An Overview Of The Current State Of DC Comics On Their 70th Birthday.

[Ian_Levine]

I know this is going to make me unpopular with collectors of modern comics, but as we're at the 70th birthday of DC, and as I feel very strongly about this, I want to look at what damage Crisis On Infinite Earths did to the DC universe, and why I hate it so much, and why DC has never recovered.

 

This is a subject that really gets me mad.

 

I hate hate hate hate hate HATE Crisis On Infinite Earths and I hate what it did to the DC universe.

 

DC comics, from 1935 to 1985, still made sense. Eighties Superman pre-Crisis was not all that different in plots and style to fifties or sixties, until Crisis came along.

 

As a kid, I loved DC comics so much that it resulted in me aiming to collect every DC ever made, which I have achieved except for one comic.

 

And I religiously buy each and every single new DC comic and trade paperback every week.

 

Yet I hate most of the current output, even though I have to buy it.

 

Pre-Crisis, we had the wonderful set up of the Justice League on Earth 1 and the Justice Society on Earth 2.

 

Superboy was Superman as a boy. Not some ridiculous clone. And his adventures in Smallville were fabulous.

 

The adventures of the Legion Of Super Heroes in Adventure Comics were as good as comic storytelling could get - especially the Fatal Five and the two parter where Earth's water supply got tainted and subjugated everyone on the planet - just awesome.

 

Justice League of America 21 and 22 were so wonderful I still get goosebumps reading them.

 

The super heroes were imaginative and fun.

 

Superman was REALLY fun - Lois Lane, Jimmy Olsen, Perry White.

 

The stories weren't full of lobotomies and mind-wipes and rapes.

 

The plots happened quickly, not wasting four pages of just punchouts with no dialogue.

 

Gardner Fox had his JLA split up into three or four teams to tackle some monstrous alien threat - and it was compulsive reading.

 

Crisis ruined everything.

 

The only decent DC comic for the last twenty years is JSA Strange Adventures. But that's because it reads like a classic comic and it has the original heroes in it, not their sons, daughters or successors.

 

Just as The Simpsons doesn't let Bart or Maggie or Lisa age as each year goes by, there was NO NEED to let the old JSA members die. They could have just imperceptibly carried on today, or could have remained on Earth 2 and been seen there in adventures which COULD have been amazing.

 

Don't get me wrong, the current JSA ongoing series (the one that's up to 68 issues) is the best of the bunch, but I hate how modern it had to become as opposed to being timeless.

 

So now DC feel the need to start their All Star line - purely because any new reader would just be SO CONFUSED by all this horrible and convoluted continuity.

 

It was so much better in the old days.

 

How can any new reader even BEGIN to understand Green Lantern Rebirth. After reading it, I felt like I needed a diploma in DC continuity just to follow the plot, and I collect these things.

 

As for the new Legion Of Super Heroes - I am lost for words. It has nothing to do with the Legion I loved. I struggled to finish the comic without ripping it in half.

 

Oh DC, what have you done to your treasured past ??

 

In the 1950s and 1960s, each Superman and Batman comic sold millions of copies per issue.

 

I believe the fact that they sell a couple of hundred thousand now if they have a big hit, is because they have made the whole line non-reader-friendly.

So that only modern comic collectors can understand them.

 

With new movies of Superman and Batman creating new interest, potential new fans will be just alienated as soon as they pick up a comic book.

 

Why can't we go back to a simpler and more accessible style, and have them back in every newsstand, candy store, shopping mall, and airport terminal

[Ron_Nasty]

As for the new Legion Of Super Heroes - I am lost for words. It has nothing to do with the Legion I loved. I struggled to finish the comic without ripping it in half.

 

Oh DC, what have you done to your treasured past ??

 

It's run by Eminem now.

 

In the 1950s and 1960s, each Superman and Batman comic sold millions of copies per issue.

 

I believe the fact that they sell a couple of hundred thousand now if they have a big hit, is because they have made the whole line non-reader-friendly.

So that only modern comic collectors can understand them.

 

With new movies of Superman and Batman creating new interest, potential new fans will be just alienated as soon as they pick up a comic book.

 

Why can't we go back to a simpler and more accessible style, and have them back in every newsstand, candy store, shopping mall, and airport terminal

 

Money. That's what killed Barry Allen too.

[Ian_Levine]

Oh DC, what have you done to your treasured past ??

It's run by Eminem now.

 

Having read the new Legion Of Super Heroes, how can I argue with this ??

[Ian_Levine]

It's run by Eminem now.

 

Hardly the legacy of Julius Schwartz.

[shrunkenhead]

Well, as far as the 40's, 50's and 60s DC's being "timeless" and the current DC output being "modern," I'm sure that kids in the 40s thought their comics were pretty modern...chock full of pop culture references, quotes from Gable flicks, etc. So I'm not quite sure that that argument holds much weight.

 

As far mindwipes and rape...what's wrong with comics stretching their boundries? The old stuff is still there, and readily reprinted in DC archive editions, so why not try something new, more sophisticated, smarter, etc. I think after writing these characters for 60 years, it's got to be done. How many 2-D stories of folks running around in tights does the world need?

 

DC's still interested in telling good stories, stories that make sense to the "modern" reader, and hats off to them for that. It's more than I can say for Marvel!

[tth2]

Ian, I agree with you 100%. All the things you loved about pre-Crisis DC were the same things I loved, and I still have a hard time understanding the post-Crisis world. Thank god I don't feel any need to keep buying the new stuff!

[flashfan-migration]

I agree Crisis really screwed things up! My absolute favorite hero growing up was the Flash - at one point my collecting goal was to obtain every Flash comic, came pretty close too. And I too loved the annual JLA/JSA teamups (although I was introduced to them via the 100-pager reprints, not the originals) - 21/22, 29/30 were classics.

 

I could... not... believe... they killed my hero in issue #7. What were they thinking? The timing coincided with end of high school for me, and I think the combinatoin turned a switch off inside me and I lost interest in comics for a very long time. It wasn't until some random eBay surfing in '98 that I started back up again.

 

Of course admidst the post-crisis shlock there are some gems. After nearly 20 years I have finally started to warm up to the new Flash; Waid and Johns are excellent storytellers and I recommend every Flash TPB with their name on it. Other notables to me are the Robinson Starman & JSA, of course Gaiman's Sandman, the Morrison JLA, Johns Titans, Kingdom Come, Morrison Animal Man. I even got a kick out of the Batman Hush storyline.

[read_em-migration]

I know this is going to make me unpopular with collectors of modern comics, but as we're at the 70th birthday of DC, and as I feel very strongly about this, I want to look at what damage Crisis On Infinite Earths did to the DC universe, and why I hate it so much, and why DC has never recovered.

 

This is a subject that really gets me mad.

 

I hate hate hate hate hate HATE Crisis On Infinite Earths and I hate what it did to the DC universe.

 

DC comics, from 1935 to 1985, still made sense. Eighties Superman pre-Crisis was not all that different in plots and style to fifties or sixties, until Crisis came along.

 

As a kid, I loved DC comics so much that it resulted in me aiming to collect every DC ever made, which I have achieved except for one comic.

 

And I religiously buy each and every single new DC comic and trade paperback every week.

 

Yet I hate most of the current output, even though I have to buy it.

 

Pre-Crisis, we had the wonderful set up of the Justice League on Earth 1 and the Justice Society on Earth 2.

 

Superboy was Superman as a boy. Not some ridiculous clone. And his adventures in Smallville were fabulous.

 

The adventures of the Legion Of Super Heroes in Adventure Comics were as good as comic storytelling could get - especially the Fatal Five and the two parter where Earth's water supply got tainted and subjugated everyone on the planet - just awesome.

 

Justice League of America 21 and 22 were so wonderful I still get goosebumps reading them.

 

The super heroes were imaginative and fun.

 

Superman was REALLY fun - Lois Lane, Jimmy Olsen, Perry White.

 

The stories weren't full of lobotomies and mind-wipes and rapes.

 

The plots happened quickly, not wasting four pages of just punchouts with no dialogue.

 

Gardner Fox had his JLA split up into three or four teams to tackle some monstrous alien threat - and it was compulsive reading.

 

Crisis ruined everything.

 

The only decent DC comic for the last twenty years is JSA Strange Adventures. But that's because it reads like a classic comic and it has the original heroes in it, not their sons, daughters or successors.

 

Just as The Simpsons doesn't let Bart or Maggie or Lisa age as each year goes by, there was NO NEED to let the old JSA members die. They could have just imperceptibly carried on today, or could have remained on Earth 2 and been seen there in adventures which COULD have been amazing.

 

Don't get me wrong, the current JSA is the best of the bunch, but I hate how modern it had to become as opposed to being timeless.

 

So now DC feel the need to start their All Star line - purely because any new reader would just be SO CONFUSED by all this horrible and convoluted continuity.

 

It was so much better in the old days.

 

How can any new reader even BEGIN to understand Green Lantern Rebirth. After reading it, I felt like I needed a diploma in DC continuity just to follow the plot, and I collect these things.

 

As for the new Legion Of Super Heroes - I am lost for words. It has nothing to do with the Legion I loved. I struggled to finish the comic without ripping it in half.

 

Oh DC, what have you done to your treasured past ??

 

In the 1950s and 1960s, each Superman and Batman comic sold millions of copies per issue.

 

I believe the fact that they sell a couple of hundred thousand now if they have a big hit, is because they have made the whole line non-reader-friendly.

So that only modern comic collectors can understand them.

 

With new movies of Superman and Batman creating new interest, potential new fans will be just alienated as soon as they pick up a comic book.

 

Why can't we go back to a simpler and more accessible style, and have them back in every newsstand, candy store, shopping mall, and airport terminal

 

Yes, we know you love the "old days". No, they're never coming back. Get over it.

[Zonker]

Again, I'm entirely sympathetic. I love the old pre-Crisis set-up. And the Legion hasn't been any good at all past the the first dozen issues or so of the first Baxter series.

 

But... there just aren't enough of us 30, 40-something year old comics buyers to keep things afloat.

 

Wait, strike that... there weren't enough 20-something year-old comics buyers in the mid-1980s who preferred old-school DC storytelling to keep things afloat. DC was getting creamed by Jim Shooter's Marvel in the late 70s early 80s.

 

So something had to be done. I just wish they had found a way to finesse things a bit better post-Crisis.

[ComicBookGuy]

Ian, I agree with you 100%. All the things you loved about pre-Crisis DC were the same things I loved, and I still have a hard time understanding the post-Crisis world. Thank god I don't feel any need to keep buying the new stuff!

 

You guys are right. The sales figures alone are more than any good business person needs to see the stupidity of DC's bad business / artistic decisions.

I'm not saying I didn't like Crisis, but I think a lot of what followed permanently alienated comic readers and kept away new readership. Marvel and DC both followed the same flawed path.

To DC's credit, the one property I think DC has handled consistently well is Batman. I can read Batman golden age "detective" stories, laugh at/with the silver age camp stuff, get into the Adams-O'Neil/Englehart-Rogers 1970s stuff or the Miller 1980s storylines and all that followed, and even the newer stuff like Robin Year One and Hush.

What's interesting is that as low as comic book sales are, superheroes are more popular than ever. Smallville is becoming a phenomenon among kids, and the Spider-man movies are as popular as anything out there. Both of these storylines are very silver-to-bronze age-ish (Smallville is getting steamier, I'll admit) in their attitudes toward the heroes, and that should be a wake-up call to the companies about what people want to see. They don't want to see the cosmic bs or some clones -- they want the core storylines and characters.

On an aside, what will it take to get cheap comics back on the racks at 7-11 next to the candy stand? A newspaper costs a quarter, so a comic should be able to be produced for not much more. If comics are to survive, the companies need to produce something people want to read, something they can read and understand, and they need to make it available at a place other than a comic shop. By studying the model of when comics were a successful enterprise and why could help today's companies tremendously. Comics were throwaway items that got tossed in with the newspapers. The collectibility of them, the insistence that they be published on quality paper and be sold in comic shops, ultimately, may be the reason for their eventual demise.

Sorry I got on a tangent here, but it's getting late...

Joe

[Forbush-Man]

If comics are to survive, the companies need to produce something people want to read, something they can read and understand, and they need to make it available at a place other than a comic shop.

 

I am WAY with you on that!

 

Comics used to be available in most convienece stores, drug stores and book stores.

[SpideySense-migration]

Not a big DC fan here, but I think your prayers might have been answered in the upcoming DC All-Star comics (think that is going to be the name of their new line). DC's answer to Marvel's Ultimate line. From what I read about it the stories are suppose to be from the pre-Crisis perspective. Sound like your voices have been heard to me.

[Forbush-Man]

Not a big DC fan here, but I think your prayers might have been answered in the upcoming DC All-Star comics (think that is going to be the name of their new line). DC's answer to Marvel's Ultimate line. From what I read about it the stories are suppose to be from the pre-Crisis perspective. Sound like your voices have been heard to me.

 

[Rob]

Not a big DC fan here, but I think your prayers might have been answered in the upcoming DC All-Star comics (think that is going to be the name of their new line). DC's answer to Marvel's Ultimate line. From what I read about it the stories are suppose to be from the pre-Crisis perspective. Sound like your voices have been heard to me.

 

Yes, I read that too. Robin is Grayson too. I can't wait for Batman & Robin.

[Bonds25]

 

Yet I hate most of the current output, even though I have to buy it.

 

Do you honestly believe this? Who cares if you have EVERY DC made after 2004? NO ONE except you!! Save the money you blow each week and buy a car, take a trip, visit a psychiatrist ... anything but continuing to waste your money on a meaningless (and endless) quest.

[Aman619]

Times change, everything changes, and DC comics (all comics) have changed. Ian Im sorry you are taking this personally. Also, I tried JSA Adventures since you and others raved about it, and guess what? it was average. I didnt even read the 4th and 5th issues. Did you really think it was so spectacular? Wow. You must really like those silly old 40s heroes. I also recently read the classic Torch/Subby crossover battle from way back in MM#9. You know, these 40s stories are so stilted, badly drawn, and almost surreal to read. They have no sophistication of storytelling techniques. I had a friend who wrote and drew his own comics on homework paper (blue-lined) in elementary school, and from what I remember, they had the same look and feel . I know the creators were doing stuff noone had ever done before, and it was revolutionary for its time. But that was 50 years ago. We've all moved onward. You should too.

[shadroch]

While I enjoyed CRISIS as a series,the ramifications of it thru-out the DC universe sucked.I enjoyed the new FLASH,but thats about it. Doing away with the JSA,Superboy,Mon-el,changing Infinety Inc,and countless others,then trying to retro-fit the changes was just inane,imho.

That said,I do enjoy some of the product the new DC has done.Watchmen,Sandman,Preacher,Idenity Crisis were all superior products. I'm enjoying GL-Rebirth even more than I expected.Green Arrow was great for far longer than the character had a right to be, I'm even enjoying JSA Strange Adventures.

I don't know much about the

All-Star line,but it sounds promising. The Englehart-Rogers team-up on Batman has me very excited.

I think DC is much,much better than it was in the mid to late 70s,and creatively,it might be in its zenith,all things considered.

[Ian_Levine]

Ian, I agree with you 100%. All the things you loved about pre-Crisis DC were the same things I loved, and I still have a hard time understanding the post-Crisis world. Thank god I don't feel any need to keep buying the new stuff!

 

But I do.

 

And the new stuff could be so much better.

 

JSA Strange Adventures proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that they CAN still do it.

And weren't there a few good issues of The Adventures Of Superman around five years ago which were new but had the old classic style ?

[Ian_Levine]

How many 2-D stories of folks running around in tights does the world need?

 

I don't consider the first 65 issues of the Justice League of America to be two dimensional AT ALL.

[Ian_Levine]

What's interesting is that as low as comic book sales are, superheroes are more popular than ever. Smallville is becoming a phenomenon among kids, and the Spider-man movies are as popular as anything out there. Both of these storylines are very silver-to-bronze age-ish (Smallville is getting steamier, I'll admit) in their attitudes toward the heroes, and that should be a wake-up call to the companies about what people want to see. They don't want to see the cosmic bs or some clones -- they want the core storylines and characters.

 

Yes yes yes.

The style of storytelling in Smallville is perfect. Almost classic Superman but with the premise that in Smallville his presence is not yet revealed to the world.

And the trailers to the new Batman film look amazing.

 

But the comics don't reflect this.