How bad was pre-Crisis 1980's DC?

[Mace Dolex]

Part of the impetus of the Crisis was to get new creative voices going in DC and really shake things up (Byrne on Superman/Action/Adventures, Perez on Wonder Woman, Baron on Flash, etc.). How bad were things from 1980-1985 in the "core" DC universe? I'm not counting the westerns, horror books, etc.; just the super-hero books.

Flash had just suffered through the interminable Trial of Barry Allen.

Wonder Woman's history had become incredibly convoluted.

Green Lantern had become plain-jane.

Superman and Action were suffering from a lack of sales, Worlds Finest wasn't, and DC Comics Presents was unpresentable.

Detective Comics was almost canceled in the late 1970's.

Justice League starred ... Gypsy, Steel and Vibe.

Yeah, they had Moore's Swamp Thing and Wolfman/Perez's New Teen Titans, but that was pretty close to all they had going on in the official universe at that point.

I think it's possible that DC needed an enormous kick-in-the-pants to restart things, as the universe had kind of petered out by then. What do you think?

 

[Hush]

I think there is a stupid questions thread at the top of the page for things like this. Just sayin'.

 

[TruerToTheCore]

A few thoughts:

Batman / 'Tec under Doug Moench was great. Also Conway and especially Wein before created some good and great stuff.

Joey Cavalieri did his usual hackwork on World's Finest

Batman & The Outsiders was not very good and not even remotely as good as its successor "The Brave & The Bold" was. Barr did much better when he wrote solo Batman.

Cary Bates on the Flash is the best run of the character ever.

Swamp Thing was awesome, first the underrated Pasko run and than Moore.

Englehart wrote an awesome Green Lantern Corps.

Justice League... well, usually rather average.

Wonder Woman was not very interesting.

Superman/Action Comics... Wolfman's "modernization" of the title was well-intended but flawed in its execution. After that there were usually only fillers, some of them were good but most rather boring.

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Let's just jump to the post-crisis reality:

Perez on Wonder Woman was definitely an improvement.

Justice League International was a nice chance of concept and "against the grain", so I appreciate that.

Denny O'Neil's reign brought a very inconsistent characterization (and continuity) to the Batman titles. Max Allen Collins was probably held back by all of this, Barr was surprisingly good in balancing a Dick Sprang feeling with a dark Batman, Jim Starlin was good, Alan Grant was great. And then we also got Wolfman who doesn't write the best stories... I wouldn't say that Batman overall improved, not at all, I think the titles became to violent and everything was kinda messy in those days. And more importantly, everything good they did could have been done without a reboot.

Wolfman/Byrne started completely from scratch with Superman and moved away from his core, at least the stories were constantly good or mediocre, but usually not great at all. Both writers didn't get and couldn't write the character so they changed him into something they could handle. Bringing in a new team was good, but instead of Carlin/Helfer they should have made Maggin the editor, perhaps Moore as one of the writers, no hard reboot, Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez as main artist...

ST/GLC had the same team afterwards, so...

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The final days of pre-crisis: Not bad at all and usually vastly superior to what came afterwards in the 90s.