Quote Originally Posted by K. Jones View Post
I've got loads of love for the JSA being a previous generation of heroes existing on the Prime Earth. I'm actually less of a fan of the whole Earth-2 shift anyway, though I did still love those JLA/JSA Annual Crisis team-ups and like the legacy they established in the context of bigger cosmic crises. (Even if ultimately those were just sci-fi tropes meant to give us a reason to have "all these characters in one book on one page".

My issue for a long time has been servicing the whole World War II storyline with them when characters like Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman and Aquaman have easily moved on and been divorced from that timeframe. WWII was 80 years ago. Every few years, a crisis tries to find a different take on how to Captain America those guys into the present day. Time travel, stasis, cosmic rejuvenation forces, reincarnation. And then separately individual members of the JSA also kind of get that treatment. And it's even still happening, as Hawkman, Doctor Fate and Jay Garrick all get different reasons for escaping Manhattan's project even as the whole of the JSA itself gets a bigger treatment. And Johnny Thunder has to be in his Nineties, or maybe even 100 years old!

So much easier if they're just on the sliding timescale with everyone else, as the mystery men "lower key" heroes from ten or fifteen years prior to the Big Superhero Surge that began with Superman and culminated in the JLA.

And that doesn't mean you fully have to drop WWII from all of their backstories, as characters like Hawkman or Spectre or Doctor Fate have plenty of built-in story logic for how they could still have been involved with the fight against Super-Nazis.
Yeah, that's the thing with superhero comics. I could be mistaken, but from my understanding, the model for the longest time was that at some point the readership was supposed to move on and comics were supposed to latch onto a whole new generation of readers. Unfortunately, however, it seems as if each generation that follows is growing smaller and smaller and the Big 2 are doing everything they can to hold onto the readers that they have, some who started reading as far back as the ''60s or earlier and these guys want things to make sense when they were supposed to've stopped reading a long time ago .