"Crisis On Infinite Earths" at 30

[Lord of Narrative]

While Crisis On Infinite Earths was a great series I feel it fixed things that didn't need to be fixed.
I started reading Marvel books around 1975 and DC around 1979. As a kid I never had any trouble understanding the DC Universe.
I kind of liked it. Sure Superman and Wonder Woman need some work but they could have been fixed without a "Crisis" event.

No. The wholesale changes to Superman and Wonder Woman's mythos were absolutely necessary and completely unfeasible if saddled with the old continuity.

[Jim Kelly]

From experience, there are always going to be things you can't figure out right away and them's just the breaks. But within months of picking up super-hero comics, when I was seven, I just accepted that was going to be the case.

You always think that they could make things better, clear things up. But that's naive. As you go along, you come to realize that the screwed up stuff allows the good stuff to happen. The B&B issues with Batman and Wildcat were great. They made no sense in continuity. But what the hell.

The proof is in the pudding. After Crisis, I was probably scatching my head more than before Crisis. It seems like every month there was some screwy thing that made no sense with what had gone before. It might have been the intention to keep things straight, but no sooner was the ink dry on issue 12 then that plan went out the window.

Sure, it might seem like a great thing to have one universe where all the characters that existed in the multiverses before now exist cheek to cheek and meet up every month. But didn't happen either. Many characters were eliminated from continuity, others were put in limbo and still more were killed off. So this big jamboree of super-hero team-ups never happened.

What's more, it seems like editors became a lot more controlling after Crisis than before. I guess they never watched SESAME STREET. They never learned how to share their toys.

[Cipher]

The only thing that takes me out of it now is th ethought bubbles, they date any story they appear in, in my opinion.

As opposed to ... what? Mologue boxes, which are functionally similar but allow writers to smatter the page with narration that couldn't possibly be intended for anyone in-universe? Of the two formats, thought bubbles are infinitely more tolerable and much more difficult to abuse.

Anyway, here's a thing: I've never read COIE. Is it worth doing so strictly from a storytelling standpoint? It always seemed like something revered for its history, but not a big draw for its narrative.

[Jim Kelly]

Don't get me started on thought bubbles. If they were good enough for Ludwig Wittgenstein, then they should be good enough for comics. But I'd bet, if thought balloons became a common device in comics again, we soon wouldn't notice them. Things only seem conspicuous because we aren't used to them

There were a lot of weird things in foreign language art movies that threw people for a loop that were normalized when they were used in regular movies and TV shows. Things like jump cuts, 360 pans, switching from colour to B&W and back, extreme close ups and tilt shots. It's what you're used to. The BATMAN TV show, believe it or not, went a long way to make the techniques of the Nouvelle Vague part of the normal visual language.

[True Herald]

Sure, it might seem like a great thing to have one universe where all the characters that existed in the multiverses before now exist cheek to cheek and meet up every month. But didn't happen either. Many characters were eliminated from continuity, others were put in limbo and still more were killed off. So this big jamboree of super-hero team-ups never happened.

Why would they all need to team up EVERY month?? DC was still selling books concerning INDIVIDUAL characters and teams. They still wanted to sell "Superman" every month, not "Superman... and Everybody Else in the DCU!" And if the characters all teamed up every month, such meetings would stop being special.

[Jim Kelly]

Hyperbole.

[AJBopp]

Anyway, here's a thing: I've never read COIE. Is it worth doing so strictly from a storytelling standpoint? It always seemed like something revered for its history, but not a big draw for its narrative.

it was worth doing at the time. But they undid most of what it set out to accomplish so its relevance today is almost nil.

From that standpoint, it was not "game-changing." And it was never "clunky."

[Desh]

The only good thing about Crisis on Infinite Earths (aside from some of the things it set out to accomplish for the DC Universe), is George Perez's art. As a narrative, it is extremely crappy. When I first got into comics, I'd always hear about the legendary Crisis on Infinite Earths, and when I went to go read that massive, boring story, I was sorely disappointed. The Anti-Monitor is really close to being a mort. It's actually almost comical how, in one story, like, three or four of his plans fail, and he's just like, "Screw it, I'm just going to send all my Shadow Demons at you." Then when that doesn't work, "Screw, I'm just going to grow really big and fight you."

[Diamond]

It's an event that uses other characters aside from Superman and Batman. I respect that.

[AJBopp]

It's an event that uses other characters aside from Superman and Batman. I respect that.

I agree, though I thought the Teen Titans had a little too much visibility.

[Jim Kelly]

THE NEW TEEN TITANS was the most popular book at the time. Wolfman and Perez were the creative geniuses behind that. In fact, COIE took George away from TITANS. I feel like the stress of producing COIE wrecked both Marv and George. NEW TITANS was never quite the same after that.

As a story, COIE might not be much. For about fifteen years, we'd been getting these great wrap around covers and full page spreads by the likes of Neal Adams, Dave Cockrum and George Perez that showed a mulitude of characters in one scene--but getting an actual story like that was hard to obtain. COIE tried to deliver on that. So as pure engineering it's a marvel.

For someone who never had read the pre-COIE stories and wasn't used to all that continuity and all those characters--I would think that the book is a challenge. The story becomes almost immaterial, as every page requires a lot of research to identify what's what. Far from being decompressed--this is compressed story telling.

The last time I read it all the way through, it seemed to me that it's like Wolfman kept adding more pages to the script as the editorial decisions about the effect of the Crisis kept changing. So the last half of the series explores all the different solutions that were considered. And it doesn't even end there with issue 12. There's HISTORY OF THE DC UNIVERSE, by Wolfman and Perez, that came out after, which again tries to establish yet another continuity for the DCU. And that wasn't the final word on the subject. When the DC comics began to reboot their universe for reals, there was an even bolder newer order to the universe.

[colonyofcells]

I don't really remember any story after coie that featured almost all of the dc characters so coie is still quite unique.