Did people really get angry over this? And how angry by today's outrage standards?

Did people really get angry over this? And how angry by today's outrage standards?

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Same as new52. If books you liked were gone because of the event you were mad if you're book remained or got better like in the case of wonderwoman you were happy.

I blame this for all the convolution DC face now. Crisis on Infinite Earths was a mistake.

Its hard to compare because mass communication was so limited. Did people get angry? Yes. How can you tell? Because they published some angry letters. Then again, there is that Busiek letter complaining about the best X-Men run of all time, so you'll find complainers about anything.

Pre-Internet, there was no good way to judge the level of anger.

My sense at the time (I'm 45 so read this in my teens) from fellow comic readers was that it was nifty but sloppy. Stage this huge event that will have massive impact on nearly all their comics then not plan on how to deal with that impact, taking years to acknowledge the changes in some cases. Byrne's reboot effectively killed the LSH, one of their hottest properties at the time. No plan on what to do with characters like Power Girl and Huntress. What few edicts that editorial imposed (when they should've cracked down hard post-Crisis) were stepped around, like "no other kryptonians" but introduce a shapeshifter Supergirl.

DC floundered for a decade after, all that old continuity was a *strength* not a weakness.

>45
Dang. Not OP but I really wonder how many comics have you read and how you feel when people come in and act that they know everything when they haven't read even 1/10th of what you've read. I have no idea how I'd be like when I'll be 45 (I'm in my 30s currently) and I'm getting mad with some people that seriously have no idea what they're talking about.

Same as usual, except without the internet's echo chamber effect making it worse and bringing in people who otherwise don't give a shit about comics.
Nerds never change, ever. Ever seen interviews of fans going NOT MUH at Burton's Batman movie?

Shouldn't all those Earths have a chain around them and Superman dragging them all behind him?

You and him not sound like sperg lords.

A necessary evil.
The crisis happened for a reason. People forget how fucked up everything was before it.

it was a meme even for it's time, taylor made for the equivalent of reddit back then

The multiverse as a concept should negate the necessity of reboots.

>Did people really get angry over this?

Yes.

>And how angry by today's outrage standards?

Hard to say because there was no internet. But you can sort of see it in the letters that Amazing Heroes got. There was a lot of resentment toward Byrne's Superman overhaul, chief among them from Mark Waid.

>Then again, there is that Busiek letter complaining about the best X-Men run of all time, so you'll find complainers about anything.

That's true, not only in the Amazing Heroes mags I was talking about but also in Comics Journal, too. In fact I think in TCJ or AH, Heidi MacDonald said (and I may be misremembering here because I don't have it in front of me) that it seemed like Spider-Man stopped progressing after Gwen Stacy's death and that you could pick up a random issue and he'd still be stuck in the same thing. I think she meant that as a negative. On top of that I think she was also quite critical of Claremont's X-Men somewhere in the mid-80's too, much like a lot of other fans at the time. There was a feeling that Claremont had declined writing-wise or something like that. Hilarious in retrospect because I'd rather take 80's Claremont, maybe even 00's Claremont over some other X-Men writers that came after.

It's not like everything was permanently reset anyway. Plot threads from the prescribes days are referenced and reoccurring constantly.

Yes, including a lot of writers like Alan Moore and Grant Morrison. How angry is impossible to really measure.

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Enough apparently, that there was rumor Morrison would undo the crisis.

>Byrne's reboot effectively killed the LSH
Which is weird because my all time favorite LSH story was spun out of COIE

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Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow is basically how Moore felt over the reboot. You know, all those beloved or not so much Silver Age characters horribly dying or turning into serial killers or Eldritch abominations for the Superman from Moore's childhood basically saying fuck this shit and quitting.

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>Byrne's reboot effectively killed the LSH
I wish they were popular again

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I mean didn't Convergence basically undo COIE and since there are infinite earths, everythings on the table.

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Also speaking of complaining, in 1986 there was also an article in TCJ that talked about a episode of a radio show Harlan Ellison did.

It involved Harlan Ellison and Steve Gerber ripping apart Byrne's Superman (Marv Wolfman was also there as a guest, and naturally defended it, sorta), Ellison ripping apart Chaykin's Shadow (Wolfman also was critical of Chaykin's Shadow, but said it was better than most of the Marvel stuff like X-Factor and New Universe).

Ellison did enjoy Watchmen but found Moore's implication that superheroes would be completely despised to be strange, but Gerber thinks it holds up (and that Moore's doing his own thing as opposed to an established world).

Later on, Alan Brennert (if you've ever read that Greatest Batman Stories Ever Told book, Brennert's the guy who wrote the story where Batman is given the chance to prevent the murders of Thomas and Martha Wayne on another Earth; he's also the one who wrote how Earth-2 Batman and Catwoman got married) called in to rip apart Miller's Dark Knight and wondered why Ellison wasn't as critical of it as he was with Byrne's Superman and Chaykin's Shadow. Ellison felt that Miller stayed more true to Batman than Byrne with Superman or Chaykin with Shadow.

Eh, the writer claimed that the Lois & Clark flashback to the battle also suggested that, but DC never officially stated it, and they've avoided dealing with all changes coming from there, like Barry surviving the Crisis and Pre-Crisis Kara being around somewhere.

Old guy here.

It went over well (for the most part).

Unlike New 52, sales went up and STAYED up.

>DC floundered for a decade after

Not in sales they sure as fuck didn't.

>Not in sales they sure as fuck didn't.

Depends where you look. The big relaunches and Batman did well, but the lines that were hurt by Crisis' changes, like Legion of Super Heroes and JSA quickly floundered afterwards. Although eventually they found a niche for them in the main Earth, at the time stripping away the trinity and lumping them on the same Earth as the JLA wasn't a positive thing. And the Legion just never really recovered.

>Not in sales they sure as fuck didn't.

That depends on what you mean by sales. Did they increase compared to the sales on early 80's? Possible. But looking at the charts in 1992 (before Death of Superman was published) Marvel seemed to have a huge fucking domination of the market share.

The Superman complaint was actually a common complaint back then. It saw some sales because Byrne had a huge fanbase, but he didn't get Superman and never even bothered to research outside of the movies and the cartoon.

A different 46 year Oldfag here & can confirm,

At first Crisis was thought of as a knock off of Secret Wars but that quickly changed with issue 7 and the feeling that DC was really gonna pull the trigger on itself, and remember it had never been done before so everybody was at least invested (Although Alan Moore blew the whole thing off & even spoiled the ending). But they spent so much time prepping FOR it that they never asked the questions for AFTER. At the end of COIE it still implies that ALL the heros present at the Specter/Anti-Monitor fight remember the previous multiverse & they'd all have to settle in the new 'single' Earth where their lives may have been different.

Well that got tossed in a hurry.

DC was making up new history on the fly & despite the shit Byrne gets for Supes at least he had a plan. Hawkman & Power Girl of course got amazingly fucked up (and arguably still are) & by the time Zero Hour rolled around DC was seriously contemplating just bringing back the Pre-Crisis Multiverse but then they'd have to re-explain it to all those Death Of Superman readers they picked up & yadda yadda.

>Same as usual, except without the internet's echo chamber effect making it worse and bringing in people who otherwise don't give a shit about comics.

Yep, letters to Amazing Heros, The Comics Buyers Guide, or the Comics Journal was where they vented, or spending half the afternoon at their LCS bitching to the clerk like he was a bartender.

>The Superman complaint was actually a common complaint back then.

It wouldn't surprise me, considering pre-Byrne stuff has fans. What was more surprising to me was seeing creators being upset about it.

Those that got into Superman due to Byrne and onward pick the Byrne (and later Jurgens) era Superman as their default Superman. I know there's at least one fan who got into arguments with some creators because he hated that Birthright was going to erase Man of Steel. And of course, Wizard seemed heavily biased toward the Byrne-era Superman during the 90's.

>At the end of COIE it still implies that ALL the heros present at the Specter/Anti-Monitor fight remember the previous multiverse & they'd all have to settle in the new 'single' Earth where their lives may have been different.

That was pretty weird when I go back and re-read some stuff from that era. It seems like the entire GL corps remembers the Crisis as most of the cast for the post-crisis GL book went to Earth directly because of the Crisis. Then you've got other books like Captain Atom and the other Charlton characters where it's just a complete new person and there isn't any memory of what happened. I wasn't really aware they were flyin blind afterwards so hard.

>DC was making up new history on the fly & despite the shit Byrne gets for Supes at least he had a plan.

This is true. I kinda liked the Byrne-era Superman though I'm also very critical of it. It still seemed like they had some idea of where they were going unlike the 00's/10's where they ended up having three more new origins for Superman (Birthright, Secret Origin, New 52 Action) and a lack of focus about where to go. It doesn't surprise me to see Secret Origin weaved into Rebirth Superman's origin since Johns is overseeing DC stuff.

Yet another oldfag here, I was young enough that I believed it could work, but as has been said by everyone else, they didn't plan for it.
Aside from NTT, Pre crisis Earth-2 was my favorite thing back then (forgotten now, Infinity inc was where Mcfarlane really started to shine). I wasn't so much angry as completely deflated by its demise.
My taste was such shit back then. I thought Dave Cockrum was the worst artist ever or something stupid like that.

Overall sales were boosted DRAMATICALLY.

Pre-Crisis Marvel had like a 2/3 share of the ENTIRE comics market. DC was under 20%.

Not the user you were responding to, but they definitely were. Look at some of the stuff that happened right after COIE; they didn't really reboot yet. In fact, look at Moore's Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow; it showed Captain Marvel among the heroes trying to help get Superman out.

Roy Thomas was kinda pissed off because COIE fucked with his plans for All Star Squadron. Last Days of the Justice Society ended up confirming that Earth-2 Dick and Helena died and showed Superman and Batman in the flashbacks... but then the rest of the story omits them.

Not only that but Thomas also was doing a revamp of Captain Marvel, in there he implied that Shazam remembered that there used to be a Multiverse. But then that miniseries got completely ignored and then retconned out by the time Jerry Ordway did Power of Shazam in the 90's.

Yep! DC said "No more parallel Earths" then these guys showed up in Giffen's JL series...

It's funny because all the multiverse and time-travel shit was what I really liked about precisis. DC.

Chaykin Shadow was such a piece of shit. It's like he tried really hard to get everything wrong about the character. He even had him using uzis.

Burton's Batman is near universally hated by the general public nowadays.

>despite the shit Byrne gets for Supes at least he had a plan

This guy gets it. Byrne's Superman was actually quite solid and for every hater there are 3 or 4 fans.

>Byrne didn't get Superman

Bullshit. It was based on 40s Superman and it was pretty accurate in that sense.

In post-Crisis, the Crisis still happened but it was just the Anti-Monitor attacking the positive matter universe from the antimatter universe. All of the other universes were retconned out.

God only knows what happened in current continuity.

So was DC messier than the New 52 in the first year after Crisis?

That was a cheat. They were from some Earth-like planet in outer space, I think.

I think it was either that or another dimension. I just remember Blue Jay sticking around for a while with either JLI or JLE.

No. But only because there wasn't as much continuity that had been semi-retconned yet.

The LoSH were the only ones to get REALLY fucked, but in New 52 they're so fucked that they don't even exist!

There was also a sort of reintroduction of Earth-3 but using Qward instead of Earth-3, during the Giffen era. Eventually Morrison ran with the idea of the CSA Earth being in the antimatter universe like Qward for JLA Earth 2.

Yes.

Nope, the place where they came from even had a goddamn ersatz Walt Disney

The other planet thing might have been editorial

True. Although science fiction has had duplicate Earths elsewhere in the galaxy in the same dimension. The original Star Trek had several.

No it isn't. If anything it's gone up since Nolan and Snyder.

CRISIS ON INFINITE EARTHS FUCKING KILLED MY ALL-STAR SQUADRON

REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

I really like the idea of combining Earth-1 and Earth-2 because it gave the DC universe a real sense of history, I just wish it didn't fuck up the Earth-2 books so much.

An user of exquisite taste

Probably worth mentioning that DC turned down Steve Gerber's Superman pitch with Frank Miller. Gerber and Miller wanted do a comic for each of the Trinity, but two of their pitches got turned down. Miller adapted his Batman story into The Dark Knight Returns

Here's a Miller Wonder Woman piece inked by Terry Austen

I'm honestly surprised Ellison and Gerber are sticklers for continuity over story, well I already knew about the Shadow thing, so it's mostly Gerber

>Here's a Miller Wonder Woman piece inked by Terry Austen

Eh, maybe it was for the best. Not that it changed things for Wondy in the long run.

Not really. His Superman was a mix of Marvel and Donner movies.

It wasn't about the continuity. It's about the direction they went in. Chaykin's Shadow and Byrne's Superman put no research and were complete 180 degree turns from the characters. Chaykin's Shadow was nearly satire.

>Chaykin's Shadow was nearly satire.

Nah Chaykin KNEW his Shadow lore, he just thought NONE of it could translate into the 80's. And yeah I think he knew exactly what he was doing in antagonizing the older fans.

>Unlike New 52, sales went up and STAYED up.
yeah bullshit, fan reaction was the fucking same as the new 52