My problem is that now DC and Marvel rely on regular crises, and I find that irritating. Once is fine. Every year is annoying.

If a title is more than peripherally involved in a major crossover event, I'm out. I very much resent being forced to buy a miniseries to read about events that have a major effect on the title that I've been faithfully reading. I deserve to have those events unfold in the comic that I've been paying for, and if I don't get that consideration, then I don't buy the comic any more. It's like following a weekly television series only to be told that I have to go see a movie to find out how things end.

That's why no major company "event" since the first Crisis has inspired me to buy more titles. Invariably, I've cut titles after almost every single major event at either company. I no longer buy any flagship titles from either Marvel or DC -- only "secondary" ones.

For what it's worth, I also vastly prefer Byrne's retooled Superman to the older version. Omnipotent Supes held no appeal for me as a child, and still doesn't. I'll grant that the old stories have a certain charm, but I don't care for them on an ongoing basis. I followed the Super titles until they started seriously undoing the reboot, and then I dropped them all and haven't ever looked back.

And that is my problem with Crisis On Infinite Earths

It changed the industry all right. Crisis marks the point where the industry decided not to make comic books for children anymore. Now, 21 years later, they wonder where the new fans are. Well, duh!

And to this day, I still absolutely love the Crisis. As many have said above, it was the first time in comics history that worlds stayed erased. That heroes sacrificed life and limb for the sake of others. And that they stayed dead. How many big event since have been able to capture the feel of Crisis? None.

I do agree that the plot devices in Crisis were a bit unexplained and dragged out. But that didnt matter to me. It never did, and it sill doesn't. What mattered to me then was the not knowing of what was going to happen to whom in which issue. Supergirl? No Way! Flash! Aww man! Huntress? Robin? Wonder Woman devolved? Are you serious? One Earth! With both a JSA and a JLA?

Looking back in the mid-80's, DC only had a handful of very succesful titles: New Titans, Legion, All-Star Squadron, Infinity Inc, Swamp Thing. But look at the flagships. Superman, Wonder Woman, Flash. Blah.

It was do or die time. And Crisis made it a do time. It gave DC the ability to revamp and refresh their entire line. It gave DC the media coverage that they so sorely needed. And lets face it, the only super heores that really ever get media coverage are Superman, Batman, and Spider-Man.

By turning the DC Universe upside down, it made way for Doom Partrol, Vertigo, even Watchman. Would we have the Ultimates line today from Marvel without a Crisis? Civil War? Witchblade, and Spawn, and Wildcats, ad naseum.... Who knows. I think in many ways, the Crisis SAVED the comics industry, not take away from it.

I think that the Crisis showed us and the creators that it was okay to pass the torch on to someone else. That a hero can stay dead, and not wake up in the shower and realize that it was all just a dream. That it was okay to take a risk, to try something different. That not everyone wants to read about spandex. That men in trenchcoats can be just as interesting as those in capes.

Anyway, the whole point Im trying to make is that, good or bad, the Crisis changed the industry. And from my point of view, thats a good thing.

Superman's really the center of this though. Superman had a lot of stupidity in his stories, oh God yes, at the same time looking at Whatever Happened To the Man of Tomorrow? and Man of Steel, or Death of Superman, or Return to Krypton, or the wedding issues, or Our Worlds At War, or the Elite story, or really anything except maybe All Star which is so much larger the comparison might not be fair...Which is better? Which is the most inventive, which is the most daring? Don't say Death Of either, Superman "died" so many times he got a free sandwich from Subway back in the day.

Insano adventures, wacky adventures and artifacts, the Superman family, the dog, the Legion, they were part of Superman. They helped make Superman. Nothing stopped Superman, he did whatever he wanted and went wherever he wanted and so had these far out, fun adventures. Sometimes they were extremely stupid. In fact I would say about 50% of them were and that may be being charitable. But they were very, very fun. And to an extent I think losing that killed him as much as moving from Whiz Comics killed Captain Marvel. This is not the same character, to me. That's literally what Crisis did, it made a new universe with fresh characters. On one level, that can be really enjoyable. I've enjoyed the hell out of JSA for its run and Justice Society before that and so on. But in a real way, this is not the Justice Society of America. And if a story was going to cut all these characters off at the knees and eliminate the possibility for their unfettered future adventures, it's reasonable to expect that story to be at least as good as any of those bygone stories if not better. Not only do you not get that with Crisis (though it has virtues), I don't think you CAN get that from Crisis.

Besides, dude, look at what happened to Superman.

in it are a few Avengers issues by George Perez, and they must be really early work by him, cause writer Gerry Conway makes a point of writing CAPTIONS just about how great his art is.

and you can tell it's at a moment where he's really expanding his thinking about page layouts; one page in particular, with a recap of the story so far in panels down the middle while break-off fights between various heroes and villains are set up on the side with no panel barriers, is just amazing.

and that is why I don't think perez is overrated, something someone's already said, but it's worth sayin again: his page layouts are genuinely creative, innovative, and fresh. and that's a consistent thing from pretty much every moment of his career. he certainly spawned plenty of creative children for his art style, but he's probably got his own little subsect of descendants based just on his approach to laying out the page.

Personally, I think that discounting "It's BIG" as an appeal of Crisis is like saying, "Tell me what's impressive about the Statue of Liberty, and don't say, 'It's BIG'." Crisis is big. It's bigger than big, it's genuinely epic on a scale that I don't think anyone has successfully matched before or since. Hundreds of super-heroes fighting the most powerful villain imaginable--a villain so powerful that he wipes out a whole universe on page one. An alliance of super-villains the likes of which the world has never seen, demanding three entire universes of their own as ransom. The death of the Flash, the passing into the light of the original Superman and of Superboy, Supergirl's funeral...and the knowledge that this wasn't a bluff, it wasn't a wink wink "epic of the week" that would be retconned away in next year's "event", it was massive and permanent change. The disgusting part is that they've been undoing bits of it lately.

(And while we're on the subject: What purpose would really be served by bringing back the multi-verse now? It was always intended to explain away how these heroes who we've never seen co-existing could co-exist...but we do see them co-exist now. There's no need to involve parallel universes in an explanation of how the JLA and the JSA could meet when they're sitting down to dinner together.)

You're right that DC started recruiting ex-Marvel staff in quick succession, but that just bolsters my point...they were doing it in order to imitate Marvel. They consciously wanted to imitate Marvel, and many people on their staff were simply incapable of doing that. Curt Swan is an excellent artist, but he isn't able to recreate that dynamic Kirby style that "pops" off the page. Even alot of Marvel alumni couldn't originally do the dynamic Marvel style when they first started working at Marvel until Stan had Kirby teach them via storyboards and sit-down sessions. So if DC wanted to be more like Marvel to compete with Marvel, what better way to do that than to use Marvel creators?

The conventional wisdom of the time was that Marvel had the better books but DC had the better characters. Now we were going to see the Marvel style and excitement applied to the great iconic DC characters at last!

Again, I disagree. The conventional wisdom in my opinion was that DC had more iconic characters than Marvel due to their age, but Marvel's characters were actually more interesting AND more exciting.

And the art was just so bad. Tiny little panel after tiny little murky panel of 345 heroes running towards some big goofy-looking tower. Oh, I can't wait until next issue when 254 other heroes run toward some other big goofy-looking tower! Ooo, is that Halo? Wait, I think it's Nightwing. Who is that little dot there in the corner under Red Bee's elbow? You shouldn't have to use a magnifying glass to read a comic book.

50 years from now when historians try to figure out why comic books went the way of the dodo, they will trace it back to one event: the Death of Barry Allen.

If I had a magic wand and could undo ONE particular weirdness about superhero comics as a whole, that would be it.

It's not just Crisis -- it started with Marvel, particularly Secret Wars and the black spider-Man costume -- but it was Crisis that really codified it and made it THE way of doing things.

Really a lot of the comments I'm seeing here are making me feel very old. The actual reason DC was trying to look like Marvel back in the 80's? Because suddenly they WERE Marvel, as far as staff was concerned. In very quick succession, Steve Englehart, Jim Starlin, Gerry Conway, Marv Wolfman, George Perez, Gene Colan, Roy Thomas, Steve Gerber, Doug Moench, Gene Day, John Byrne and Frank Miller had fled Marvel for the creative freedom of DC. Not to be outdone, Denny O'Neil and one or two others had left DC for Marvel. The conventional wisdom of the time was that Marvel had the better books but DC had the better characters. Now we were going to see the Marvel style and excitement applied to the great iconic DC characters at last!

A couple of times we actually did: you could tell Roy Thomas had been waiting his whole life to write a book like Infinity Inc., and that passion came through. More often we got pale imitations of successful Marvel books, like Night Force from Wolfman and Colan. And Crisis was the ultimate expression of that whole We-are-going-to-do-for-DC-what-we-did-at-Marvel kind of thinking. That's where it was coming from. There really wasn't anybody working there at the time to raise their hand and say, "Y'know, DC's NOT Marvel, we shouldn't completely submit to that style."

Have to disagree with this.

If anything can be credited with sparking the "grim and gritty" era of superheroes, it would probably be the success Moore & Gibbons' Watchmen rather than any attempt to emulate Marvel.

(sure, DKR also bears mention here, but I'd say Watchmen was probably more influential in this particular case)

Also, it's pretty reductionist to suggest that the only successes DC had pre-Crisis derived from emulating Marvel or using "Marvel creators" (a term which is problematic in of itself).

There's no denying that Marvel definitely was more popular than DC during the Shooter era, but offerring the fact that nobody in your school read DC really isn't much of an argument since that was probably more of a function of the "Make Mine Marvel" propaganda machine than of the actual quality of the comics.

I hate, hate, hate reading DC comics from the 60s. They make me want to stab my eyes out. But I love almost everything DC put out from 86-90 or so. And I love DC in the second half of the 90s. And I love DC now (though I'm increasingly wary about some things).

I, for one, find and found Byrne's Superman to be far more compelling than the Silver Age one, who could move planets with ease and whose only limitation was the deus ex machina du jour.

And Perez's art is phenomenal, IMO: after characters have been through fights, their costumes are damaged in ways which actually make sense.

So everyone's entitled to their opinion, but I'd have a hard time agreeing with pretty much anything you wrote in this case.

In retrospect, Crisis wasn't necessary to my mind, so much as it might have been time to draw a moratorium on stories where the different Earth timelines mingled. I mean, toward the end of the Bronze Age, Earth-2 characters could apparently just bop on over to Earth-1 to hang out whenever they wanted. I like the multiverse and that's really a bit much for me.

As a crossover I found Crisis basically readable, and that's more than I can say for 90% of its ilk. I'm not sure it's an editorial decision I would've agreed with had I been a fan at the time; and in general I'm not a fan of turning editorial housecleaning into a storyline.

As an editorial decision, the continuity restructuring really has its ups and downs, and I'm kind of ambivalent about it in retrospect. Not happy it happened, not exactly sure it didn't need to happen. I'm not old enough that I was a reader at the time, so I've only seen its effects in back issues. I know a bunch of series I grew fond of via dollar boxes just went all to crap once they hit their post-Crisis issues. LOSH to this day has never really recovered. Had Infinite Crisis brought back the multiverse, I would've been quite happy, as I am rather fond of Earth-2 stories.

This being said, there's a bunch of post-Crisis stuff I enjoyed that would not have been possible if not for the multiverse being done away with. Suicide Squad, Giffen/DeMattheis Justice League, and a host of other books were specifically possible because of the opportunity for a full continuity restructuring that Crisis posed. I definitely don't think you would've gotten stuff like Sandman, Swamp Thing, or the other Vertigo forerunners if not for the experimental attitude fostered in DC's first five years or so post-Crisis.