The main reason I think was the DCs at the time were not very good on the whole.
Yeah...and whose fault was THAT, Marv? Was it just me, or around that time was every single DC title written by either you, or Gerry Conway?
MW: It gave Marvel fans an excuse to try DC. It allowed them to realize DC had really good characters and it allowed them to start "at the beginning" so to speak.
Actually, this is kind of true; I've spoken to many people that refused to collect DC comics before CRISIS. Crisis, for all its many, MANY faults of shortsightedness, contempt for the past, and crass egomania, did give DC a new image. My question is, though, did they have to drastically affect everything so catastrophically, in a way to eliminate future story potential? Just because the writers can't think of a story involving Earth-X or Kid Psycho doesn't mean that future writers won't.
NRAMA: Crisis gave new life to series like the Flash that went from cancellation to 20 years of strong sales,
Well, as much as I love and miss Barry, I'd have to say this is true. Why is it that eventually, Hal came back but nobody has thought to bring back the Silver Age Flash?
Two reasons:
1) The Flash was dead, but the Flash's world was intact (the Pied Piper, Captain Cold, etc.), and thanks to CRISIS, they now had the Earth-2 Flash's plot elements (the Thinker, Keystone City) to mess around with.
2) Bill Messner-Loebs, Baron, and Guice were able to make Wally unique, likeable, and three-dimensional, strong and weak at the same time - heroic and principled but at the same time ruled by hormones with a chipper sense of humor, a worthy character that is equally interesting as the character he replaced. On the other hand, nothing that Marz did was equal in imagination to the concepts he destroyed. This was not true of Kyle (ecch), who was constantly characterized as the "rookie" in JLA. Why? Because they had really, no other personality to give him! Concepts were destroyed, but nothing equal in imagination was created to replace them.
And so, this is why Wally (despite Mark Waid's best efforts) is still around.
MW: I think the Legion fit in fine. The only question was where Superboy fit into the Legion and that came about only after the decision was made to revamp Superman and that the new version would not have a Superboy, so that was not Crisis related but an offshoot of Man of Steel.
"Hear that, everybody? It wasn't me!"
A decision YOU participated in, Marv. Don't try to pass the buck when the next guy is yourself.
The fact that perhaps the Legion stories weren't great for awhile may have hurt the book more than anything we ever did in Crisis itself. Until the current run by Mark Waid - which I love, the only other time - in my mind - that the Legion was good was Paul Levitz's run and before that when the Legion occasionally appeared in Superboy - before they became a feature in Adventure. But then, I've never been a Legion fan.
Wow, check out the sour grapes here. "Okay, yeah, I will freely admit I deprived the Legion of Super-Heroes of their reason to exist, but that's okay, because the Legion wasn't that great anyway."
I really, really wish I could send a slap through the internet.
MW: I actually wanted to do follow-up stories but they were never approved. I really do think comic heroes should be more ethnically diverse.
A belief I share; Marv Wolfman did give us the gift of the Asian female Dr. Light, an interesting character that was never written to her full potential.
Didn't Julie Schwartz say that all the females in the DC Universe were either Italian or Jewish? (A view supported by the fact that Julie's wife's name is "Jean," like the good Ms. Loring.)