I just finished reading this and it was even more convoluted and insane than I'd heard, yet somehow I've come away with the feeling that I just read a masterpiece and was simply too stupid/uninformed to understand. Every other page introduced 20 random characters and the story jumped from one universe to another and different time periods in each, half a dozen times on a single page, but I felt things without even understanding. I cannot comprehend the sheer balls it must have taken to even attempt such a story.What are your thoughts on this seminal piece?
>>156199538Kinda pointless seeing that Earth 2 and Earth 1 were brought back to DC Multiverse.I am not even against making post-1985 comics take place on another earth, but what's the point of destroying the previous ones?
>>156199538Imagine being a kid and reading this mess as your introduction to comicbooksAm still an expert
>>156199719"Comic books aren't all that popular!"Gee, I wonder why.
>>156199715>Kinda pointless seeing that Earth 2 and Earth 1 were brought back to DC Multiverse.At least that is what I think happened in Convergence and Doomsday Clock
>>156199780>Earth-1 becomes Earth 1985.Who in-universe is coming up with these designations? It's always written so matter-of-factly.
>>156199846idk. The Presence?
>>156199538There was a novelization released in 2005 by one of the original authors. It was told mostly from the perspective of Bary Allen as a ghost, and which changed a bunch of important details in the story. Also for some reason the characters kept blaming God whenever anything went wrong, in typical 2000s edgelord fashion. I regret listening to the audio book and I'm glad I didn't waste my time actually reading it.
Barry Alien's death in the original version was pretty based though and was further proof that The Flash is the main protagonist of DC.
>>156199538Did you actually read the full 60 issue storyline or just the 12 core issues by Perez and Wolfman? It feels less haphazard if you fully immerse yourself and just read everything, but I can understand if you don't, its kind of a lot. I think the point too in crisis is to show how complicated and wild everything is and then they just press that big reset button at the end and everything is cut pretty nicely for a new simplified era of DC titles.
>>156199538Why didn't they just do a completely clean reboot instead of cynically murdering everything that came before?
>>156200005>Did you actually read the full 60 issue storyline or just the 12 core issues by Perez and Wolfman?I pretty much just read the last issue of The Flash v1 and the 12 main issues. I did start reading all of the tie-in comics in sequential order but after finishing about a half dozen of them none of them actually tied in at all, they just showed The Monitor on his satellite watching them on a screen for like one or two panels. I'm sure if I read them all anyway it would have at least introduced me to some of the more random characters that were only there in the background for a single page.I did enjoy the story though despite how much of a clusterfuck it was. The Anti-Monitor truly felt unbeatable and the desperation by the end was real.
>>156200101Actually I think I just read the "prequels", which probably weren't as substantial as the actual tie-ins.I'm probably going to read the whole thing again at some point but I'm just getting back into reading comics and will save it for when I have a greater understanding of the DC universe pre and post Crisis.
>>156200101>The Anti-Monitor truly felt unbeatable and the desperation by the end was real.Sounds good.
>>156199715>I am not even against making post-1985 comics take place on another earth, but what's the point of destroying the previous ones?they really needed a hard, definitive understanding at the time that they couldn't go back to the old well. It was a way to build confidence in the new direction.Believe it or not, a lot of readers did hate having to juggle knowledge of different Earths and what mattered to one or the other, so hard setting this streamlining was meant to make it very clear to readers it was a fresh start. Plus the way the comic tries to handle it at the time, it's less like the old main Earth 1 is gone and more like the old Earth changed into this one and the backstories were different. The truly incompatible characters from other Earths were the ones who died, but otherwise the way it was understood was that the E1 characters just had different histories now. This isn't entirely right but in a broad sense, at least.
>>156199538I thought it was kinda bad>>156200101>The Anti-Monitor truly felt unbeatable and the desperation by the end was real.He just felt like another a shitty comic book villain.
>>156199846Barry. He was the first one who meet Earth 2 and was the one on a journey in the multiverse after batkek events
>>156200032Wolfman wanted to but the bulk of the DC writing and editorial staff were explicitly "no fuck no" when Wolfman pushed it.But ultimately Wolfman abandoned the whole issue to get Levitz, Moore, and Thomas onboard with playing ball with crisis.
I thought it was boring, crowded, gratuitously edgy, and not even really about anything worthwhile. One of the lousiest event comics.>>156199943Funny that Wolfman says that DC Editorial told him to kill Barry because they thought he was boring. Decades later, Didio the fanboy brings him back because he had to have his Barry.
>>156199715At the time it didn't seem like there was any chance of them bringing back Earth 1/Earth 2/etc so that was why there was so much importance placed on it>I am not even against making post-1985 comics take place on another earth, but what's the point of destroying the previous ones?Like >>156200504 said there was this belief at DC that readers were confused by the multiverse, although how much of that was actually true is debated. There are some who believe that it just came about because Jeanette Kahn asked Shooter for advice and he suggested simplifying things to one Earth (Shooter did recall the talk on his blog) and that claiming readers were confused was a marketing play that just got repeated over and over.I started reading the old comics and realized it was really easy to understand the core Earths of the Multiverse that interact multiple times:Earth-1: "Main" Earth, Silver/Bronze guysEarth-2: "real time" Earth, Golden Age guysEarth-3: "Evil" versions of heroesEarth-S: Captain Marvel/Fawcett Comics worldEarth-X: Quality Comics characters vs NazisEarth-Prime: "our" EarthAnything else was usually one-off imaginary stories.They had some reasonable rules such as trying to avoid having too many crossovers between the Earth-1/Earth-2 Superman/Batman/Wonder Woman to avoid confusion. The only time I think there were real issues was when they were coming up with convoluted explanations for things, like Black Canary's backstory to explain why she isn't older than Oliver or needing to get rid of the Quality Comics heroes on Earth-2 by explaining they're the ones who went to Earth-X
>>156201541>like Black Canary's backstory to explain why she isn't older than OliverThey couldn't just say time works differently on Earth 1?
>>156201568The problem was that they had already established early on that time went by slower on Earth Two compared to Earth One.
>>156201568They could've but the problem is that, Black Canary left Earth-2 to go to Earth-1 in 1969, which was how she eventually ended up being Oliver's girlfriendIf she is supposed to be the original Black Canary from the Golden Age, she'd be in her early/mid 20s during the late 1940s and in turn be in her mid/late 40s by the time she makes the decision to leave Earth-2, so she'd still be older than Oliver. I think there are several other solutions for this that were less convoluted than the Pre-COIE solution they went with.
>>156199538Oldfag hereIt was pretty gripping at the time and readers felt like we were seeing a legitimate and series CHANGE like we'd never seen before, especially from DC. I don't like Wolfman personally but he managed to engineer a capeshit epic that felt like the entire DCU was involved with.The problem was that they spent so much effort preparing for it (having a guy literally read EVERYTHING DC had published and make notes and along the way rediscovering characters everyone had forgotten like Dr. Occult) but they needed a very clear plan about what happened AFTER among editorial and writers and that's when it began to crumble and that's tarnished most of the perception of COIE.
