Over on my blog, I've been, for years now, doing a
week-by-week chronicle of DC Comics between the Implosion and the Crisis. Now in the last month of 1984 (cover dates! The 1984 of the calendar has a few more months to go.), it's worth reflecting on
Crisis' effects on the DC Universe.
Every New Beginning...The biggest beneficiaries of Crisis were DC's big-name headliners. Of course, they didn't all benefit equally. The Superman titles of the early 80s seem to me stuck in an outmoded way of telling stories that didn't capitalize on the more serial (and more soap operatic) storylines preferred by readers that had made X-Men and New Teen Titans hits. Superman is mostly engaged in done-in-one stories by frequently changing creative teams that are lower on action, drama, and stakes. There were attempts made at innovation, particularly by Wolfman, but these didn't amount to much.
Batman, in contrast, had decent runs in the years before Crisis by Conway and Moench, though mostly in harmony with the 70s revitalization of Batman. There are some shakeups to the status quo. Dick Grayson becomes Nightwing and Jason Todd the new Robin, with a somewhat new dynamic with Batman. Catwoman is pushed aside as both a heroine and love interest (though it won't be until Barr's run post-Crisis where she is fully returned to villainy), but Moench introduces Nocturna, a new adversary and potential love interest, for perhaps a fresher variation on the same old theme. Both Killer Croc and Black Mask debut in what seems to be an attempt to create new, major adversaries.
Wonder Woman is somewhere between the two. Her title is less stuck in a rut, because (presumably) poor sales seem to lead to a number of "new directions" in the early 80s, but none of these are particularly bold, and they tend to come across as flailing rather than innovative.
The marquee team of the Justice League gets a risky makeover with the Detroit League that doesn't really work. An attempt to follow the "Cap's Kooky Quartet" template and harness the soap opera stylings of X-Men and Teen Titans is hampered both by poorly conceived characters and Conway perhaps not being the right writer for the job. (Ironically, Batman & the Outsiders both builds a better team from the Kooky Quartet template and does the character drama a bit better.)
While not necessarily required by Crisis, the bringing in of new creators and a willingness perhaps by editorial to entertain bolder pitches leads to a revitalization of these titles, though not without a cost. The rich mythology of Superman was jettisoned in a desire to strip him back to basics. Wonder Woman also lost most of her mythos, but also her place of prominence within the DC Universe. Batman got a personality shift, altering his relationship to other heroes, and a personality ans origin shift for his sidekick set Jason Todd on a course to an ignominious and gimmicky death.
...Some Other Beginning's End
More minor heroes, particularly those attached to the mythos of marquee characters were even less well served. The last issue of Supergirl and the last backup in Wonder Woman featuring the Huntress have editorials promising more to come for these characters, but both are erased in Crisis. While both returned, it's perhaps fair to say they've been hampered by too many revisions and new directions since. Power Girl, though she wasn't regularly featured pre-Crisis, has suffered a similar fate.
The Flash, whose title's sales struggled, I assume, died in the Crisis and got replace by his sidekick. Aquaman had a tough time before Crisis, and continues to do so after. Green Arrow and Hawkman are arguable brought to greater prominence (at least for a while) by the interesting takes in Green Arrow: The Longbow Hunters and Hawkworld, but at the cost of erasing much of their past. The grittier. more grounded take on Green Arrow also has the result of sidelining him for years in the DCU as the new version isn't really superhero team material, and the unfortunate decision to set Hawkworld in the present makes a hopeless tangle of the Hawks' continuity, and likewise, I think, sidelines them. It is true that none of these changes or poor editorial decisions were necessitated by Crisis, but the spirit of revision unmoored by any adherence to past continuity opened the door to them.
These new directions also condemned to obscurity the interesting stuff done in the Barr/von Eeden Green Arrow limited series, The Shadow War of Hawkman, Kupperberg's and Infantino's Supergirl, and the Cavalieri Huntress stories. Okay, maybe few of these are absolutely classics; Maybe none of them were! But they aren't universally worse than everything that's been done with these characters since.
World's Will Die
I was really only becoming aware of the DC Universe as an entity at the time just-pre-Crisis era, so Crisis sucked me in, and the just-post-Crisis period is one I have a great deal of nostalgia for. I'm certainly not one of those grumpy old fans (old at the time of Crisis!) that talked about the event and its effects with horror. However, it's fair to say that not every decision, in retrospect, was a good one, and every decision has unintended consequences.
Like it's interesting to think about how the course of DC Comics might have been different had there been the courage to reboot at the end of Crisis, it's also interesting to consider how the DCU might have gone if a path to revitalization had been take that didn't entail wholesale revisions.