Or, why Secret Wars was better than Crisis on Infinite Earths — at least in one aspect. Tim O’Neill has been looking at Crisis again and what it accomplished:
The final accomplishment of Crisis is the most obvious one, and in hindsight the most problematic: the establishment of the new post-Crisis single-Earth status quo. While on paper the post-Crisis integration may have seemed like the most logical solution to proliferating complexity, in actuality the benefits of the streamlined New Earth were severely mitigated by the company’s absolute refusal to disengage from the practice of constantly updating and “fixing” lapsed continuity. Post-Crisis, the smartest thing they could have done would have been simply to stop caring so much about consistency: with a working model New Earth and streamlined continuity, they should have declared Crisis #12 (or, more likely, Man of Steel #1) ground zero and gone forward without so much as a backwards glance, making it up as they went and not worrying so much about the particulars. But of course it didn’t work like that. There were problems immediately out of the gate: Roy Thomas and Paul Levitz, to name two prominent offenders, did not easily incorporate their distinctive and disparate fiefdoms – Earth 2 and the 30th Century, respectively – into the New Earth continuity, and therefore proceeded to pick at the scabs of bruised continuity in such a way that, for many characters and settings, the transplant never entirely took. Hawkman was problematic as well – but again, instead of simply just shrugging and going forward, they insisted on making a big deal of the problem, and thereby drawing more attention to what should have been merely a glitch.
I only read Crisis long after its effects had made themselves felt in the DC universe, sometime in the midnineties or so. That was late enough to know that what Wolfman and co had set out to do, streamline the DC universe and get rid of all the too complicated crap and start fresh, had failed. Individual series like Superman and Wonderwoman had rebooted well, became “hotter” than they had been in years if not decades, at the price of sacrifising all their history, but the universe as a whole was a mess, with the Legion of Superheroes as Tim also mentions fairing the worst, together with Hawkman. Contrary to Tim however I don’t think the problems lay with the execution, but with the concept of Crisis as a spring clean.
The DC universe wasn’t broke and didn’t need fixing. Sure, you had one popular title set in the future, two more on an alternate Earth and the Superman/Superboy “problem”, but none of this required a reboot. These were all things that could be ignored: the real problem was that DC’s flagship titles, like Superman, Action, Wonderwoman, Flash Justice League and to a lesser extent, Green Lantern and even the Batman titles were not very good and hadn’t been for a while. Superman in particular was in bad shape, dull insipid stories and artwork that looked dated and dull too. Something needed to be done with them, but it didn’t need to have been a continuity reset. Just getting Byrne to revamp Supes could’ve been enough: just focus on the present and forget “fixing” Superboy or the zillions of Kryptonians still hanging around or the sillier villains. What DC needed was better comics, not an improved continuity.
But I can understand that it would’ve been tempting back in 1984, when Marvel had been beating DC in sales for years and when it seemed the only successes DC had was with “new” titles like the Titans without too much historical baggage (and usually written by refugees from Shooter), that an universe wide cleanup was needed. But it was the wrong choice and it led to years and now decades of continuing revisions and origin regurgitations and in the end the DC universe is still difficult to get into.