**** 

It added mystery for me, too, just not in a good way. In this case, the two Supermans in CRISIS were E1 and E2 -- specifically NOT the JB version.

Plus, the scene in the comic is so awkwardly handled. Here's Superman's thought process after Blok calls him Superboy:

"What - what did he call me??"

"SuperBOY! He called me Superboy!!"

So far it sounds natural -- he's responding to a name he's never heard before. Then comes the next page:

"I met a kid who called himself Superboy a few months ago. But he went off into limbo at the end of the crisis."

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In the Post-Crisis universe, the Crisis still happened. The Anti-Monitor still invaded the matter universe. Barry still died stopping the anti-matter cannon. It was just the bits with the multiple-Earths that were supposed to no longer exist.

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I think it was mostly referenced obliquely. JLA: Incarnations #5 shows some of the post-Crisis-Crisis events. And Flash #150 involves Wally ending up in an alternate timeline where the Anti-Monitor wins because Barry was killed earlier than he was supposed to be.

Any number of wrong decisions were made throughout. One was the editorial dictate that the heroes be allowed to remember everything while the villains be made to forget. The previous universe, the events of the Crisis, all of it. Word came down that the heroes were to have complete recollections of it all.

To this end, Wolfman had to rejigger his story so that all of the heroes (and none of the villains, with the exception of the Psycho-Pirate) had to be present at the moment when the Anti-Monitor hand displaced the Krona hand at the moment of Creation, and therefore were not "caught up" in the sweeping changes thereby brought about...

How was this supposed to work? Were the heroes really supposed to go through their lives saying things like, "Ah, meeting Barbara Gordon for the first time... In this new Universe, she is Commissioner Gordon's niece rather than his daughter. I'll have to remember that..." Seriously, what do you do when every single thing you've every known is now either wrong or in question? What were they thinking putting this dictum into place?

Another major flaw in the reasoning and scheduling of Crisis was what to do with all of the comics published in the interim between the end of Crisis and the establishment of new histories for the various heroes. Heroes not yet rebooted remained in a default Pre-Crisis mode (ala' Hawkman in Action Comics) until some sort of brilliant Post-Crisis reinvention of them could be thought up and then put forth as the official Post-Crisis version. Every single character in the DC Universe was in this Pre-Crisis/Post-Crisis Limbo until their new histories were solidified.

Superman is clearly shown, Post-Crisis, taking the body of his cousin back to her family and introducing the Earth-2 Superman to co-workers as his uncle, "the one that he was named after." Did the universe restart itself or didn't it? Was there some sort of "lag time" as history caught up to the present with all of the changes it was putting into effect? Did Billy Batson have a photo of Freddy and Mary in his back pocket with Freddy's head gradually disappearing?

In a sense, Wolfman & Perez's "History" was only a snapshot of one brief iteration of this odd "Flux-Verse" in which Superman is the "Man of Steel" version, but Plastic Man still lives in the 1940's, because we hadn't hired Phil Foglio to "fix" him yet.

There was also the problem of the everyone's favorite DC stories not existing anymore. What to do when Wonder Woman isn't there for the origin of the JLA? Did Superman date a mermaid in college? Was there ever a Mer-Boy and Bird-Boy in Wonder Woman's past? And what of... the Glop? So began the tedious, endless process of bringing... every... damn... thing... back... Retelling all of the stories we all loved so well, but telling them... differently, this time. Telling them right. A knife rather than a harpoon, Black Canary rather Wonder Woman, a young Aquaman rather than Mer-Boy... And so on, ad infinitum.

Of course, this created problems as well... If Aquaman and Wonder Woman are the same age, and Wonder Woman is only nineteen, why is Aquaman deep into a bad marriage, his son already dead? 

Nothing. Worked. Nothing. Fit.

Crisis was a complete botch-job, from start to finish. Appalling. The repair job that was supposed to make everything clean, streamlined, and cohesive, just like Marvel (yeah, right...) left everything up in the air. Previously, there were contradictions in what was known. Afterwards, nothing was known and all that was left were contradictions. 

And, by and large, it's been that way ever since.

As for the Flash, Mason, the story of his death was retold in Secret Origins Annual #2 somewhat differently than it appeared in Crisis, as he is taken apart putting an end to the Anti-Monitor's Tachyon Cannon rather than his Anti-Matter gun. To the best of my knowledge, this is the only story that could be said to take place in the Post-Crisis, reinvented version of Crisis rather than the original one. I vaguely recall a caption somewhere telling us, the readers, that Crisis had in fact taken place in the Post-Crisis DC Universe, but that it took place differently (No Supergirl, No Earth-2 Superman.) "Maybe sometime we'll tell you that story..." it concluded.

Oh, goody. Can't wait for that one...

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But they had new origins that did not involve them being part of Crisis. Barry was reinvented after Crisis as well, but it still ended with him dying stopping the Anti-Monitor during the Crisis.