tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6250269071385467004.post2343644797691569544..comments2024-01-23T19:26:48.882-05:00Comments on Julian Perez Conquers the Universe!: Crisis on Infinite EarthsJulian Perezhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16276143599750947248noreply@blogger.comBlogger8125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6250269071385467004.post-88714958621383691112023-01-23T23:24:06.704-05:002023-01-23T23:24:06.704-05:00First time I've seen an anti-Perez point-of-vi...First time I've seen an anti-Perez point-of-view.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6250269071385467004.post-89600641300800893492022-09-21T21:34:37.798-04:002022-09-21T21:34:37.798-04:00Methinks your admiration of Johns has gone down ov...Methinks your admiration of Johns has gone down over the years judging from some of the stuff he's put out.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6250269071385467004.post-82581737522840569692017-01-08T18:46:27.617-05:002017-01-08T18:46:27.617-05:00How is drawing correct anatomy perverted?How is drawing correct anatomy perverted?Doc Savagehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/08783244633195233970noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6250269071385467004.post-9160665748355295452010-02-25T21:23:37.993-05:002010-02-25T21:23:37.993-05:00Let me ask you a question, Nightwing: when was the...<i>Let me ask you a question, Nightwing: when was the last time you read Crisis, as a series? I'm just curious. </i><br /><br />As a series? Probably 1986. I reread a big chunk of it back when they did the "Legends of the DC Universe" one-off in 1999 (supposedly taking place "between the panels" of COIE #4). And a couple of years ago I got a trade paperback version from my local library, but I wasn't able to read it from cover to cover. I tend to go to the highlights (cool group gatherings, Kara and Barry's deaths, what little Batman there is and, more often than not, issues 11 and 12 in their entirety) but I can't read the whole thing. Partly that's due to the way it meanders, but mostly it's a case of eye fatigue. Those jam-packed Perez pages were hot snot on a monthly basis, but taken together, they're overwhelming.<br /><br />Interestingly, the library at the university where I work holds an annual book sale that includes comics, and every year there is a stack of "Crisis" issues available for the original cover price. Not the whole series, mind you, but the issue you single out for praise in your post: #9, the all-villain issue. There must be 20 copies of that thing in the sale every year (maybe the same 20), and if it's in the sale it means someone donated them to the school's (sizable) comic collection but they didn't need it. So either a lot of folks didn't like the issue or the donor was a shop owner, speculator or somesuch who owned them all.<br /><br />Again, the further I get from Crisis,the more I think DC wasn't trying to "dumb down" their continuity for kids so much as they were trying to woo away Marvel devotees. In this sense, too, it was a harbinger (ahem) of things to come, as we've witnessed over the last couple decades an ongoing fight to win the business of an existing reader pool rather than a serious attempt to expand the readership to include newcomers.<br /><br />I'm not "married" to the Multiverse, either. I went into Crisis with high hopes, as I did Byrne's Superman reboot. But what I got was 10 issues of what felt like stalling tactics, leading up to two issues that were supposed to lay the groundwork for the new universe, but instead confirmed our suspicions that the men behind the curtain had no game plan whatsoever.Davidhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13840878272493564209noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6250269071385467004.post-56011361538934985862010-02-25T17:05:15.010-05:002010-02-25T17:05:15.010-05:00Let me ask you a question, Nightwing: when was the...Let me ask you a question, Nightwing: when was the last time you read Crisis, as a series? I'm just curious. <br /><br />I totally agree with you when you say that kids don't have a problem keeping track of very complicated things. Hell, at age 11, I was programming in HTML and Visual Basic - and I was a downright lazybones and late bloomer compared to some of the other kids I knew from spelling bees and whatnot. <br /><br />I think one of the problems that I have with the instinct to say, "this is too complicated, dumb it down" is that it really does a disservice to the intelligence of the audience, kids or otherwise. People like really complicated things, especially in fiction. <br /><br />The Pasko story in particular is interesting, since Khan pulled the trigger on this. I think this actually makes everything else fall into place: Wolfman and Perez were hypnotized by the idea of doing a story STARRING EVERYBODY to think it all through. This is why, at some level, I really like Crisis: like I said, it was obviously written by people who felt this story was more of a calling than an assignment. <br /><br />I'm not exactly married to the idea of the multiverse, though...first because Geoff Johns and others saw potential in what a singleverse could be, and secondly because it's an idea, not a character. Characters and people are what I like and what I owe my allegiance to, not "ideas." For instance, the one thing that ticked me off about the Jessica Alba FF movie wasn't the rewritten origin, but the fact that they got a character like Dr. Doom all wrong.Julian Perezhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16276143599750947248noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6250269071385467004.post-10508604539251171542010-02-24T15:22:49.629-05:002010-02-24T15:22:49.629-05:00You're talking about rebooting everything. Why...<i>You're talking about rebooting everything. Why not keep everything?</i><br /><br />Well, of course you know from previous discussions that this would have been my first choice. I never for a moment bought into DC's claim that "the multiple Earths are too confusing for new readers." Heck, much of the fun for me, thrown into into the Multiverse in 1971 or so, lay in figuring out who all these people were, what Earth they came from and what the differences were. When I first encountered the JSA in one of those annual summer crossovers, I didn't think, "Two Green Lanterns and two Flashes? That's it, I give up!" No, I thought, "A whole other world full of heroes I never saw before? AWESOME!!" And I can tell you, my 7- and 5-year old feel the same way about it now, reading my reprints.<br /><br />The truth is DC wasn't worried about kids keeping up (look how many kids manage to memorize baseball stats going back to Year One. Trust me, kids can handle detail). What they were worried about was the Marvel Zombies, and how to attract their business. The only people I ever knew who carped about the Multiverse were Marvelites and if any of them were attracted by the Crisis I doubt they hung around for long; when you're that polarized, you tend to stay that way.<br /><br />It's not like "complexity" is kryptonite to Marvel fans. The ins and outs of Avengers history, the billion and one mutants running around, even just the tangled backstory of a single character like the Vision can be byzantine to say the least. And for the record, the second most fun I had after learning about the Multiverse was figuring out who all those mutants were when I happened on my first issue of the Claremont/Byrne <i>X-Men</i>. No, the reason Marvel Zombies stayed away is because they just plain didn't like DC characters, and no amount of lipstick will ever pretty up that pig in their eyes. DC was just so desperate to emulate Marvel's "single universe" model that they completely missed what worked about it: It was built with care over time, not plopped down fully-formed in 1961.<br /><br />I just finished Marty Pasko's "DC Vault" and he suggests the Multiverse ended because one person in particular couldn't figure it out, and that was Jennette Kahn. Mind you he found a way to say it that made her look like the greatest storytelling genius since Homer, but still...<br /><br />It's great to hear that Johns and others are essentially slipping the old continuity back in over the transom, but too much water's under the bridge for me to come back now (besides, I have to feed three kids, and new comics are too rich for my blood). BUT...since it took over two decades to get here, now DC's just cheesing off a whole new group of fans who stuck with them through the Dark Age. Now all those fans of Byrne's Superman or Tim Truman's Hawkman or PAD's Aquaman are left out in the cold as they're told their "age" essentially didn't happen. And of course once Johns and co. are gone, the next generation will toss out half of what you're enjoying right now.<br /><br />As you say, at least with Marvel it all counts. Even if a story really, really sucks, at least characters have to deal with it, and you aren't told, "Remember that 2 bucks you spent on that comic a couple years ago? Well never mind, we've retconned it out of existence." <br /><br />So yeah, I'd have liked it if they'd kept the timeline intact. My point was if you're going to "fix" things with a "reboot" then have the courage of your convictions. DC gave us the worst of both worlds; an end to all the good stuff about the pre-Crisis era, with the "bad" part (convoluted continuity) magnified a thousandfold.Davidhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13840878272493564209noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6250269071385467004.post-91693500122660902812010-02-24T14:33:05.473-05:002010-02-24T14:33:05.473-05:00You're talking about rebooting everything. Why...You're talking about rebooting everything. Why not <i>keep</i> everything? <br /><br />The thing I think is great about DC under writers like Johns, Simone and so on is how sharp they are in DC history: Johns and Busiek characterize Luthor in a very sympathetic, warped pre-1985 way, and there are now tons of references again to the Pre-Crisis Legion of Super-Heroes, the events of Secret Society of Super-Villains, and things like monsters that originally showed up in issues of Tommy Tomorrow. <br /><br />This is what I mean when I say I'm startled at DC fans sometimes...if somebody wanted to replace the Stan Lee version of characters like Iron Man or Spider-Man...I'm pretty sure the entire internet would <i>explode.</i> In a situation like that, I would actually fear for the person's life.<br /><br />I agree with what you say about the piecemeal approach after the Crisis. Hawkman and Aquaman became fenced-off disaster areas because after Crisis nobody even knew who they were at all. The Silver Age version of characters fared the worst under this...the Earth-2, Golden Age versions stuck around, the modern age equivalents also started to appear, but with characters like Hawkman in particular, and Superman, the Silver/Bronze Age version just evaporated. <br /><br />I think it's important to point out that the characters with a clean break with the past, like Superman, Hawkman and Wonder Woman were the exception. The majority of DC had more or less the same continuity as before. Still, they were very, very annoying exceptions. Take Supergirl; it was up in the air what happened to the villains she fought after Crisis. I guess there was an attempt to explain that Power Girl fought them: it's interesting to note how Power Girl was pushed after Crisis. To be honest, the character never clicked for me until Geoff Johns started writing her. <br /><br />Also, the rationale for the reboots after Crisis made no logical sense to me. Wonder Woman received a built-in logic for her 'reboot' in Crisis as she was de-aged, and a Captain Marvel raised on Earth-1 'all along' would be a very different, but why would a single universe result in Superman being a different person, and Thanagar being a totally different place? <br /><br />(Not that anyone actually cared about Wonder Woman, anyway, of course, because as I have often pointed out, nobody <i>really</i> cares about Wonder Woman.)<br /><br />I suspect what happened is, people wanted reboots so badly there wasn't much concern for how it happened. I can kind of understand why there would be a desire for them. With a few notable exceptions, like Teen Titans, Legion of Superheroes under Levitz, and Len Wein and Englehart writing JLA, the DC Universe was always a two-dimensional universe. After Crisis, it was trying to break into third dimension. For much of the time after Crisis, DC was a 2 and a 1/2 Dimensional Universe trying to pop out and become a 3-D one.Julian Perezhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16276143599750947248noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6250269071385467004.post-17633794416127054212010-02-24T12:07:25.383-05:002010-02-24T12:07:25.383-05:00Re: DC's broken continuity. You say:
It trou...Re: DC's broken continuity. You say:<br /><br /><i>It troubles me how absolutely inured DC fans are to this, to the point where they don't realize how wrong or extraordinary this situation is.</i><br /><br />Taking it literally, I suppose you're right. Anyone classified as a "DC fan" in 2010 likely is indeed unconcerned with the problem, or doesn't see it as one. But speaking as someone who <b>used to be</b> a DC fan, I can tell you this was, eventually, what drove me away.<br /><br />As you say, DC organized this huge event to reboot their entire line of books and then failed to do it. Superman and Wonder Woman got a reboot, but neither immediately, so it was almost as if it had nothing to do with Crisis. Hawkman was rebooted, then when that didn't work he was rebooted again and again (and may not have stopped yet, for all I know). Green Lantern and Batman got no reboot at all (Batman got a fractional reboot with the new origin for Jason-Robin, just to add to the confusion).<br /><br />So...Hal, Guy and John should remember the Crisis, but Clark and Diana weren't around for it. Everyone seems to remember Barry's sacrifice (even if they can't recall the details) and hold him up as a saint for it, but nobody remembers Kara even existed. The JSA remembers their life on Earth-2...no they don't...yes, they do...oh, forget it. It doesn't matter, since it never existed. Except then where did the Earth-2 Superman come from?<br /><br />The *first* thing DC should have done on deciding to reboot was to sit down and hash out exactly what the DCU would look like after issue 12. That was never done, and the resulting muddle just led to more reboots and more reboots, both in individual titles and in company-wide "events." DC has spent the last quarter century trying to straighten out the mess they made with Crisis, which ironically was pitched as something that would clean up an earlier mess. For that alone, I'll never like "Crisis." No other story in memory has had such a negative effect on so many comics for so long.<br /><br />The reason Anti-Monitor is the least developed villain this side of Doomsday is that both are editorial devices and not characters. "Crisis" happened because DC wanted to start over, and rather than do it with guts -- just reboot every title with a new #1 in January 1986 -- they instead turned it into a 12-issue "event" that in the end only affected a few of their titles anyway, and never consistently. <br /><br />As a story, it's a mess. As an idea, it was a mistake. Art-wise it was pretty because it was Perez, but he's done prettier. And of course it launched the era of company-wide "event" crossovers, so for that alone it deserves a place in Comic Hell.<br /><br />Of course, there are the nipple shots, but that's your bag there's always Image.Davidhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13840878272493564209noreply@blogger.com