Okay, I've been threatening to do this for a while now, so here goes: I'm taking on Crisis on Infinite Earths as part of my duties here on the Howling Curmudgeons. Expect it to be a long, long series of posts: if I took 9000 words to talk about Superman, it'll probably take me at least that long to talk about Crisis in anything even remotely like depth. May God or Brahma or Ormazhd or Rao take pity on us all.
Did CRISIS work as a story? Yep! Did it neaten up our universe? You bet! Did it give DC Comics a launch pad to the future? Of course! Did we take advantage of all the opportunities presented by the dramatic conclusion of the landmark series called CRISIS ON INFINITE EARTHS...? Well... yes and no. A full answer would take too much space here, and I don't want to spoil our celebration.
Dick Giordano, September 10, 1998 afterword to the trade paperback collection of Crisis
This is where I lay my prejudices out on the line and explain where I'm coming from with this review/dissection/commemoration of Crisis (I'm not using Dick's all-capitals spelling, sorry) and how it affected me and the comics industry. First up, I'll admit it now: Crisis on Infinite Earths is probably my favorite comic book story ever, and if not, it's certainly in the top ten. It's huge... it has the superheroes of five worlds uniting to combat an evil that's destroying whole universes, the Guardians of the Universe and the weaponeers of Qward, the distant past and the far-flung future, Atlantis and Apokolips. It's the first comic book I remember reading where the true sense of scale of the universe, both historical (heroes from the Golden Age standing shoulder to shoulder with the ones I was familiar with, although I was pretty familiar with the Golden Age or Earth-2 characters as well) and in terms of the breadth and depth of the superheroes involved. I mean, there were two Supermen and a Superboy in this story! I'm incredibly biased here... I love reading Crisis to this day, and that's going to show up in my discussion.
However, I part company with Dick when it comes to considering the effect Crisis had on the comics that followed. Part of this isn't Crisis' fault... clearly, Wolfman had no such intent when he wrote the series, but many writers used Crisis as a convenient 'reboot' excuse, and while in the case of George Perez's Wonder Woman that made a kind of sense (the Anti-Monitor did kill her with some sort of time regression beam at the end of the series, so a revised origin in the new universe could be justified) it wasn't as necessary in other cases. What wasn't a good idea in the hands of John Byrne (the revamp/retooling of Superman that abandoned the charming silver age complexities Weisinger had created for the character) became an absolute hash when it was applied to characters like Hawkman, and led to the character's incoherence and eventual disintegration, only recently returning in a throwback to the original golden age character. This obsession with revision led to a lot of babies being thrown out with the bathwater: worse than that, however, was the sudden explosion of company-wide crossover events that led to such nadirs as Millennium from DC and Secret Wars II from Marvel. (I personally don't think the original Secret Wars series was that bad... certainly it was a thousand times more coherent and readable than its successor.) These crossovers were, by in large, an exercise in trying to force you to read every single comic book put out while the event was going on, and generally don't hold up well today, with some exceptions.
Obviously, I don't agree with Dick that Crisis 'neatened up their universe' at least not in the definition of neat that means 'something cool or interesting'. It may have tidyed the universe up a touch, but it also stripped a lot of the more fascinating elements from characters who'd been around for decades, got rid of the excellent 'parallel worlds' conceit that writers like Broome and Fox had gotten such mileage out of, promoted a cult of redaction that led to muddled, hard to understand comic books and in many ways, instead of promoting a more concise, easier to understand comic book universe for new readers to come on board created a complex, mutually contradictory sea of unclear backstories that only became more confusing as new writers sought to untangle them. While comics like Animal Man got mileage out of the changes, not all comics fared as well.
Those are my biases out of the way. Now, we'll get started on the whys and wherefores of Crisis, and the history it was simultaneously the culmination of and the destroyer of, like Shiva, only with more Supermen.
When I was growing up in the '60's, the super-hero team comic to read was THE JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA, a book featuring seven or eight of DC's super-heroes. Occasionally, the JLA would meet THE JUSTICE SOCIETY OF AMERICA - their 1940's counterparts from Earth-Two, which was in another dimension - and we'd have maybe fifteen or sixteen heroes in a special two-part JLA/JSA story. But, being the greedy fan that I was, I always wanted to see a single story featuring all the DC super-heroes from the past, present and future.
Marv Wolfman, introduction to the trade paperback of Crisis
The DC multiverse (a word coined by Michael Moorcock to describe his own fiction, but applicable here as well) was theoretically infinite. In practice, it mostly focused around a few worlds, but it grew out of a throwaway moment in Showcase #4, the origin of the silver age Flash as created by Kanigher, Broome, Infantino and Kubert. In that story, as a throwaway moment, the Barry Allen character (fresh from his electrified bath in chemicals that gave him superhuman speed... ah, the silver age, when origins were simple and totally insane) decides to take on the name and mantle of the Flash, inspired by a character in a comic book he'd read as a kid. That character? The original golden age Flash, Jay Garrick himself. Now, up until this point, DC had been publishing only the adventures of Superman, Wonder Woman and Batman out of their vast stable of golden age icons... the Justice Society, Green Lantern, the Flash, Hawkman and the others had all discontinued publishing. So, when Julius Schwartz revived the Flash as an entirely new character (and with a great costume design by Infantino, I might add) he inadvertently created an opportunity for writers like Broome and Gardner Fox. Hot on the heels of the return of the Flash came the new Green Lantern, given his power ring by a dying alien rather than by the mystical train lantern of the golden age character. (The Guardians of the Universe would come later.) Hawkman (now an alien policeman come to Earth) and the Atom (now a scientist with a size-changing ray) would be revamped next, in addition to the creation of a Justice League of America to take the place of the now-defunct Justice Society originally written by Gardner Fox in the 40's. Gardner was now writing the successors of his original team. Finally, in 1961, Gardner Fox and Julius Schwartz would bring the golden age Flash face to face with his silver age counterpart in the excellent Flash of Two Worlds story.
From there, Fox quickly twigged to the idea of Justice League/Justice Society team-ups. The excellent Crisis on Earth-1 begins this trend in Justice League #21, and it is in the tradition created by Fox that Crisis on Infinite Earths clearly stands: in essence, it's Marv Wolfman driving a stake into the heart of Fox's concept of parallel worlds separated by 'vibrational barriers' and it has to be considered as such. In essence, while other people consider Dark Knight or Watchmen to be the end of the silver age of comics, for me it's Crisis. I've always been painfully struck by the irony that Gardner Fox and his great creation of Earth-2 both died in 1986.
While writing GREEN LANTERN I received a letter from a fan asking about a mixup in DC continuity. In my reply I said, "One day we (meaning the DC editorial we) will probably straighten up what is in the DC Universe... and what is outside." At this point in its history DC Comics had Earth-One, Earth-Two, Earth-Three, Earth-B, etc. There were super-heroes on each Earth and though old-time readers had no problem understanding DC continuity, it proved off-putting to new readers who suddenly discovered there was not one but three Supermans, Wonder Womans, Batmans, etc.
Marv Wolfman, introduction to the trade paperback of Crisis
I am younger than Marv Wolfman. I came into comic books between 1977 (when I was six years old) and 1986 (when I was fifteen) and I can honestly say that I have no greater disagreement with Marv than this one: everything he seems to have feared was driving new readers away was in fact attractive to them. People were reading comic books in record numbers then. They are not doing so now. This proves little, of course: there are many reasons why there are far fewer kids reading the comic books put out by DC, Marvel, etc than there were while I was a child sneaking comic books into my room to keep my father from finding out about them. (And yes, Manga sales are up.) However, it's simply not true that DC's continuity was a barrier to understanding: most kids who were exposed to Superman didn't know and didn't care about Earth-One, Earth-Two, etc, and wouldn't find out until they were already hooked. When they did find out, it was no more off-putting to the young reader than the exotic costumes, super powers or brawls against criminals. Indeed, it was cool to see a collection of super heroes from two worlds gather together to battle some extraordinary threat. (It was certainly cool enough to draw Marv in, by his own admission.) The original Crime Syndicate story, the JLA/JSA/Legion of Super Heroes team up against Abnegazar, Rath and Ghast, the death of Mister Terrific, the JLA/JSA/All-Star Squadron battle against Per Degaton that included an Earth-Prime (our world, folks) destroyed by nuclear war because Degaton stole the Russian nukes from Cuba during the missile crisis, all of these and more were stories rooted in the essential concept of multiple Earths. They didn't confuse young readers, they delighted them. Perhaps it was Wolfman's roots in the rise of comics fandom that led him to forget his earlier wonder at the cross-dimensional fun to the degree that he seems to have in his desire to 'clean up' what wasn't that complicated to anyone but the obsessive who needs every duck to line up in a row.
Crisis, therefore, is an anomalous story. It's a grand, sweeping epic which was designed to make any such grand, sweeping epic on that scale impossible for DC to ever create again: an all-inclusive story with a catholic breadth and reach that strives to weed out the very characters it intends to include in the first place. Its setting is the infinite worlds it seeks to destroy down to one, like some sort of parody of the ancient algebra Crowley mentioned of the occultists, trying to work the infinite equation of God down into a single number. And characters like Pariah and Krona in the story almost act as an objective correlative to this quixotic intent: they seek to break down all the mystery and wonder in the universe to a single primary access point and know how it all works even if in so doing they'll destroy the very beauty of the creation they're obsessed with unravelling. It may be hubris on my part to consider Wolfman in this case as having these characters as his stand-ins, but there's still a correlation there, if nothing else a strange coincidence of sympathy in goal between Krona, the madman who wants to know how it all fits by going back to the dawn of time and watching it, and Wolfman the author, who intends to make it all fit by going back to the dawn of time and forcing it. Gone the three Supermen, gone the daughter of Batman, gone the Crime Syndicate and all the infinite possibilities of the silver age... and while Wolfman clearly didn't intend for the history of the world that remained to be a radical division from the comic books that were being published at the time (his intent for Supergirl to be remembered and to have existed is made clear in the final pages of Crisis, for example, in the deeply ironic narration over the panels of Batman at a graveside service for the Earth-Two Robin and Huntess, or Superman holding Power Girl: They would not be forgotten, it says, and a few months later they were) the destructive approach of Crisis itself made it inevitable that the revisionists would make sweeping changes. Once Gardner Fox's spirit was finally killed, so to speak, it was time to redecorate the house that Fox built to suit new creators who believed themselves far superior to the generation of writers sent packing by Julius Schwartz because they dared to ask for health insurance.
Well, next time, we'll take a break from lamenting the effects of Crisis and look at it purely as a gripping twelve issue story: how successful was Marv Wolfman at writing that story he'd wanted to do ever since reading Crisis on Earth-One? Well, you already know my opinion of it, but let us see if it still holds up to a thorough reading.
Posted by Matt Rossi at September 23, 2004 5:18 PM