Did The Reboots Caused By the Original Crisis Cause As Much Outrage As OMD/BND?

[SMARTASS8]

I've always read Marvel & DC(although I was finally driven away from Marvel sometime last year), but I was a bigger Marvel fan as a kid. I was wondering if the Crisis On Infinite Earths reboot to the DCU caused as many "boycotts" and outrage by DC fans as JoeyQ's One More Day/Brand New Day has for Spidey fans?

[marshal99]

Nope , not really . COIE as a whole , the event was actually well done .DC was rebooting their entire line so fans were looking forward to it as i seemed to remember. There were some dissapointment towards the treatment of the earth 2 characters for me but otherwise , not really a lot of outrage.
OMD/BND is and will always be garbage.

[protonik]

It is also hard to judge considering we didn't have the internet back then. I'd say it didn't because COIE seems near universally loved but the aftermath seems to be a mixed bag because it wasn't a rousing success across the board. Superman & Batman's reboots were well done, as was Wonder Woman but I think she is where the problem starts as when she appears in Legends, it was her debut in the DCU period. SHe wasn't a founder of the JLA etc. so it wasn't as clean a break as originally envisioned. I think her re-intro should have been handled much like Superman & Batman's with a in series reboot like Batman or a mini-series & soft relaunch like Superman & Action Comics. Perez would still tell his new origin for Wonder Woman and that aspect of continuity would remain intact. Secret Origins would have been best used to explain origins for the more b-list and lesser heroes who made the changeover from Earth-2 like the characters from Infinity Inc & Teen Titans (Donna) in order to maintain integrity with the History of the DCU being a guide for how it all fits together.

[earl]

At least going by the people I ran with collecting comics and the shop I worked at a year or so after the Crisis, people just didn't read that much DC until the revamps. The Titans was the only book that was a "hit" they published, everything else sold pretty much lower than even the middling Marvel books. People in the know, would read the good stuff, but it sold like a 10th of pretty much any regular Marvel title. Crisis on Infinite-Earths was one of the few books that bunches of people read.

After the Dark Knight, Killing Joke and the movie, Batman became huge and started to sell like the X-men, but before, it didn't sell much at all. Superman and Wonder Woman sold about nothing until the Byrne and Perez revamps. Same is true for the JLA, which was a huge title when they started the 'ha ha' Justice League book.

It may have been different other places, but that is what it was like in my town.

My favorites in the 80s were many of the indie books, but for super hero stuff DC definitely became the cool stuff at one point. I never really read Superman at all until the Byrne revamp.

[kalorama]

There wasn't much in the way of outrage in the immediate wake of COIE, because most fans were in favor of the stated gaol behind the changes, to make DC's superhero comics a little more "grown up" for lack of a better term. It wasn't until the rolling wave of individual character reboots started in the following years that there seemed to be a lot of grumbling, because they were handled in such a slapdash, piecemeal manner with little-to-no coordination, unlike COIE itself.

[the4thpip]

We also didn't really know what was coming, did we? The new status quo was slowly being unwrapped over the next few years.

[Mat001]

The outrage for OMD/BND centers around how the marriage was retconned out, which is that Peter cannot accept that May was going to die and that he and MJ agree to have their marriage taken away by Mephisto. With Crisis, it was about an attempt to stop the Anti-Monitor at the dawn of time results in changes to history. It was also centered around statements made by Joe Quesada since the start of his tenure as Editor in Chief at Marvel, where he said that he was going to get rid of the marriage because it aged the characters and divorce wasn't a logical choice. The only thing that the DC staff had to say was that Crisis would allow them to clean house and try to make it easier for new readers. There wasn't as clear a bias coming from DC as there was from Marvel.

There were readers who didn't like the changes and some of their letters were printed in the letters column pages. But I don't know if they were as great as or greater in volume, than what Marvel has heard about OMD.

[the Dagman]

After the Dark Knight, Killing Joke and the movie, Batman became huge and started to sell like the X-men, but before, it didn't sell much at all.


Yeah, when I was in high school in the early 80s I had a Batman t-shirt and it was considered quite the novelty. It was your basic black tee with the old tv series bat-signal logo on it. I remember going to a party wearing it and the cute girl hosting the party had to take a picture of me because she thought it was so cool that I actually had one.

Fast forward a decade to after the Burton Batman movie, and everyone had a Batman t-shirt of some kind. Or so it seemed.

[Lorendiac]

It is also hard to judge considering we didn't have the internet back then. I'd say it didn't because COIE seems near universally loved but the aftermath seems to be a mixed bag because it wasn't a rousing success across the board. Superman & Batman's reboots were well done, as was Wonder Woman but I think she is where the problem starts as when she appears in Legends, it was her debut in the DCU period. SHe wasn't a founder of the JLA etc. so it wasn't as clean a break as originally envisioned. I think her re-intro should have been handled much like Superman & Batman's with a in series reboot like Batman or a mini-series & soft relaunch like Superman & Action Comics. Perez would still tell his new origin for Wonder Woman and that aspect of continuity would remain intact. Secret Origins would have been best used to explain origins for the more b-list and lesser heroes who made the changeover from Earth-2 like the characters from Infinity Inc & Teen Titans (Donna) in order to maintain integrity with the History of the DCU being a guide for how it all fits together.

Within the last year or two, I ran across a fascinating rumor about the Post-COIE Wonder Woman Reboot. It basically said that when George Perez got the chance to sign on as penciler and co-plotter for the rebooted Wonder Woman title, he initially thought that it would work along the same general lines you suggest!

The idea was (per the rumor) that the first several issues of "Wonder Woman" would retell, with new twists, the origins of the Amazons in general, the story of Diana growing up and winning the big contest, and her first foray into the outside world as a lady who spoke fluent Ancient Greek but not Modern English at first.

Then, after the first big arc was over, things would suddenly "fast-forward" to a time years later, with Diana now being fluent in English, and quite competent and experienced in the "costumed crimefighter" role, still having debuted at roughly the same time as Superman and Batman, "several years ago" as one of the first of a new generation of superheroes. In other words, the first several issues of "Wonder Woman" would have been the functional equivalents of John Byrne's "Man of Steel" mini and Frank Miller's "Year One" arc in the "Batman" title -- retellings of origin stories from "several years ago, when she was just getting started!"

According to the rumor, Perez got a nasty shock when, after he had signed on and started drawing the first arc, someone on the editorial side at DC had a sudden mood swing and abruptly changed the timing, saying that now Diana would continue to be "the new kid on the block" in superhero terms, "just now" debuting, many years after other people had founded the old JLA, and also long after Donna Troy had been a founding member of the Teen Titans.

At that point, Marv Wolfman and George Perez suddenly realized, to their mutual chagrin, that their work just a few years earlier on the Titans story "Who is Donna Troy?" had just been cut off at the knees. The first Wonder Girl's origin story no longer worked if Donna was now "the very experienced superhero who's been doing this for several years" and if Diana was now "the naive rookie who just showed up last week as the brand new hero who, as Wonder Woman, is following in the footsteps of the seasoned veteran known as Wonder Girl!"

So Wolfman and Perez reunited on a Titans title long enough to tell a whole new origin story of Donna Troy. This time, since the connection with Wonder Woman and the rest of the Amazons had been thrown out the window, they tried to find some other way to connect Donna to Greek Myth, so they had her be a "seedling" who was raised far away, on another world, by a bunch of the original Titans of Greek Myth. Best they could do, given the crippling restrictions they were under.

As I said, all that was a rumor. I have not seen a transcript of any interviews with Marv Wolfman or George Perez to confirm the details of what Perez originally thought the nature of the Wonder Woman reboot would be. But it all sounds frighteningly plausible. After I saw that rumor, I went back and reread the first year or so of Wonder Woman's Post-COIE title. In the opening story arc, there was at least one reference in dialogue to Superman, the Man of Steel in Metropolis (although he did not appear onstage) -- and that was about it; I didn't notice any reference to any other superhero or group of superheroes, nor to any previous superhero-centric events in the DCU's continuity which would help us nail down the question of "When is this story supposed to be happening? Silver Age? Bronze Age? Or shortly after the sky turned red during the big Crisis just recently?" In other words, after we got past the parts about "ancient history" and Diana being created from a statue and so forth, the main plot of the first several issues of Diana's reboot could very easily have been happening "several years ago, when Superman had only been a household word for the last couple of months," as far as I could tell!

Note: Long before I ever heard this rumor, I had said before, over the years, that the idea of "Donna has been Wonder Girl for much, much longer than Diana has been Wonder Woman" made as little sense as it would to say: "Dick Grayson was the first Robin; he came up with that role all on his own. After he had been protecting Gotham for several years, a young man named Bruce Wayne came along and found Dick so inspiring a role model that Bruce decided he would invent the role of Batman so he could follow in Dick's noble footsteps!" :tongue:

[Bob Violence]

I don't think so. COIE for all it's faults was executed in traditional DC comic book style, a big fight where stuff happens. OMD/BND was just a chickenshirt way of getting a result the Marvel higher ups wanted. It's like if my kids want ice cream: I can say 'No' or I can say "I'll think about it' and delay and delay until, "Hey look! the ice cream shop just closed".
Also, it was done in a way (a magic wish) that goes against the traditional Marvel way of doing things. It's consequences are also decidedly half-arsed and it conveniently erased the biggest Spidey development to come out of CW, the unmasking. It shows how Marvel editors have no idea what made Marvel comics great in the first place.
COIE was a good faith effort to streamline the DCU, I can't say I agree with all the decisions that came out of it, but it's not like it wasn't obvious to anyone that the DCU had (but continues to have) some real continuity conundrums. I think it's a bit of hubris for DC to keep thinking that one more crisis will make everything make sense.

[Lorendiac]

I don't think so. COIE for all it's faults was executed in traditional DC comic book style, a big fight where stuff happens. OMD/BND was just a chickenshirt way of getting a result the Marvel higher ups wanted. It's like if my kids want ice cream: I can say 'No' or I can say "I'll think about it' and delay and delay until, "Hey look! the ice cream shop just closed".

Also, it was done in a way (a magic wish) that goes against the traditional Marvel way of doing things. It's consequences are also decidedly half-arsed and it conveniently erased the biggest Spidey development to come out of CW, the unmasking. It shows how Marvel editors have no idea what made Marvel comics great in the first place.

Back around the early 90s, I would occasionally see fans saying in print something along these lines:

"Marvel may have its faults, but at least they admit that all of their old stories happened. If they don't like the fallout from something, they find a way to retcon it a little, so they can get an old character back the way they want her. For instance, if they want to use Jean Grey again without having her still be a genocidal nutcase who wiped out an entire planetary population, then they just 'reveal' that the Phoenix who died in the Dark Phoenix Saga wasn't really Jean Grey at all -- but the plot of the Dark Phoenix Saga still happened after you make allowances for an unsuspected impersonation going on at the time! DC, on the other hand, is much more willing to try throw anything 'embarrassing' out the window by saying, 'No, that never happened! Years and years of this guy's published stories are now erased from history! And nobody ever heard of a Supergirl who was Kal-El's long-lost cousin Kara, either, so stop whining about how we ought to 'bring her back from the dead!'"

But that was in the early 90s, even before DC's "Zero Hour" which was supposed to magically "fix" some of the lingering problems from "Crisis." (For instance, trying to straighten out Hawkman's continuity, and also rebooting the Legion of Super-Heroes entirely because of editorial mood swings over whether or not Superboy, from one universe or another, had or had not been a vital part of the early days of the Legion!) In those days, Marvel had never done any "massive reboots" to shake things up so badly. Nowadays, Marvel doesn't look as "virtuous" about respecting its old continuity as it did, say, 15 years ago in comparison to DC.

(For instance, after the time when I had first noticed comments such as I paraphrased above about Marvel being better about keeping its own stories in continuity, Marvel made the hideous mistake of trying to use another "Impostor Retcon" on a much larger scale than the Jean Grey thing by trying to tell its readers: "Every Spider-Man story you've read in the last 20 years or so was all about a Clone Impostor, even though he didn't know it himself! The new-and-improved Spider-Man is the 'original' who doesn't remember anything that happened in any Spidey book between the mid-70s and the mid-90s! Because he spent all that time wandering around calling himself Ben Reilly!" That concept had "train wreck" written all over it, in my opinion at the time.)

[Bob Violence]

Back around the early 90s, I would occasionally see fans saying in print something along these lines:

"Marvel may have its faults, but at least they admit that all of their old stories happened. If they don't like the fallout from something, they find a way to retcon it a little, so they can get an old character back the way they want her. For instance, if they want to use Jean Grey again without having her still be a genocidal nutcase who wiped out an entire planetary population, then they just 'reveal' that the Phoenix who died in the Dark Phoenix Saga wasn't really Jean Grey at all -- but the plot of the Dark Phoenix Saga still happened after you make allowances for an unsuspected impersonation going on at the time! DC, on the other hand, is much more willing to try throw anything 'embarrassing' out the window by saying, 'No, that never happened! Years and years of this guy's published stories are now erased from history! And nobody ever heard of a Supergirl who was Kal-El's long-lost cousin Kara, either, so stop whining about how we ought to 'bring her back from the dead!'"

But that was in the early 90s, even before DC's "Zero Hour" which was supposed to magically "fix" some of the lingering problems from "Crisis." (For instance, trying to straighten out Hawkman's continuity, and also rebooting the Legion of Super-Heroes entirely because of editorial mood swings over whether or not Superboy, from one universe or another, had or had not been a vital part of the early days of the Legion!) In those days, Marvel had never done any "massive reboots" to shake things up so badly. Nowadays, Marvel doesn't look as "virtuous" about respecting its old continuity as it did, say, 15 years ago in comparison to DC.

The thing is, both companies are victims of their own success. What I like about DC is the way they don't insult our intelligence; I know I'm reading a comic book, Batman and Superman are media machines that will live on long after their creators and readers die. DC doesn't expect us to believe Batman is really dead.
Marvel's strength is it's 'realism', stuff is supposed to count in the MU. There are suppose to be consequences to everything.
The problem is DC needs a dose of realism. Constant reboots and crises have left too many DC characters rootless. Who is Supergirl? Hawkman? the Legion? Aquaman? Everytime one of these properties is revived they screw it up in a novel new way.They need to accept the fact that some characters cannot sustain a series and should get a mini series every few years. They should accept the fact that the Legion will never fit into the DCU. They should reboot characters only to simplify them and only if it leaves a sustainable character in place.
Marvel, on the other hand needs some sort of reboot if they think they are going to sustain their realism. They need to streamline and weed out the stuff that's clutter from the stuff that defines the characters.

[jgiannantoni05]

There wasn't much in the way of outrage in the immediate wake of COIE, because most fans were in favor of the stated gaol behind the changes, to make DC's superhero comics a little more "grown up" for lack of a better term. It wasn't until the rolling wave of individual character reboots started in the following years that there seemed to be a lot of grumbling, because they were handled in such a slapdash, piecemeal manner with little-to-no coordination, unlike COIE itself.
This is exactly how I've heard it was after COIE. (Should be noted that no internet)

COIE was at first welcomed as a means to make the DCU more grown up and streamlined. Then 2 things happened: 1) many of the reboots gradually angered people, and 2) people gradually changed their mind about the multiverse (lost their shame?) and missed it and wanted it back.

[Lorendiac]

This is exactly how I've heard it was after COIE. (Should be noted that no internet)

COIE was at first welcomed as a means to make the DCU more grown up and streamlined. Then 2 things happened: 1) many of the reboots gradually angered people, and 2) people gradually changed their mind about the multiverse (lost their shame?) and missed it and wanted it back.

Marv Wolfman, in an interview (http://stlcomics.com/columns/tftlof/V/) years ago, responded to a comment from the interviewer to the effect that Roy Thomas had called COIE tragic and unnecessary. Wolfman said the following (I took the liberty of adding boldface to a key line):

"That's Roy's opinion and he's entitled to it. Fortunately, the fans have always supported it. As for whether it was necessary, the answer is yes it was because it got Marvel readers to buy DC Comics for the first time and prior to Crisis they weren't. That each time it's been reprinted it outsells all DC's projections indicate the fan's feelings for it as a real classic. Also, that it was voted in the CBG poll as the 2nd best comics story of the 20th century says what the majority feels. By the way, Roy and I were, are and remain good friends. We can disagree with creative choices but that's okay. I believe every number of years you should clean house and start over again for the new generation of readers."

So it sounds as if one of the mission statements for COIE was to make a big splash and try to draw in Marvel fans who hadn't been regular readers of any DC comics in a long time, if ever. It occurs to me that anybody who only started reading COIE and then the Rebooted Superman and the Rebooted Wonder Woman, for instance, wouldn't really know or care about how those characters had been handled in their Pre-COIE Multiverse incarnations (Earth-1, Earth-2, evil counterparts on Earth-3, etc.). So those fans weren't likely to scream bloody murder about the way the old multiversal continuity was being "disrespected."

On the other hand, fans who had already been reading lots of DC comics regularly for awhile before 1985 might react differently after they realized how haphazard some of the rebooting was. Hawkman, for instance, at first seemed -- in appearances in Superman's stories and the Giffen/DeMatteis Justice League -- to have come through the Crisis virtually untouched! But then, around 1989, the "Hawkworld" mini, which I hear was originally just supposed to be a "more mature retelling of his origin story from ten years ago," suddenly transformed into "this is a belated reboot of Katar Hol and Shayera, who are just now appearing on the modern Earth of the DCU for the very first time, and we editors at DC don't care if that doesn't make any sense!"

I can see how even someone who had scarcely heard of Hawkman until, say, 1985 or 1986 -- a newcomer from Marvel's fanbase, for instance -- might feel very annoyed by being told in 1989-1990: "Any old stories you ever read about Katar Hol -- even six months ago -- didn't happen that way at all!"

[kalorama]

Personally, I think you bolded the wrong line. This is the real key one:

I believe every number of years you should clean house and start over again for the new generation of readers."

I believe the current messy state of comics comes from the reluctance of companies to do this. Scrap the whole deal and start from the ground up. But they won't do it because, as much as they give lip service to wanting new readers, they're deathly afraid of alienating the old ones who, as a class, reject change and want everything to be the same as it was when they were in junior high school.

[Bob Violence]

I believe the current messy state of comics comes from the reluctance of companies to do this. Scrap the whole deal and start from the ground up. But they won't do it because, as much as they give lip service to wanting new readers, they're deathly afraid of alienating the old ones who, as a class, reject change and want everything to be the same as it was when they were in junior high school.

The problem is, DC does this selectively, the result being half the pieces don't fit together. They reboot Aquaman or Hawkman over and over to the point where you don't know how the characters are supposed to know each other anymore.
Marvel tries to do this, but they can't bite the bullet and do it across the MU. You would think it wouldn't be so hard considering there is a relatively tighter timeline. What they did to Spider-Man in OMD/BND screws up what happened in CW and opens a real can of worms.

[scary harpy]

It wasn't until the rolling wave of individual character reboots started in the following years that there seemed to be a lot of grumbling, because they were handled in such a slapdash, piecemeal manner with little-to-no coordination, unlike COIE itself.

Well said!

If they had actually rebooted everything there would not exist the twenty-plus year-old mess that exists today.

It simply would not have been that difficult; correcting the mess now is impossible.

:frown:

[scary harpy]

This is exactly how I've heard it was after COIE. (Should be noted that no internet)

COIE was at first welcomed as a means to make the DCU more grown up and streamlined. Then 2 things happened: 1) many of the reboots gradually angered people, and 2) people gradually changed their mind about the multiverse (lost their shame?) and missed it and wanted it back.

Saddest of all, TPTB at DC have never learned from their mistakes so they keep repeating them.

[scary harpy]

I believe the current messy state of comics comes from the reluctance of companies to do this. Scrap the whole deal and start from the ground up. But they won't do it because, as much as they give lip service to wanting new readers, they're deathly afraid of alienating the old ones who, as a class, reject change and want everything to be the same as it was when they were in junior high school.

The problem is, DC does this selectively, the result being half the pieces don't fit together. They reboot Aquaman or Hawkman over and over to the point where you don't know how the characters are supposed to know each other anymore.


Agreed.

Too True.

:frown:

[Lorendiac]

The problem is, DC does this selectively, the result being half the pieces don't fit together. They reboot Aquaman or Hawkman over and over to the point where you don't know how the characters are supposed to know each other anymore.

Preach it, brother! If they're going to reboot anything, I really wish they'd work out all the details, for their entire universe, in advance, and then make it crystal-clear to our fans how much of the old stuff (if any!) was still in continuity, instead of taking this hit-and-miss approach and leaving us scratching our heads as we mutter, "Okay, I think they've rebooted at least 33% of this, and 50% of that, and now they're rebooting the Legion of Superheroes for the third time in what, the last 15 years? If turning back the clock to where the Legion was in the mid-80s really counts as a 'reboot' instead of, I dunno, an 'unboot' or something?"

I mentioned earlier that they really shot themselves in the foot in the late 80s after they decided: "Wonder Woman is getting rebooted -- she's just now debuting as a superhero, many years after the founding of the JLA, et cetera -- but her former sidekick and younger-sister-by-adoption, Wonder Girl, isn't getting rebooted! All of Donna's old stories as a stalwart member of the Teen Titans are still in continuity! Now who could possibly find that confusing?"

Marvel tries to do this, but they can't bite the bullet and do it across the MU. You would think it wouldn't be so hard considering there is a relatively tighter timeline. What they did to Spider-Man in OMD/BND screws up what happened in CW and opens a real can of worms.

Let's be fair about this: I think Marvel made a sincere effort to do a "universal reboot" when they started their Ultimate line of titles. Rewind everybody back to the beginning, retell the essential elements of their origin stories, and move on from there? They just wanted to have it both ways at once by also continuing to publish the old titles set in the same old Marvel Universe which rested on the foundations of all those stories written by Stan Lee back in the 1960s! :smile:

I generally was not blown away with sheer admiration by the Ultimate stuff I looked at, but at least I give them credit for trying to start all over in what was supposedly going to be a much more new-reader-friendly fashion!

[adam_warlock_2099]

Let's be fair about this: I think Marvel made a sincere effort to do a "universal reboot" when they started their Ultimate line of titles. Rewind everybody back to the beginning, retell the essential elements of their origin stories, and move on from there? They just wanted to have it both ways at once by also continuing to publish the old titles set in the same old Marvel Universe which rested on the foundations of all those stories written by Stan Lee back in the 1960s! :smile:

I generally was not blown away with sheer admiration by the Ultimate stuff I looked at, but at least I give them credit for trying to start all over in what was supposedly going to be a much more new-reader-friendly fashion!

This is what I enjoyed about the Ultimate Universe over 616. Simply having the choice. They took a retelling of classic characters for new readers, while leaving us old timers, me, what we grew up reading.

But let me say, that I really enjoyed COIE. I don't mind change, like COIE was. But what people have said about BND and all that (I haven't read it) sounds like it has caused more problems then it "fixed".

[kalorama]

The only Ultimate book that really worked for me was Ultimate Spider-Man because that was the only one where the character actual felt like a modern retelling og his origin rather than completely different characters with the same name.

The problem with the Ultimate line is that Marvel half-assed it while trying to have it both ways. It wasn't really a relaunch of the MU because they basically tried to cram the entire thing in a small handful of books. The whole thing felt forced and cramped, and it eventually ended up weighing down the Spider-Man book by trying to cram every one of Bendis's pet characters into Spidey's backstory instead of expanding the line and giving them their own space (even if it was only an anthology or miniseries).

The fact that they basically blew up almost the entire thing and started over after less than a decade is an indication of how far and quickly off track it got.

[invisiboy]

The problem is, DC does this selectively, the result being half the pieces don't fit together. They reboot Aquaman or Hawkman over and over to the point where you don't know how the characters are supposed to know each other anymore.

That's my major beef with DC. They seem intent on dividing fans of certain characters. I suspect Didio actually believe a "Hawkman fan" will like whatever Hawkman he throws out there, and that is simply not true. And that goes for a lot of other characters/monikers that have been rehashed way too often, like Supergirl, Aquaman, Hawkman, Batgirl, Robin, etc. Also, all the tiny retcons that seem to take place weekly further complicate matters. This is why I try not to think to much about "continuity" -- because DC cannot do it well at all. Releases retcons on a steady basis is the opposite of having continuity, and it's lazy.

[adam_warlock_2099]

The only Ultimate book that really worked for me was Ultimate Spider-Man because that was the only one where the character actual felt like a modern retelling og his origin rather than completely different characters with the same name.

The problem with the Ultimate line is that Marvel half-assed it while trying to have it both ways. It wasn't really a relaunch of the MU because they basically tried to cram the entire thing in a small handful of books. The whole thing felt forced and cramped, and it eventually ended up weighing down the Spider-Man book by trying to cram every one of Bendis's pet characters into Spidey's backstory instead of expanding the line and giving them their own space (even if it was only an anthology or miniseries).

The fact that they basically blew up almost the entire thing and started over after less than a decade is an indication of how far and quickly off track it got.

Spiderman is all I read, up to about a year ago. I enjoyed it, as much as I read it, but I never read any of the other titles besides X-Men for maybe 10 issues or so, and that didn't last long.

And that really is only because I had lost any interest in 616 Spiderman since the Clone Saga. But being that I haven't read it since Immomen took over for Bagley on art, I have no idea about the recent reboot of the Ultimate Universe. But being on other message boards I have heard both good and bad.

[scary harpy]

Note: Long before I ever heard this rumor, I had said before, over the years, that the idea of "Donna has been Wonder Girl for much, much longer than Diana has been Wonder Woman" made as little sense as it would to say: "Dick Grayson was the first Robin; he came up with that role all on his own. After he had been protecting Gotham for several years, a young man named Bruce Wayne came along and found Dick so inspiring a role model that Bruce decided he would invent the role of Batman so he could follow in Dick's noble footsteps!" :tongue:

LOL.

This rumor has a real ring of truth. Too many retcons were handled like this.

[scary harpy]

Preach it, brother! If they're going to reboot anything, I really wish they'd work out all the details, for their entire universe, in advance, and then make it crystal-clear to our fans how much of the old stuff (if any!) was still in continuity, instead of taking this hit-and-miss approach and leaving us scratching our heads as we mutter, "Okay, I think they've rebooted at least 33% of this, and 50% of that, and now they're rebooting the Legion of Superheroes for the third time in what, the last 15 years? If turning back the clock to where the Legion was in the mid-80s really counts as a 'reboot' instead of, I dunno, an 'unboot' or something?"

I mentioned earlier that they really shot themselves in the foot in the late 80s after they decided: "Wonder Woman is getting rebooted -- she's just now debuting as a superhero, many years after the founding of the JLA, et cetera -- but her former sidekick and younger-sister-by-adoption, Wonder Girl, isn't getting rebooted! All of Donna's old stories as a stalwart member of the Teen Titans are still in continuity! Now who could possibly find that confusing?"


Amen!

Hallelujah.

[squirecam]

Personally, I think you bolded the wrong line. This is the real key one:



I believe the current messy state of comics comes from the reluctance of companies to do this. Scrap the whole deal and start from the ground up. But they won't do it because, as much as they give lip service to wanting new readers, they're deathly afraid of alienating the old ones who, as a class, reject change and want everything to be the same as it was when they were in junior high school.

This cant possibly be true, given that many Spidey readers wanted Spidey to grow and mature, rather than OMD ret-con into the "younger" pathetic single nerd he is today.

Its the comic editors that dont want any real change. Not the readers.

[Lorendiac]

This cant possibly be true, given that many Spidey readers wanted Spidey to grow and mature, rather than OMD ret-con into the "younger" pathetic single nerd he is today.

Its the comic editors that dont want any real change. Not the readers.

But remember something -- for about 20 years before OMD, Spidey had been "a married man who's outgrown the adolescent immaturity of his Silver Age stories." For anyone who only came became a regular reader within the last 20 years, that was The Sacred Status Quo. From their viewpoint, OMD was the "Drastic Change We Didn't Want!" That's why they started screaming bloody murder at a shocking rewriting of history which rested upon the strange assumption that "Peter Parker is the kind of gullible knucklehead who assumes that making a Deal with the Devil is a brilliant idea which couldn't possibly backfire!"

[kalorama]

This cant possibly be true, given that many Spidey readers wanted Spidey to grow and mature, rather than OMD ret-con into the "younger" pathetic single nerd he is today.

That's because the vast majority of the fans doing the protesting grew up with the version of Spider-Man that was done away with by OMD/BND. They were protesting a change away from the version they were familiar and comfortable with.

[Bob Violence]

But remember something -- for about 20 years before OMD, Spidey had been "a married man who's outgrown the adolescent immaturity of his Silver Age stories." For anyone who only came became a regular reader within the last 20 years, that was The Sacred Status Quo. From their viewpoint, OMD was the "Drastic Change We Didn't Want!" That's why they started screaming bloody murder at a shocking rewriting of history which rested upon the strange assumption that "Peter Parker is the kind of gullible knucklehead who assumes that making a Deal with the Devil is a brilliant idea which couldn't possibly backfire!"
That's exactly the problem. Not only was the status quo overturned, but it was done in the lamest way possible. And to top it off, this drastic change screwed up the drastic change of the year before and casts doubt about any drastic changes yet to come.:eek:

[Mat001]

The unmasking was never going to be permanent. Marvel lied to us about it. It was only used to get to OMD/BND. A cheap, yet effective sleight of hand. DC never lied about what they were going to do with the first Crisis. They just didn't execute it as well as they should've. This was due to everyone not wanting to play ball afterwards and making the changes one at a time, rather than all at once.

[Hullababy]

I'm still anti reboot.

[3D Master]

That's because the vast majority of the fans doing the protesting grew up with the version of Spider-Man that was done away with by OMD/BND. They were protesting a change away from the version they were familiar and comfortable with.

It has got nothing to do with comfortable, it's got to do with it being BAD. Just because you've got change, doesn't mean it's good change. Everyone keeps going on as if the moment there is change, it must automatically be good, because it's CHANGE!, and then everyone who resists is, are a bunch of pathetic people who can't deal with CHANGE!

The moment you have change you can have change for the better, as well as for the worse. Spider-man changed for the worse, on top of that, in an absolutely horrible story where he made a deal with the devil.

In contrast, writers have wanted to change Spider-man by giving him kids. And most readers go, "Yay!" Who resist that change? Editors: "No, no, no! Spider-man and kids!? NO! It ages him too much! I don't want an old fogey for a super hero! Bwaa!"

[Lorendiac]

It has got nothing to do with comfortable, it's got to do with it being BAD. Just because you've got change, doesn't mean it's good change. Everyone keeps going on as if the moment there is change, it must automatically be good, because it's CHANGE!, and then everyone who resists is, are a bunch of pathetic people who can't deal with CHANGE!

It's been said before that in politics, anytime your faction wants to change something, you should call your proposal a "reform." Because everyone knows "reform" is "good." Then, if your opponents offer reasons why they think your idea is stupid, you just shake your head, ignore their actual reasons, and say sadly, "This is the sort of knee-jerk opposition which we true reformers always have to endure!"

(Of course, when the other side wants to change something, you must be sure to always call their proposal something else entirely, such as "a half-baked scheme which would only cost more money and upset the good, efficient system that we already have!")

[kalorama]

It has got nothing to do with comfortable, it's got to do with it being BAD. Just because you've got change, doesn't mean it's good change. Everyone keeps going on as if the moment there is change, it must automatically be good, because it's CHANGE!, and then everyone who resists is, are a bunch of pathetic people who can't deal with CHANGE!

The moment you have change you can have change for the better, as well as for the worse. Spider-man changed for the worse, on top of that, in an absolutely horrible story where he made a deal with the devil.

In contrast, writers have wanted to change Spider-man by giving him kids. And most readers go, "Yay!" Who resist that change? Editors: "No, no, no! Spider-man and kids!? NO! It ages him too much! I don't want an old fogey for a super hero! Bwaa!"

At the risk of stating the fairly obvious, I will simply point out that I did not, in fact, say, suggest, or imply anything of the things you're railing against, and leave it at that.

[Lorendiac]

But remember something -- for about 20 years before OMD, Spidey had been "a married man who's outgrown the adolescent immaturity of his Silver Age stories." For anyone who only came became a regular reader within the last 20 years, that was The Sacred Status Quo. From their viewpoint, OMD was the "Drastic Change We Didn't Want!" That's why they started screaming bloody murder at a shocking rewriting of history which rested upon the strange assumption that "Peter Parker is the kind of gullible knucklehead who assumes that making a Deal with the Devil is a brilliant idea which couldn't possibly backfire!"

That's exactly the problem. Not only was the status quo overturned, but it was done in the lamest way possible. And to top it off, this drastic change screwed up the drastic change of the year before and casts doubt about any drastic changes yet to come.:eek:

Looking back on it, I expressed myself very poorly in the passage quoted above. I must have been typing in a terrible hurry. I made it sound as if I believed the only reason anyone could object to Peter saying "It's time to make a deal with the devil and pray it all works out for the best!" was because the fallout from that deal would upset his "status quo" of the last 20 years as a married man.

I should have said that anyone who had come to take that marital status for granted would have complained long and loud in any event if it suddenly got swept away from history in the mainstream MU timeline, via any rationale at all -- but that Marvel was adding insult to injury by having Peter lose his marbles in order to set up that rewriting of history in such an incredibly lame fashion.

I, for one, have had my opinions fluctuate over the years regarding the wisdom of his married condition in the "regular continuity," and I was not automatically outraged by the idea that Marvel was trying to "fix" what Joe Quesada perceived as a "problem" in that area -- but I admit I was still disgusted by what I heard about using "Peter makes a pact with the devil" as the rationale for setting the whole thing in motion!

Although I had been taking it for granted, ever since the day I first heard about him "publicly revealing his identity" during "Civil War," that some sort of massive retcon or global mindwipe or whatever must be scheduled to undo that boneheaded maneuver in the regular continuity before too much time had passed! Mat001 says that Marvel lied to us about the permanence of "no more secret identity for Spidey" -- I didn't remember hearing that, since I wasn't actually reading "Civil War" or any Spidey titles at the time. If I ever saw reports that they had claimed this public revelation was "permanent," I would have laughed at that and assumed that "permanent" meant about as "permanent" as it is whenever Jean Grey dies all over again! :rolleyes:

[invisiboy]

I was very young when COIE was published, but I do recall people bieng upset that Supergirl, The (Barry Allen) Flash, and Huntress/Robin2 were killed. Other than that, I think people liked COIE just fine. The Superman rebot after was painful at times and upset some people, but I am not sure what else people may have complained about. As a previous poster stated, there was no Internet back then, so communication on the subject was limited.

[Lorendiac]

I was very young when COIE was published, but I do recall people bieng upset that Supergirl, The (Barry Allen) Flash, and Huntress/Robin2 were killed. Other than that, I think people liked COIE just fine. The Superman rebot after was painful at times and upset some people, but I am not sure what else people may have complained about. As a previous poster stated, there was no Internet back then, so communication on the subject was limited.

One thing about the death of Supergirl -- I believe Marv Wolfman has said, regarding the issue in which Kara died, that he's heard two opinions over and over from fans of that character who later met him at conventions.

1. "I hated it that Kara died!"

2. "That sequence of COIE was probably the best-written story about Kara Zor-El that I ever read!"

What that suggests to me is that what Kara desperately needed in the early 1980s was an outstanding writer to "put her on the map" and improve her sales figures. If she had gotten one, then she might have already been doing so well (when DC editors were drawing up their "hit lists" for COIE) that she would have automatically been labelled "hands off!" and Byrne would have been told to make room for her in his planned Superman Reboot?

But I guess that instead, she was considered just as "Thoroughly Expendable" as Don Hall (Hawk) and Barry Allen (Flash) and Tula (Aquagirl) and Helena Wayne (Huntress) and various others?

[the4thpip]

One thing about the death of Supergirl -- I believe Marv Wolfman has said, regarding the issue in which Kara died, that he's heard two opinions over and over from fans of that character who later met him at conventions.

1. "I hated it that Kara died!"

2. "That sequence of COIE was probably the best-written story about Kara Zor-El that I ever read!"

What that suggests to me is that what Kara desperately needed in the early 1980s was an outstanding writer to "put her on the map" and improve her sales figures. If she had gotten one, then she might have already been doing so well (when DC editors were drawing up their "hit lists" for COIE) that she would have automatically been labelled "hands off!" and Byrne would have been told to make room for her in his planned Superman Reboot?

But I guess that instead, she was considered just as "Thoroughly Expendable" as Don Hall (Hawk) and Barry Allen (Flash) and Tula (Aquagirl) and Helena Wayne (Huntress) and various others?

I am still surprised that Warner Bros. marketing let them get away with the "last son of Krypton" idea.

I mean, the market potential for Supergirl lunch boxes, stuffed Krypto toys etc. isn't exactly small.

[Lorendiac]

I am still surprised that Warner Bros. marketing let them get away with the "last son of Krypton" idea.

I mean, the market potential for Supergirl lunch boxes, stuffed Krypto toys etc. isn't exactly small.

It suddenly occurs to me that I have no idea how much marketing of Supergirl-themed merchandise continued to be done in the late 80s and 90s. T-shirts, toys, lunch boxes, posters, coloring books? Were there any? If there were, did Warner make any effort to label those products as "Matrix Supergirl" materials after the new Supergirl debuted toward the end of Byrne's run?

[lawman]

The thread-starting question here is an interesting one. I was reading back in the day before COIE, both DC and Marvel books, although I was primarily a DC fan. And I think the proposed comparison (COIE to OMD/BND), although intriguing, is a little off-base.

The thing is, as already observed, Crisis was a big project intended from the start to shake up the DCU. The end result was a streamlined and integrated universe, with the promise of more sophisticated storytelling... and the story itself that got us there was a terrific one. It not only pulled in a lot of new readers (Marvelites, as Marv noted), but also excited the current ones. It was greeted with a great deal of enthusiasm.

The aftermath is where things became more of a mixed bag. The Superman reboot was controversial, but apparently pleased more readers than it dismayed. Wonder Woman's reboot and Wally's launch as Flash were very well-received. OTOH, there was considerable confusion about the backstory for characters like the Titans and the JLA and the Legion... and later on Hawkman, among others. Still and all, I remember the late '80s/early '90s as a high-water mark for DC.

By way of contrast, with Spider-Man the controversy has been about not the aftermath of the reboot, but the reboot itself. Virtually nobody actually liked the way OMD/BND was done, including the writer himself (JMS has subsequently opined that he should perhaps have just stepped aside and removed his name from it). Since then the book has had some top-notch creative teams, and from many accounts the storytelling has been pretty strong (within the everything-old-is-new-again constraints of the BND continuity). I wouldn't know; I dropped it when BND began, and have no intent of reading a Spider-title again so long as the current editorial mandate is in place.

All things considered, a better analogy for what Spidey's been through, instead of COIE, might be "Emerald Twilight," the story that did away with the GL Corps and ruined Hal Jordan for years. Even people who agreed that the GL concept needed a breath of fresh air were disgusted by how that story was executed, and the majority of the strong fans of Kyle Rayner in later years were those who had never read GL before his tenure.

Now, as to the philosophy of the readers reacting to all these various things? This was an interesting exchange...

I believe the current messy state of comics comes from the reluctance of companies to do this. Scrap the whole deal and start from the ground up. But they won't do it because, as much as they give lip service to wanting new readers, they're deathly afraid of alienating the old ones who, as a class, reject change and want everything to be the same as it was when they were in junior high school.
This cant possibly be true, given that many Spidey readers wanted Spidey to grow and mature, rather than OMD ret-con into the "younger" pathetic single nerd he is today.

Its the comic editors that dont want any real change. Not the readers.
That's because the vast majority of the fans doing the protesting grew up with the version of Spider-Man that was done away with by OMD/BND. They were protesting a change away from the version they were familiar and comfortable with.
It has got nothing to do with comfortable, it's got to do with it being BAD. Just because you've got change, doesn't mean it's good change. Everyone keeps going on as if the moment there is change, it must automatically be good, because it's CHANGE!, and then everyone who resists is, are a bunch of pathetic people who can't deal with CHANGE!

The moment you have change you can have change for the better, as well as for the worse. Spider-man changed for the worse, on top of that, in an absolutely horrible story where he made a deal with the devil.

In contrast, writers have wanted to change Spider-man by giving him kids. And most readers go, "Yay!" Who resist that change? Editors: "No, no, no! Spider-man and kids!? NO! It ages him too much! I don't want an old fogey for a super hero! Bwaa!"
Kalorama, I think you're making an over-generalization here that's not especially logical, nor fair.

First of all, Marv's original statement is questionable from the start. Did COIE work well at rebooting things and attracting new readers? Yes, mostly. But that doesn't necessarily mean the same thing has to be done every few years. For one thing, we underestimate new readers if we assume they can't handle backstory. How many of us here, after all, happened to start reading comics just exactly when something was being launched from scratch? I'd wager it's very few, and it seems self-evident that we weren't deterred. Second, the marketplace dynamic is different than it was in 1985. The supply of new readers to be gained at the expense of old ones isn't necessarily that large; there isn't a whole generation of Marvel Zombies around who've never tried DC, like there was then.

More importantly, I think Squirecam and 3DMaster hit on a logical distinction you elide: rejecting reboots is not the same as rejecting "change." In fact, in quite a few instances (BND certainly being an example), reboots and revamps and retcons are precisely about, not moving the characters forward with logical changes, but rolling them back to some earlier status quo — usually the one that obtained when not the readers, but the writers and editors, were in junior high. At other times (and here "Emerald Twilight" again springs to mind, as does Marvel's "Heroes Reborn" from the '90s), they're a misguided attempt to make the characters "fresh" and "hip" for young readers (something writers/editors almost invariably misread), poorly executed instances of "change for change's sake" that lack any sense of authenticity.

OTOH, changes that actually matter and flow sensibly from what's been set up in the past — like, e.g., Lois Lane learning Clark Kent's ID and eventually marrying him, or, say, Jack Knight taking over as Starman (to cite a less-obvious example) tend to be embraced by readers with very few reservations.

Moving on...
Saddest of all, TPTB at DC have never learned from their mistakes so they keep repeating them.
That's my major beef with DC. They seem intent on dividing fans of certain characters. I suspect Didio actually believe a "Hawkman fan" will like whatever Hawkman he throws out there, and that is simply not true. And that goes for a lot of other characters/monikers that have been rehashed way too often, like Supergirl, Aquaman, Hawkman, Batgirl, Robin, etc. Also, all the tiny retcons that seem to take place weekly further complicate matters. This is why I try not to think to much about "continuity" -- because DC cannot do it well at all. Releases retcons on a steady basis is the opposite of having continuity, and it's lazy.
These two points, I entirely agree with. As a long-time reader, I care about continuity (and it was true when I was a kid, too, actually). And it's not because I want things to stay mired in some status quo... on the contrary, it's because if creators are focused on redoing and re-re-doing the past, they never have a solid foundation on which to move into the future.

[DanCMH]

My loathing for OMD aside, here's a little something I think a lot of the fans who collected COIE issue by issue...one month at a time...dont often mention.

As amazing as COIE was at the time....as epic as the story remains to this day...a lot of fans like myself were just relieved as hell when it was finally OVER and done with.

Collecting DC was tough during Crisis. Every issue had the token red skies and every storyline tried to feed off of and into COIE. And the event was a lot longer than the 12 issue year. Red skies and storylines began developing well over a year in advance of the first COIE issue so by the time the whole story was told a lot of us were just happy as hell it was done. It was a great story but damn it was a long time from start to finish. When the rolling reboots began after Crisis, a lot of us were just grateful to pick up a DC book that didnt feature shadow demons and gallons of red ink.

Power Girl is now Atlantean in ancestory? Is she fighting a shadow demon? No? Well then awesome.

Wonder Woman can fly and wasnt part of the original league? Are the skies she's flying through red? No? I can live with that.

[tim_cbr]

My favorites in the 80s were many of the indie books, but for super hero stuff DC definitely became the cool stuff at one point. I never really read Superman at all until the Byrne revamp.

We had an incredible selection of Indies in the 1980s.

I guess we still do. It's just hard for me to distinguish them. Maybe they get less press. A lot of today's indies seem to be superhero universes... ladies with big boobs on the covers...

1980s: Cerebus, Concrete, translated Japanese titles (Lone Wolf and Cub, et c.)
2000s: Fables, Hellboy, BPRD, Chew, ...

[tim_cbr]

My loathing for OMD aside, here's a little something I think a lot of the fans who collected COIE issue by issue...one month at a time...dont often mention.

As amazing as COIE was at the time....as epic as the story remains to this day...a lot of fans like myself were just relieved as hell when it was finally OVER and done with.


I agree with all of what you said. My memory is fuzzy (I was 15 during COIE), but I believe I wound up dropping all my DC titles before COIE ended. I was tired of the tie-ins and not getting complete stories within the series' I was actually collecting.

I later dropped all of my Marvel titles due to the Inferno event for the same reasons.

Also, I don't remember understanding what COIE was all about. I collected JLA and Batman (I was more into Marvel). And, from the perspective of those two titles, COIE didn't buy me anything. I was a big Earth 2 fan due to JLA and any changes to Earth 2 would have annoyed me

(as I said, my memory of the time is really fuzzy... I'm probably mixing time-lines, etc). I collected JL International... did that come during or after COIE? (You see what I mean?)

-Tim

[Mat001]

It suddenly occurs to me that I have no idea how much marketing of Supergirl-themed merchandise continued to be done in the late 80s and 90s. T-shirts, toys, lunch boxes, posters, coloring books? Were there any? If there were, did Warner make any effort to label those products as "Matrix Supergirl" materials after the new Supergirl debuted toward the end of Byrne's run?

I don't recall seeing anything for Supergirl up until 2005. If there was, it was only when it was connected to "Superman: The Animated Series". I don't collect coloring books, so I couldn't tell you there. I don't recall seeing any shirts like I have in the last few years. Mainly pink shirts and occassionally they'll have the name Supergirl on it. The only action figure was for the DCAU and from DC Direct. It was the same way with Krypto. Only Conner and John Henry were given real consideration and that was just action figures. Didio, I think it was, once said that it was easier to market Supergirl and Krypto if they were revereted back to their basic origins and not the convoluted ones they had post Crisis.

First of all, Marv's original statement is questionable from the start. Did COIE work well at rebooting things and attracting new readers? Yes, mostly. But that doesn't necessarily mean the same thing has to be done every few years. For one thing, we underestimate new readers if we assume they can't handle backstory. How many of us here, after all, happened to start reading comics just exactly when something was being launched from scratch? I'd wager it's very few, and it seems self-evident that we weren't deterred. Second, the marketplace dynamic is different than it was in 1985. The supply of new readers to be gained at the expense of old ones isn't necessarily that large; there isn't a whole generation of Marvel Zombies around who've never tried DC, like there was then.

Bingo. When I jumped onto Superman, I didn't know all that had changed since 1986. Jonathan and Martha being alive, Lex being a corporate CEO who never went to prison, a Superman who was not as powerful, a Clark Kent who was not like the films or the cartoons I had seen, Kara was dead and someone else was Supergirl, Krypton was different and Clark wasn't fond of it. I had to learn as I went along. Anyone can handle it if they make the effort.