Crisis on Infinite Earths, Part Three: Reboot in the Head

And now, finally, we conclude our look back on the January to December of 1985 event Crisis on Infinite Earths with a look at the long-term consequences of the story. I hope I've established in part one and part two my simultaneous affection for Crisis as a pure story and my dislike for some of the fallout caused by it. As Tom has pointed out, Crisis sort of eats its own tail in the telling: by redacting the DC universe, it in effect says that everything you have read in every issue of Crisis from #1 to #10 is false. This is a strange thing to keep in your head... that the various heroes so fundamentally altered or deleted by Crisis didn't even experience it. As a result, for instance, the epic role played in the story by the Earth-Two Superman becomes arbitrarily assigned to someone else in the 'Crisis no one had ever read'. Superman doesn't remember his cousin dying in the Crisis because he never had a cousin. (Recent issues of Superman/Batman nonwithstanding.)

A lot of this comes from the change of plan between when Marv Wolfman first conceived of Crisis and what happened after it came out. Clearly, an editorial shift took place even during the writing of the series: I've already alluded to the argument some have extended that originally, there would be five worlds left. However, for now, let's assume that Crisis appeared entirely as it was intended to and performed exactly as it was meant to: what about the stories born out of it? How good were they? Dick Giordano posed a question and then answered it in his afterword: 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. What were those opportunities, and how were they taken advantage of or not?

The Relaunch of Superman
As Crisis wrapped up, Julie Schwartz, who'd been editor of the Superman family of titles since the departure of Mort Weisinger, was told that the character was being restarted. As a result, Julie attempted to get Jerry Siegel to write what Julie considered 'The Last Superman Story', and when that fell through, he tapped Alan Moore (or was tapped by Alan, in a rare display of fervor consisting of the words if you get anyone else to write that story I'll kill you) to write Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow. It's not my absolute favorite Superman story... that would be For the Man who has Everything... but it is an unmitigated masterpiece of silver age storytelling, and in a way, it wouldn't have happened without Crisis. Even to this day, it's been reprinted and honored as a classic.

I can't think of a single one of the John Byrne Superman stories I can say is a classic. While I have in the past slammed Byrne, in this case it isn't meant as one: his Man of Steel limited series is devoid of what I consider his usual stylistic hobbles, the odd over-dialogued pages, the boring layouts. It's a competently illustrated book. (I think it would have been better with Terry Austin inking instead of Dick Giordano, whose style doesn't seem to match as well with Byrne's, but that's a quibble and a highly subjective one at that.) But it's the first flowering of Byrne's obsessive need to reboot or relaunch a character, and as such, it's exhibit A in any case of DC not taking advantage of the opportunities given them by Crisis. And this one, at least, is as much Marv's fault as anyone else's, as he took part in the dismantling process during his tenure on the relaunched Adventures of Superman. It's pretty clear during Crisis itself that the Lex Luthor of the world that survived the Anti-Monitor's attack is in prison, is relatively young and trim, is bald, and even talks the same as the Luthor who appears before time is realigned. He's the Lex Luthor who alongside Brainiac took advantage of the Crisis to conquer (or almost conquer) three worlds. He's not a beefy, semi-balding businessman, he's not someone who had dedicated his life to ruining Superman without anyone being able to pin it on him (clearly the Luthor Batman visits in Crisis is unabashedly a criminal: he even claims that Batman is visiting him to give him a bad rep with the other prisoners) and so we end up with a situation where Crisis itself will be contradicted later, and used as the justification for its own contradiction. The danger in doing a series like Crisis is that since it is dedicated to revising the status quo, whatever it revises it to can be just as easily revised: in the name of continuity mongering, continuity itself is trampled underfoot.

Even that is forgivable if the story itself is worth it. Crisis itself, despite it doing things I object to, is (to my mind) an eminently readable comic book. (I'm aware not everyone shares my opinion here.) It's fun, fast-paced, covers a lot of ground and does it well. Unfortunately, the Superman reboot never really seemed to manage to bottle the lightning, so to speak, of the opportunity that Dick spoke of: compared to the Wonder Woman reboot, which was even more drastic continuity wise, the Superman relaunch is just kind of... there. Perez went back to the original conception of the character, worked in as much of it as he could while emphasizing a more dramatic presence for the Greek gods (his Ares is an exceptional redesign which does a lot to impart menace to the character and makes Wonder Woman's struggle against him worthwhile) and Greek mythology: it's not the silly origins of Wonder Woman's lasso/invisible plane/tiara/boots stuff, but it does connect the character to something important and profound, a mission to man's world to help stop Ares' plans now and in the future. It's a good example of positive mythmaking in a comic, and its the absolute opposite of what Byrne does in his revamp, which is to kill as much of the Superman mythology as he can. It's no longer a loss for Superman to be the last survivor of doomed Krypton: the planet is now revealed to be a cold, sterile wasteland that no one would want to return to, a planet where personal contact doesn't happen and the greatest mind of his generation doesn't do anything, instead of being the inventor of the Phantom Zone and great discoverer of antigravity. Byrne's Luthor is petty and small, a smug little man who can't handle a moment of humiliation and decides to exact an equally small, petty revenge for it, a man who pays other people to make inventions for him. The Luthor who preceded him was an eccentric genius who went from seeking to humiliate Superboy by exceeding him into a frustrated criminal madman so intelligent he invented a time machine as an aside between his schemes to hide out, who could decipher alien technology and improve it. Similarly, Byrne's Krypton is an empty, pallid reflection of the Weisinger/Schwartz planet, a world with hundreds of thousands of years of grand history and exotic flora and fauna, a lush, seething, grandiose world it would be a shame to lose. Superman wouldn't, and didn't, miss Krypton in Byrne's conception of it... he didn't even know about it until he was an adult. I can't fault everything the man did... I'm an established fan of his decision to have Jonathan and Martha Kent live into adulthood... but I believe that to have been necessary because of the next consequence of the reboot.

The Death of the Legion
In the early 80's, DC had two unequivocal hits, two comics so popular that they were given Baxter format series: The New Teen Titans and The Legion of Super Heroes. It's clear from reading the last issue of Crisis that the Legion were intended to have survived it intact. It's also clear that once John Byrne decided to reboot Superman's continuity drastically, that was no longer possible.

When the Legion first appeared in Adventure, they did so in a Superboy story: three super-teenagers come back to the 20th century and put Superboy through super-tasks to join their club for super-teens in the future. There's a twist on the story... you can find it reprinted, and I won't spoil it in case you choose to... but in the end Superboy joins the Legion. A great many stories, some of the good and some of them not so good, followed this meeting (and you've seen a lot of posts on the Legion here on the Howling Curmudgeons lately in the wake of Mark Waid's reboot... one of many... and a lot of discussion I don't want to rehash) and up until Crisis, the Legion was on a creative upswing. Superboy had just rejoined the team after a confusing Reflecto storyline involving the 'death' of Ultra Boy, the Great Darkness Saga had just provided some excellent storytelling, it was looking like a great time for the Legion.

Then Man of Steel was published. Suddenly, DC was saying there was no Superboy for the Legion to have gone back in time to invite into the team in the first place. Quickly Paul Levitz and John Byrne whipped up a story involving the Time Trapper and a pocket universe where the Superboy of the past thirty-plus years resided, with all the trappings of the silver age... multiple colors of Kryptonite, a phantom zone, Krypto the Superdog... and said Superboy was said to have always been the one who appeared in all those classic Legion stories. He was then summarily executed, and John Byrne moved to eliminate the silver-age pocket universe he existed in (or at least the Earth within it) as well as giving us a Superman who kills people. And so the door was shut on Superboy's adventures with the Legion.

The next ten years were an exercise in reboot after reboot. Rather than 'neatening up' the DC universe, Crisis and the Superman reboot served to utterly muddle the origin and history of the Legion. Where did Mon-El come from, if not an astronaut given directions by Jor-El and placed into the Phantom Zone by Superboy after a toxic lead exposure? Was Mon-El from the Pocket Universe, too? A new origin was created. What about Dev-Em, the Kryptonian delinquent who came to the future and became a member of the Inter-Stellar Espionage Corps? Now he was a Daxamite maniac? Soon, the rebooting itself damaged the continuity established that forced the reboot in the first place... if Blok and the second Invisible Kid didn't exist, who were those two Legionnaires that Byrne's rebooted Superman met? Why did we even establish the existence of the Pocket Universe since by now the Legion makes no reference to it? Superman in the current comic books has met the Legion more times that it's met him, with members who don't even exist anymore. And all of this comes from the pulling of that first pin out of its history, the Superboy connection. I've argued before that the real reason for the Legion in the first place was to provide a 'place' where he could be a Superboy, a canvas big enough for him to stretch his legs alongside peers in a setting that would provide him with challenges and peers, which served to help inform us as to his later personality and to show us exactly how important he was going to become: the reflected glory of his presence in Legion stories, the way everyone from Cosmic Boy to Wildfire couldn't help but respond to the idea that this is Superboy in their midst, the way even ostensibly more powerful members like Mon-El (and by the way, I never bought that for a second: watching Dev-Em take on twenty Daxamites at once convinced me that Superboy could take Mon-El, and it's damn certain that Mon-El/M'Onel/Valor was never the equal in terms of presence to the big blue boy scout, who could throw the balance of a fight back over just by showing up) never could affect their fellows. But if that were all it was, then the Legion could well have survived the loss of Superboy a lot more gracefully than they did.

The real heart of the Legion was its connection to the modern comics: that it was the future of the DC universe. The result of the rebooting of DC from Crisis forward was felt then, in tangles of contradictory backstory that needed to be ironed out. But what was a few annoying hitches and shifts in the comics set in the modern day became magnified exponentially as it 'travelled forward', so to speak, into the future. The death and rebirth and redeath of the Green Lantern Corps, the loss and return of the phantom zone, the continuous revising of how time-travel functions... each of these changes and more besides served as an editorial axe aimed at the base of the Legion's very storytelling tree, the trunk they were a branch off of. In order to continue, they had to consign more and more of their previous adventures to the ash-heap of that never happened, leaving them with little choice but to reboot and retell those stories instead of telling new ones. Did anyone wonder what Monstress would bring to a Mordru story? Did we need to see the Fatal Five created again? Did Final Night make a better Sun-Eater story than the original one? Whether you loved or hated the original Legion stories, it seems almost incontrovertible that for a comic book to spend so much of its time trying to go back and make sense of its past, it cannot focus effectively on doing anything new... and that's a slow death by strangulation. Crisis could have brought Legion into even more prominence, handled correctly... with the loss of Supergirl a chance to do some emotional storytelling was present, as well as one of the classic we can't let Superboy know about this storylines that popped up from time to time, maybe even a story where Brainiac 5 has to deal with the loss of what he never actually got to have... but instead, it was all swept away with the revisions.

An Animal, Man
Grant Morrison's runs on Doom Patrol and Animal Man shine as glorious examples of what someone could do with classic silver age characters post Crisis. Doom Patrol itself takes the original Drake conception of the team and runs beautifully with it, creating a comic book that's entirely unlike anything that went before it without the need for a hard reboot or a massive revision. Morrison took the original conception of the team - freaks and outcasts banded together for support as well as to help others - and cranked it up into a near-dada explosion of unusual characters and situations without ever once invalidating what others had done with the book before him, and in Animal Man Morrison played around with the idea of this is all a comic book in ways no character, not even Ambush Bug, had ever managed to. He also dealt intelligently with the fallout from the revision of reality in Crisis, using Psycho-Pirate's stated memories from the end of the series to good effect. Paradoxically, this makes him one of the few writers to have gotten the point of Crisis, which is not that it was a free pass to revise everything and anything, but rather that it was a fresh start to help make sense out of what had gone before. (It's possible Crisis was self-defeating from its conception... lord knows, I think it has a paradox at the heart of it between its desire to be the big superhero crossover with all the characters and trimmings and its intention to slice away much of said characters and trimmings... but Morrison seems to have been the only one even trying to make use of it afterwards as more than an excuse for shoveling old stories in the coal furnace.) I still remember the death of Buddy's family and Morrison's author's admission that he did it 'because he was out of ideas' as a stunning indictment of authors in superhero comics who kill off characters too quickly: it's colored my outlook ever since. While it may seem strange, may even be strange, to list comics that were in many ways critical of the post-Crisis mindset as examples of the opportunities missed or hit in the wake of Crisis, it's still a fact that they wouldn't have happened without Crisis, especially not Animal Man: in many ways it was his appearances with the Forgotten Heroes alongside Brainiac that helped establish the character as one who could anchor a series, and Grant's whole run on the comic was in part a reaction to the event. As for the Doom Patrol: well, it was an excellent comic and Kupperberg and Lightle probably wouldn't have gotten to relaunch it without Crisis, and in many ways the pre-and-post Grant runs on the book (including a crossover with Byrne's Superman that was an exercise in brute tedium and cross-character continuty with the new Metallo that simply failed to entertain on any level) are examples on how not to get how to relaunch a book, and a contrasting look, see how you don't need to trash what came before to make something new statement that many of the editorial teams on other books at the time could have learned from. Grant's take on Doom Patrol was far more exotic and strange than Byrne's recent run could hope to be, and yet, it didn't invalidate the origins of any of the characters spun off from the original Arnold Drake stories like Mento or Changeling/Beast Boy, proving that great comic book writing doesn't mean throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Two highly-recommended stories that come straight out of the Crisis.

The Batman effect
In some ways, Batman got off easy. Perhaps that's because before Crisis, Batman was one of the few of the big DC heroes to have never met his Earth-Two analogue: the closest he came was a team-up with the Batwoman and Robin of Earth-Two after his counterpart had died, and a couple of interesting stories where he had run-ins with the Huntress, an Earth-Two character who was the daughter of Bruce Wayne and Selina Kyle. However, that's not to say that Batman didn't suffer a few bumps on the road from the revamp-happy writers and editors at DC after the Crisis. One of those bumps was an excellent storyline, mind you... Miller and Mazucchelli's very worthwhile Batman: Year One (I like it a lot more than The Dark Knight Returns, actually) that restated Batman's origin and showed us a dark, gritty Gotham City that worked very well in a pulp/noir vibe. And I love its portrayal of Jim Gordon) which, at the same time that it's a worthwhile story adds some elements that make you question it a touch: does Jim Gordon actually know who Batman is? Still, a good story is worth a lot.

It did lead to a general sweeping under the rug of a great big chunk of the published Batman stories, however, and a general insistence on 'Batman is a loner' that has to some degree continued to the present day even after it looked like Grant Morrison had finally put a stake in it. Both Batman and Superman (and Wonder Woman, since she was said to have never existed) were taken out of the original line-up of the Justice League, all those old Batman/Superman team ups were invalidated, and the relationship between the two characters was summed up by Byrne in his Man of Steel as one of wary hostility and grudging respect. (Granted, it was at least a clever device on Batman's part that kept Superman at bay in the storyline.) Even that, however, paled compared to what happened to Jason Todd.

Remember For The Man Who Has Everything? Published in 1985 during the end of the silver age Superman, it contains an appearance by Jason Todd as Robin. Moore, a master at taking the sum total of a character's appearances to day and using them effectively presents Wonder Woman as powerful and determined (and bearing an entire gemstone replica of the bottle-city of Kandor, being unaware that Superman has recently restored it), Batman as intelligent and cunning but a good friend to Superman (one willing to spend his fortune in the crafting of a unique rose in memorial of Superman's dead planet, a world at the time fit for mourning) and the Jason Todd Robin saves the day in the end by dropping the Black Mercy on Mongul. It's a portrayal of Jason Todd's Robin in line with all his pre-Crisis appearances as a young man striving to live up to the responsibility of being Batman's partner and doing a good job at it: anyone who's read the more recent Tim Drake Robin's appearances might well recognize it. Following Crisis, Jason Todd was reintroduced as the son of a petty criminal, a cocky, arrogant jerk who was eventually killed in a 'vote-in' event called A Death In The Family (a storyline that also serves to highlight how strange it is that Batman has never chosen to kill the Joker off... even as many people comment on how unlike Batman it is to stand laughing with the Joker in A Killing Joke, the fact that several years later Batman still hasn't at least hospitalized the man who killed his partner and so many others kind of boggles the mind) and it was an arbitrary editorial choice, brought on by the 'revised Batman' post Crisis that ultimately led to Jason's death. (A Death In The Family does feature an all-too-rare appearance of Jim Aparo drawing Superman... what's Jim doing now? Let's give him a series.) Still, for the most part, Batman's pretty unscathed post-Crisis, compared to our next contestant.

Emerald Dawn
Okay, I'm torn on this one myself. I love Green Lantern, and I like a lot of this series, with Hal going to Oa, training under Kilowog, fighting an alien menace and proving himself a suitable replacement for Abin Sur. But it succumbs to the urge to change a character, make him 'relatable' to a modern audience by introducing flaws that are incompatible with the original conception of the character.

Making Hal Jordan a cocky drunk does not make sense.

You can argue back and forth about giving a character flaws to make him more relatable or give him or her something to strive against and overcome. In many cases, this is certainly understandable (some of my favorite novels have such characters, like Tim Powers' The Anubis Gates or William Golding's Darkness Visible) but in the case of Hal Jordan, a little goes a long way. This is a character whose original origin didn't take a whole lot of time to present: test pilot in flight simulator is selected by dying alien to be the bearer of one of the most powerful weapons in the cosmos, a power ring that can respond to the wearer's willpower and do almost anything he can think of. It's a hard character to always write: some of the stories weren't very good at all, admittedly. But the ultimate core of the character, a fearless, strong-willed champion of a sector of the cosmos, one of 3600 of the finest the universe has to offer, is in the right hands one of the most powerful character concepts DC comics had. Making Earth's representative a cocky drunk... even a recovering cocky drunk... is taking the idea of a flawed hero and taking it too far: it was a death-blow to the character who once willingly turned himself over to the Manhunter robots because he thought he'd done the wrong thing, who would resign his power ring rather than act against his conscience, who allowed himself to be exiled from Earth by the Guardians because he was spending too much time neglecting his space sector. If Hal Jordan had a character flaw, it wasn't arrogance or alcoholism, it was fearlessness and a willingness to do what was right over what was good for him.

Emerald Dawn and its sequel, Emerald Dawn II (which I like reading to this day: I love the portrayal of Sinestro in the second, and the idea that Hal, even as he saw Sinestro going off the track as his trainer, still tried to stay loyal to him: it made their later rivalry even more interesting) aren't bad stories, but they mishandle Hal to the point where, years later, it seemed reasonable to the editorial staff at DC comics to have Hal Jordan kill individual Green Lanterns in combat, break Sinestro's neck, and walk into the power battery to usurp the power of the Guardians in an attempt to recreate Coast City, even though it meant the deaths of countless Green Lanterns on patrol in space at that time and the disbanding of a fellowship Jordan himself had fought numerous times to save: this is the same man who once willingly offered himself up in expiation of a crime he ultimately didn't even commit? This is the action of the man who fought against Krona the mad guardian and a spirit of death itself and was offered the position of head of the entire GL corps, a position above even that of the honor guard, second only to the guardians themselves? Never mind what incompetent ninnies this group of immortals ends up looking like having selected not only Sinestro but Jordan himself... one turncoat in billions of years is understandable, but two right on top of each other? I'm not a zealot calling out for Jordan's return to the Corps... personally, I'd leave him dead by this point, and leave Kyle as a Green Lantern either way, after all, there are supposed to be 3600 of them. Two or three from Earth seems acceptable since this is supposed to be an important planet with all the superheroes and that excreable Millennium series and all that. It's this fundamental disconnect between the years upon years of DC history fostered by the scourge of revamping series for the sake of revamping them that's the problem here: having Hal Jordan become a merciless killer is as out of character as having Superman begin punting bassinets across the horizon.

Ooh, baby, baby it's a Hawkworld
Forget it. I'm not even going to freaking try and work this mess out. Geoff Johns was completely justified in scraping the silver age Hawkman aside and going back to the golden age conception of a reincarnating Egyptian with wings and archaic weapons, and the fact that he retained the silver age Thanagarian stuff at all (by postulating that the ninth metal in the golden age Hawkman's harness is from said planet, a psychoactive metal that helps one fly and helps one reincarnate) is a nice workaround of the ultimate in continuity nightmares. I don't blame Tim Truman's Hawkworld for this mess: it could well have served as an origin for Hawkman if they'd just said it happened before the current day and kept presenting Hawkman as we had come to know him, as he'd appeared as late as 1987 in an issue of Action Comics. There was no reason at all to hard-reboot Hawkman, but even then, things could have been okay: it was the combination of the total revamp of Hawkman and Thanagar and then the decision to argue that, like Wonder Woman, Hawkman had never appeared in a DC comic up until the first issue of his new continuing series that served up a gigantic continuity nightmare. And it was entirely avoidable: another example of something taking the opportunity afforded them by Crisis and not making good use of it at all.

Okay, we're thousands of words in now: we could be thousands more. I haven't really even talked about Zero Hour, mainly because I really can't bear to: it is in many ways the ultimate manifestation of DC's then-policy of baby and bathwater flinging, and worse, it wasn't even a halfway-decent story. The less said about it (although I will mention it again in this essay, God help me) the better. The continuity revision aspect of Crisis has been seen to have positive effects (Perez' Wonder Woman revamp, Grant Morrison's Animal Man and Doom Patrol) and negative effects, many of which have already been listed in exhaustive detail. Some of the stories were good, with bad effects (Emerald Dawn and Hawkworld) that were purely editorial miscues, while others were fundamental mistakes in execution for stories that didn't require the effort in the first place: why cause good stories like For The Man Who Has Everything into the closet in favor of stories that end up having their own effect on future issues disregarded later in an endless cascade of revisionism? Part of this is a mindset that has managed to propagate itself into the DC editorial offices to this day... dear God, can anyone explain why we should be hard-rebooting Doom Patrol? I'd like to know... and part of it is an understandable drive to try and make characters more 'realistic' or 'relevant' even if it means sweeping previous creators and their work under the rug. I pointed out Doom Patrol under Grant Morrison exactly because it shows how strong a story, and how new and relevant it can be, you can make without a wholesale abandonment of what's gone before: Drake's run on Doom Patrol informed Grant's without controlling it. Such can be done with any comic, and I think it was at least in part one of the aspects of Wolfman's approach on Crisis that was the most ignored. The series wasn't meant to be a hammer taken to everything that went before, but rather a starting point for a streamlining... unfortunately, such a policy requires a strict editorial policy that no one at DC was prepared to enforce, and creators willing to embrace the glorious chaos of a storied 40 year history that had all been combined on one Earth for the first time ever. It's been pointed out before how much storytelling charge could have been created by the Justice Society directly inspiring those that came after them, especially considering how Roy Thomas' work on All-Star Squadron and Infinity Inc. to create a sense of legacy for those great golden age characters was being tossed aside: the least DC could have done was taken the opportunity presented here to set up connections between the JSA and JLA, used the history they now had settled on one world.

Instead, we got wave after wave of revisionism and a policy of disregard that led us to Len Strazewski's Justice Society of Old Grumps followed up by Zero Hour and the annihilation of much of the Justice Society for no good reason. While I'm not a gigantic fan of the current JSA series, I believe it at least has its heart in the right place, and follows up well from the Starman series in that it at least respects the characters it draws on, even if those characters are revealed to be flawed in places: it's not the idea of a flawed hero I object to as much as the idea of wantonly disregarding what came before instead of making the attempt to make history work for you. In a shared universe with the work of dozens of creative teams combined in the fashion that DC had, Starman has been one of the few to get that it's a strength to fall back upon, not a weakness. I guess that would put Starman into the seizing the opportunities camp as well. There are probably a lot more examples on both sides, and one of the great things about a weblog is, there's a comment feature for y'all to discuss them.

In the end, my ultimate take on the fallout of Crisis on Infinite Earths is as follows: it was intended to prune away the DC multiverse and create a unified single universe with all the strengths of DC's classic golden age, its silver age renaissance and so strengthened, to provide a launching pad for new stories to be created. In some cases (Starman, Animal Man) it did just that. In a great many others, it was taken instead as license to disregard what had gone before or twist it entirely out of shape in the name of revamping it, in what I believe to be a mistaken idea of what Marv had intended Crisis to do in the first place. Some of the blame for this has to fall on Crisis itself, however: while new creators and editors may have taken the revision too far, they were encouraged to do so by what Crisis itself had set out to do. If they took the sweeping of the past too far, it may have been inevitable considering they'd just seen icons die or been relegated to the trash in the name of consistency. It may be ironic that such an obsession with a consistent, unified continuity created more contradictions than it ultimately fixed, or it may be exactly what we should expect when loose threads are pulled on considering how elaborate the tapestry was in the first place.

I mentioned during my discussion of the Legion that the greatest strength of that book was its relation to the 'history' of the DC universe that went before it. Perhaps that's why it and the JSA were the hardest hit by Crisis. Books with an inborn need to respect the history of the setting may be the most devastated by the desire to ignore it, because when the tapestry starts to unravel, they're the ones with the most obvious threads to pop out. Perhaps not. Either way, I think that as DC grows to appreciate what it has, those books can recover (or maybe even already have, in the case of JSA, even though it's not a book I personally enjoy) and I have high hopes for DC, 20 years after Crisis, starting to take advantage of what went before.

Posted by Matt Rossi at October 5, 2004 7:45 PM | TrackBack