Superman Through the Ages! Forum

I have not yet gotten to any of this "crisis" storyline yet, & my understanding of it is so small that I wouldnt know where to begin. From reading some of the posts about it, it doesn't seem as though most readers from my generation are in favor of it. When, exactly, did it begin? What does "prime" refer to?
   An advertisement for the current storyline in the magazine "all star superman" read, "remember the pre-crises Superman? Here he is again.' I really dont understand, how is it different?  These "ALL STAR" magazines, along with the "Showcase presents Superman" book & "Superman Chronicles vol. 1 " & a used copy of the George Lowther novel is all my budget has allowed me to purchase since my interest was re-kindled, largely due to finding this site, & all of this material is, I suppose, pre crises.
   Will the new movie be considered "pre-crisis"? Do readers ever anticipate a movie in the series that deals with the "crisis"?

If you want to start by reading about the original "Crisis on Infinite Earths", this site is a pretty good start...but really, a Google search will bring up a lot...

http://www.io.com/~woodward/chroma/crisis.html

Well, the movie isn't even going to pretend to be part of the continuity, so don't try to fit it into any of that. If anything, it's supposed to be a sequel to Superman II, so I guess that canonically, that places it in the same continuity as the Superman comics Cary Bates and Elliot Maggin scripted.

As for the rest of it, I don't even understand what this latest Crisis business was supposed to achieve. Okay, so this series called 52 is supposed to fill in the blanks? All right! I'll pick it up then. And what do I get? The Elongated Man attempting suicide.

The Elongated Man. Attempting suicide. Er, wasn't this character all about fun?

DC would seem to have a unwavering, unilateral stance *against*  fun which the latest Crisis series does nothing but enforce. Unless you find cheap shock value, gratuity, and gore to be fun in which case the stuff will be right up your alley.

The "Crisis" begins with Crisis on Infinite Earths, the series published in 1985-1986. You can get it at many bookstores or libraries. In that series, the writers acted as editors, getting rid of parallel earths and supposedly simplifying the DC universe. (Didn't work out as well as they would have liked.)

In December 1986, all Superman comics were restarted and Superman's origin was rewritten. Therefore, all of the comics on this site either from 1938-1986, or refer to that time period, because of some of the major changes or missing elements in the comics between 1986-2006.

Infinite Crisis is supposed to be the sequel to Crisis on Infinite Earths, twenty years later. It began early last year with a single comic book called Countdown to Infinite Crisis, then spread out into 5 or 6 miniseries, and then back to the Infinite Crisis series. After the end of the series, all comics began one year later, with a series called 52 filling in the missing year.

In my opinion, having read a lot of those comics, it's better to read a giant summary of the comics than the actual comics. They apparently didn't change very much, except that MAYBE Superman was once Superboy...again.

The new Superman comics, on the other hand, seem to be pretty good.

Basically, it all started with the DC Universe just being one universe that eventually most of the superheroes they created in the Golden Age appeared on.

Then it became TWO universes when they decided to refurbish some of the Golden Age heroes like Flash and Green Lantern for the Silver Age, and Flash of the Silver Age found a way to meet the Flash of the Golden Age.

From there the universes kept increasing, either because of DC Comics inheriting heroes from other comic book publishers (Fawcett, Quality, Charlton), or simply for the sake of having a completely different universe to craft a story around (like the Crime Syndicate's Earth-3).

And things got messy to the point where they decided to do a cleaning of house and a consolidation of universes for their 50th anniversary.  Hence, the Crisis On Infinite Earths and the Earth-Sigma universe.

Good enough, except that DC started tinkering with revamping various superheroes, including those that didn't necessarily need any revamping (like the modern-day Superman, who survived the Crisis suffering only the loss of his cousin Kara, until John Byrne took over).

Things got messy again, and DC tried yet another house-cleaning with Zero Hour, which did little but reboot the Legion of Super-Heroes from scratch.  Not much else changed.

Then came their introduction of a new "multiverse" with The Kingdom called Hypertime, which gave us the fun meeting of the Elseworlds Kingdom Come Justice Trio with that of the mainstream universe's.

And now, we had another house-cleaning event to start things back to zero again (or maybe not, since I haven't read Infinite Crisis).

Who knows what's going to happen from here?

i think you got mixed up for a sec there. Elongated man is not about fun. Your thinking of Plastic man Grin

Elongated Man is about fun - as in solving mysteries that make his nose twitch with his pert and lovely wife Sue in tow.

Anything else is someone's nightmare.

Amen!

I wish I could find that Fred Hembeck cartoon of the Elongated Man and Plastic Man armwrestling...  ;)

http://www.proudrobot.com/hembeck/elongated.html (http://www.proudrobot.com/hembeck/elongated.html)

Ask, and ye shall receive. Thanks, Spiff!

the way the crisis is growing i wouldnt be suprised if that frustrated arms dealer Emil Norvell from the first superman story will turn out to be the master genius behind the crisis

"well superman! if i learnt one thing from the firecracker buisness, its to go out with a BANG"

The current JSA Classified with Alan Scott Green Lantern was pretty enjoyable