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