Had continuity really become that problematic for DC by the time Crisis on Infinite Earths went to press?
A writer at Monkeys Fighting Robots speaks about the history of 1985's Crisis on Infinite Earths, DC's followup to Marvel's Secret Wars the previous year, and what led to the decision to write it up:
And are universe-wide crossovers really needed if you want to change or update something about an individual character? Of course not. Not even for a whole group. When Marvel originally did it, their assigned writers would work in certain details title-by-title, not acting like it took a whole crossover to "erase" previously established characteristics and story developments, whether good or bad, as DC did when they followed up Secret Wars with Crisis on Infinite Earths. And unlike DC, when Marvel first produced crossovers up to the turn of the century, some were sadly mediocre, but the saving grace is that unlike DC, Marvel's staff weren't producing all of theirs just for the sake of turning any particular character, select or otherwise, into a sacrificial lamb in the tomb out of some ludicrous notion that only killing certain characters or worse, turning them into villains, would convince the audience to take them seriously. Of course, as some may know, that definitely changed for the worse in 2004, when Marvel turned Scarlet Witch into more of a madwoman for the sake of it than she'd previously been written as in 1990, and in contrast to the Avengers West Coast story, which only lasted several months, the storyline from Avengers: Disassembed lasted for at least 8 years. Let us be clear. Such storylines, made worse as they were with House of M, were completely uncalled for, reek of contempt for the original creators, and were nothing more than cheap ways to shove specific characters to the curb. The same goes for DC's Identity Crisis, of course.
And no matter what I think of COIE, I'm not buying the whole notion that DC's continuity wasn't linked together as Marvel's was. Or that it couldn't have been sorted out individually and self-contained. Or that it couldn't have been done without dragging almost every ongoing title into the mess in a way I'd describe as a wheel hub with spokes. Besides, this item fails to acknowledge that if there was any character/title at the time that really suffered post-Crisis, it was Green Lantern, in more ways than one. Though it actually does acknowledge Marvel originally took a different approach:
But to say Marvel kept their history tidier definitely doesn't work now, years after Joe Quesada and Bill Jemas oversaw the derailing of continuity, and the above paragraph seems to allude to the post-2000 era, where some of the aforementioned changes were made, no longer to any avail. Why, to say a character's history could be rewritten to make them more interesting also falls flat, because that's not exactly the case with Mary Jane Watson in the Sins Past storyline from Spider-Man any more than it was with Gwen Stacy, and turning MJ into a new variation on Venom doesn't improve the situation either. As seen in the past decade, they certainly weren't trying seriously to make the characters more interesting so much as they were keeping on with woke publicity stunts, and even before that, the damage was done.
From what I can tell, when DC launched COIE, the whole idea was to merge Earth One and Two into a single universe, even though 2 or more parallel dimensions could work in retaining a self-contained setting for some of the casts. But jettisoning the multiverses is still nothing compared to trashing moral values, as seen since the turn of the century, and that's why their so-called attempts to streamline their universe eventually fell apart. Funny how they didn't take the same approach at the time with the Legion of Super-Heroes, simply because they were set several hundred years in the future, but they did eventually take steps that led to eroding what made the Legion work, including the elimination of Dawnstar from continuity, and retconning Bouncing Boy into a non-powered bit player post-Zero Hour.
I think it's a shame how these columnists continue sugarcoating the history of crossovers like COIE - and Secret Wars - without any objective questions asked as to whether crossovers are that necessary to clean up alleged continuity problems. The simple answere is, no, they are not. It's entirely possible to retcon/simplify these shared universes without resorting to company wide crossovers, and if a story is really needed where only so many heroes appear together, it can be done in a self-contained miniseries, without mandating every ongoing title be a part of the proceedings. Those points still continue to be ignored by apologists for company wide crossovers.
If there is one thing that will get fans of superhero comics talking and (most likely) arguing, it’s a big crossover event. Probably more than any other comic book run, a crossover event will divide a fandom and even entice non-fans to get in on the conversation. Unfortunately, a lot of the dialogue, especially in the internet age where anyone can post their thoughts online, comes from a negative place, often disparaging the story, criticising the character representation, and calling the publishers out for their blatant marketing ploy. However, the fact that the “event comic” exists at all is most likely a marketing ploy, mixed with a wider publishing decision, and it is this thought that shapes the event’s narrative and characters, not the decades of comics that came before it. The simple reason for this is that the publishers want to change something about the current direction of a particular comics series, or even their entire publishing line.Umm, the aforementioned writers/artists may not have concocted the stories all by themselves, but they were willing participants, and the whole notion Johns "loved" the cast of characters he was scripting is utterly phony, as he's proved since. And let us be clear about something. I don't know about back in the mid-80s, but today, crossovers really have become worse than a marketing ploy - they've become an act of desperation for short sales boosts that don't last long, and have really bored out the audiences since.
Do you think it was Jonathan Hickman’s idea to destroy the Marvel Multiverse and restart it? Was Mark Millar badgering the Marvel offices with his magnificent idea of forcing the superheroes to fight against each other? Did Geoff Johns and Andy Kubert hate the Flash so much they wanted him to run the multiverses to death? No. All of these, and most other event stories, were born out of publisher necessity or desire, and it was the creators who had to sell it to the readers.
And are universe-wide crossovers really needed if you want to change or update something about an individual character? Of course not. Not even for a whole group. When Marvel originally did it, their assigned writers would work in certain details title-by-title, not acting like it took a whole crossover to "erase" previously established characteristics and story developments, whether good or bad, as DC did when they followed up Secret Wars with Crisis on Infinite Earths. And unlike DC, when Marvel first produced crossovers up to the turn of the century, some were sadly mediocre, but the saving grace is that unlike DC, Marvel's staff weren't producing all of theirs just for the sake of turning any particular character, select or otherwise, into a sacrificial lamb in the tomb out of some ludicrous notion that only killing certain characters or worse, turning them into villains, would convince the audience to take them seriously. Of course, as some may know, that definitely changed for the worse in 2004, when Marvel turned Scarlet Witch into more of a madwoman for the sake of it than she'd previously been written as in 1990, and in contrast to the Avengers West Coast story, which only lasted several months, the storyline from Avengers: Disassembed lasted for at least 8 years. Let us be clear. Such storylines, made worse as they were with House of M, were completely uncalled for, reek of contempt for the original creators, and were nothing more than cheap ways to shove specific characters to the curb. The same goes for DC's Identity Crisis, of course.
But before we start piling all of the blame on the publishers, let’s not forget that it was the fans, and the creators who grew up reading superhero comics, that necessitated the first in-world shake up event: Crisis on Infinite Earths. The story goes that in 1981 Marv Wolfman received a letter from a fan asking why a character did not recognise Green Lantern in a comic that he had edited, even though the characters had met before. Wolfman did not have an answer, but it did raise the issues of a) why he didn’t know, and b) why there was no way for him to check this information. After several decades of ongoing comic titles, continuity was becoming a problem, especially at DC, who hadn’t really linked their comics into a shared universe in the same way as Marvel. Benjamin Woo has noted that “Comics were not only sequestered from the media choices readily available to most people but also increasingly incomprehensible to anyone uninitiated into the culture of fandom” (1). This situation had occurred because of the changing comic book landscape in North America from the 1950s to the 1980s. Publishing had changed, distribution had changed, and fandom had changed.Oh, good grief. If this really occurred, then pretty strange Wolfman didn't have the courage to just acknowledge he made a mistake, or wasn't aware of a certain continuity development. I think something similar happened with Fantastic Four in the late 70s-early 80s in regards to whether Sue Storm had seen Dr. Doom's face behind the armor mask. But nobody made a big deal out of a continuity error that really is petty, especially when you consider what kind of horrors have taken place since the turn of the century in both major superhero universes.
And no matter what I think of COIE, I'm not buying the whole notion that DC's continuity wasn't linked together as Marvel's was. Or that it couldn't have been sorted out individually and self-contained. Or that it couldn't have been done without dragging almost every ongoing title into the mess in a way I'd describe as a wheel hub with spokes. Besides, this item fails to acknowledge that if there was any character/title at the time that really suffered post-Crisis, it was Green Lantern, in more ways than one. Though it actually does acknowledge Marvel originally took a different approach:
In comparison, Marvel were less obvious with their clean ups than DC. Almost from the beginning, Marvel promoted the shared universe idea and seemed to keep a better in-house record of their history. However, this does not mean they did not make changes, even if a number of these were subtle, or relating to only one family of titles. Every time The Punisher‘s origin story was told, small changes would be made to make the story fit the era in which it was published. For example, the Vietnam War became the war in Afghanistan, and then finally an all-encompassing, unnamed war. Characters would have their histories rewritten, in story, so that they could return from the dead, or just become more interesting characters. See the Hobgoblin saga in the Spider-Man comics for an example of this, as that character’s real identity was revealed several times, each time rewriting the previous reveal.This also alludes to another repellent mistake DC made: up to a point, they were far more adamant about keeping certain characters in the grave after killing them off, or worse, turned them into criminals in the worst ways possible, as seen with Jean Loring circa Identity Crisis. They did eventually seem to finally back off of these status quos in the past several years, but the damage was done, and we're still shaking off its effects. All because DC - and Marvel - are so utterly desperate to remain relevant, yet vehemently refuse to convincingly deal with the kind of issues that came up post-September 11, 2001.
But to say Marvel kept their history tidier definitely doesn't work now, years after Joe Quesada and Bill Jemas oversaw the derailing of continuity, and the above paragraph seems to allude to the post-2000 era, where some of the aforementioned changes were made, no longer to any avail. Why, to say a character's history could be rewritten to make them more interesting also falls flat, because that's not exactly the case with Mary Jane Watson in the Sins Past storyline from Spider-Man any more than it was with Gwen Stacy, and turning MJ into a new variation on Venom doesn't improve the situation either. As seen in the past decade, they certainly weren't trying seriously to make the characters more interesting so much as they were keeping on with woke publicity stunts, and even before that, the damage was done.
From what I can tell, when DC launched COIE, the whole idea was to merge Earth One and Two into a single universe, even though 2 or more parallel dimensions could work in retaining a self-contained setting for some of the casts. But jettisoning the multiverses is still nothing compared to trashing moral values, as seen since the turn of the century, and that's why their so-called attempts to streamline their universe eventually fell apart. Funny how they didn't take the same approach at the time with the Legion of Super-Heroes, simply because they were set several hundred years in the future, but they did eventually take steps that led to eroding what made the Legion work, including the elimination of Dawnstar from continuity, and retconning Bouncing Boy into a non-powered bit player post-Zero Hour.
I think it's a shame how these columnists continue sugarcoating the history of crossovers like COIE - and Secret Wars - without any objective questions asked as to whether crossovers are that necessary to clean up alleged continuity problems. The simple answere is, no, they are not. It's entirely possible to retcon/simplify these shared universes without resorting to company wide crossovers, and if a story is really needed where only so many heroes appear together, it can be done in a self-contained miniseries, without mandating every ongoing title be a part of the proceedings. Those points still continue to be ignored by apologists for company wide crossovers.
Labels: crossoverloading, dc comics, history, marvel comics, msm propaganda
Keeping track of continuity should be easy with Excel sheets dedicated to each character, keeping track of all appearances and highlighting significant events. One of the problems especially for Marvel, is their sliding time scale and the fact that the stories don't happen in real time. In the seminal issue of AMAZING SPIDER-MAN, Peter Parker graduates from college in ASM 25, published in 1965. It took him 157 issues to graduate high school in ASM 28 and start college in ASM 31, graduating in issue #185 in 1978, a period of fourteen years in publication time, but only about four years Marvel Time. Continuity slowed down in 1968, due to merchandising concerns, leading to the whole idea of "the illusion of change." Can't having characters changing too much, they have t- shirts, lunchboxes, action figures and movies to sell. Continuity started to break down with Ron Perelman's purchase of Marvel in 1989 because of too many titles being published, with the final nail in the coffin being continuity cop Mark Gruenwald's death in 1996.
As far as DC, the introduction of multiple earth's was the start of their continuity troubles with the debut of Barry Allen and relegating the JSA to an "Earth 2". This led to confusion, as there was no line of demarcation to indicate when the debuts of Earth One Batman and Superman actually began. Crisis SHOULD HAVE fixed continuity with a single cohesive history reestablished, but it was not well coordinated leading to even more discrepancies, Hawkman being the most egregious example. Zero Hour should have never been necessary a mere nine years after the publication of Crisis. Until you allow characters to age in real time, and make deaths permanent, you'll always have continuity problems.
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Joerizzo2025 |
9:58 AM