In other words, I thought of more stuff to say that should have been in part one, and which isn't really part of the review of the series in part two, and so you lucky men and women get to read more musings about a crossover that will be 20 years old in a couple of months.
Never let it be said I am a slave to topicality. You can basically consider this an addendum to part one of the essay: a gigantic footnote on continuity in comic books. I'm sure we're all thrilled. Hopefully I can eventually get past all this and onto my unabashed praise for Crisis as a story, because while you may not be able to tell from all this I really do love the book. I guess if I didn't I wouldn't think about it this much.
Wolfman: The only differences in what I'd do today as opposed to 1985 are: 1. I would have insisted all characters had NO memory of the Crisis - which was my intent but I was overruled by the other editors at the time. 2: I would have insisted all books began over with issue #1 starting in Jan. 1985, which was the original intent. 3: I would have stayed in New York to make sure all this was done instead of immediately moving to Los Angeles. If that had all happened then nobody would have been able to veer from what we accomplished. Under the new and current DC editorial they have worked hard to fix what was done wrong by those who were there immediately after Crisis, but the mistakes never should have been made in the first place. But the Crisis, in and of itself, did the job it was intended to do. What followed wasn't always good.
Marv Wolfman, from an interview in Redoubt magazine
Last time, I discussed what I saw as some of the negative consequences of the outcome of Crisis on Infinite Earths: the overarching philosophical intent of the series to redact and reduce the many alternate Earths of the Schwartz/Fox/Broome conception of the DC Multiverse down to just one (or, as reported by a few comments in the previous post, five) in order to simplify DC's supposedly confusing continuity problems. I believe my own opinion that these problems were mostly in the minds of a few overly anal-retentive fans who required every single comic book ever published by National Periodicals/DC Comics to fit seamlessly into a continuum with every other single comic book so published was made clear, but just in case it wasn't: the modern mania for 'continuity', in my opinion, comes from the period of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby's first big success with Fantastic Four and the growth of Marvel comics as one single interconnected entity with Stan firmly ensconced for those first few years as ultimately in charge of everything.
It was a bold and interesting idea for the time, and it really helped make the setting of the early Marvel comics feel dynamic... Hawkeye could debut in Iron Man's comic as a villain, move over to the team book Iron Man was vacating and become one of the Avengers, and while there fight alongside former X-Men villains the Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver, which creates a sense of scope... you can imagine Iron Man fighting either alongside or (as seemed more likely back then) against the X-Men more easily because they were part of the same world, and it was easier for the writers and editorial staff of these various books to coordinate this kind of cross-comic continuity because Stan was there in some capacity for all that Marvel was doing. Meanwhile, National Periodicals had begun in the thirties and forties with a divided editorial approach: there was no Stan Lee who was in overall control: the Superman books did not coordinate with the Justice Society books, for example. (This lack of inter-company unity is one of the reasons that Superman and Batman weren't part of the original Justice Society comics that were published in the 1940's, as those were under the aegis of the All-American Comics editorial staff.) Long after this concrete division between All-American Comics and the Superman offices ceased to exist, Mort Weisinger rang the Superman books like a private fiefdom: instead of the deliberate creation of a continuous setting like that which Marvel had, DC comics instead had to constantly explain the disconnected setting created by this division, with two surviving cities of Atlantis underwater (one the home of Aquaman and the other where Superman's mermaid girlfriend Lori Lemaris came from) as just one example. Eventually, as Mort took his hands off the reins and Julie Schwartz took over the Superman office, the DC comics universe was created out of the until-then disparate editorial offices.
As a result, Marvel in the 1960's and 70's had a more streamlined interconnectivity between titles: crossovers initially happened because Stan Lee, the nominal writer and editor of just about every damn book Marvel put out (and we can argue how much of the actual writing Stan did and how much was done by his collaborators, but this is about Crisis, not silver age Marvel) was aware of what these characters were doing in their own books and could seamlessly work them in. (One example of this is how the Sub-Mariner essentially became Marvel's designated ombudsman and gadfly during the period, making appearances in Avengers, the Hulk, Daredevil and the Fantastic Four which flowed perfectly from his earlier appearances in totally unrelated comics. The Sub-Mariner who appeared in FF with a giant walking whale was the same guy who got pissed at eskimos and threw a frozen Captain America in the ocean.) With the exception of the excellent Superman/Batman crossovers in their own books and in World's Finest (a pretty good example of the late derivation of same can be found here) it just wasn't as easy for DC comics to bring characters together that way, and so you ended up with smaller groups, like the Superman/Batman stories, the Flash/Green Lantern friendly rivalry, characters whose editorial staffs and writers were either the same or who knew each other well enough to work out in advance what was going to happen.
Because of this difference of approach, DC comics had a messier internal continuity: there was no way around it, with Mort Weisinger being totally disinterested in making his Superman stories fit at all into what they were doing in the Atom and Hawkman book, as an example. When Gardner Fox and Julie Schwartz played off of Broome and Kanigher's original idea for Barry Allen to have been inspired by Jay Garrick's comic book escapades, they hit upon a brilliant way out of the mess that the editorial squabbling between DC's offices had created: embrace the contradictions. If some Superman story published in 1952 contradicted what they were doing at the time, it simply took place on Earth-2. It allowed for why DC's big 3 icons hadn't aged and why other characters like Green Lantern and the Flash were totally different now: these stories were happening on a whole new world. It was, in its own way, a totally opposite approach to that of the continuity obsessed fans who grew up on the House that Stan and Jack built with it's smaller-scale cosmos: instead of deciding which story is true when a writer would accidentally or even deliberately contradict an older story, the multiple Earths approach argued "They're both true, just on different worlds."
In essence, Crisis has (as I mentioned last time) a bit of an anomalous aspect to it, a slightly chimerical divided self: it is basically an attempt to make DC into a Marvel-style universe, as far as continuity is concerned. While Marvel had its 'What If?' series and occasionally allowed characters to jaunt to alternate worlds where their histories had not entirely unfolded the same way (I seem to recall a story where Ben Grimm went to various alternate Earths and met versions of himself, but I'm not willing to swear to it) these were manufactured and never taken very seriously. (For instance, when Marvel decided to explain Stan Lee's return to writing Captain America in the 1950's as a communist basher, considering that Stan later had a Cap frozen since WWII fished out of the drink by the Avengers, they didn't say those Red Menace Cap stories were on 'Earth-Pinko', they came up with a story arguing that Cap had been replaced by a school teacher who was dangerously obsessed with him, to the point where he convinced a student to take the super-soldier serum and become a replacement Bucky and fight commies with him. An entirely different approach.) Two of the writers who went over to DC in the 70's were Marv Wolfman and Roy Thomas, both of whom proved to have a fondness and affinity for the multiversal concept. But while Roy seemed to like it entirely because it let him play with a huge sandbox of costumed characters in stories set in a World War II where he was free to do what he liked, detached from what was going on now in the comic books (for instance, he could use the Ultra Humanite and Superman in WWII without having to clear it with the Superman editors, since it wasn't that Superman) Marv seemed to bring along with Marv Wolfman the writer who deftly wrote stories like DC Comics Presents Annual 1 with the Supermen of two worlds teaming up against the Luthors of two worlds (and even worked in the Ultraman and Luthor, respectively, of the Crime Syndicate world) another Marv Wolfman, one who was Editor-in-Chief of Marvel Comics and who preferred that style of continuity over the cobbled-together DC house style.
Makes you wonder what Roy Thomas would have written if he'd been the hot property at DC at the time instead of Marv? But Marv was coming off of the success of his collaboration with George Perez on The New Teen Titans and so it was Marv's suggestion to Jenette Kahn that became Crisis. Marv himself seems aware that in order to have succeeded in his goal (which is not a goal I particularly want to see implemented, but let's not consider that for now) he would have had to go even further than he was allowed to: in essence, as Chris Roberson mentioned in the previous thread, he would have needed to create Earth-0 and start over from scratch, which is what he'd wanted to do.
Look at that: 1500 words and I haven't even begun to review the comics themselves yet. Man. Still, I think the irony is worth mentioning... at the time Crisis came to be, DC was grappling with a 45 year old comic universe that had been cobbled together from rival editorial staff decisions by Fox and Schwartz. Now, twenty years after that, Marvel Comics is facing an almost exact inversion, where its originally neat and unified continuity is fracturing into multiple lines that star supposedly the same characters without clearing up (or even addressing) how they different takes on them relate, if they do at all. Between Marvel Age, the Ultimates and the core Marvel Universe, Marvel is the one with the mutually exclusive editorial offices that don't talk to each other. In a way, they've become the DC comics of the early 1960's.
Okay, next time, I promise we'll get into the actual 12 issues of Crisis itself. Really. Even if I have to hit myself in the head with a frying pan.
Posted by Matt Rossi at September 24, 2004 10:23 PM
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Recently I've been searching the back issues for old issues of SECRET ORIGINS.
Roy Thomas liked to connect the dots, especially post-Crisis...with a VENGEANCE. And to the exclusion of, you know, logic.
Well, I think Roy was pretty damn bitter after Crisis. It more or less smashed his sandbox and scattered his meticulously constructed sandcastle, and he resorted to ever more desperate attempts to fix it. Reading All-Star Squadron during the Ultra-Humanite story and then Young All-Stars is revelatory in the vast difference between them.
I don't disagree that he liked to connect the dots, but I think he tended more towards trying to connect them in his own little fiefdom of Earth-2 when he went to work for DC. Between him and Marv, it was definitely Marv who wanted the whole shooting match to work together.
Makes you wonder what Roy Thomas would have written if he'd been the hot property at DC at the time instead of Marv?
I wonder these kinds of things all the time Matt--but then I think to myself: "Is it even possible to imagine Roy Thomas as a "hot writer"? The people that love Roy's work (and I would not hesitate to rank myself in the top percentile bracket of that group!) really love it, but I think you're dead-on target when you point out that, though you cannot read a Thomas story without feeling that it participates in a much larger fictional structure (good ol' "metanarrative"), you never (or, at least, I never) feel that he is slavishly feeding the "contnuity monster". Thomas (like Gruenwald and Stern, and maybe Englehart) possesses (possessed?) the wonderful ability to obssess upon "what has come before" without coming off as merely nostalgic... What I'm saying, I guess, is that it always feels like there's more than just a passion for connecting the dots motivating this guy. He seizes upon "gaps" in past continuity as opportunities--he doesn't treat them as errors/problems that must be soldered/reified into bright hard spinning objects before the "faithful" awake from their hypnotic slumber...
Thomas is too concerned with the given elements of the "corporate past" to land a "cool" rep, but his use of that past is far too personal/creative/auteurist to earn him the loyalty of the borderline autistics who worship continuity for its own sake.
Dave
Thomas is too concerned with the given elements of the "corporate past" to land a "cool" rep, but his use of that past is far too personal/creative/auteurist to earn him the loyalty of the borderline autistics who worship continuity for its own sake.
Remember to send your angry cards and letters to Dave Fiore care of...
Seriously, one of the things about Roy (and about Alan Brennert, who I'm rediscovering recently because of his two stories in the Greatest Batman collection) is that there's a sense of 'Nobody's done that yet?' in their best work. His run on 'Invaders' took the WWII appearances of the Human Torch and the Sub-Mariner, tossed in Captain America and a whole host of lesser lights from the old Timely days, and made gold out of that particular sow's ear.
That being said, I mentioned DC Comics Presents Annual #1 (as reminded by Greg in the earlier post) because if anything, Marv Wolfman the writer is just as capable of making use of those same elements. There's something almost touching in the way he works the relationship between the Earth-Two and Earth-One Supermen... you get the sense that after the initial discomfort is past, there's literally an almost avuncular bond between them, this feeling of "Finally, I have someone who understands what it is to be Superman" that underlies and is really rather remarkable (and is touched upon in Crisis to rather haunting effect) - but in Wolfman that editorial eye seems to stand in tension against this tendency, whereas with Thomas there's much less a compulsion to change things to make them fit: he worked well in sympathy with the Fox/Schwartz concept, as when he established that the Earth-Two Atom, Wildcat and Guardian had in fact all trained under the same boxing instructor, who was now possessed by an evil entity out of the old Green Lanten books.
Agreed Matt--I certainly didn't mean to imply that Wolfman never did anything decent, but I like your idea that the "great power" of the writer/editor was too much responsibility for him!
I share your admiration for Brennert...his Deadman story in Christmas With The Superheroes #2 (1989) is fantastic!
Dave
Makes you wonder what Roy Thomas would have written if he'd been the hot property at DC at the time instead of Marv?
No offense to Roy Thomas, but I always thought Alan Moore was a pretty "hot property" at DC in the early '80s...! Just imagine Crisis by Moore and Perez.... Of course, Alan Moore probably wouldn't have wanted to do away with the Multiverse in the first place.
Also just wanted to say I'm glad you're tackling Crisis, Matt. You can't write enough about it for me.
Moore was the up and comer at the time Crisis was originally planned (remember, we're talking 1981 when it was first announced): clearly his participation in the event as it took place was desultory at best and quite honestly, had he written it I don't have the slightest idea what it would have been like, but damn would I like to see that! I don't think Perez would work on it without Wolfman, though... they were a package deal back then. Moore and Gibbons, maybe? What was Alan Davis up to back then?
I'm glad you don't think I can write enough about Crisis, Tom, because that way you won't grow numb and horrified by the size of the review portion of this set of essays.
I don't think it's humanly *possible* to write too much about Crisis. I just hope you also cover stuff like Grant Morrison's Animal Man run, and the way that tied in with it - the only truly *great* use of the Crisis *story* (as opposed to just the rebooting of the universe) I've come across.
BTW you said you were referencing from the TPB because you didn't want to buy the issues again. I have scans if there's anything you want to check against...
What was Alan Davis up to back then?
Marvelman, maybe, or Captain Britain? You're right; it probably would have been Moore & Gibbons, since that was around the time Gibbons got Green Lantern.
...that way you won't grow numb and horrified...
I like to think I know a little something about numbing, horrifically long essays, so no big deal.
Well, part of Moore's Twilight of the Superheroes story seemed designed to fix some of Crisis' problem and also salvage some of the "Multiverse" concept. His idea of a "fluke" in time around a fifty-year period that could be used to place, in his examples, Prez and the Rainbow Batman and Hex, seems rather similar to the idea of Hypertime(at least in end result). Now I'm wishing for Earth-Alan, where Marvel and DC hadn't pissed off Moore and he had written Crisis(and Thor and the Fantastic Four).
But then again Moore didn't seem totally against the idea of revisions - just look at Supreme. IIR the Twilight proposal C his major problem with the Crisis was that it undid all the old stories - a problem that could easily have been circumvented...
I still say that the greatest tragedy in comics is that we didn't have a Moore/Gibbons revamp of Superman rather than a Byrne one - still with the involvement of Wolfman, so you'd have *his* input into the story, like the change in Luthor.
My bad, for "Crisis", I meant "Twilight". I'm more interested in that than "Crisis", to tell the truth. The discussion must have me stuck on the word Crisis.
Has anyone explored what affect, if any, Marvel's cosmic storylines had in influencing Crisis?
Ever since "The Galactus Trilogy" in Fantastic Four Vol. 1, #48-50 (conceived, legend has it, as "the FF meet God"), Marvel seemed to think that they had a lock on the big, cosmic saga; their next attempt at this was "The Kree-Skrull War" in The Avengers, and with the introduction of new blood into the Marvel bullpen, the cosmic stuff seemed to come out at ever increasing speed (the many cosmic storylines [Thor's invasion of Hades to rescue Hercules; the High Evolutionary and his New Men; the Colonizers of Rigel and Ego, the Living Planet; Mangog and the Odinsword; etc.] in Thor; the X-Men's defeat of the Z'noxx thanks to Professor X and Jean Grey linking the minds of everybody in the world who was filled with "compassion" and "brotherly love" and beaming said qualities into the Z'noxx's collective noggins like an icepick; Thanos's first bid at becoming God thanks to the Comsic Cube in Iron Man, Captain Marvel, Marvel Feature and The Avengers; Thanos's adventure with the former "Him," Adam Warlock, wherein Warlock supposedly killed his negative avatar, the Magus; the Celestial Madonna storyline in Avengers and Giant-Size Avengers; Galactus's return engagement to Earth with his robotic herald, Gabriel the Air-Walker, designed to cow the Judeo-Christian part of the globe into submission with his biblical overtones; Baron Mordo's destruction of the entire world and its recreation by Eternity in the Steve Englehart-scripted Doctor Strange Vol. 1, #10-3; Thanos's next major power-grab, resulting in the death of Warlock, in Avengers Annual #7 and Marvel Two-In-One Annual #2; and the Enemy/Korvac/Michael arc, mostly scripted by Jim Shooter, in Avengers #167-77, resulting in the deaths of nearly everybody who had been an Avenger up to that point as well as the Guardians of the Galaxy, and their resurrection by the Enemy/Korvac/Michael, aided and abetted by Moondragon and Thor's mortal avatar Dr. Don Blake), until they culminated with the absurdities of the Secret Wars and various Infinity gauntlets/wars/crusades in the mid-1980s onward.
If I had to guess, I'd say that Englehart's apocalypse in Doctor Strange and Shooter's mini-armageddon in Avengers were the Marvel stories that most immediately influenced "Marvelous" Marv Wolfman in shaping the plot of Crisis; but I'm less than a babe in the woods when it comes to DCU continuity. Any thoughts?
On another note, I suppose we can all be grateful that the DC multiverse wasn't even more complicated; check out this quote from the interview that Jim Amash conducted with Stan Goldberg in Roy Thomas's Alter Ego fanzine (Vol. 3, No. 18), where Stan G. says:
"I heard this story second-hand, but after the staff was let go in 1957, DC wanted to buy all of Timely's titles. They offered around $15,000 because they wanted to own Captain America, Sub-Mariner, and The Human Torch. I think Stan [Lee] may have told me this. $15,000 was a lot of money then, but [Timely's publisher] Martin Goodman still had his magazines and was a millionaire. Goodman said, 'Aw, what's $15,000 going to mean to me? I'll hold on to these titles. Why should I give it to them?' This was probably the smartest thing he ever did."
-- Alter Ego Vol. 3, #18 (Oct. 2002); p. 22
Ron: Since Marv came over from Marvel (as did Englehart, who wrote some kick-ass JLA storylines involving the Guardians of the Universe and the Manhunters) I would say that those stories influenced Crisis insofar as they were stories Marv had undoubtedly read by writers who had helped change the medium: I don't think he directly cribbed from them, as he had plenty of direct cosmic antecedents in DC's own history (Superman's comic had been growing steadily more 'cosmic' under writers like Bates and Maggin, the aforementioned decade of JLA/JSA crossovers, Paul Levitz's Great Darkness Saga, the New Gods/Fourth World stories that Thanos was... ahem... inspired by)... but it would be incredibly disingenuous to argue that there wasn't any inspiration. I would point out that the influence went both ways: Marvel 'borrowed' the entire Justice League/Justice Society crossover idea with their 'Serpent Crown' storyline and the Squadron Supreme.
If I had to guess (and I would have to, since Marv's not said to my knowledge) I would guess it was Englehart's work on both JLA and Green Lantern, along with Marv's own work on those books, that inspired Crisis the most, and so one could assume that Englehart's work on Marvel books like Dr. Strange could be said to be inspiration for Crisis.
If DC had bought the Timely characters, they would probably have languished: look at what happened to Plastic Man, who was bought entirely so he didn't appear anywhere. Then again, one would hope DC would be smart enough to use Captain America somewhere... Earth-Timely, perhaps?
Matt -- I'm well past the point of being so "Zombie-ized" that I think that Marvel was the only comics company doing original things with its superheroes; I certainly wasn't accusing Marv in particular or DC in general of swiping ideas from Marvel for Crisis, just wondering how much influence, if any, some of Marvel's cosmic storylines had in the editorial meetings that formulated Crisis. In retrospect, Shooter's Enemy/Korvac/Michael storyline in Avengers seems to me a likely influence, with DC upping the ante by having some of the heroes' deaths be real (or, owing to stories published years later, "real at that point in time"). Shooter came to Marvel from DC (as did, I believe, Dave Cockrum), so the pollination of ideas certainly travelled both ways; the comic book world was (particularly in the pre-Eclipse/First/Image/Valiant/Darkhorse/etc. days) and, to a certain extent, still is, fairly incestuous, after all: it would be more surprising if a major storyline wasn't influenced by something that another house did, particularly if it sold well and/or generated a lot of fan excitement (good or bad, I guess...).
I think it was Englehart who first showed that Marvel's "homage" to the Justice League, the Squadron Supreme (an alternate, evil version called the Squadron Sinister was first introduced in Avengers Vol. 1, #68-70, in the first Grandmaster storyline, wherein Granny and Kang the Conqueror played a sort of chess game with the Avengers on one side and the Squadron and the core members of what would become, seven or eight years hence, The Invaders on the other; the Squadron Sinister, however, was limited to "homages" to DC's Big Four: Superman [Hyperion], Batman [Nighthawk], The Flash [Marvel's 2nd Whizzer], and Green Lantern [Dr. Spectrum]), could be mined for serious stories rather than a one-off joke-cum-tribute (as their creator, "Roy the Boy" Thomas, used them as when he introduced them in Avengers Vol. 1, #85-6; none of the Squadron appeared on the covers of these two issues, BTW: perhaps Marvel was worried about possible legal action from DC if their "homages" were splashed across the covers); J.M. DeMatteis later used them in The Defenders, and Mark Gruenwald finally used them for his own take on "What if superheroes ruled the world?" in the 12-issue mini-series The Squadron Supreme. As for the Sinisters, Nighthawk wasn't really developed until Steve Gerber assumed the writing chores on The Defenders after Nighty joined (Nighthawk's only other foray as a villain was in Daredevil Vol. 1, #62; even Roy Thomas, his creator, wasn't comfortable using him as an ersatz Batman in this issue); Dr. Spectrum became a fairly significant Iron Man villain in the hands of Mike Friedrich, but he tweaked him into a being little better than a pawn of his Power Prism, which subsequent stories showed to be inhabited by a Skrull criminal; while the evil Hyperion never quite managed to be more than a pallid, villainous imitation of Big Blue, Marvel somewhat reformed him in later years and paired him off with The Thing's one-time groupie, Thundra (who ended up palling around with Arkon after the "bad" Hyperion's death). The Whizzer's character development was non-existent before I left the serried ranks of Marvel.
And let's not go into Claremont/Cockrum's "homage" to the Legion of Superheroes, the Imperial Guard of the Shi'ar Empire, in X-Men....
Last night I read one of the odd issues of Grant Morrison's Animal Man that I managed to pick up (I don't have quite all of his run, but I did buy enough of it off the rack to be blown away by #25), #13, and I saw this brief reference to Crisis in a letter from David Edward Martin of Hiawatha, IA: "Although Buddy was very out of place in the 'Forgotten Heroes' team and especially in that execrable 'Crisis,' he's found solid footing in this series."
Animal Man #13 was published in 1989; obviously Crisis still wasn't setting well with some of the fans. Guess every major superhero comic of any longevity is going to eventually, inevitably, publish a revamp/revision/reboot story that drives some fans out the door; pretty stupid, since the "aging" fans usually have more disposable income than the teenagers and twentysomethings who ostensibly comprise the preferred demographic of the comic companies. Just once I'd like to see a comic company make a go of publishing a line of superheroes who aged in something close to real time -- maybe they could age one year for every two "real" years -- and stick to it, à la Gasoline Alley. I wouldn't mind if there were a couple of immortal or near-immortal characters; but let the majority of the cast age, marry, have kids (or not), grow old, retire, train and advise their successors. Y'know, sorta like DC started to do with its JSA'ers. It could work. Sigh.
Andrew:
Marv's contribution of the modified Lex Luthor to the Superman revamp is the least interesting part of the revamp, not the part to be preserved in a wishing for another way.
IMPO, of course.
Amen.
I will say, in mild defense of this strictly hypothetical Moore/Wolfman revamp, that Moore wrote a mean Businessman Lex back in Swamp Thing #53.
But that only had to last a few panels. Over the long term, the potential of Kingpin Lex is just too limited in comparison to a Lex Luthor who's so brilliant, so jealous, and so unmatchably nasty that he travels back in time and space not to kill Superman's mother, but to marry her before Jor-El can, just because he's that much of a dick.
Hey, Lara was a hot astronaut (OK, so the astronaut retcon hadn't happened yet; work with me here) who'd managed to snag the attention of the brightest of the current generation of -Els, the family that invented or did, well, everything of note in Krypton's history. I don't think it's that unreasonable that Lex might have had some ulterior motives beyond just changing Superman's genetic code in that courtship. :-)
I recently got into a debate with some people as to whether that was the first appearance of Businessman Lex (outside Man Of Steel) or the last appearance of Pre-Crisis Lex, given that that issue came out the same month as the revised Luthor...
I thought the idea of businessman Lex was a wonderful one, but Byrne's execution was ludicrous - Luthor has no real motive to hate Superman. But given Wolfman's handling of the pre-Crisis Luthor in Crisis itself, I don't think *Wolfman's* part in the generation of the new character was to blame...
To be honest, I never understood why you couldn't have a young Lex in Smallville hating Superboy for making him go bald (or even just as a jerk and rival to Clark Kent if you wanted to keeo the *no Superboy* clause, which even Byrne admits was a mistake at this point), have him grow up into buisnessman Lex and restart the rivalry once Superman hits Metropolis (he's successfully recreated himself as a Pillar of the Community while Clark's been off discovering himself or whatever. Then eventually he goes too far, Superman busts him, and he becomes Arch-Criminal Lex.
And then all you need is to work Lexor into it, the planet where Lex manages to re-create himself again as a Pillar of the Community, but that's just me trying to shovel all the silver age stuff back in.
The Lex who appeared in Swamp Thing was to my mind clearly pre-reboot. He was a brilliant scientist, not a businessman; he was in jail, not a corporate headquarters.
I'm pretty sure Lex wasn't in jail when he appeared in Swamp Thing. He was charging some ridiculous amount of money for 10 minutes of his time (but, pre-Crisis-like, was worth every penny of his fee in terms of quality of consult), something I don't think prisoners get to do.
I would argue, in fact, that the Swamp Thing Lex is quite plausibly the post-Crisis one; the specific reference to "his people" developing the anti-Swampy weapon suggests the businessman-Lex rather than the scientist-Lex.
Swamp Thing Lex has some properties of Businessman-Lex, but also has many properties that the Kingpin-on-Atkins either never had or didn't have at that time in continuity. ByrneLex didn't become Bald for another year or too, and had no history in fighting invulnerable persons at that time. For that matter, even at this point, Lex hasn't had anything close to the real Lex Luthor's success/near-success in fighting Superman, certainly nothing to justify that fee. And, of course, the new Lex is almost completely bereft of technical skills. ST52-3 Lex is, then, something never seen before or since: what a competent writer would have done with the "Lex is a respectable businessman" concept.