What is Crisis on Infinite Earths Legacy

[HsssH]

Again, though, that had already been started back when DC first even introduced the multi-Earth concept so that they could treat the Silver Age Green Lantern and Flash as separate entities entirely from the Golden Age ones, but only do some minimal house cleaning with Batman and Superman.

I don't understand what you mean by this, they were treated as separate entities from their very first appearance. Earth-2 was introduced like 4-5 years after their debuts.

[married guy]

While it was published with good intentions, we know what the road to Hell is paved with.

Things have been compounded over the years as editorial realised the equation, reboot = $
(Sure, it's diminishing returns every time, but gotta flog that horse carcass)
Hence the 'reboot' every 5-10 years.

CoIE
Zero Hour
Infinite Crisis
Final Crisis
New 52
Dark Crisis

Wait another few years and DC will roll out another one.

[Triniking1234]

We shouldn't be blaming the effects of succeeding events on COIE just because the creative teams at those times looked to COIE for inspiration.

[SiegePerilous02]

It got rid of the good Superman and all of their lore and replaced them with a boring alternative. We now have a Superman that is more or less a "it all happened" composite with all of the best elements, but the road to get there was needlessly convoluted by post-COIE chucking all of his stuff and the awkward attempts by subsequent writers to bring that stuff back into a continuity that didn't mesh with most of it anymore

Fact of the matter is that COIE just makes a clear landmark event for the continuity inconsistencies that use it as an excuse, but the Silver Age transition has the same type of impact, just without the specific landmark event and instead a smaller series of stories carrying out the change.

That's what made the Silver Age creation of the multiverse a better landmark. Storylines weren't as complicated back then, and the Multiverse allowed them to preserve most of their content as it was published, with some necessary tweaks here and there in the subsequent years. The tweaks aren't as disrupting when they are spread out, but having one BIG landmark with the goal of altering continuity is inherently different and causes more confusion. Because by that point, DC continuity had gotten more dense than it was in the early Silver Age, and it accumulated plot points that no longer worked in the aftermath. Now they had backissues that no longer made any sense as something the modern stuff would have built off of. COIE is a snake that eats its own tail, it cleans up continuity by wiping out the Multiverse but created the need to refer back to the Multiverse to make any sense of the contradictions between back issues and modern ones.

[kingaliencracker]

Crisis on Infinite Earths itself will always be an all-time classic. No amount of watering down, sequels, or undoing will change the impact it had or the overall quality of the story. I think of it in terms of the Halloween movie series. No matter how many sequels or reboots they make, they'll never diminish the original as far as I'm concerned.

With that said, although I consider the period right after Crisis up until about 1993 to be the greatest period in DC's history, I can't say that COIE was necessary for DC to accomplish that. A lot of what they ultimately did could have been done with the previous continuity intact. I also think it was a monumental mistake for them to keep some things unchanged (such as the Legion and Titans) but jettison everything else. This created both small inconsistencies (such as Superman remembering meeting Superboy Prime), to glaring conflicts (such as Superboy's and Supergirl's place in the Legion and Donna Troy). It also indirectly rendered my favorite version of Hawkman unusable for several years.

[DrNewGod]

Having thought some more about it, I'd say CIoE's really legacy is two things:

• It addicted DC to immense crossover events, whether it made sense to include every character or not.
• It probably saved DC from being bought out on the cheap by Marvel

[GreyFox]

I'll agree to some others when I say the the 'continuity problems' were not caused by the Crisis, or even the reboots that followed.
•The Hawkman problem was caused by editor Mike Gold, when he insisted on treating the Hawkworld miniseries as 'current' in the followup monthly in 1990, knowing it would screw continuity.
• The convoluted storylines of the Five-Year-Later Period are what caused TPTP decide a Legion of Super-Heroes reboot was needed (and that worked out fine!).
• People just didn't like the JLI/JLE Power Girl compared to the older one. If she had been written better, the Atlantean origin could have worked.
• As for Donna Troy, it was John Byrne in Wonder Woman who discarded the 'Titan Seeds' origin almost a decade later, and made her origin confusing.

Zero Hour? I haven't seen anything to indicate it was planned to fix continuity problems at all. It was just a dramatic event, one of others (like the Death of Superman) intended to boost sales when there was heavy competition. The Legion reboot was added after it was conceived.

[Captain Britain of Earth 20]

A great read with a better ending.

[Captain Britain of Earth 20]

While it was published with good intentions, we know what the road to Hell is paved with.

Things have been compounded over the years as editorial realised the equation, reboot = $
(Sure, it's diminishing returns every time, but gotta flog that horse carcass)
Hence the 'reboot' every 5-10 years.

CoIE
Zero Hour
Infinite Crisis
Final Crisis
New 52
Dark Crisis

Wait another few years and DC will roll out another one.

Hoping the Secret Crisis with Marvel (which may happen) if Disney buys DC,Which by the way I hope never happens in any way shape or form because look what DC did to the Star wars & the Indiana Jones franchise!
JUST SAYING !

[SixSpeedSamurai]

Zero Hour? I haven't seen anything to indicate it was planned to fix continuity problems at all. It was just a dramatic event, one of others (like the Death of Superman) intended to boost sales when there was heavy competition. The Legion reboot was added after it was conceived.

I remember them talking about it fixing continuity issues pretty well at the time.

As someone who dislikes the multiverse, I like CoiE. Blame the editors for letting writers muck things up since. As many have stated, starting off with new number 1's would probably would have been better than what DC did after CoiE.

[krazijoe]

COIE was awe inspiring to 15 year old me back in 85. LOVED IT! And just like Nu52 it would have been better if the EIC had a backbone and a better plan.

[krazijoe]

Hoping the Secret Crisis with Marvel (which may happen) if Disney buys DC,Which by the way I hope never happens in any way shape or form because look what DC did to the Star wars & the Indiana Jones franchise!
JUST SAYING !

What??????

[wonder39]

Correct me if I’m wrong, but I thought it was the exact opposite: Hawkman and Hawkgirl showed up in the Giffen/DeMatteis Justice League (I just reread that arc last week!) more or less as their classic Silver Age selves, only for that to necessitate confusing retcons after Hawkworld rebooted the characters and made those appearances impossible to reconcile chronologically.

Like others have said, one of the biggest problems with the reboot was not committing to an across the board clean slate for everyone. I can see why they did it and I’m glad that they didn’t wipe everything, but choosing to keep some parts of the history while removing others didn’t really make things less confusing in the long run.

My take, is that graphic novels that should not have been main continuity ( or were not intended to be such) becoming so popular that the " elseworlds" continuities get forced onto the main continuity.

Was Hawkworld intended to be main post crisis continuity? Longbow Hunters? Kingdom Come? Yet all of those books ( negativity, imo) impacted the main post Crisis continuity.....

[Doctor Know]

My take, is that graphic novels that should not have been main continuity ( or were not intended to be such) becoming so popular that the " elseworlds" continuities get forced onto the main continuity.

Was Hawkworld intended to be main post crisis continuity? Longbow Hunters? Kingdom Come? Yet all of those books ( negativity, imo) impacted the main post Crisis continuity.....

Add The Killing Joke to the list. That book ruined Barbara for 3 generations. When it was always clearly a standalone story. TPTB at the time could've reintroduced Barbara as Batgirl any time they wanted Post-Crisis. But instead they decided to run with it and canonize TKJ and Barbara being paralyze in Ostrander's Suicide Squad run.

[Laser_Man]

It got rid of the good Superman and all of their lore and replaced them with a boring alternative.

People talk about pre-Crisis Superman in glowing terms yet the only pre-Crisis stories that are still remembered are all written by Alan Moore as standalone stuff. Even if we accept that Silver Age stuff was silly and we start from Bronze Age, how come Superman didn't have something on the level of 'The Joker's Five-Way Revenge', 'Night of the Stalker', 'The Demon Lives Again', 'Strange Apparitions'? Why was he still stuck just doing the same dance with random villain of the week in the exact type of stories for decades?

I looked at the Action Comics covers from early 1980s and it seemed like Superman was stagnant for 25 years starting from late 1950s. While Spider-Man, X-Men and Fantastic Four were having epic adventures in their comics, Superman was still relying on clickbait covers to sell issues. It was sad to see his stories being so basic and generic even in the early 1980s.

I think people just love the idea of pre-Crisis Superman but actually reading his stories is a slog.