From: mss2@quads.uchicago.edu (Michael S. Schiffer)
Subject: Re: DC--Crisis: The Aftermath
Keywords: DC Crisis 
Reply-To: mss2@midway.uchicago.edu
Organization: University of Chicago Computing Organizations
Date: Fri, 24 Jul 1992 06:14:28 GMT

In article <1992Jul23.204523.2361@nic.csu.net> gary@futon.SFSU.EDU (Gary Hoo) writes:

>I'm not fond of picking, or rather nit-picking, stories apart.  I was 
>curious about Crisis because while it rewrote history, it didn't seem to 
>have a huge emotional impact on the characters.  I was looking for more
>stories like the Infinity, Inc. issue that followed the disappearance of
>the JSA.  But of course, under the "multiple wave" theory, since no one 
>could remember what really happened, the Crisis became something akin to
>"Invasion," and when cosmic disasters happen annually, as they seem to 
>in the DC Universe today, even the most sensitive superhero can't be 
>blamed for getting a little thick-skinned.  (Sorry, no smileys here.)


	One of the great ironies of the Crisis is that in the
miniseries itself, probably the most common refrain was that a
particular dead character "will not be forgotten."  "Kara is a hero.
She will _not_ be forgotten."  [Crisis #7]  "The bodies of Robin,
Huntress, [both of Earth-2-- m.s.] and Kole were never found.  Still,
there were graveside services.  They would _not_ be forgotten."
[Crisis #12]  Of course, they couln't have been more wrong, and indeed
that was probably known even at the time those issues were being
scripted-- even if they weren't sure about Supergirl (and by all
accounts I've heard, the removal of Supergirl was required of Byrne
rather than being one of his interpolations), certainly there was no
chance that the Golden Age Robin (a now redundant middle-aged Dick
Grayson) or the original Huntress (the daughter of the Golden Age
Batman) could be retained in their clean new continuity.  That's _why_
they had to be killed off, after all (convenient, actually, how the
universal crisis thinned the ranks disproportionately of redundant and
originless characters-- Power Girl might thank her lucky stars that
her own status didn't doom her, though it cost her her Kryptonian
vision powers pretty quickly and a lot of the rest of it soon
afterward.)  Knowing what was coming, Wolfman might have chosen a
different phrasing to honor the fallen heroes who would soon become
unpersons.

	Just about the only people to die in the Crisis and actually
_stay_ dead and _be_ remembered were the Flash and Kole and the
original Dove.  Note that the Immortal Man died in the Crisis, but a
modified version showed up in Flash a year or so back.  The original
Crime Syndicate's status is ambiguous given the recent JLIQ--
certainly the Qwardian version wouldn't have been killed the same way.
(I must say that the death of Ultraman in Crisis #1 was done almost
perfectly, with the dark reflection of Superman demonstrating just a
spark of the nobility which produced his Earth-1 and Earth-2
counterparts before he died.)  Lori Lemaris was resurrected in
Superman, as I understand it.  And so on, ad infinitum.  Very few of
the characters acknowledged to exist at all any more have stayed dead,
and I wouldn't make any five year bets on any of them.  No wonder,
then, that there's so little reflection on the Crisis even as it's
remembered now-- there weren't, in the end, that many major
casualties, the Flash being the primary one (and to give DC credit,
people _do_ seem to give him due respect).  But Kara Zor-El and Kal-L
and Helena Wayne and Diana Prince, all of whom were fairly important
and who had a plethora of friends who should have mourned them, no
longer reside in the memories of the DC Universe, so why should anyone
reflect overlong on what has become, as Mr. Hoo noted, one
world-threatening crisis among many, and not the most crucial?

Mike
-- 
Michael S. Schiffer, LHN, FCS	"Workers of the world, forgive me.
mss2@midway.uchicago.edu	 You had more to lose than I thought."
mike.schiffer@um.cc.umich.edu	 -- Karl Marx (1990) as imagined by
mss2@usite-next.uchicago.edu     Jim Koncz (konc@midway.uchicago.edu)
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