ulianPerez writes:I'm very, very tempted to agree with you, however, to be fair, the period we're talking about wasn't all geniuses like Ed Hamilton and Cary Bates. There was Bob Haney and Gerry Conway.
My point here is, that it's possible to enjoy and appreciate something if it is not 100% great, if you judge it by the high points and not the low ones. FUTURAMA was right on the money when they joked that out of STAR TREK's 79 episodes, only 30 are any good.
I'm loathe to give up on DC for several reasons.
Well, don't get me wrong. I'm not saying it's impossible to do good comics today, or that everything in the Silver and Bronze Age was high-quality. (far from it!)
What I meant was that whatever happened from 1956 to 1986, whether treasure or trash, has to be dealt with in some way and acknowledged as part and parcel of some continuing, evolving vision of the Multiverse. But in contrast, nothing published after the Crisis can affect in any way what happened in that previous, 30-year period.
If a writer in 2005 says the JLA performed mind-wipes during the Satellite Era, so what? He can't touch the REAL Satellite Era, because he's not writing about those characters. They are gone. If Frank Miller says Batman kidnapped and terrorized Dick Grayson into being Robin, who cares? That doesn't change the way it happened in the Golden or Silver Ages.
There was a time when the history of the Silver Age could be tweaked and re-written, and that time was the Silver Age (and to some extent the Bronze, since it continued Silver Age concepts). Uncle Morty was forever messing around with the story of Jor-El and Lara, for isntance. Sometimes in a good way, as with "Superman's Return to Krypton," sometimes in a bad way, as with the Superboy story that had the El's floating around space in suspended animation. But love or hate those stories, you had to at least put some thought into whether and how they fit the mythos. You are under no such obligation to reconcile modern stories. They are interesting, but they only "count" in modern continuity, not any continuity that preceded them.
When DC published the Crisis, they wrote the last chapter on Earth-1 and Earth-2. Anything after that involved characters with the same names, but different lives.
Having said all that, it's not impossible for me to enjoy modern stories on their own merits. After all, I could enjoy some episodes of "Enterprise" without ever accepting that it fit in the continuity of any other Star Trek. I rather like "The Seven Percent Solution" though I don't for a moment accept it as part of Holmes "canon." And when Pierce Brosnan's 007 did that embarassing para-sailing scene in Die Another Day, it didn't retroactively taint Sean Connery's portrayal.
Today's DC can say whatever thay like about any previous age, but it doesn't matter. When they pulled the plug on the Multiverse in 1986, they removed their own power to revisit the era. They can't have it both ways.
Anyway, coming in at this stage and casting aspersions on Silver Age characters is pretty pointless. Today's audiences are too young to be shocked or appalled (since they don't even KNOW the SA characters) and anyone with any attachment to the Silver Age has moved on anyway.