Yet Another Comics Site 

_____The Crisis on Infinite Earths.
_____What does that call to mind first? Twelve issues of a comic maxi-series? The fight against the Anti-Monitor? Red Skies? Firebrand, John Stewart, and Jonah Hex all in one page?
_____No.
_____What first springs to mind is more like this: When continuity shattered. When everything got confusing. When comics went all grim 'n' gritty. When they started giving us contradicting versions of characters. When they removed my childhood comics from canon. When simple one issue stories got replaced by endless "sagas".
_____Crisis is more than a story. It is also a symbol, partially correctly, for a major shift in the Industry.
_____I've already addressed Crisis the twelve part story. This is about what it did, and what it has become.
_____First the former. What did Crisis do? Well, it permanently altered the DC multiverse into a universe. That change alone eliminated one of the more important background elements of DC during the Silver Age, to the point where it effectively ended it. Obviously, this change alone would be enough to earn it enmity from those who cherished the old JLA/JSA team-ups, but this is nowhere near what Crisis has come to mean, nor even the sum of what Crisis did.
_____The rest comes in the wake of Crisis. Basically, DC used the oppurtunity to reboot 2 (and only 2) of its principal characters, Superman and Wonder Woman. These changes totally eliminated what had gone before. It never happened.
_____The logic used had some merit. The notion of a coherent continuity that had been building over the past several decades had not gone hand in hand with the actual creation of same. Further, elements that had once worked no longer did, and the legends of the two heroes had become so cluttered with deadwood that something needed to be done.
_____The revised versions of these characters were more consistent, incorporating (by and large) what had worked and eliminating what did not.
_____The problem that arose was that the previous versions of these characters had been involved with stories that were still presumed to exist, such as the Justice League of America.
_____Enter... inconsistency.
_____The solutions to the problems this posed were slapdash and ill constructed. Black Canary was slotted to fill Wonder Woman's role in the JLA, though this was ludicrous if one considered the Canary's inability to perform at the power levels Wonder Woman had.
_____Still, those problems might have been minor, if it had stopped there.
_____But the floodgates were open, and not hell nor high water could stop the revamps now. The brilliant Hawkworld series tore the Silver Age Hawks out of the picture, leaving a surprisingly large gaping hole to be plugged. The small touches on Green Lantern's origin looked far more reasonable. Batman's origin was similarly tweaked, though the minor alterations proved to have quite a large effect.
_____The amount of Silver Age stories that could be considered canonical was shrinking almost as fast as the amount that were canonical but now made no sense was growing.
_____Add to that a tendency to produce overly elaborate fixes, sometimes to the point of redundancy if not outright contradiction. (Who was the Golden Age Wonder Woman's replacement in the JSA? Miss America? Fury? And now Hyppolita?)
_____Zero Hour's attempts to fix things was laughable. It caused all the problems that Crisis had (now Batman was an urban legend, etc.) without even the elimination of deadwood.
_____The changing attitudes of the late 80s also affected things greatly. The grim and gritty attitude that prevailed then might have been much shorter lived if it had not come at precisely the same time that DC's most iconic characters were being re-worked.
_____Thus, the new versions of such classics as Hawkman were steeped in a decidedly un-Silver Age atmosphere. Unlike the new creations of the era who by and large vanished soon after, the mark that was left on DC's signature creations would not go away, and would carry this grim and grittiness well into the next decade.
_____And the commercial success of Crisis led to a string of cross-overs that had a marked tendency to be lame in the extreme.
_____Your humble host NWJ loves the Crisis as a twelve part story. He is not fond in the least of the mess that was created in its wake.
_____I love much of the pre-Crisis DC Universe, and I do not like much of what followed in Crisis' wake. But the problem I have is the construction of the post-Crisis DC Universe, not any flaw in any issue of Crisis itself.
_____The most logical thing to have done would have been to re-boot the Silver Age entire, in essence starting from where the DCU was just before Showcase #4.
_____This time, creating one consistent universe, if that was what was needed.
_____And a universe whose tales were still told with the story telling values that the Silver Age had had (fun, heroism, understandability), albeit with a slightly more modern flavour.
_____I prefer to think of Crisis as the last, greatest, Silver Age story, the capstone of a legend. Others think of it as the first Modern (Bronze) Age story, the cause of a disaster.
_____I see a cup half full.
_____But it is the half empty cup that Crisis has come to mean.