Crisis on Infinite Earths, Part Two: Comes the Superman

Worlds will live. Worlds will die. And the universe will never be the same again.

Frontispiece quote from the trade paperback of Crisis on Infinite Earths

And finally, starts the review.

If I tried to sit down and do an exhaustive recap-style review like I'm attempting in my Batman review series, and I kept myself to a strict limit of 500 words per issue, this review would be six thousand words long, and would feel confined and cramped by the artificial word limit (because each issue of Crisis could easily be reviewed in twice that space) so I'm not going to do that. There's no point to the exercise if I can't even finish it, and I doubt anyone reading this site wants to wade through that long a review.

Instead, a general overview of the story glossing the major points, and then a discussion of what the story did right and did wrong. For starters, it opens perfectly. The first page of the book is gorgeous, a depiction of the theogony of the DC universe with the black infinity of nothingness pierced by the explosion that creates the multiverse, and from there a two-page spread introduces us to Pariah, one of several characters Marv created for the series, as he is forced helplessly to watch yet another Earth die before the antimatter wave.

I should stop here and point out that Marv's style can be somewhat overwrought at times, bordering on purple. This is especially clear in the dialogue, really almost monologue that Pariah brings out to accompany the wave of antimatter: Don't you people understand that there is no hope in running? Or maybe they do understand. They see their world fraying, fading away before their terrified eyes. Ten thousand years of civilization stolen without explanations or alternatives. Oh, they understand all too well. But they run because they fear prayer is not enough. You know, Pariah, I can see the antimatter destroying everything. I bring this up because I've heard it criticized by others, and it is a real problem in the series... at times, the labored dialogue and narration almost become tortured. Still, for me at least, it's a minor quibble and it does help to establish the sense that bad things are happening. The art on these pages is extraordinary, some of Perez's best. From there we move to Earth-Three, the home of the Crime Syndicate, criminal analogues of the Justice League, and the latest victim in the path of the antimatter wave that's inexorably destroying the positive matter universes. It's very odd to read this scene, watching the Crime Syndicate desperately trying to save their world and being doomed to fail. Marv really uses the exchange between Power Ring (the Green Lantern analogue) and Ultraman (this dimension's version of Superman) in a very telling way, pointing out how they differ from their Earth-One opposite numbers: Power Ring a pessimistic defeatist who is, in this case, entirely correct that they can't save their world and Ultraman an aggressive combatant who still shares with Superman that quality of indomitable courage that characterizes his heroic doppleganger... watching Ultraman throw himself into the antimatter, trademark spit curl dangling over his forehead while this dimension's Luthor places his infant son in a cross-dimensional escape rocket and fires him through the vibrational barrier just ahead of the antimatter wave that destroys his entire universe... it simultaneously shows Marv's mastery of DC lore and his willingness to evoke every bit of it he can in new ways through the series.

From here, the rest of the issue is nothing terribly new: the Monitor sends his sidekick Harbinger off to recruit superheroes and supervillains from across the remaining worlds of the multiverse to help him defeat his antimatter opposite, called variously either the Anti-Monitor or just the Monitor himself. There's a big fight scene with the Anti-Monitor's shadow demons (wherein we get to see Marv's initial choice of character to open Crisis with, most of them forgettable in the grand scheme of the storyline... but keep your eyes on the Psycho Pirate, Psimon, and the Earth-Two Superman) and then the big reveal, carried on into issue number two when the temporal instability starts up. It's interesting to watch as Marv plays the typical hero crossover game here for a while even as he ramps up the action.

When reviewing Crisis several things come to mind. The first is that of the big, name brand characters who die in it like the Barry Allen Flash (sacrificed on the altar of his own comic not doing very well at the time) and Supergirl (a victim of editorial policy indicating that Superman was to be the last son of Krypton again, the sole survivor, which to me is silly... clearly Siegel and Shuster themselves, especially Siegel, didn't have any problem with their being survivors of Krypton other than Superman, otherwise Siegel would never have created Dev-Em) it's interesting to note that their deaths dominate the issues they appear in, but hardly the series as a whole. Up until his swan song in A Flash of the Lightning the Flash spends the whole series either slipping in and out of time 'during' his last run against the anti-matter cannon (powered by a single tachyon that Flash must outrace) or dominated by the emotion-warping powers of the Psycho-Pirate. Granted, the Flash gets to die well... A Flash of the Lightning is classic Barry Allen using his intelligence as well as super-speed to come up with a way to balk the Anti-Monitor, a welcome throwback to the character before stories with the Reverse Flash killing his wife Iris and dying while trying to kill another woman Barry had grown to love, but it's not the heart of the series, just a dramatic section of the orchestration. Similarly, Supergirl's death in the previous issue is powerful (I don't think anyone can dispute that: it was even more powerful in the hands of Alan Moore in his Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?) but again, Supergirl hasn't played a significant enough role in the series to really say she's the through-line, and like the Flash she dies right in the middle. You can hardly say the Anti-Monitor himself is the heart of the series; he's almost more of a MacGuffin than a villain, a force of nature who keeps reappearing to menace our heroes and their worlds, but never an especially compelling character. He even gets upstaged in villainy by Brainiac and Luthor, who assemble an army of supervillains and cold-bloodedly plan to take over three of five Earths right in the middle of the Crisis itself (and I'm sorry, but in this appearance Luthor and Brainiac prove exactly how good they are as villains as they calculate out exactly how many heroes and villains will die: you get the sense that Superman's been barely winning those fights by the skin of his teeth over the years, and Luthor's smirk as his Earth-two counterpart is atomized by Brainiac is chilling) and so you can hardly say the Anti-Monitor is more than a cosmic disaster on legs. In terms of raw power he may be the most fearsome threat ever, but he's bland for all of that.

But there is a presence in Crisis that dominates the series. A figure who, even in an assembly of titans this awesome, stands out. And in a very real way, Crisis on Infinite Earths is a paean to this one figure, who started an industry and a company on the path it would take that led it there, an inspiration and an unmatched presence both in comic's history and in the series itself.

The Superman. The Superman.

Maybe I'm wrong for talking for everyone, Pariah, but I will. Send us back... let the doubters decide. But I promise you this -- if we can save the worlds that remain... we will!

We fight for what's right, not for revenge.

We won't be apart, Lois. I promise you that. But I have to do this. It's as simple as that.

Kara gave us all a chance to save our worlds... Don't let your hunger for vengeance destroy that chance.

You can be a fan of the Man of Steel, as I am, or not, and you still have to recognize that this is the swan song not just for the many Earth's of the Fox and Schwartz DC multiverse, but of the hero who started it in the first place, the character whose existence under Mort Weisinger started the dueling editorial policy that led to its establishment, the figure who we all remember holding a car over his head in that long-ago issue of Action Comics. A story as large as Crisis has no one protagonist, of course... many characters meet their ultimate fates in it, and even purely mortal men like Batman have moments of strength and determination in it... but it is the Superman who stands from the beginning to unify the disparate heroes united by the Monitor. It is the Superman who refuses to be defeated, or to allow his younger self to wallow in grief and despair. It is the Superman who, at the end of a long life, embraces his wife and tells her that he has to confront the Anti-Monitor at the dawn of time, who shows us the real human cost so often lost in such storylines. It is the Superman who loses not only yet another world, but his very self, who has everything he has taken away from him... wife, identity, even his doomed homeworld never having existed. It is the Superman who ultimately willingly makes the supreme sacrifice of his life to stand and fight a being who has killed whole universes, and is rewarded with a dubious paradise within a netherworld (as Mark Waid once put it in his The Kingdom miniseries, He deserved heaven, not prison), a small reward for his having made it all possible, and then having made it all possible again. It is Kal-L of Krypton who proves himself to be the legend from which all others have come and whether it is in his moments of reassurance and rapport with his younger self, clearly not begrudging in the least the idea of the torch being passed, his effortless ability to inspire the young Superboy (and think how it must have felt for him, to see himself replicated again... and never any resentment from this man of steel), his presence in the story is a necessity. I've often heard people discuss Frank Miller's Dark Knight and wonder why Superman never got such a series: my response is that he did, and it was Crisis on Infinite Earths.

In a series so large there are bound to be missteps. Marv's dialogue, the feeling of some characters dying as afterthoughts, like Dove and Kole (and I've always felt that the death of the Earth-Two Robin and Huntress feels a bit too much like housecleaning, and that they might well have survived the Crisis if not for the relentless need to line up all our continuity points, that letting them live just long enough to know the pain of their reality being erased before being killed in a pointless fight was a bit overly cruel, but that's a personal hobbyhorse) and I'm sure the individual reader can find their own. But for me, the format of Crisis... building from the initial fifteen superhumans enlisted by the Monitor to prevent the disruption of his tuning machines to the confrontations across multiple times and universes, to the Monitor's own death so early in the series and the aftermath of the fusion of worlds (including the Psycho-Pirate's bid for most evil bastard ever as he helps the Anti-Monitor induce a lemming-like urge for death and unreasoning hate in the native heroes of the worlds being destroyed by the wall of anti-matter) and the show-stealing evil of Brainiac and Luthor's army of villains, then the dual strike on Krona's lab and at the dawn of time that leads to the disruption of history and the reformation of the universe, with stops along the way for the heroic deaths of Supergirl and the Flash (two of the most dramatic issues of any comic book series to that point, I would argue... and can we forget the scene of the Spectre grown to the size where he dwarfs the five worlds, an homage to past JLA/JSA crossovers with the Spectre holding two Earths apart) and then the final battle in the anti-matter universe itself, all the heroes of the new Earth against the Anti-Monitor and his shadow demons. All of it leading up to the final battle, where the first superhero of the DC multiverse stands against the multiverse's destroyer and, perhaps pyrrhic in victory, defeats him. You can argue for its formulaic nature, of course, although it's hard to see what series has ever used the formula before it and no series has ever used it so well since. You can point out that it telegraphed its intent, and you'd probably be correct. I'm not going to stand here and say that Crisis was flawless or even the best comic book ever written, although it's certainly one of my favorites. The art is some of the best Perez would ever put out (and my personal favorite art is that inked by Jerry Ordway, giving a nice golden age feel to the original Man of Steel's last battle) and while Marv and George's mania for including every single character would be recalled by Perez and Busiek's JLA/Avengers this year, in this series no character feels tacked on... even when Sgt. Rock and the Losers of Easy Company show up, they feel like they're supposed to be there.

I mentioned before that if you gave each issue of Crisis a five hundred word capsule review, it would end up at six thousand words: I'm still tempted to do it. There is so much going on here that I am doomed to leave out someone's favorite bit: perhaps it's the Challengers of the Unknown spelunking down into a cave that's being swallowed up by the Anti-Monitor's dimensional portal, or maybe it's watching Phobia of the Brotherhood of Evil try and control the mind of a robot, Platinum of the Metal Men. Wolfman juggles his immense cast fairly well, and even throws in a few scenes I suspect were there just for the fans; for instance, the scene of the Red Tornado unconscious while the Atom crawls around inside him and T.O. Morrow exclaims in shock that the Tornado's innards are all wrong is a bit of a tip of the cap to the Kree-Skrull War, and the conversation between Superman and the Spectre where they casually discuss previous efforts to change the flow of history tells you exactly what kind of story we're dealing with, and recalls all those classic 50's and early 60's Weisinger era stories, like the Superboy tale where he went back in time to save Lincoln from being assassinated only to be ambushed by an adult Luthor, who was hiding out from Superman in the 1860's. Even the scenes with the Guardians of the Universe, helpless before what is in essence their fault and divided on how to respond to it, help add to the sense of ascending tension. It's exceedingly well done, put together almost like a blueprint of how to do this kind of thing. It's no suprise that those that followed it often blatantly stole from it.

I love this story. I am an unabashed fan of it: it is one of my favorite stories ever put out in a comic book. I can still read Barry Allen's death and nod as he uses the Psycho-Pirate to turn the entire planet Qward against the Anti-Monitor. I can still find myself tearing up as Supergirl flings herself into a battle to the death to prevent her cousin from dying. I can still remember the resignation with which Wally West found his mentor's costume and ring, the way Power Girl bristled as everyone looked at her and thought of her analogue's death, the eruption of a villainous army across helpless Earth after helpless Earth, the attack on Oa, the Spectre battling the Anti-Monitor at the dawn of time (fitting that Siegel's other big creation should have so important a role), the shadow-demons attacking as the sky went black and shattered, and the determination of a Superman determined to save everything even though he had lost everything. It's a huge, sprawling, chaotic mess of a storyline, and I remember being in awe when it came out. I don't love what happened after... I don't love that later writers would ignore that clearly, Luthor is in prison on the new Earth, for just one example. (It's clear that Marv intended Earth-One to be the original Earth because it is where Oa is, where Krona activated his viewer and looked back on the dawn of time. He explicitly says so when he has Oa's duplicate world exist nowhere in the multiverse, but rather in the anti-matter universe, the planet Qward itself. I wonder often what Marv meant by the prime Earths that he created in the story... were each of those five worlds considered to have been the closest to Earth-One, and thus the most important? It's never clearly said, but it is clear that post-Crisis, DC's Silver Age continuity was intended to dominate. I dislike intensely that it was not allowed to.)

Crisis did what it set out to do, as Marv himself argued a few years later. And it did it with style, and even with a certain affection for the very universe it was setting out to systematically dismantle. I've mentioned the anomaly of the series, how it set out to gather all of the vast complexity of the DC multiverse beneath its wings yet slashed at it mercilessly, how it included even minor characters like the Metal Men and the winged Titans second-stringer Azrael while seeking to rein in the tendency of the DC Universe to provide a haven for such figures... reading it as a pure story, it's a love letter and an eulogy for the multiverse, a story that could never be told again, a grand curtain call for the forty years that went before.

What would come after? What followed wasn't always good, our friend Marv tells us. I agree with him. Next time, we'll discuss the aftermath and the missteps of the rebooted DC universe, and how the haphazard continuity of the DC Multiverse was only made worse by reboot-happy writers and artists who couldn't grasp that so complicated a haystack would fall right on top of you if you weren't careful. Hawkman editorial team, I'm looking right at you here.

Posted by Matt Rossi at September 27, 2004 2:17 AM | TrackBack