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Underground > Comic Books >

Pre-Crisis

17:45 / 27.11.01

I was reading through my copy of The World's Funnest the other day when a friend from Montreal called. I had lent her a wide assortment of my favourite comics and now she's borderline addicted. She's less interested in the comics themselves and more interested in the odd, tangled 60 year narratives some of these titles can produce.

We started talking about World's Funnest and because of its use of abandoned DC characters I had to take a couple hours out to explain the intricacies of the pre Crisis continuity and the post Crisis continuity, why Crisis happened, how it failed, and basically the whole of DC comics history, including The Legion of Super-Pets, Gorilla City and all the different types of kryptonite. All this talk, along with something Flux said, made me start thinking about the Crisis on Infinite Earths again.

The Crisis, for me, did the exact opposite of its initial purpose. It was supposed to eliminate all the previous, silly backstory that had organically been created in the DC Universe over decades, but in order to do this they chose to say goodbye to all those old characters and worlds before trying to toss them out forever. The problem with this plan was that, at least for me, by showcasing all this strangeness one last time they simply made me want for more. If it wasn't for Crisis I wouldn't give a damn about the Earth 2, 3, X, S, etc. Obviously others felt the same way (especially Morrison and Waid), because now we have seen most of these concepts come back out of retirement.

The other comic that opened my eyes to these hidden universes was Ambush Bug #3, where AB discovers what happened to those characters not caught up in Crisis, including Wonder Tot, Ace the Bathound, and Egg Fu, the four story asian head that was shaped like an egg. As a child I thought that there was no way these characters existed, and that most of them had been made up by Keith Giffen. It turns out it’s all true. This all ties into the thing I love most about comics. The surprises. Every time I think I’ve seen it all, I turn around and find out Uncle Sam, the Phantom Lady and Doll Man are still fighting Nazis on a parallel earth, or the Creature Commandos are floating around the earth’s orbit in a space capsule.

18:09 / 27.11.01

I hope they have plenty of food in there.

Ronald Thomas Clontle

18:53 / 27.11.01

I'm in the camp that thinks Crisis, Zero Hour et al are all silly because they attempt to do away with all the cool things Moriarty has mentioned...I think it is better to have the option of "imaginary stories" "hoaxes" "alternate universes" etc because they are often creative and fun...straight continuity with all the kinks ironed out is, in my opinion for the uncreative and anal-retentive. I think DC lost a lot of its charm for ditching all the weirdness for a while...I think the re-launches of the core DC characters were pretty cool, Keith Giffen did a lot of great work grappling with post-Crisis continuity. Byrne's streamlining of Superman was probably for the better...

Funny thing is, the re-booted post-Crisis DC just added one more universe to the Infinite Earths... and post-Zero Hour one more.

Infinite Earths is a beautiful concept, and Moriarty has a point: the Crisis series simultaneously celebrated all that weird continuity while destroying it... odd.

09:15 / 28.11.01

I love continuity. I loved the Crisis anI too became one of those fascinated by all those different Earth's. And doesn't Hyper-Time make eveything 'all-inclusive'? Theoretically it does, right?
That's so cool.

09:15 / 28.11.01

Just found the Crisis TPB in a used book store.. so I picked it up & "re"read it... Haven't looked at it since it originally was published... The version in my memory was much more enjoyable than my attempt to reread this story about lots of charactors I'm not really interested in anyway...

In the mean time series like STARMAN did such a fantastic job of absorbing charactors like Phantom Lady & WW2 history that Crisis seems even more lame...

I remember enjoying it at the time... & Zero hour slightly less... though it was from there that STARMAN was born...

The Kingdom's presentation of Hypertime sucked ASS bigtime... but after books like Earth2 what really matters to me is simply the work itself... IMO--The Concepts of Hyper-time or The Bleed or Multiverse are just self evident now in most fiction... weither indended or not...

Ronald Thomas Clontle

09:15 / 28.11.01

So... how exactly does "Hyper-Time" work?

The Damned Yankee

09:15 / 28.11.01

Yeah, but would you really want a continuity that includes all of those gimmicky transformations of the Superman supporting cast (Jimmy Olsen as a Bizarro, Lois Lane as a mermaid, and the list goes on and on and ON...)? DC needed the Crisis, if only to clean out the really crap stuff from their characters' "official" histories.

Solitaire Rose as Tom Servo

09:15 / 28.11.01

quote:Originally posted by THX-1138:
I love continuity. I loved the Crisis anI too became one of those fascinated by all those different Earth's. And doesn't Hyper-Time make eveything 'all-inclusive'? Theoretically it does, right?
That's so cool.

I LOVE hyper time, since at its core it says, Whatever you want to believe happened...did. Which is how continuity should be.

Miuke Barr, when he did the first run of the Outsiders, used to answer questions from people who asked "Why didn't you reference thus and such obscure bad Bob Haney story?" by saying, "I ignored it. If a past story gets in the way of my current one, I will ignore it. They're all just stories, after all."

09:15 / 28.11.01

quote:Originally posted by The Damned Yankee:
Yeah, but would you really want a continuity that includes all of those gimmicky transformations of the Superman supporting cast (Jimmy Olsen as a Bizarro, Lois Lane as a mermaid, and the list goes on and on and ON...)?

Guess I wasn't very clear in my first post.

09:15 / 28.11.01

I also think that getting rid of the Multiverse was a bad move. I loved Crisis; I even bought the slipcase edition (the first and last time I buy something THAT expensive!), but DC's Multiverse and Silver Age in general was so imaginative, so outlandish. Some of the post-crisis stuff is nice, Year One, Giffen's JLA, Wally as Flash...But did they have to throw all those lovely characters to the limbo? All those great imaginary stories, all those stories filled with strange and impossible science...Thank God there's a Grant Morrison to bring back those good old times.

09:15 / 28.11.01

The crisis did achieve one very important thing.

It put all of DC's top characters onto the same planet/earth. Captain Marvel on the same world as Blue Bettle as Superman, and both GLs and Flashes.

If not for the crisis Blue Bettle could never have joined the justice league!!!

Our Lady of The Two Towers

18:30 / 28.11.01

the death of Supergirl was quite cool though.

Though for me when I read it it highlighted some of the more wanky parts of the DC Universe, the haunted Tank? Uncle Sam? The entire fucking Marvel family? Good riddance to the lot of them.

Dan Fish - @Fish1k

19:59 / 28.11.01

>Flux = R to the Izz-ad
>asked:
>So... how exactly does "Hyper-Time" work?

Well...Imagine a piece of string...Lets call it 'John Byrne's Superman'. Imagine another piece of string, we shall name this one, I dunno, 'Grant Morrison's Superman as featured in JLA'. YOU choose whether the Grant Morrison one is attached to the John Byrne one.

Now, multiply this piece of string by each character, and each story, and screw them up into a ball.

Now pick up a story and read it (For arguments sake, we'll say it was 'Frank Miller's Dark Knight Returns, featuring Superman'). Unless the story states otherwise, YOU get to decide whether the thread in this story links to Grant's story, John's story, or even the funky Spiderman crossover they did in the 70's.

All clear? Excellent.

Basically, Hypertime says 'It all happened. If it matters to you, YOU figure out which stories Superman remembers.'

- Danny Fish -
Comics 4 sale @ www.fish1000.freeserve.co.uk

Ronald Thomas Clontle

20:34 / 28.11.01

quote:Originally posted by Danny Fish:
Unless the story states otherwise, YOU get to decide whether the thread in this story links to Grant's story, John's story, or even the funky Spiderman crossover they did in the 70's.

Ah, see, this is why I love Grant Morrison. This is how superhero comics continuity always should be.

17:02 / 29.11.01

The thing I liked about the Crisis wasn't that I read it, but that I got filled in on all this weird stuff by more comics-savvy friends. A great time for the oral tradition of comics continuity, as opposed to the lame-ass written stories.

cuz the concepts are so much more fun.

17:51 / 29.11.01

Anyone who loves the old DC stories from the 50's and 60's owes it to themselves to track down Alan Moore's run on "Supreme". He took all the great old concepts from the Superman and other DC mythoi and wrote them better. It's really hard to find, but well worht the search. "Supreme the Return" #6 puts modern-day Supreme into a Rick Veitch drawn Jack Kirby-verse. Amazing stuff.

Zoom.

p.s. My first intro to the DCU was Crisis. I thought it a shame to have gotten rid of all that cool stuff, but the advent of hypertime just lets all us really anal-retentive people feel it's okay to acknowledge the old stories.

Elijah, Freelance Rabbi

14:55 / 01.12.01

i liked that in the green arrow mini by K smith someone tells ghost ollie he is "pre Crisis"
he he

13:03 / 04.12.01

Yeah, Crisis does not get rid of the past, it just made a new "Earth" where the heroes don't remember the past. Of course, more and more characters are acknowledging it now. At the very least, the Flash and is aware of pre-Crisis events. All the pre-Crisis stuff is still there, now you just need Hypertime to get there.

Superman recently visited old school Krypton and even brought back his dog Krypto. Its all still fair game. Its just up to the writers to find a fun way to use it.

14:31 / 04.12.01

I didn't think Hypertime was like that... I pretty much thought that it was a description of how a cosmology works in a world that is composed as comic books.

As in (for example), imagine each comic book series - or stretch of time as written by one particular writer. Imagine the continuity behind these things diverging slightly as time passes - characters change and develop and not always consistently. These are like diverging parallel realities - like timelines gradually separating from one another every time an inconsistency crops up. But these timelines collapse back upon each other every so often - some 'win', some 'lose', some are partially assimilated, and some divergences wander off for years before becoming reincorporated.

So in principle the universe exists at the point of reading only - and AT THAT MOMENT must APPEAR consistent within its own remit, but can be erased by subsequent developments and readings.

I think the idea is to make the universe as evolving and fluid as the comics medium itself - which is an interesting Grant trope - you turn the limitations or quirks of the genre into super-scientific cosmological models of how that particular universe works. The universe is then always 'consistent' within its own rules, because the 'rules' match the way that the industry works.

Plus it reincorporates all the wonderful alternatives of previous generations... I really like it - it feels like quantum theory.

01:50 / 18.10.07

I read Crisis on Infinite Earths a while back, and while I followed all the in story deal with Earth 2, I'm a bit curious about how the actual comics played in the pre-Crisis era.

The team up between Earth 2 Superman and Earth 1 Superman was cool, but was this something that happened frequently? Would they hang out all the time, or was it a crossovers only kind of thing? And, did Earth 2 Superman have his own book, or would he only pop up occasionally in other stuff.

The same question applies to Earth 2 Batman. Did we follow the character as he got married and eventually died, or was that more one story where regular Batman crossed over?

And, when did everyone forget about the multiverse? That didn't seem to happen at the end of actual Crisis, was it something that happened afterward?

01:58 / 18.10.07

I know there were Earth 2-only stories, because Detective Comics used to reprint them when it was a giant-sized comic. And Paul Levitz used to do eight/ten pagers with Huntress in the back of somebody else's book. Helena Wayne Huntress, not the current.

I haven't actually read too many cross-overs, the classic two Flashes bit and a few others. So my presumption would be that crossovers were rarer than single-world stories of Earth 2.

11:33 / 18.10.07

As I recall, the crossovers were usually done in JLofA, as part of the various "Crisis on Earth-*" stories. The only characters that I am aware of that had an ongoing set on another Earth were the All-Star Squadron (and, later, Young All-Stars). Otherwise, it was basically the occasional backup or fill-in.

Hallo, Paper Spaceboy

15:45 / 18.10.07

Young All-Stars was explicitly a post-crisis book, Mario, and took place on the "New Earth" -- it was there to insert Fury, Iron Munro, and Flying Fox into the All-Star Squadron as stand-ins for the big three; as well, Neptune Perkins presumably for Aquaman.

I've read a fair number of the cross-over stories, and they happened more often than you think -- I seem to remember a really good one in Green Lantern, where Hal Jordan was flying over the desert and discovered, well, millions of people crammed into a stasis field there; seems Alan Scott had a break-down on Earth-2 and willed his ring to remove everyone from Earth-2. It wasn't really explained how they fit everyone into the desert, though.

Shiny: Well Over Thirty

16:07 / 18.10.07

I think the original Infinity Inc, featuring such characters as Helena Wayne, adult Robin, Power Girl and Hector Hall was the main Earth-2 ongoing before COIE. I think a lot of the clean-up to explain why the settled post Crisis earth was different from the one shown in COIE 11 & 12 might have been done there as well.

18:52 / 18.10.07

My mistake... I confused Infinity Inc. with Young All-Stars.

Hallo, Paper Spaceboy

14:28 / 19.10.07

Young All-Stars was a pretty watered-down book that seemed to be there only to establish new continuity under the guise of what was essentially a Golden Age Teen Titans. I read bits of it when I was younger, the first couple chapters, mostly because the covers were good (emulating those old JLA covers with the main shot being surrounded by a border of hero portraits) even though the contents were generally pretty contrived. Were there other titles being built up at the time, just post-Crisis, establishing with the new status quo was but maybe not doing much beyond that?

16:00 / 19.10.07

Not really. That period was fairly nebulous thanks to the decision to only reboot a couple of books (Superman, WW), which means things went from "the Pre-Crisis Universe stories happened, but almost nobody remembers" to "those stories never ever happened", which left a lot of books flailing around for a status quo, especially Legion.