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Topic: Q for JB: CRISIS and after (Topic Closed Topic Closed) Post ReplyPost New Topic
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Jason Schulman
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Posted: 30 December 2014 at 9:54pm | IP Logged | 1  
I never understood what Steve Englehart was trying to do with MILLENIUM. I can't even remember what the story was about other than "such-and-such character is really a Manhunter."
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Brian Hague
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Posted: 30 December 2014 at 10:48pm | IP Logged | 2  
Millennium was largely about Englehart taking elements he'd introduced in mid-70's JLA tales; links between Kirby's Manhunter and the Green Lantern Corps and giving the Guardians a failed "first draft" of their interstellar police force; and then making that the single biggest thing to hit the DCU that year.

It was also supposed to get rid of the Guardians by marrying them off to the Zamarons, release the Corps to operate more or less on their own, give Hal a team of his own to train, and set up a team of earth-people as the New Guardians, beings destined to play at least as big a role in the unfolding of the cosmos as their predecessors had.

The decision by DC editorial to make one supporting character in each hero's cast a scheming alien robot was unfortunate at best. Especially in the Legion where that month's Manhunter turned out to be... someone who activated a thousand years too late to be of any good to the plan...


Edited by Brian Hague on 30 December 2014 at 10:48pm
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Stephen Churay
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Posted: 30 December 2014 at 10:54pm | IP Logged | 3  
Twenty-Two years later, they finally accomplished that goal with
BLACKEST NIGHT.
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Jason Schulman
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Posted: 30 December 2014 at 10:56pm | IP Logged | 4  
Laurel Kent, right?

And then the New Guardians were promptly forgotten about. I certainly forgot about them.
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Brian O'Neill
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Posted: 30 December 2014 at 11:40pm | IP Logged | 5  
BRIAN: For me, the Pasko stories were a golden era and 
the idea that Lana grew up into the character she was 
shown to be in those comics was fine with me. There had 
to be a reason Superman chose Lois over the girl who was 
just like her back in Smallville. Pasko did an excellent 
job of delineating the differences, big and small, that 
existed between the two women in Superman's life.

SER: You know, something I really liked about JB's 
SUPERMAN run was that Lana Lang was a "normal" Kansas 
girl. She was the woman Clark would inevitably "leave 
behind" when he moved to the big city. It felt rooted in 
an emotional reality.

Pasko certainly got the most out of that late '70s version of Lana, but, like Stephen, I preferred JB 'restoring' her to her 'girl next door' persona.(To some extent, in the early '80s, Lana had mellowed quite a bit, when she and Clark started dating after Marv Wolfman's 'Superman breaks up with Lois' subplot, but I still preferred Lana without the TV news trappings).
JB's Lana and Clark had a bond that had never really been there before, and it was a good addition to the relationship.
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Brian O'Neill
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Posted: 30 December 2014 at 11:50pm | IP Logged | 6  
 JB:Ah, MILLENIUM. "You have to reveal that one of your established supporting cast characters is a Manhunter. Your choices are Perry White, Jimmy Olsen or Lana Lang." Just like that, I knew nothing had changed at DC, CRISIS or no CRISIS.

I picked Lana thinking I could shape my tale so as to do the least amount of damage.

Too bad Morgan Edge wasn't one of the choices. That guy added nothing to the stories when he wasn't under Darkseid's control..so basically, any time he showed up from 1972 until he was 'reintroduced' post-CRISIS, he was a non-entity.

And getting back to Brian Hague's remarks...

It was an editorial mandate at the time that Superman spend time at the office as Clark and that Steve Lombard play some stupid prank on him that Clark must cleverly turn around.


It wasn't negotiable. As I understand it, you had to include these elements. These provided younger readers with a sense of familiarity as well as filling everyone in on the supporting cast every issue. 

As I said not long ago, Steve Lombard was the Reggie Mantle of Earth-1, although that did not mean that Clark being written like Archie Andrews for one scene each month, then turning the tables, was something that needed to be in every story. I guess Julie Schwartz knew what he was doing. To be fair, as was the case with Reggie, occasionally a story would show that Steve did have his heart in the right place. Unfortunately, the story where he was shown to have the greatest amount of emotional depth was the one where Morgan Edge fired him, and Steve made a somewhat tearful(for both!) apology to Clark for all the 'jokes'. For another analogy, Steve was like 'M*A*S*H*'s Frank Burns, never really allowed to have any 'mature adult' development until he was written out.


Edited by Brian O'Neill on 30 December 2014 at 11:52pm
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Geoffrey Langford
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Posted: 31 December 2014 at 1:02am | IP Logged | 7  
I loved CRISIS.

I love and loved all the multiple Earths and loved all the stories that come from them, whether good or bad. 

What I hated as a kid was only getting the occassional book where E1 and E2 crossed over because seeing two Flashes, etc was awesome.

With CRISIS, all these characters were now going to co-exist, and I was thrilled.  I was completely blown away by the death of Flash and Supergirl -- but a couple other yahoos had killed Jean Grey a few years before, so killing off favorite characters was actually sort of a cool notion for me as a young reader because "I didn't see that coming".

What ruins CRISIS is trying to view it through the eyes of a 30 and 40 year old.  Trying to rationalize they fact that these are just cartoons and comic books that should make the imaginations of 12 year olds run wild --- giving in to the angst of aged readers who have outgrown the content, that's what ruins CRISIS.

CRISIS remains (almost) perfect for me.  it was exactly what a 14 year old comic fan wanted from the DC Universe.  It was big.  It was beautiful. It changed everything. AND no one saw "that" coming (when something major happened).

The constant attempts to keep the worms in the can AFTER Crisis have been awful.

DC's recent reboot was really the way to go.  I don't like a lot of the new material -- but just hitting the reset button was pretty smart.

I've not read a Marvel comic in years and years -- have they done that yet -- or do they still try and write in continuity all the stories from the past 40 years?
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Jason Schulman
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Posted: 31 December 2014 at 3:21pm | IP Logged | 8  
Marvel pretends that most everything from the past 50 years is still canonical. Obviously it can't all be unless the USSR lasted much longer on Marvel-Earth than in the real world. And some stuff is flat-out revised (Tony Stark first became Iron Man in Afghanistan, not Vietnam, in current canon -- I think).

(I do wonder how Baron Zemo and Magneto-the-Holocaust-survivor managed to stay so young and vital into the 21st century when they first fought the Avengers and the X-Men, respectively. Secret supplies of the Infinity Formula?)

I don't think DC needed a total line-wide reboot in 1985-6 but the transition from the multiverse to the singleverse could've been handled much more smoothly than it actually was. But that would've involved having clear plans concerning the reboots of Wonder Woman and Superman (and some other characters) BEFORE the end of CRISIS.

The New 52 was and is a bad idea. DC had JUST published SUPERMAN: SECRET ORIGIN, and then one mere year later it no longer "mattered." Very sloppy.

At the very least DC should've waited a few years before doing a line-wide reboot. And it should've been done in a way other than "let's make every single title as 'dark' as possible and give everyone a new costume with many, many extraneous lines. And let's have all of the Robins fit into a six-year timeline!"

Godawful crap.


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Vinny Valenti
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Posted: 31 December 2014 at 3:58pm | IP Logged | 9  
"The New 52 was and is a bad idea. DC had JUST
published SUPERMAN: SECRET ORIGIN, and then one
mere year later it no longer "mattered." Very sloppy."

---

Excellent, you summed up every single one of DC's
"relaunches" with one word: Sloppy. There wasn't a single
one over the past 30 years that doesn't count as such. It's
so pathetic that it's really kept me from ever becoming a
dedicated DC reader. Every single attempt to "fix"
continuity was half-assed and only made it even worse.
You'd think that they'd learn their lesson by now!

And Good Gravy, we're about to hit 30 years since CRISIS!
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Brian O'Neill
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Posted: 31 December 2014 at 4:41pm | IP Logged | 10  
And Good Gravy, we're about to hit 30 years since CRISIS!
One year longer than the 'Silver Age' characters lasted!
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