When was the last time you felt "harmony" in the DC comics Universe?

[Adekis]

Vordan and SiegePerilous are right on the freaking money. DC was never totally consistent with everything in its place. Anyone saying as much for pre-Flashpoint or post-Crisis, is just ignoring crucial elements of how messy those periods were, or maybe just didn't notice at the time.

And who can blame people? If you don't care about Kara much, if you aren't paying attention to the fact that the Legion basically broke for a while without Superboy, then it might look to you like post-Crisis Superman is this perfectly constructed thing. But it really says more about what you va,value, as a reader, what you're willing to ignore, than it does about the comics themselves.

I don't mean this to sound like an indictment! I've done the same thing!

I felt pretty good during the New 52. There was a sense to me that Grant Morrison, on Action, was bringing back something Superman had lost, from before the Crisis, something from the Golden and Bronze Ages, and there were no major retcons I was aware of for five solid years. I really enjoyed Azzarello on Wonder Woman, for his treatment of Diana as a character and the Greek Gods as concepts. I thought it was cool that Red Hood had a series. Bunker was a great new Teen Titan. My roommate loved him. Yet I also knew something was rotten in Denmark, with the compressed Bat-Timeline, the Savage Amazons, the Question who was some kind of magic being instead of Vic Sage or Renée Montoya, the always angry Supergirl, the disrupted Batman and Green Lanterns arcs. I just kind of ignored it because I was having fun. I knew it was very flawed though.

The only time I really and truly thought there was harmony in the DCU, I was just too young to know about retcons. I recall reading comics by the stack in my grandmother's basement, before I ever heard of the Crisis on Infinite Earths, and the Silver Age Superman seemed the exact same guy as the one from the 90s. It was my ignorance that allowed me to think Superboy would grow up into Superman, marry Lois, be cloned, and the new clone Superboy would move to Hawaii. When that Superboy got into a fight with Supergirl, it was my ignorance that allowed me to think she was Kara. It was ignorance that let me think Jay Garrick was still the Flash of Earth 2 after Wally took over for Barry, or that Batman and Hulk lived in the same world all the time. You get the idea, haha!

[godisawesome]

Vordan and SiegePerilous are right on the freaking money. DC was never totally consistent with everything in its place. Anyone saying as much for pre-Flashpoint or post-Crisis, is just ignoring crucial elements of how messy those periods were, or maybe just didn't notice at the time.

And who can blame people? If you don't care about Kara much, if you aren't paying attention to the fact that the Legion basically broke for a while without Superboy, then it might look to you like post-Crisis Superman is this perfectly constructed thing. But it really says more about what you va,value, as a reader, what you're willing to ignore, than it does about the comics themselves.

I don't mean this to sound like an indictment! I've done the same thing!

I felt pretty good during the New 52. There was a sense to me that Grant Morrison, on Action, was bringing back something Superman had lost, from before the Crisis, something from the Golden and Bronze Ages, and there were no major retcons I was aware of for five solid years. I really enjoyed Azzarello on Wonder Woman, for his treatment of Diana as a character and the Greek Gods as concepts. I thought it was cool that Red Hood had a series. Bunker was a great new Teen Titan. My roommate loved him. Yet I also knew something was rotten in Denmark, with the compressed Bat-Timeline, the Savage Amazons, the Question who was some kind of magic being instead of Vic Sage or Renée Montoya, the always angry Supergirl, the disrupted Batman and Green Lanterns arcs. I just kind of ignored it because I was having fun. I knew it was very flawed though.

The only time I really and truly thought there was harmony in the DCU, I was just too young to know about retcons. I recall reading comics by the stack in my grandmother's basement, before I ever heard of the Crisis on Infinite Earths, and the Silver Age Superman seemed the exact same guy as the one from the 90s. It was my ignorance that allowed me to think Superboy would grow up into Superman, marry Lois, be cloned, and the new clone Superboy would move to Hawaii. When that Superboy got into a fight with Supergirl, it was my ignorance that allowed me to think she was Kara. It was ignorance that let me think Jay Garrick was still the Flash of Earth 2 after Wally took over for Barry, or that Batman and Hulk lived in the same world all the time. You get the idea, haha!

I’m with you, even though I’m generally a Post-Crisis fan and Anti-New 52 critic.

Pretty much from the second that DC started trying to care about complicated continuity, there were little areas where someone could justifiably feel that a character they liked was getting neglected; even the multiple Earths idea could do that. And a weird side effect of trying to combine things into one world with COIE was that you introduced a different status quo separate from the previous question entirely - as a Millennial, I always feel likes it weird to not have a JSA precede the JLA, so while I get why fans of the Golden Age heroes wanting them to get equal treatment without being overshadowed by their successors, I also feel like I’m missing out on stuff I like from having the OG Green Lantern and Flash hang out with “my” generation” of characters.

I’d say the only real way you can make this argument is if there’s a specific time where all or most of the characters you yourself care about are in a good situation. Usually, nostalgia will play a big role in that, but not always - trying to find a time where I am most satisfied with the “Big 7” is very difficult for me, because I feel like Batman and Green Lantern’s Pre-Flashpoint Renaissances are perfection... but Superman was going through Grounded after Johns’s first attempt to revamp him fell through, and Wonder Woman was mid-failed-reboot as well, while the Flash books saw better days around the time of Blitz and Ignition, but those don’t really align with the best time for the youngest generation of heroes with PAD in Young Justice, and I feel like Superman’s last real time at something like equilibrium was around Worlds at War and the Polkistani Zod, of all things

[Agent Z]

This is like saying that resurrecting Bruce or Clark is DC favoring Silver Age nostalgia. Oliver is almost as old as Batman and Superman, golden age characters, and as far as I can tell, Connor Hawke wasn't setting the world on fire the way Wally and Kyle arguably did.

Neither was Oliver.

[Jabare]

Pre-Flashpoint

[Buried Alien]

The 1970s?

I'll second that. Maybe as late as 1983. The first big ripple was Dick Grayson moving on from Robin to Nightwing. You could make a strong argument for 1979, though, when both Iris West Allen and Aquaman and Mera's son perished violently.

Buried Alien (The Fastest Post Alive!)

[Bored at 3:00AM]

There's never been a time in which I was completely happy with the state of the DCU, but there have certainly been times that I think were stronger than others. I think DC was really on a roll in the mid to late 80s, but I think a lot of characters and concepts got the shaft due to the unnecessarily drastic changes to continuity. I also loved the comics that were getting produced in the early 2000s to 2011, but there was also an undercurrent of pandering to the worst elements of fandom in regards to the rape, maiming and murder of characters that always felts completely unnecessary.

So, I don't really think I have an answer here, but those two periods are probably my favorites.

[Flash Gordon]

There's never been a time when, across the entire publishing line, there was total consistency. That's what makes comics great, things appeal to different people and audiences. Diversity in material.

Outside of right now, where only 15 Batman books and 6 Superman books are being published, there's always been something interesting waiting to be discovered!

[tib2d2]

I'd say from 98 to 03.

But of course, it was not 100% flowers either, just more cohesive than average.

The 98-03 span intrigues me as well. I think this 6 year span is free of major crossovers and events, and also major character/continuity changes.

I'm not familiar with the quality of writing during this span, or if it featured a good portion of the DC characters.

[BohemiaDrinker]

The 98-03 span intrigues me as well. I think this 6 year span is free of major crossovers and events, and also major character/continuity changes.

There were some. DC1000000 is from hat timespan, as is No Man's Land if I'm not mistaken. But they mostly added to the mythos, didn't "take" anything.

I'm not familiar with the quality of writing during this span, or if it featured a good portion of the DC characters.

Oh, the writing was great and everyone who was alive was there, for the most part.

[superduperman]

The pre-Crisis universe. It was basically the Marvel universe today. Subtle changes along the way not big reboots.

[SJNeal]

The 98-03 span intrigues me as well. I think this 6 year span is free of major crossovers and events, and also major character/continuity changes.

I'm not familiar with the quality of writing during this span, or if it featured a good portion of the DC characters.

How can you forget JLApe?!



Aside from that gem, we did have "Day of Judgement", which gave us Hal Jordan's resurrection as The Spectre, as well as "Our Worlds at War", which while rooted in the Superman books, effected several other properties substantially.

[Jon-El]

Two periods for me. I started reading in the mid 70’s. The Bronze Age / Silver Age definitely has a certain uniformity to me. They’re different in tone but silver age Superman feels like 70’s Superman. (Silver age Batman is in a pocket universe in my brain.) Pre Crisis the multiple Earth’s made sense, the Legion worked, and basically all titles felt “right” to me. I can still pull out 70’s JLA and feel like the stories flow and fit. That period is the definitive DC to me.

However , I felt the years following Crisis were equally strong. There was an energy and a focus. The period 1986 - to the mid 90’s is really good to me. I felt like the books were moving forward and not looking back to previous eras much. Then in the late 90’s, things seemed to lose focus. I felt writers were drawing more inspiration from older comics. I didn’t mind much but the energy following Crisis seemed to be fading. Felt like writers were trying to revive older concepts and create this hybrid DC Universe and characters lacked consistency.

[The Kid]

I think Bronze age and the first 10 years after Crisis were the best. DC choosing to haphazardly reincorporate pre-Crisis material is when things started getting messy. They should have pushed forward in this 'new continuity' of theirs instead of trying to mix and mash. I feel similarly about the New 52 which could have worked if they had planned it as well as post-Crisis was at the start

[tib2d2]

Another point for the post-crisis to zero hour era is for the sheer volume of titles and characters that were available. I think 1987 holds the record for most monthly titles being published. Although I'm not sure how well these titles were managed in a shared universe.

[Adekis]

I’m with you, even though I’m generally a Post-Crisis fan and Anti-New 52 critic.

Pretty much from the second that DC started trying to care about complicated continuity, there were little areas where someone could justifiably feel that a character they liked was getting neglected; even the multiple Earths idea could do that. And a weird side effect of trying to combine things into one world with COIE was that you introduced a different status quo separate from the previous question entirely - as a Millennial, I always feel likes it weird to not have a JSA precede the JLA, so while I get why fans of the Golden Age heroes wanting them to get equal treatment without being overshadowed by their successors, I also feel like I’m missing out on stuff I like from having the OG Green Lantern and Flash hang out with “my” generation” of characters.

I’d say the only real way you can make this argument is if there’s a specific time where all or most of the characters you yourself care about are in a good situation. Usually, nostalgia will play a big role in that, but not always - trying to find a time where I am most satisfied with the “Big 7” is very difficult for me, because I feel like Batman and Green Lantern’s Pre-Flashpoint Renaissances are perfection... but Superman was going through Grounded after Johns’s first attempt to revamp him fell through, and Wonder Woman was mid-failed-reboot as well, while the Flash books saw better days around the time of Blitz and Ignition, but those don’t really align with the best time for the youngest generation of heroes with PAD in Young Justice, and I feel like Superman’s last real time at something like equilibrium was around Worlds at War and the Polkistani Zod, of all things

Yeah, you get it. There's never a time of perfect equilibrium, there's just the times when certain characters you love are doing well - or even just that those characters are doing things you personally like.