Crisis II – The Villain Crossover: Responses

Pencils & Production

Last time out, we looked at the proposal for another potential sequel to CRISIS ON INFINITE EARTHS, the “Villain Crossover” as masterminded by a small consortium of DC editors and creators. As we know in hindsight, this storyline was never put into production, and eventually the story that became LEGENDS was used in its place. So what did the editors and creators of the period think of that document when they’d had a chance to read it? We’re about to find out, at least in a limited capacity.

So to begin with, here’s a follow-up document drafted by editor Barbara Randall, outlining who and what she saw as the specific villainous players at the heart of that storyline.

But almost immediately, for reasons that aren’t entirely well spelled out in this memo, the idea of doing the Villain Crossover was dropped in favor of other ideas. Here, the creative committee tasked with working out the storyline reports to the larger group that they’re shifting gears. There’s one additional name on the list of attendees who might give a clue as to what had happened. This would be Mike W. Barr, the writer and editor of OUTSIDERS among other things. Barr was very much anti-crossover throughout his career, and he certainly might have spent some time poking holes in the proposed storyline for this new one.

You can see the seeds of the destruction of this line of thinking right here, where people are spending way too much time attempting to explain something that most readers didn’t care about–that being, what about all of teh normal people on the new merged Earth? Don’t they all come from different realities, too, and have different memories of the past like the heroes do? This is one of those moments that was best hand-waved away (as it was in the actual execution of CRISIS ON INFINITE EARTHS and its aftermath) rather than something to stare at and point out.

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5 thoughts on “Crisis II – The Villain Crossover: Responses”

  1. I kind of like the idea of exploring what the new world and its history is like though that does seem a thin reed for Crisis II. The idea of heroes suddenly becoming hated and feared did carry over into Legends, I presume.
    This feels like an idea Berger might have greenlit for Vertigo down the road.

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  2. This is an example of DC being unable or simply unwilling to follow its own logic out of Crisis On Infinite Earths. Not to blame Marv Wolfman; I know the smart logic was part of his original pitch for Crisis, & I’m pretty sure originally intended even while they were doing it, only to be overruled as the series progressed due to protest from various DC editors: once the Anti-Montor had been defeated at the beginning of time, & a single rather than multiple universe henceforth progressed out of the Big Hand, no one should have remembered their previous existences b/c those existences would then never have happened. (The Psycho-Pirate would’ve been the only person who remembered, & thus thought stark raving mad by everyone else.) This was abandoned due to several reasons such as editors being unwilling to abandon unresolved plotlines begun in their books prior to Crisis that involved multiple Earths, & the (mistaken, in my opinion) view that such approach would strip the “heroism” out of the sacrifice of those like Supergirl & The Flash who gave their lives in the course of the Crisis. (The idea that their sacrifice would go unremembered makes it more heroic in my view, not less, but no one asked me.)

    i.e. Logically, there should’ve been no need for a series featuring characters trying to correlate their old memories w/their new existence b/c at that point their new existence should’ve been the only one they’d ever known…

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  3. Yes, it’s funny how much all these early concepts relied on the original Crisis outcomes, from the space-time meddling to the Psycho Pirate involvement, when in the end the universe-changing event was hardly mentioned at all throughout the post-crisis age down to Final Crisis, the whole Crisis was actually hand-waved, not just the details.
    To Legends in the end being “no less epic in scope or scale”, well… Unless you call a well-written teaser for the new Wonder Woman and the origin of the new JL, COIE-level epic.

    It is also funny (or sad), retrospectively, to see the effort DC put in deleting the same multiverse concept which is today keeping the whole cinematic superheroes business alive, a concept invented – in comics – by DC and in which they are joining far too late the party with the “been there/done that” Flash flick.

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