse as written by Claremont, and the X-Men dominated over for well over a decade).
But it also feels like the DC creators and editors got sick of fans coming up to them and pointing out perceived continuity gaffes. Of course part of the great "is it ironic or just sad?" Crisis thing is that because of the way in which Crisis was the launching point for an era of do-as-you-please with regard to rebooting, retconning, and revamping characters and titles, the continuity gaffes and mysteries flew faster and more furiously than ever. (Who can forget certain creators blowing their stacks on Usenet over stuff like this?).
Anyway, what I'm getting at in this point is that it seems like there just developed a mindset taken for granted by creators and large portions of fandom alike that the pre-Crisis DC continuity simply had to be "fixed" or "cleaned up," that is was somehow inevitable. Even some fellow readers I know who enjoyed DC multiverse stories seemed to accept without question that DC's continuity was one of the Core Weaknesses that made DC not as cool as Marvel (one of the other Core Weaknesses being "heroes that were too good," another nugget of conventional thought I never agreed with).
3) I also think that Crisis was right there with DKR as the opening two salvos in the "Comics As Ultra-Collectible Physical Objects" revolution that eventually led to things like the seven X-Men #1 covers and "the Death of Superman."
Good stuff, Matt.
Chris - good point on 'Earth-New' or whatever they could have called it. And while I intend to stick to Crisis itself for the foreseeable future, who knows? I have this envisioned as a three parter, so if there's interest I suppose part four could attempt to round all of those up, but I'll be honest and admit I didn't read all of them, not by a long shot. We know I'm a fanatic for Green Lantern, of course, but even so it has been a while. And yeah, All-Star Squadron and Infinity Inc. suffered hard from Crisis... I do like having the Justice Society as a direct predecessor of the Justice League, but I am a little put off by the current situation, where both exist and the successor doesn't feel very, well, like it has a direct connection to the predecessor anymore.
Greg - Marv's clear affection for the multiple worlds concept is evident, especially in his interactions between the Earth-One and Earth-Two Supermen. I admit to being at times baffled how he could write them so well and yet want to get rid of one of them. I don't know if editorial pressure led to the winnowing down from an original idea of five to a final decision of one: Marv seems pretty steadfast now in maintaining that it was always going to be this way.
The Hawkman reboot and Zero Hour will be touched upon in the third part of this, I promise.
To me, the most "must-have" of the crossovers is the DCCP issue that actually introduced the Superboy hanging around in Crisis (and on which Secret Identity was based...). If I were putting that companion together, I'd put that in one, some of the GL mentioned above, the Firestorm 'prequel' crossover, the Swamp Thing crossover [any excuse to include an Alan Moore story, of course], maybe the Teen Titans with Kole's death, and one of the 'mourning supergirl' stories. Preferably the legion crossover, but I don't recall if that stands alone well enough. I think that even if it doesn't I still have a better choice than the 'Supergirl's secret husband' story.
The Roy Thomas stories are somewhat amusing to read at the meta level, as writer/editor slapstick. [The brass takes away key elements of the continuity; Roy juggles things around to support the schedule; then they take away one of the most essential parts of the new patch. Repeat ad nauseam...] As actual stories, of course, they're drivel...
Crisis is of historical interest only, imo. I do not think it is engaging as a story, and reads very formulaically. It only has any impact if the reader has a past attachment to the characters involved.
Crisis is of historical interest only, imo. I do not think it is engaging as a story, and reads very formulaically. It only has any impact if the reader has a past attachment to the characters involved.
How can something read forumulaically when it defined the formula? You're of course willing to your opinion as to its engagability as a story, but claiming that it hews to something that didn't exist before it did is absurd. Crisis is a culmination of the JLA/JSA crossover, yes, but there was no real set formula for any of them and Crisis certainly hasn't got the benefit of any big predecessor or precursor to ape... like it or not, it was the first big every character we have miniseries of its kind.
And since it involves every single DC comics character extant at the time and changed the direction DC went in for the next two decades, then it has plenty of impact for anyone who reads DC comics. But yes, it also has historical impact, which is why I'm discussing it.
I don't question it's impact on the comics industry, just it's appeal as a story. I don't think you can give Crisis to someone who isn't already very invested in the DCU and have them enjoy it. I wouldn't expect a "final" story to really have much impact outside of the target demographic. (see also Alan Moore's final Superman story)
I'm not saying it shouldn't have been published. It made a bunch of money for DC and brought them a ton of attention to push the rest of their books with relaunches and new creative teams and whatnot. Good for them, that's what they're supposed to do.
I should mention that it doesn't hold any nostalgia value for me, since I wasn't even reading (American) comics at the time. As far as formula, I just meant that it reads predictably in parts. (and this could of course be colored by the fact that I didn't read it until well after it was all completed) I didn't even really think about the whole JLA/JSA crossover culmination aspect of it until you mentioned it. Since it literally used everybody, both teams being used didn't draw any extra attention from me.
As an aside, I thought Secret Wars was the first uber-crossover (following the smaller uber-crossover Contest of Champions)? In any event, they both came out around the same time, and Crisis definitely upped the bar by literally using every character and effecting lasting changes. The most Secret Wars did was give Spider-Man a nifty new costume for a while.
The interesting thing about the Swamp Thing cross-over issue is the way that it stays at the fringes of the entire thing. We get to the Monitor's Satellite, we meet Alex Luthor, we even see the chronal effects(which are interesting because Moore explores the melding of time beyond just established DC characters, making for the sad moment of Clyde watching his own biopic, among others) but Moore pretty much says both that 1)Swamp Thing doesn't matter to Crisis per se and that 2)the "Crisis" he'll be fighting is much bigger than all that. Strangely, that Swamp Thing issue sums up the richness and strangeness DC lost because of Crisis best of anything (though I haven't read to that part of Animal Man).
Its pretty interesting that as early as Alan Moore's Twilight, "fixes" were being explored for Crisis. I wish that his idea of the "fluke" had been exploited. Of course, I also wish that Twilight had been written. At the same time, imagine the effect that would have had (greater than Crisis).
Ralf is arguably correct that Contest of Champions predates Crisis as an all-universe crossover event.
True, but Contest was a three-issue, "wouldn't it be fun if...?" miniseries, whereas Crisis was designed to be an event that permanently and massively changed the entire continuity of DC Comics.
Also, Crisis was first announced at the Comicon in 1981, according to Wolfman, and then pushed back to 85 because of research. In addition, both CoC and later Secret Wars are variations on the 'cosmically powerful entities make heroes/heroes and villains' fight story that Marvel had been doing with the Grandmaster for years, while Crisis was a culmination of the cross-universal storytelling I mentioned earlier. I think it's fair to say that Jim Shooter and Mark Gruenwald were aware Crisis was coming when they did Marvel's events.
Did they collect those Swamp Thing issues with the rest of Alan Moore's run? Given the randomness of DC trade paperbacks you never can be too sure.
My single-data-point refutation of "Multiverse am confusing" was that the one of the first DC comics I bought with my own money was the final part of Crisis on Earth Prime. I bought it in part because of the border on the cover showing all these superheroes...how could something with THAT MANY heroes be bad? And Per Degaton looked so cool on that cover, I had to know more.
I'm only about a year older than Matt, and I wasn't confused at ALL by the multiverse concept. In fact, I wasn't confused by the issue at all, save to want to know more about some of the characters.
Think about it. Part five of a megastory. Dozens of heroes from three Earths (no Earth-Prime heroes). I was 12, I wouldn't be seriously buying comics for another year...most of my comics experience was Marvel stuff and a few issues of Superman here and there. And I had no real problems following the story and enjoying it. This was DC Multiverse at its most elaborate, and it didn't faze me. I loved it. Heck, I still have a soft spot for Per Degaton after all these years (which is part of why I'm enjoying the current issues of JSA more than some seem to be).
Oh, and the Companion should include the Blue Devil issues, mostly because they put a comedic spin on the whole concept. :)
Not to keep harping on the Green Lantern thing, but I'm pretty sure Hal Jordan never appears in one panel of Crisis' twelve issues. (I don't count Earth-3's Power Ring.) For a series that celebrated DC's entire history, Hal's omission is pretty big.
In the same vein, at no point in Crisis is the original JLA lineup reunited (even substituting John Stewart for Hal). That would have been nice too.
I considered the Blue Devil issues; I suppose dropping them in would be just fine. But then I'd want to include my other edge case and put in one of the Omega Men issues [the one BD crossed over into would do just fine...]
(The crisis Swamp thing was reprinted, by the way. The only Alan Moore DC book that they haven't ever reprinted is his first Swamp Thing, which is a deep shame, since it sets up some of the plot points for near the end of the run and has a nifty thematic echo with his penultimate issue as well. On some level, I'm sure that this omission is karmic payback for Sandman #8 appearing twice in the trade version of that run. [would it really have hurt to put it in Across the Universe?])
On the topic of missed opportunities in the Crisis, to me the biggest one was that there was not a single crossover dealing with the Villian War. [Well, there might have been some in the Thomas Parallel Crisis run; I don't recall very well.] Considering that those two issues had actual dramatic potential in a way that "a bunch of guys stand around looking sad and hopeless while a giant wall of antimatter approaches" never did, this is a tremendous shame.
Was there a story reason for Hal's absence? Was he retired at the time or something?
In 1984 or thereabouts, Hal quit the GL Corps and John Stewart took over for him. John was the GL of Earth during Crisis, but the Green Lantern crossover issues (#s 194-98, I think) told, among other things, the story of Hal's return.
In fact, they told a story parallel to the last few issues of Crisis, which is why you don't see any of the Green Lantern Corps past Crisis #9 (and even that was just the bit with Guy).
Not to be pedantic (well a bit perhaps, but it's important to set the record straight)-- it wasn't Julius Schwartz who fired the would-be unionizers in 1968. Carmine Infantino had just become publisher and although he was sympathetic to the artists' cause, he also felt a loyalty to National Periodicals and upper management for giving him his position and title.
Personally, as a post-Crisis comic book reader (I didn't get into comics until I was in high school, really, in the early 90's), one of the coolest things about the DC universe, IMHO, was the whole multiversal concept that Crisis and Zero Hour sought to destroy. This is part of why I like the Amalgam Universe, the multi-company crossovers, and books like Marvel's "Exiles." Of course, I'm also a huge fan of shows like Sliders and of the entire AH genre (particularly Harry Turtledove)... parallel Earths have so much potential for interesting plot twists without worrying about the continuity of the mainstream plotlines...