Mike Gold: What Goes Around Inevitably Comes Around
DC Entertainment Co-Publisher and Editorial Big Kahuna Dan DiDio let the cat out of the bag on Facebook last week. In referring to Countdown To Infinite Crisis, he said “Definitely one of the highlights of my time at DC, but it gets me thinking, has it really been almost ten years since then, and maybe its time to do it one better.”
Dan, I’m sorry to say this, but your average seven year old could do it one better; two if you gave him a bigger box of Crayolas.
Look, we haven’t even finished Future’s End, a.k.a. Crisis on Infinite Angst. That means we haven’t even seen its trans-universe gangbang follow-up (pictured above, WordPress willing), Blood Moon. And now you’re “teasing” us with still another Crisis?
No, you are not. I know the difference between a tease and threat. A tease involves taking off almost all of your clothes. A threat is Vladimir Putin taking on Darkseid.
I really liked the original Crisis On Infinite Earths. It was a great series in and of itself. But immediately thereafter DC relaunched Superman and Wonder Woman, which sort of pulled the rug out from under the linear reboot. Then DC launched into a whole mess of predictable game-changers: The Death of Superman, followed by The Death or Disappearance of Almost Everybody Else One At A Time. It wasn’t too long before all the cool stuff in Crisis On Infinite Earths was invalidated or contradicted or ret-conned into oblivion. I can’t count the number of Crisis sequels that followed the one that set the DC Universe straight for the first and still-only time.
Indeed, over the past 30 years the DC fans have learned one and only one thing: we cannot trust DC to sustain a thought.
Like most of your readers and ostensibly many of your staff (hard to tell with the big move to Los Angeles), we all love and revere the DC characters. I know you share these feelings because you’ve said so yourself many times. Some of us were inspired to read because of DC’s output. Some of us got a nice slice of our morality from the doings of these characters. They may be entertainment, but entertainment can be enlightening and DC has spent the best part of 79 years doing just that.
Dan, I am not picking on you, nor am I picking on the talented writers and artists you employ, many of whom I count among my friends. If you want to do a sequel of something, base it upon one of the most innovative, daring and worthy projects in American comic book history. Maybe you can call it Thursday Comics.
You wanna do another Crisis? Do another Crisis. I can’t stop you. But, please do one thing: do not call it “Crisis.” Show some originality.
Besides, Marv Wolfman and George Pérez deserve better.
The rug was pulled out from under Crisis in the fourth or so issue of Justice league when the heroes from “A parallel dimension” (As opposed to Parallel Earth) were introduced.
The idea of parallel earths / timelines is just too good a story to put on a Bannned list.
I can, and have, gone on about the thirty-year nightmare that has been DC Comics trying to “Fix” things. Any argument that the original multiverse was too complex is ridiculous. I have long said I could explain the original Multiverse, in exacting detail, in five minutes flat. If I had the skills to edit video, I’d do a you-tube clip. (Do we have people with said skills on staff, by any chance?)
I get the idea of needing to weed the field every so often. Continuity is like the junk drawer in your kitchen – eventually it gets too full. So you either give the drawer a few shakes to get everything to settle a bit, or you root through it and toss the stuff you know you’ll never need.
I mostly stopped reading mainstream comics when “events” became the rule rather than exceptions
The New 52 took care of the “mostly” part.
Amen, Mike!