INTRO: As I write this, preparing to post the following material again, it is 18 September 2006. The first version (almost everything you see below this "Intro" section) was posted way back when, in January of 2005, when word had just recently been leaking out that DC was planning to do something vaguely similar to "Crisis on Infinite Earths" for its "twentieth anniversary," but we didn't even know what the follow-up Big Event would be called! In this piece, I referred to it as Crisis 2 for lack of any better name!
But at the time, in anticipation of whatever "Crisis 2" would turn out to do for the DCU, I spent some time gathering together quotations from Marv Wolfman relating to why he thought the old Crisis on Infinite Earths would be a good idea at the time he wrote it, etc. Now that "Infinite Crisis" has come and gone, and we've all had about four months to calm down and form our opinions of what it actually accomplished, what it should have accomplished, where it "succeeded" or "failed" in a particular area, et cetera, it seems like a good time to dust off this old piece. Those of you who remember reading it before may be interested in looking it over to see if your attitudes on the subjects Wolfman refers to have changed any after what we've been through in the last twenty months or so. Those of you who haven't read it before may find Wolfman's comments thought-provoking, whether you agree with all of his opinions or not!
***** OLD POST BEGINS *****
Everybody keeps talking about how some sort of Crisis 2 is coming our way on the 20th Anniversary of the original Crisis on Infinite Earths, and lately I've been feeling the need to do a little online research to see just what Marv Wolfman, the writer behind that Crisis, had to say about why he did it, how it turned out, how he feels about "continuity problems" in general, and so on and forth.
First I'll present you with a choice selection of quotes from Wolfman on relevant points; then I'll offer some commentary of my own.
1. Quotations
2. Comments
1. QUOTATIONS
http://www.marvwolfman.com/WHAT TH 2.html
This Question is apparently a composite of various questions he gets in his email (and by other mediums, I'd imagine) over and over and over again. The Answer, of course, is pure Marv Wolfman.
At http://stlcomics.com/columns/tftlof/V/ we have a point where the interviewer raised the subject of Crisis on Infinite Earths by saying:
2. COMMENTS
I provided URLs and Quotations from them to minimize the risk of being accused of treating Marv Wolfman unfairly by recklessly "paraphrasing" or "misquoting" his actual thoughts on Crisis, and Continuity Issues in general.
First, I don't really believe the funny claim I quoted at the very start, wherein he claimed that killing off all those characters and their homeworlds and so forth in Crisis was a nasty trick he pulled on DC when everybody else was out to lunch or something. Though I get the strong feeling that he's been accused of exactly that evil deed from time to time by angry fans, and was gently teasing them by trying to suggest how unlikely it would be that he could get away with it.
In fact, it's interesting to note that he claims he didn't propose to DC that he kill Barry Allen; but instead was ordered to use Crisis as an opportunity to kill Barry Allen! I don't know what that was all about. (But then, I was never really a collector of Flash comics as a kid. Nor am I now, for that matter. I have heard that in the mid-80s, for a loooong time, the Flash title was bogged down in a "Trial of the Flash" storyline after Barry killed Professor Zoom in defense of his own bride at a wedding, a storyline which just dragged on and on without making much sense . . . I've read reprints of some columns by lawyer and comics fan Bob Ingersoll that take various Flash issues from that era and tear them to shreds, describing all the errors in legal procedure that crept in.)
Wolfman does criticize all the other "Great Big Universal Crossover Events" stuff that Marvel and DC (and sometimes other companies) have played around with ever since Crisis became a surprise hit. In other words, when he wrote Crisis, he saw it as a one-time project that dealt with something he really cared about, but he wasn't trying to start some sort of regular trend with everybody else jumping on the bandwagon. That's good to know!
Things he says about wanting Crisis "to get rid of all the old continuity" seems to support rumors I had heard before (unless he was exaggerating just how much continuity he wanted to get rid of at the time?). The rumors said that ideally, Wolfman would have liked to see every DC title turn back the clock and reboot its continuity from scratch, and perhaps had reason to hope this would happen? Of course, as it turned out, that is exactly what happened with Superman and Wonder Woman, but most of the writers and editors dealing with all the rest of the DCU tried to maintain as much of the old pre-Crisis continuity as possible. (With a couple of exceptions, like whatever it was that happened to Hawkman - I'm not a regular collector of his stuff, but I've heard it got confusing and disjointed.)
On the other hand, some of what he says basically implies that he felt any writer should feel free to dust off any particular piece of continuity from the old days if it suited the new writer's purposes . . . otherwise, he should feel free to pretend it didn't happen at all (using Crisis as an excuse). That is fairly close to what Jeph Loeb, for instance, has often been accused of doing in his work on Batman. The Long Halloween, Dark Victory, and Hush all had inconsistencies with other people's work, for better or for worse.
[Note, added 18 Sept. 2006: In an introduction he wrote for the TPB collection of the Loeb/Sale "Challengers of the Unknown" miniseries from the early 90s, Jeph Loeb said something like this: "My basic attitude toward continuity is that Jimmy Olsen did not become Robin the Boy Wonder, and everything else is negotiable." In an interview with Newsarama (http://www.newsarama.com/dcnew/Sams_story/sam_superboy.html) he reiterated that perspective if you want to check it out. At the time I wrote the first draft of this piece, I had never seen Loeb's comment in the "Challengers" TPB and he had not yet given that Newsarama interview.]
Wolfman also wanted the fact that there had even been a Crisis to completely disappear from Post-Crisis dialogue. But I can see why other writers wanted to explore some of the ramifications in their own way, if it would have profoundly influenced (but not erased or totally rebooted) their own characters. I seem to recall Roy Thomas, for instance, in Infinity Inc., wanted to describe his character Lyta Trevor, aka Fury, feeling very bad about the fact she no longer had parents to go home to, before eventually "resolving" that problem. Also, I think Paul Levitz in his work on Legion of Superheroes in the mid-80s had a long running mystery about someone named "Sensor Girl," a masked blond with mysterious powers whom Brainiac-5 was obsessively convinced must be the 20th Century Supergirl somehow come back from her heroic death during the Crisis, or words to that effect. I can certainly see why both of those writers wanted to deal with those loose ends at their own pace instead of just having their beloved characters develop total amnesia and never refer to those emotional issues again.
One thing Wolfman doesn't seem to specifically address in the quotes I found is this: Did he think it would have been a good idea for his own dearly beloved "The New Teen Titans" series to get rebooted from scratch post-Crisis? Or was that a case where he would have felt free to exercise his right as a writer to say "As much as possible, all the Pre-Crisis continuity I wrote about these characters still happened because that's the way I want it?"
Beyond that, I think I see a possible logical flaw in Wolfman's avowed positions that A) One writer shouldn't be held prisoner by the dumb ideas of another writer in the "same continuity" of a comics universe, but B) Crisis on Infinite Earths was meant to throw out a lot of the restrictions created by the old continuity and make life easier on writers.
Think about the original Captain Marvel and his friends and family, for instance. I think the Big Red Cheese worked better when he and his fellow Fawcett refugees were over on their own Earth, one where Cap didn't find himself surrounded by a zillion other heroes who presumably had similar degrees of physical strength (Superman, Wonder Woman, the Martian Manhunter, and I don't know how many others).
Similar points can be made about Roy Thomas's two series in Earth-2, the All-Star Squadron dealing with the old Golden Age heroes in their heyday (World War II, that is to say), and Infinity Inc., dealing with their kids and proteges and so forth. By squeezing characters from several different Earths into one tight timeline, didn't you inevitably force the same continuity assumptions upon all of them and make it "feel" much more necessary to make sure that future episodes of each new series with any DC heroes would have to be more "consistent" with what everybody else was doing, now that they all lived on the exact same planet?
Did it really hurt anything to let Roy Thomas basically have his own Earth to play around on, separate from the "mainstream" Earth-1 where the 1980s titles about Superman, Batman, the JLA, the Titans, etc., were set?
But at the time, in anticipation of whatever "Crisis 2" would turn out to do for the DCU, I spent some time gathering together quotations from Marv Wolfman relating to why he thought the old Crisis on Infinite Earths would be a good idea at the time he wrote it, etc. Now that "Infinite Crisis" has come and gone, and we've all had about four months to calm down and form our opinions of what it actually accomplished, what it should have accomplished, where it "succeeded" or "failed" in a particular area, et cetera, it seems like a good time to dust off this old piece. Those of you who remember reading it before may be interested in looking it over to see if your attitudes on the subjects Wolfman refers to have changed any after what we've been through in the last twenty months or so. Those of you who haven't read it before may find Wolfman's comments thought-provoking, whether you agree with all of his opinions or not!
***** OLD POST BEGINS *****
Everybody keeps talking about how some sort of Crisis 2 is coming our way on the 20th Anniversary of the original Crisis on Infinite Earths, and lately I've been feeling the need to do a little online research to see just what Marv Wolfman, the writer behind that Crisis, had to say about why he did it, how it turned out, how he feels about "continuity problems" in general, and so on and forth.
First I'll present you with a choice selection of quotes from Wolfman on relevant points; then I'll offer some commentary of my own.
1. Quotations
2. Comments
1. QUOTATIONS
http://www.marvwolfman.com/WHAT TH 2.html
This Question is apparently a composite of various questions he gets in his email (and by other mediums, I'd imagine) over and over and over again. The Answer, of course, is pure Marv Wolfman.
In "What Th--?" #7 (http://www.marvwolfman.com/WHAT TH 7.html), he says in part, while discussing the reasons for Crisis and its aftermath the way things turned out:
And later in that same column:
In "What Th--?" #11, he returned to that theme, saying in part (at http://www.marvwolfman.com/WHAT TH 11.html)
At http://stlcomics.com/columns/tftlof/V/ we have a point where the interviewer raised the subject of Crisis on Infinite Earths by saying:
On Wolfman's website, he says something at http://www.marvwolfman.com/Q&A.html, in response to a question about how some DC heroes seemed to remember things about the Crisis (and the people from one Earth or another who had died in it) in their monthly titles, while the characters in other titles seemed totally oblivious. Here's Wolfman's reply on what he originally intended:
Further down on that same page, Wolfman reveals something else about the death of Barry Allen. (Including the part about what loophole he thought he left for bringing Barry back someday, but I'll let you go read that for yourself if you really care.):
And on the subject of Kole, who only got a few appearances in the Titans title in the mid-80s title before being slaughtered in Crisis, Wolfman said in a letter to the "Women in Refrigerators" site about the mistreatment of female comic book characters (http://www.the-pantheon.net/wir/c-mwolf.html):
In an interview at http://www.collectortimes.com/2003_04/Clubhouse.html Marv said about the success (and subsequent imitations) of Crisis:
2. COMMENTS
I provided URLs and Quotations from them to minimize the risk of being accused of treating Marv Wolfman unfairly by recklessly "paraphrasing" or "misquoting" his actual thoughts on Crisis, and Continuity Issues in general.
First, I don't really believe the funny claim I quoted at the very start, wherein he claimed that killing off all those characters and their homeworlds and so forth in Crisis was a nasty trick he pulled on DC when everybody else was out to lunch or something. Though I get the strong feeling that he's been accused of exactly that evil deed from time to time by angry fans, and was gently teasing them by trying to suggest how unlikely it would be that he could get away with it.
In fact, it's interesting to note that he claims he didn't propose to DC that he kill Barry Allen; but instead was ordered to use Crisis as an opportunity to kill Barry Allen! I don't know what that was all about. (But then, I was never really a collector of Flash comics as a kid. Nor am I now, for that matter. I have heard that in the mid-80s, for a loooong time, the Flash title was bogged down in a "Trial of the Flash" storyline after Barry killed Professor Zoom in defense of his own bride at a wedding, a storyline which just dragged on and on without making much sense . . . I've read reprints of some columns by lawyer and comics fan Bob Ingersoll that take various Flash issues from that era and tear them to shreds, describing all the errors in legal procedure that crept in.)
Wolfman does criticize all the other "Great Big Universal Crossover Events" stuff that Marvel and DC (and sometimes other companies) have played around with ever since Crisis became a surprise hit. In other words, when he wrote Crisis, he saw it as a one-time project that dealt with something he really cared about, but he wasn't trying to start some sort of regular trend with everybody else jumping on the bandwagon. That's good to know!
Things he says about wanting Crisis "to get rid of all the old continuity" seems to support rumors I had heard before (unless he was exaggerating just how much continuity he wanted to get rid of at the time?). The rumors said that ideally, Wolfman would have liked to see every DC title turn back the clock and reboot its continuity from scratch, and perhaps had reason to hope this would happen? Of course, as it turned out, that is exactly what happened with Superman and Wonder Woman, but most of the writers and editors dealing with all the rest of the DCU tried to maintain as much of the old pre-Crisis continuity as possible. (With a couple of exceptions, like whatever it was that happened to Hawkman - I'm not a regular collector of his stuff, but I've heard it got confusing and disjointed.)
On the other hand, some of what he says basically implies that he felt any writer should feel free to dust off any particular piece of continuity from the old days if it suited the new writer's purposes . . . otherwise, he should feel free to pretend it didn't happen at all (using Crisis as an excuse). That is fairly close to what Jeph Loeb, for instance, has often been accused of doing in his work on Batman. The Long Halloween, Dark Victory, and Hush all had inconsistencies with other people's work, for better or for worse.
[Note, added 18 Sept. 2006: In an introduction he wrote for the TPB collection of the Loeb/Sale "Challengers of the Unknown" miniseries from the early 90s, Jeph Loeb said something like this: "My basic attitude toward continuity is that Jimmy Olsen did not become Robin the Boy Wonder, and everything else is negotiable." In an interview with Newsarama (http://www.newsarama.com/dcnew/Sams_story/sam_superboy.html) he reiterated that perspective if you want to check it out. At the time I wrote the first draft of this piece, I had never seen Loeb's comment in the "Challengers" TPB and he had not yet given that Newsarama interview.]
Wolfman also wanted the fact that there had even been a Crisis to completely disappear from Post-Crisis dialogue. But I can see why other writers wanted to explore some of the ramifications in their own way, if it would have profoundly influenced (but not erased or totally rebooted) their own characters. I seem to recall Roy Thomas, for instance, in Infinity Inc., wanted to describe his character Lyta Trevor, aka Fury, feeling very bad about the fact she no longer had parents to go home to, before eventually "resolving" that problem. Also, I think Paul Levitz in his work on Legion of Superheroes in the mid-80s had a long running mystery about someone named "Sensor Girl," a masked blond with mysterious powers whom Brainiac-5 was obsessively convinced must be the 20th Century Supergirl somehow come back from her heroic death during the Crisis, or words to that effect. I can certainly see why both of those writers wanted to deal with those loose ends at their own pace instead of just having their beloved characters develop total amnesia and never refer to those emotional issues again.
One thing Wolfman doesn't seem to specifically address in the quotes I found is this: Did he think it would have been a good idea for his own dearly beloved "The New Teen Titans" series to get rebooted from scratch post-Crisis? Or was that a case where he would have felt free to exercise his right as a writer to say "As much as possible, all the Pre-Crisis continuity I wrote about these characters still happened because that's the way I want it?"
Beyond that, I think I see a possible logical flaw in Wolfman's avowed positions that A) One writer shouldn't be held prisoner by the dumb ideas of another writer in the "same continuity" of a comics universe, but B) Crisis on Infinite Earths was meant to throw out a lot of the restrictions created by the old continuity and make life easier on writers.
Think about the original Captain Marvel and his friends and family, for instance. I think the Big Red Cheese worked better when he and his fellow Fawcett refugees were over on their own Earth, one where Cap didn't find himself surrounded by a zillion other heroes who presumably had similar degrees of physical strength (Superman, Wonder Woman, the Martian Manhunter, and I don't know how many others).
Similar points can be made about Roy Thomas's two series in Earth-2, the All-Star Squadron dealing with the old Golden Age heroes in their heyday (World War II, that is to say), and Infinity Inc., dealing with their kids and proteges and so forth. By squeezing characters from several different Earths into one tight timeline, didn't you inevitably force the same continuity assumptions upon all of them and make it "feel" much more necessary to make sure that future episodes of each new series with any DC heroes would have to be more "consistent" with what everybody else was doing, now that they all lived on the exact same planet?
Did it really hurt anything to let Roy Thomas basically have his own Earth to play around on, separate from the "mainstream" Earth-1 where the 1980s titles about Superman, Batman, the JLA, the Titans, etc., were set?
