llozymandius writes:Another reason i prefer the Pre-Crisis DC Multiverse to the current DCU is crossovers. Inter-dimensional crossovers are more interesting (to me anyway) than same-earth meetings. In a multiverse setting you can have as many heroes as you want, & have any of them meet any (or all) of the others. Granted you can also do that on just one earth, but here things end up super overcrowded real fast. Besides that old Marvel cliche of "heroes fighting each other when they meet, because each thinks the other is (or could be) a super-villain", would be at least a little more credible if the heroes involved are from separate earths.
Well, yes, it was more interesting. Usually in the JLA/JSA crossovers at least a year had passed, and in the case of some characters even longer, since we'd seen the Earth-2 crew. That gave us a chance to catch up on them. And since they weren't in a monthly book, there was the freedom to do really interesting and permanent things with them, without worrying about how it would affect another book in the line. A big problem with cross-overs today is making them work within every character's continuity...it rarely succeeds.
And as you say, mixing universes feels much more like an "event." Having two heroes from different towns bump into each other is no big whoop.
Matter Eater Lad writes:The Crisis taken alone seems to be a super hero story again...
Yes, the Crisis is THE superhero story, in the sense of most characters involved in one big, 12-issue slugfest. But what do you do with it? You can tack it on to the Bronze Age as "THE END" and end your collection there. But you can't really use it as a starting point for the new DCU.
And it does not stand on it's own. In order to understand, or care, about what the heck's going on, you have to have a near-encyclopedic knowledge of pre-Crisis history. In fact, it's kind of ironic, given that it was meant to make things easier for the reader, that this story requires more knowledge and understanding of tangled DC history than any other tale ever published. Certainly it is much less accessible than any JLA/JSA crossover I ever read.
So you have to know a lot of history to even understand the series But at the same time, you have to have a willingness to watch that history come to a violent end. So I have to wonder; who is buying all these hardback, paperback and soon "Ultimate" collections of the story? Modern fans? They don't have any emotions invested in the characters, so why bother? Old-timers like me? Why would I want to watch it all happen again?
For my money, Crisis is a story that had tremendous interest at the time...but because it was an event, not because it was a good story. Here in 2005, it's an irrelevant oddity that doesn't fit anywhere and can't stand on its own. It's kind of like "Who Shot JR"...it seemed important at the time, but who gives a rip now?