JohnLees
Friday, August 06, 2010, 01:16 AM
Hey Clubbers! Sorry for another lengthy delay in getting up a new column. Between getting ready for my trip to San Diego, and the stuff I needed to get caught up on upon returning, it took me ages to get around to even reading the material for this meeting, let alone writing about it. But here we are, and this meeting is a little different from the other meetings that have made up this block. While the last few meetings covered a number of volumes in a single series, usually by the same creative team, this time round our focus is on three individual graphic novels, each series separated by years, with each created by a different writer/artist(s) team. But all of these titles are brought together by one word, one important word whose ramifications will be a key discussion point in this meeting: Crisis. The three graphic novels that make up today’s recommended reading – Crisis on Infinite Earths, Infinite Crisis and Final Crisis – all fall under this Crisis banner, and have come to be viewed as a loose trilogy. But how closely are these stories really connected? And as comic readers, what have we come to expect from the “Crisis brand”?
Of course, the only logical place to start is with Crisis on Infinite Earths. Originally a 12-issue maxi-series written by Marv Wolfman and drawn by George Perez, released throughout 1985 to coincide with DC Comics’ 50th anniversary, it is hard to fully illustrate the huge influence Crisis on Infinite Earths still has – not only on DC, but mainstream American comics as a whole – 25 years down the line. So first, let’s look at Marv Wolfman’s attempt to explain its impact in his introduction to the graphic novel:
What began as one child’s dream of doing a special series featuring all the heroes he knew has blossomed into a regular event at every company. After the astounding success of CRISIS – which was created only to simplify the DC universe for new readers – every publisher, even those who were brand-new, jumped onto the bandwagon with a company-changing series of their own, whether they needed to “clean house” or not. In many ways, I fear, the annual stunt has taken over comics publishing. If it isn’t big, if heroes don’t die, if world’s don’t change, then, many feel, the stories aren’t worth reading.
Wolfman highlights what can be seen as a negative legacy of Crisis. Whether or not it’s a bad thing is up for debate, but there’s no denying how impressive a feat this is – to change the way DC and Marvel publish their comics. Crisis may not have been the first ever huge crossover event – just a year earlier Marvel had released one of their own with Secret Wars – but it was Crisis on Infinite Earths that truly popularized the idea of the crossover event in comics, and Marvel and DC have been structuring their yearly output around them ever since. One could argue that without Crisis on Infinite Earths, there would be no Civil War, or no Blackest Night, or any of the other big events of the last few years. That’s quite a legacy to have, this whole practice we all take for granted now of one event laying the seeds for another, of teasers and hints peppered through various comics setting the stage sometimes years in advance, of culminating in the large-scale conclusion within the space of a limited series.
More specifically, Crisis has had a lasting impact on the DC Universe, so much so that the company’s entire 75 year history is typically divided into two sections – “pre-Crisis” and “post-Crisis”. “Pre-Crisis” covers the entire early history of DC, the formative years of its various iconic figures, leading up to and going through the pivotal Silver Age, the age of comics that many view Crisis on Infinite Earths as the official end of. “Post-Crisis” is when we saw game-changing stories such as Batman: Year One and Superman: The Man of Steel, when the worlds of The Flash and Green Lantern were radically altered, when the landscape of DC Comics was changed forever.
But it seems to me that, for all the talk about the story’s influence and importance, comparatively little is said about the story itself. Yes, we are told about the big deaths and the bigger changes that it brought about, but as someone who never got round to reading Crisis on Infinite Earths until I had to write this column, I found I knew relatively little about the story itself, and hadn’t heard much said about the actual quality of the writing. So upon approaching Crisis for this meeting, I was interested to see how the story itself held up. I wanted to try and separate it from everything that came afterwards, and judge it on its merits as a graphic novel in itself. Does it still work?
It’s a bit dated, yes, but I found that it does still hold up as an entertaining story. And despite how ingrained the story is in the canon of DC history, elements still managed to surprise me. For example, while I knew The Flash died in one of the book’s climactic moments, I wasn’t expecting it to be so clearly signposted so early on. Wolfman makes frequent use of dramatic irony, to good effect – like telling us well in advance that The Monitor will be betrayed and killed, having The Monitor himself know this will happen, then going through with it. What struck me about Crisis as I read it is that this very much feels like a transitional piece of comic history. On one hand, there are elements in here that feel very Silver Age, such as the style of narration and the exposition-heavy dialogue. But on the other hand some elements feel very modern, like some of the ambitious, experimental work George Perez does with his page layouts.
And I think this is a good time to take a moment to just give major kudos to the stellar artwork provided by Perez in Crisis on Infinite Earths. People were quick to complain about the huge delays on Final Crisis: Legion of Three Worlds – and yes, they were crazy delays, though Perez is one of the few artists whose work is so good it’s always worth the wait – but back in 1985, George Perez pumped out an issue a month of Crisis, often featuring scenes with massive casts and epic scope, for 12 months running, a whole year. An achievement made all the more impressive when you look at the art-driven delays of Infinite Crisis and Final Crisis, and those had multiple artists in the end rather than one penciller working (aside from the odd touch-up from Ordway at the inking stage) pretty much by himself.
With the huge success of Crisis on Infinite Earths, and the degree to which it changed the DCU, its name has gained a certain power. As such, subsequent DC events such as Zero Hour: A Crisis in Time or Identity Crisis worked the word “Crisis” into their titles in an effort to recall the scope and significance of that original event. But it would be 20 years before an actual sequel to Crisis on Infinite Earths would be released: this finally came in the form of Infinite Crisis, written by Geoff Johns and drawn by Phil Jimenez, Ivan Reis and Jerry Ordway. So what were the implications of writing another “Crisis” 20 years down the line? And did Infinite Crisis succeed in following one of the most important stories in comic history?
One thing that DC did very well with Infinite Crisis was build-up. Crisis on Infinite Earths was first announced back in 1981, four years before the event actually began in 1985, and in the year preceding it, The Monitor was introduced into a number of DC Comics as a shady figure to set the stage for his subsequent role in Crisis. For Infinite Crisis, the build-up was even more ambitious. It arguably started with the previous event, Identity Crisis, which we know from our study of it back in Meeting #17 was a very grim, dark story. The darkness spread through much of the DCU afterwards, too, with the ramifications of the heroes performing mind-wipes on villains being expanded upon; both in the form of the external threat of the world’s supervillains all banding together on the notion that the world’s heroes have lost any moral authority they claimed to have, and in the more internal form of it driving a rift amongst the superhero community so deep that it led to the dissolution of the Justice League of America.
Such notions of moral ambiguity and a palpable sense of the world growing darker were further explored in the one-shot Countdown to Infinite Crisis. In this story, popular hero Blue Beetle (a heavily featured protagonist in the early chapters of Crisis on Infinite Earths) is murdered by Maxwell Lord, thought up until that time to be a fellow hero. In the aftermath of this, Maxwell Lord is killed by Wonder Woman, an act which deepens the divide amongst the Justice League, to the point where the iconic trinity are all feuding with one another. The destruction of the JLA Watchtower proves symbolic of the shattered team dynamic. Following on from the one-shot came four mini-series’, launched in the months leading up to Infinite Crisis. We discussed the villain-centric Villains United in our last meeting. Day of Vengeance explored what happens when a powerful force for good like The Spectre falls to the dark side. Rann-Thanagar War demonstrated that violence and unrest was spreading on a cosmic scale. And The OMAC Project showed how technology created through Batman’s paranoia and distrust of his fellow heroes led to disastrous consequences. Each story contributed to this through-line of the DCU getting darker, nastier.
Cleverly, DC editorial then went back and retroactively linked all this to much of the grim-n-gritty exploits of the late 1980s and 1990s. The shooting and crippling of Barbara Gordon in The Killing Joke. The murder of the second Robin, Jason Todd, in A Death in the Family. The Death of Superman. Batman’s back being broken in Knightfall, leading to him being temporarily replaced by the mentally unstable Jean-Paul Valley. The annihilation of Coast City and the millions you lived there, leading to Hal Jordan being driven insane and becoming Parallax in Emerald Twilight. Aquaman losing his hand. Kyle Rayner finding his girlfriend's corpse stuffed in the fridge. All this and more became part of a pattern, as if Infinite Crisis had been in development ever since Crisis on Infinite Earths ended. Though its precise nature was not yet clear, it seemed a massive reckoning lay ahead for what had become of the DC Universe in the wake of the last Crisis, so much so that a new Crisis lay on the horizon.
It is easy now for us to roll our eyes and talk about “event fatigue”, and say that the word “Crisis” holds no significance anymore, but at the time, amongst fans, this was seriously anticipated, and felt like the real deal. I know this, because I partially have Infinite Crisis to thank for getting me back into buying comics in 2005. Even back in the ‘90s when I was regularly getting comics as a kid, it was mostly Marvel stuff. In the early ‘00s I stopped buying altogether for a while, and when I did make my first tentative steps back into regular reading, it was mainly just Batman stories (and later the occasional Flash story), either older graphic novels or the odd current single issue or arc that caught my interest. But all the hype behind Infinite Crisis caught my attention, and it became such a hot talking point that I felt I would be missing out if I didn’t read this book. So I picked up a collection titled Prelude to Infinite Crisis, which served as a kind of beginner’s crash course on the key points we needed to familiarize ourselves with in preparation for Infinite Crisis itself. And then Infinite Crisis served as my introduction of sorts to the DC Universe as a whole.
Riding high on the momentum of an impeccable marketing campaign – and further bolstered by the presence of Geoff Johns (back then the can-do-no-wrong wunderkind of DC rather than the guy it’s become hip and trendy for fanboys to hate) as writer – Infinite Crisis had engendered a lot of good will going in, and was no doubt starting on the right foot. But was the event itself any good? Did it live up to the hype, as well as the legacy of Crisis on Infinite Earths?
It certainly starts strongly. The first couple of chapters of Infinite Crisis feature an unknown narrator chronicling this descent into darkness I’ve already touched upon in the paragraphs above, building to the big reveal that the threat to the universe in Infinite Crisis is not a malevolent, shadowy Anti-Monitor, but rather comes in the form of Earth-2 Superman, Alexander Luthor and Superboy Prime – three of the heroes of Crisis on Infinite Earths.
Superboy Prime, in particular, is brilliantly portrayed by Johns. A lot of readers absolutely loathe him, and back when I was first reading Infinite Crisis I hated him too. But I’ve come to realize that’s actually a good thing: in an era of “cool villains”, it’s good having a bad guy that you can just detest, that you want to see the good guys destroy. Superboy-Prime is arguably the most vocal about how crappy the current DC universe is, and how things should go back to the way they were in the Silver Age. One of the most powerful moments in the story for me was when Superboy-Prime thoughtlessly strikes out at Pantha, only for the force of the blow to accidentally kill her in gruesome fashion. Superboy-Prime is horrified by what he’s done, and in a wonderfully meta moment cries that it isn’t supposed to happen like that.
As many have pointed out before, Superboy-Prime reads like a warped parody of the embittered fanboy, the guy who doesn’t want change, who wants things exactly the way he liked them back in the day, looking on that past with rose-tinted shades. But at the same time, it’s also a knowing send-up of Geoff Johns himself, or at least the way his detractors perceive him: a nostalgia-driven interferer who wants to spoil the perfectly good DC universe we have in order to bring back the stuff from the past he loves, causing damage and making unwanted changes as he wades through the world trying to make everybody see things his way.
The huge, DCU-altering change delivered by Infinite Crisis was the restoration of the multiverse that Crisis on Infinite Earths took away. While this was executed fairly well within the confines of the story, in terms of its impact on the DCU as a whole my initial reaction remains pretty consistent with how I feel now: that it could have been a case of fixing what wasn’t broke. Many comic book fans enthusiastically talk about the period between Crisis on Infinite Earths and Infinite Crisis as being a creative heyday for DC, a time when the company was leaving Marvel in the dust – creatively if not in terms of mass audience appeal – and these same fans bemoan Infinite Crisis as being the event that changed all that, and kickstarted a creative decline and a chain reaction of bad editorial decisions that has made the company lose its luster. I personally don’t agree with this assessment – there has been plenty to like in DC since Infinite Crisis, and I think people’s nostalgia is making them forget some of the more unpopular aspects of that “heyday” (Superman Red/Superman Blue, anyone?) – but I must concede that Infinite Crisis failed to have as enduring and respected an influence as its predecessor. The most obvious proof of this is that, a mere three years later, we were already getting another Crisis.
Now, Final Crisis - written by Grant Morrison and drawn by J.G. Jones, Dough Mahnke, Carlos Pacheco and Marco Rudy – should make for an interesting source of discussion. It has proved to be incredibly polarizing amongst readers, with some hailing it as a work of genius while others have slammed it as incomprehensible trash. So where does it fall? Well, before looking at Final Crisis itself, let’s look at the problematic build-up, and the various factors that worked against it right from the off-set.
I talked earlier about how much Infinite Crisis benefitted from a stellar lead-in, how much goodwill it engendered. This was not the case with Final Crisis. Grant Morrison had requested that an embargo be placed on the New Gods of New Genesis and Apokalips, in order for their presence in Final Crisis to have more impact. This request was declined in favor of the much-derided Countdown, a weekly series heavily featuring the New Gods, but doing in a way that clumsily contradicted the simultaneously running mini-series, Death of the New Gods. So rather than riding high on a wave of positive momentum, people entered into Final Crisis looking for Morrison to address these continuity screw-ups and fix the mistakes of other writers within the space of his event. But Morrison had by this time already long ago written the scripts for Final Crisis, and apparently wasn’t overly interested in changing them, as he alludes to in his 28th January 2009 interview with Matt Brady on Newsarama, “Grant Morrison: Final Crisis Exit Interview, Part 1”:
Apart from that, my simple goal was to reach the end without too much hassle and/or interference! Apart from one scene at the end, which I included at DC’s request, and contrary to online rumours, there were no rewrites on Final Crisis. Every word is mine. The guilt and the glory are all mine!
His take on the New Gods managed to contradict both Countdown and Death of the New Gods, confusing and angering the fanboy community even more. Morrison’s Final Crisis was less a follow-up to Countdown than to his own re-interpretation of the New Gods in his Seven Soldiers of Victory series.
Final Crisis itself has a very unusual structure. In a lot of ways, it doesn’t feel like a Big Event. A lot of the big narrative moments happen off-panel, making it at times feel like we’re simply getting a ground-level view of universe-shaking events. And scene changes can often feel sudden, jarring and increasingly fragmented, making for an often uncomfortable reading experience. As Morrison puts it in the Newsarama interview, “We even break down the conventional storytelling modes at the end until there’s nothing familiar left in an effort to convey what the end of a universe might feel like.” In the early issues in particular, a lot of the scenes you’d normally expect in the set-up stages of an event don’t happen, or are presented in an off-kilter way. In a story with the tagline “The Day Evil Won”, perhaps it’s a deliberate stylistic device to immerse us in the tale, give us a sense of things not quite clicking for the heroes the way it normally does, even in the very nature of the story’s construction.
In the previously quoted Newsarama interview, Morrison was asked what he hoped to achieve with Final Crisis, and how he saw it in relation to his larger body of work. His answer is very lengthy – advance warning! – but also rather informative:
It’s one of the most highly-structured and demanding pieces of work I’ve done and brings to fruition a lot of long-time obsessions, I suppose. It’s my Monitor-vision, high-altitude view of the DCU as an entity; before I take a long-awaited break to do some other work. It’s my sci-fi/horror version of everything I love about DC, everything I ever thought or felt about DC, in one book. It’s about the confusion and excitement of getting into this wild, colorful fictional continuum as a kid, and it’s an attempt to define what makes DC unique and vibrant in relation to other superhero universes. It also offers a full cosmology of higher dimensions, including our own, and an insight into the creative impulse of God, so it’s well worth the cover price, I like to think. It’s filled with interesting and life-changing occult and philosophical secrets too and the more you read it, the more you’ll pick up on them.
It’s also a deliberate attempt to show how so-called ‘rules’ can be broken to create different kinds of effects in our comics. It’s a way of using superhero comics to talk about the ‘real’ world that doesn’t rely on news headlines, mock-‘relevance’ or ‘adult’ language and imagery.
I found myself wondering what it would be like if comics’ storytelling stopped aping film or TV and tried a few tricks from opera, for instance. How about dense, allusive, hermetic comics that read more like poetry than prose? How about comics loaded with multiple, prismatic meanings and possibilities? Comics composed like music? In a marketplace dominated by ‘left brain’ books, I thought it might be refreshing to offer an unashamedly ‘right brain’ alternative.
Just as Marvel Boy in 1999 foreshadowed the storytelling trends of this last decade, Final Crisis is an attempt to predict how ‘channel-zapping’ techniques might develop as the Fifth World of the Information Age of Obama gets underway and begins to define itself in opposition to the previous generation’s ‘rules’.
It’s all of the above. I was trying to distil everything I love about superhero comics into this loaded, condensed...artifact, which meant using all the lessons I’ve learned in a lifetime’s writing for a living.
So, work of genius or incomprehensible trash? I would personally lean more towards the former, but there is one drawback that proves near crippling to its chances of success:
The “Crisis brand”.
As simply an exploration of the nature of the superhero by Morrison, or as a revisiting of some of the recurring themes in his work, Final Crisis might not have received such a backlash. But the word “Crisis” carries with it certain expectations for what the story should feature, what kind of story it should be. Is this a case (much like Batman RIP, where Batman doesn’t die) of a Morrison book being cursed with an ill-fitting name?
On one hand, many of the recurring hallmarks are present and correct, making this feel very much indeed like a Crisis: red skies, Monitors, the multiverse, a huge-scale threat to reality itself. But on the other hand, one key difference – one many a fan complained about when it was all said and done – is that, unlike any self-respecting Crisis, Final Crisis didn’t “change everything forever!” This was a relatively self-contained event, with little in the way of ramifications outside of the main title and its few tie-ins. This led to a funny “grass is always greener” situation, where the same fanboys who so often complain about Marvel or DC draining their wallets by forcing them to buy loads of irrelevant tie-ins and issues of monthly titles that continued the story of the latest big event were now suddenly complaining about an event that didn’t have enough tie-ins, that wasn’t more reflected in the various monthly titles.
But worse than being self-contained, the DCU was pretty much business as usual after Final Crisis was done. No massive alterations to DC continuity to contend with, no massive sea changes in company direction. The only events that had real relevance to the wider DCU beyond the story’s completion were the death of Martian Manhunter (he came back in Blackest Night), the return of the Barry Allen Flash (a story that wasn’t fully told until Flash: Rebirth) and the death of Batman (only he didn’t actually die, as seen in the last page of Final Crisis). This brings us back to Marv Wolfman’s concern about the over-saturation of event comics in the industry today: “If it isn’t big, if heroes don’t die, if world’s don’t change, then, many feel, the stories aren’t worth reading.” We’ve come to expect this from events, and when one doesn’t deliver on that front we feel it is lacking.
Part of the problem could be that Final Crisis came along into an environment with no sense of requirement for change. Crisis on Infinite Earths was driven by a clear purpose of simplifying DC continuity and clearing the slate to make the universe more accessible to new readers, and followed through on that objective. Infinite Crisis engineered a purpose for itself by setting up a 20 year downward spiral into violence – though ultimately Infinite Crisis itself delighted in wild amounts of gore and paved the way for even nastier stories afterwards, rather than fixing the “problem” it was addressing, the fact that it’s requirement for change was a manufactured one didn’t make it feel any less potent. Final Crisis, on the other hand, had no such sense of purpose. How could it? Crisis on Infinite Earths was a story 50 years in the making, Infinite Crisis 20 years in the making. What requirement for change could Final Crisis muster up in a mere 3 years, apart from “the need to make people forget about Countdown?”
No, Morrison approached Final Crisis from the perspective that the only “requirement” was for him to tell a good story in an original way. And is that really such a bad thing? Is this the point Crisis on Infinite Earths has ultimately led us to, where events have become more about “how does this affect the continuity of this book?” or “where does this neatly fit into the chronology for that character?” than about simply telling a big story on a grand scale with an all star cast? And really, in its purest form, isn’t that what the “Crisis brand” should really represent?
Meeting #32
Open Forum time again! This time round, I want to talk about the deluxe, oversized hardcover editions of graphic novels that are released. DC calls them Absolute editions. Marvel calls them Omnibus editions. And Image and some other smaller companies have their own variants on the idea too. Do you own any? If so, which ones do you have? And tell us a little bit about what you like about the favorite one in your possession. If not, would you like to own any? Which ones, and why? What is the value of these deluxe hardcover collections?
Meeting #33
Kick-Ass
Scott Pilgrim’s Precious Little Life
Of course, the only logical place to start is with Crisis on Infinite Earths. Originally a 12-issue maxi-series written by Marv Wolfman and drawn by George Perez, released throughout 1985 to coincide with DC Comics’ 50th anniversary, it is hard to fully illustrate the huge influence Crisis on Infinite Earths still has – not only on DC, but mainstream American comics as a whole – 25 years down the line. So first, let’s look at Marv Wolfman’s attempt to explain its impact in his introduction to the graphic novel:
What began as one child’s dream of doing a special series featuring all the heroes he knew has blossomed into a regular event at every company. After the astounding success of CRISIS – which was created only to simplify the DC universe for new readers – every publisher, even those who were brand-new, jumped onto the bandwagon with a company-changing series of their own, whether they needed to “clean house” or not. In many ways, I fear, the annual stunt has taken over comics publishing. If it isn’t big, if heroes don’t die, if world’s don’t change, then, many feel, the stories aren’t worth reading.
Wolfman highlights what can be seen as a negative legacy of Crisis. Whether or not it’s a bad thing is up for debate, but there’s no denying how impressive a feat this is – to change the way DC and Marvel publish their comics. Crisis may not have been the first ever huge crossover event – just a year earlier Marvel had released one of their own with Secret Wars – but it was Crisis on Infinite Earths that truly popularized the idea of the crossover event in comics, and Marvel and DC have been structuring their yearly output around them ever since. One could argue that without Crisis on Infinite Earths, there would be no Civil War, or no Blackest Night, or any of the other big events of the last few years. That’s quite a legacy to have, this whole practice we all take for granted now of one event laying the seeds for another, of teasers and hints peppered through various comics setting the stage sometimes years in advance, of culminating in the large-scale conclusion within the space of a limited series.
More specifically, Crisis has had a lasting impact on the DC Universe, so much so that the company’s entire 75 year history is typically divided into two sections – “pre-Crisis” and “post-Crisis”. “Pre-Crisis” covers the entire early history of DC, the formative years of its various iconic figures, leading up to and going through the pivotal Silver Age, the age of comics that many view Crisis on Infinite Earths as the official end of. “Post-Crisis” is when we saw game-changing stories such as Batman: Year One and Superman: The Man of Steel, when the worlds of The Flash and Green Lantern were radically altered, when the landscape of DC Comics was changed forever.
But it seems to me that, for all the talk about the story’s influence and importance, comparatively little is said about the story itself. Yes, we are told about the big deaths and the bigger changes that it brought about, but as someone who never got round to reading Crisis on Infinite Earths until I had to write this column, I found I knew relatively little about the story itself, and hadn’t heard much said about the actual quality of the writing. So upon approaching Crisis for this meeting, I was interested to see how the story itself held up. I wanted to try and separate it from everything that came afterwards, and judge it on its merits as a graphic novel in itself. Does it still work?
It’s a bit dated, yes, but I found that it does still hold up as an entertaining story. And despite how ingrained the story is in the canon of DC history, elements still managed to surprise me. For example, while I knew The Flash died in one of the book’s climactic moments, I wasn’t expecting it to be so clearly signposted so early on. Wolfman makes frequent use of dramatic irony, to good effect – like telling us well in advance that The Monitor will be betrayed and killed, having The Monitor himself know this will happen, then going through with it. What struck me about Crisis as I read it is that this very much feels like a transitional piece of comic history. On one hand, there are elements in here that feel very Silver Age, such as the style of narration and the exposition-heavy dialogue. But on the other hand some elements feel very modern, like some of the ambitious, experimental work George Perez does with his page layouts.
And I think this is a good time to take a moment to just give major kudos to the stellar artwork provided by Perez in Crisis on Infinite Earths. People were quick to complain about the huge delays on Final Crisis: Legion of Three Worlds – and yes, they were crazy delays, though Perez is one of the few artists whose work is so good it’s always worth the wait – but back in 1985, George Perez pumped out an issue a month of Crisis, often featuring scenes with massive casts and epic scope, for 12 months running, a whole year. An achievement made all the more impressive when you look at the art-driven delays of Infinite Crisis and Final Crisis, and those had multiple artists in the end rather than one penciller working (aside from the odd touch-up from Ordway at the inking stage) pretty much by himself.
With the huge success of Crisis on Infinite Earths, and the degree to which it changed the DCU, its name has gained a certain power. As such, subsequent DC events such as Zero Hour: A Crisis in Time or Identity Crisis worked the word “Crisis” into their titles in an effort to recall the scope and significance of that original event. But it would be 20 years before an actual sequel to Crisis on Infinite Earths would be released: this finally came in the form of Infinite Crisis, written by Geoff Johns and drawn by Phil Jimenez, Ivan Reis and Jerry Ordway. So what were the implications of writing another “Crisis” 20 years down the line? And did Infinite Crisis succeed in following one of the most important stories in comic history?
One thing that DC did very well with Infinite Crisis was build-up. Crisis on Infinite Earths was first announced back in 1981, four years before the event actually began in 1985, and in the year preceding it, The Monitor was introduced into a number of DC Comics as a shady figure to set the stage for his subsequent role in Crisis. For Infinite Crisis, the build-up was even more ambitious. It arguably started with the previous event, Identity Crisis, which we know from our study of it back in Meeting #17 was a very grim, dark story. The darkness spread through much of the DCU afterwards, too, with the ramifications of the heroes performing mind-wipes on villains being expanded upon; both in the form of the external threat of the world’s supervillains all banding together on the notion that the world’s heroes have lost any moral authority they claimed to have, and in the more internal form of it driving a rift amongst the superhero community so deep that it led to the dissolution of the Justice League of America.
Such notions of moral ambiguity and a palpable sense of the world growing darker were further explored in the one-shot Countdown to Infinite Crisis. In this story, popular hero Blue Beetle (a heavily featured protagonist in the early chapters of Crisis on Infinite Earths) is murdered by Maxwell Lord, thought up until that time to be a fellow hero. In the aftermath of this, Maxwell Lord is killed by Wonder Woman, an act which deepens the divide amongst the Justice League, to the point where the iconic trinity are all feuding with one another. The destruction of the JLA Watchtower proves symbolic of the shattered team dynamic. Following on from the one-shot came four mini-series’, launched in the months leading up to Infinite Crisis. We discussed the villain-centric Villains United in our last meeting. Day of Vengeance explored what happens when a powerful force for good like The Spectre falls to the dark side. Rann-Thanagar War demonstrated that violence and unrest was spreading on a cosmic scale. And The OMAC Project showed how technology created through Batman’s paranoia and distrust of his fellow heroes led to disastrous consequences. Each story contributed to this through-line of the DCU getting darker, nastier.
Cleverly, DC editorial then went back and retroactively linked all this to much of the grim-n-gritty exploits of the late 1980s and 1990s. The shooting and crippling of Barbara Gordon in The Killing Joke. The murder of the second Robin, Jason Todd, in A Death in the Family. The Death of Superman. Batman’s back being broken in Knightfall, leading to him being temporarily replaced by the mentally unstable Jean-Paul Valley. The annihilation of Coast City and the millions you lived there, leading to Hal Jordan being driven insane and becoming Parallax in Emerald Twilight. Aquaman losing his hand. Kyle Rayner finding his girlfriend's corpse stuffed in the fridge. All this and more became part of a pattern, as if Infinite Crisis had been in development ever since Crisis on Infinite Earths ended. Though its precise nature was not yet clear, it seemed a massive reckoning lay ahead for what had become of the DC Universe in the wake of the last Crisis, so much so that a new Crisis lay on the horizon.
It is easy now for us to roll our eyes and talk about “event fatigue”, and say that the word “Crisis” holds no significance anymore, but at the time, amongst fans, this was seriously anticipated, and felt like the real deal. I know this, because I partially have Infinite Crisis to thank for getting me back into buying comics in 2005. Even back in the ‘90s when I was regularly getting comics as a kid, it was mostly Marvel stuff. In the early ‘00s I stopped buying altogether for a while, and when I did make my first tentative steps back into regular reading, it was mainly just Batman stories (and later the occasional Flash story), either older graphic novels or the odd current single issue or arc that caught my interest. But all the hype behind Infinite Crisis caught my attention, and it became such a hot talking point that I felt I would be missing out if I didn’t read this book. So I picked up a collection titled Prelude to Infinite Crisis, which served as a kind of beginner’s crash course on the key points we needed to familiarize ourselves with in preparation for Infinite Crisis itself. And then Infinite Crisis served as my introduction of sorts to the DC Universe as a whole.
Riding high on the momentum of an impeccable marketing campaign – and further bolstered by the presence of Geoff Johns (back then the can-do-no-wrong wunderkind of DC rather than the guy it’s become hip and trendy for fanboys to hate) as writer – Infinite Crisis had engendered a lot of good will going in, and was no doubt starting on the right foot. But was the event itself any good? Did it live up to the hype, as well as the legacy of Crisis on Infinite Earths?
It certainly starts strongly. The first couple of chapters of Infinite Crisis feature an unknown narrator chronicling this descent into darkness I’ve already touched upon in the paragraphs above, building to the big reveal that the threat to the universe in Infinite Crisis is not a malevolent, shadowy Anti-Monitor, but rather comes in the form of Earth-2 Superman, Alexander Luthor and Superboy Prime – three of the heroes of Crisis on Infinite Earths.
Superboy Prime, in particular, is brilliantly portrayed by Johns. A lot of readers absolutely loathe him, and back when I was first reading Infinite Crisis I hated him too. But I’ve come to realize that’s actually a good thing: in an era of “cool villains”, it’s good having a bad guy that you can just detest, that you want to see the good guys destroy. Superboy-Prime is arguably the most vocal about how crappy the current DC universe is, and how things should go back to the way they were in the Silver Age. One of the most powerful moments in the story for me was when Superboy-Prime thoughtlessly strikes out at Pantha, only for the force of the blow to accidentally kill her in gruesome fashion. Superboy-Prime is horrified by what he’s done, and in a wonderfully meta moment cries that it isn’t supposed to happen like that.
As many have pointed out before, Superboy-Prime reads like a warped parody of the embittered fanboy, the guy who doesn’t want change, who wants things exactly the way he liked them back in the day, looking on that past with rose-tinted shades. But at the same time, it’s also a knowing send-up of Geoff Johns himself, or at least the way his detractors perceive him: a nostalgia-driven interferer who wants to spoil the perfectly good DC universe we have in order to bring back the stuff from the past he loves, causing damage and making unwanted changes as he wades through the world trying to make everybody see things his way.
The huge, DCU-altering change delivered by Infinite Crisis was the restoration of the multiverse that Crisis on Infinite Earths took away. While this was executed fairly well within the confines of the story, in terms of its impact on the DCU as a whole my initial reaction remains pretty consistent with how I feel now: that it could have been a case of fixing what wasn’t broke. Many comic book fans enthusiastically talk about the period between Crisis on Infinite Earths and Infinite Crisis as being a creative heyday for DC, a time when the company was leaving Marvel in the dust – creatively if not in terms of mass audience appeal – and these same fans bemoan Infinite Crisis as being the event that changed all that, and kickstarted a creative decline and a chain reaction of bad editorial decisions that has made the company lose its luster. I personally don’t agree with this assessment – there has been plenty to like in DC since Infinite Crisis, and I think people’s nostalgia is making them forget some of the more unpopular aspects of that “heyday” (Superman Red/Superman Blue, anyone?) – but I must concede that Infinite Crisis failed to have as enduring and respected an influence as its predecessor. The most obvious proof of this is that, a mere three years later, we were already getting another Crisis.
Now, Final Crisis - written by Grant Morrison and drawn by J.G. Jones, Dough Mahnke, Carlos Pacheco and Marco Rudy – should make for an interesting source of discussion. It has proved to be incredibly polarizing amongst readers, with some hailing it as a work of genius while others have slammed it as incomprehensible trash. So where does it fall? Well, before looking at Final Crisis itself, let’s look at the problematic build-up, and the various factors that worked against it right from the off-set.
I talked earlier about how much Infinite Crisis benefitted from a stellar lead-in, how much goodwill it engendered. This was not the case with Final Crisis. Grant Morrison had requested that an embargo be placed on the New Gods of New Genesis and Apokalips, in order for their presence in Final Crisis to have more impact. This request was declined in favor of the much-derided Countdown, a weekly series heavily featuring the New Gods, but doing in a way that clumsily contradicted the simultaneously running mini-series, Death of the New Gods. So rather than riding high on a wave of positive momentum, people entered into Final Crisis looking for Morrison to address these continuity screw-ups and fix the mistakes of other writers within the space of his event. But Morrison had by this time already long ago written the scripts for Final Crisis, and apparently wasn’t overly interested in changing them, as he alludes to in his 28th January 2009 interview with Matt Brady on Newsarama, “Grant Morrison: Final Crisis Exit Interview, Part 1”:
Apart from that, my simple goal was to reach the end without too much hassle and/or interference! Apart from one scene at the end, which I included at DC’s request, and contrary to online rumours, there were no rewrites on Final Crisis. Every word is mine. The guilt and the glory are all mine!
His take on the New Gods managed to contradict both Countdown and Death of the New Gods, confusing and angering the fanboy community even more. Morrison’s Final Crisis was less a follow-up to Countdown than to his own re-interpretation of the New Gods in his Seven Soldiers of Victory series.
Final Crisis itself has a very unusual structure. In a lot of ways, it doesn’t feel like a Big Event. A lot of the big narrative moments happen off-panel, making it at times feel like we’re simply getting a ground-level view of universe-shaking events. And scene changes can often feel sudden, jarring and increasingly fragmented, making for an often uncomfortable reading experience. As Morrison puts it in the Newsarama interview, “We even break down the conventional storytelling modes at the end until there’s nothing familiar left in an effort to convey what the end of a universe might feel like.” In the early issues in particular, a lot of the scenes you’d normally expect in the set-up stages of an event don’t happen, or are presented in an off-kilter way. In a story with the tagline “The Day Evil Won”, perhaps it’s a deliberate stylistic device to immerse us in the tale, give us a sense of things not quite clicking for the heroes the way it normally does, even in the very nature of the story’s construction.
In the previously quoted Newsarama interview, Morrison was asked what he hoped to achieve with Final Crisis, and how he saw it in relation to his larger body of work. His answer is very lengthy – advance warning! – but also rather informative:
It’s one of the most highly-structured and demanding pieces of work I’ve done and brings to fruition a lot of long-time obsessions, I suppose. It’s my Monitor-vision, high-altitude view of the DCU as an entity; before I take a long-awaited break to do some other work. It’s my sci-fi/horror version of everything I love about DC, everything I ever thought or felt about DC, in one book. It’s about the confusion and excitement of getting into this wild, colorful fictional continuum as a kid, and it’s an attempt to define what makes DC unique and vibrant in relation to other superhero universes. It also offers a full cosmology of higher dimensions, including our own, and an insight into the creative impulse of God, so it’s well worth the cover price, I like to think. It’s filled with interesting and life-changing occult and philosophical secrets too and the more you read it, the more you’ll pick up on them.
It’s also a deliberate attempt to show how so-called ‘rules’ can be broken to create different kinds of effects in our comics. It’s a way of using superhero comics to talk about the ‘real’ world that doesn’t rely on news headlines, mock-‘relevance’ or ‘adult’ language and imagery.
I found myself wondering what it would be like if comics’ storytelling stopped aping film or TV and tried a few tricks from opera, for instance. How about dense, allusive, hermetic comics that read more like poetry than prose? How about comics loaded with multiple, prismatic meanings and possibilities? Comics composed like music? In a marketplace dominated by ‘left brain’ books, I thought it might be refreshing to offer an unashamedly ‘right brain’ alternative.
Just as Marvel Boy in 1999 foreshadowed the storytelling trends of this last decade, Final Crisis is an attempt to predict how ‘channel-zapping’ techniques might develop as the Fifth World of the Information Age of Obama gets underway and begins to define itself in opposition to the previous generation’s ‘rules’.
It’s all of the above. I was trying to distil everything I love about superhero comics into this loaded, condensed...artifact, which meant using all the lessons I’ve learned in a lifetime’s writing for a living.
So, work of genius or incomprehensible trash? I would personally lean more towards the former, but there is one drawback that proves near crippling to its chances of success:
The “Crisis brand”.
As simply an exploration of the nature of the superhero by Morrison, or as a revisiting of some of the recurring themes in his work, Final Crisis might not have received such a backlash. But the word “Crisis” carries with it certain expectations for what the story should feature, what kind of story it should be. Is this a case (much like Batman RIP, where Batman doesn’t die) of a Morrison book being cursed with an ill-fitting name?
On one hand, many of the recurring hallmarks are present and correct, making this feel very much indeed like a Crisis: red skies, Monitors, the multiverse, a huge-scale threat to reality itself. But on the other hand, one key difference – one many a fan complained about when it was all said and done – is that, unlike any self-respecting Crisis, Final Crisis didn’t “change everything forever!” This was a relatively self-contained event, with little in the way of ramifications outside of the main title and its few tie-ins. This led to a funny “grass is always greener” situation, where the same fanboys who so often complain about Marvel or DC draining their wallets by forcing them to buy loads of irrelevant tie-ins and issues of monthly titles that continued the story of the latest big event were now suddenly complaining about an event that didn’t have enough tie-ins, that wasn’t more reflected in the various monthly titles.
But worse than being self-contained, the DCU was pretty much business as usual after Final Crisis was done. No massive alterations to DC continuity to contend with, no massive sea changes in company direction. The only events that had real relevance to the wider DCU beyond the story’s completion were the death of Martian Manhunter (he came back in Blackest Night), the return of the Barry Allen Flash (a story that wasn’t fully told until Flash: Rebirth) and the death of Batman (only he didn’t actually die, as seen in the last page of Final Crisis). This brings us back to Marv Wolfman’s concern about the over-saturation of event comics in the industry today: “If it isn’t big, if heroes don’t die, if world’s don’t change, then, many feel, the stories aren’t worth reading.” We’ve come to expect this from events, and when one doesn’t deliver on that front we feel it is lacking.
Part of the problem could be that Final Crisis came along into an environment with no sense of requirement for change. Crisis on Infinite Earths was driven by a clear purpose of simplifying DC continuity and clearing the slate to make the universe more accessible to new readers, and followed through on that objective. Infinite Crisis engineered a purpose for itself by setting up a 20 year downward spiral into violence – though ultimately Infinite Crisis itself delighted in wild amounts of gore and paved the way for even nastier stories afterwards, rather than fixing the “problem” it was addressing, the fact that it’s requirement for change was a manufactured one didn’t make it feel any less potent. Final Crisis, on the other hand, had no such sense of purpose. How could it? Crisis on Infinite Earths was a story 50 years in the making, Infinite Crisis 20 years in the making. What requirement for change could Final Crisis muster up in a mere 3 years, apart from “the need to make people forget about Countdown?”
No, Morrison approached Final Crisis from the perspective that the only “requirement” was for him to tell a good story in an original way. And is that really such a bad thing? Is this the point Crisis on Infinite Earths has ultimately led us to, where events have become more about “how does this affect the continuity of this book?” or “where does this neatly fit into the chronology for that character?” than about simply telling a big story on a grand scale with an all star cast? And really, in its purest form, isn’t that what the “Crisis brand” should really represent?
Meeting #32
Open Forum time again! This time round, I want to talk about the deluxe, oversized hardcover editions of graphic novels that are released. DC calls them Absolute editions. Marvel calls them Omnibus editions. And Image and some other smaller companies have their own variants on the idea too. Do you own any? If so, which ones do you have? And tell us a little bit about what you like about the favorite one in your possession. If not, would you like to own any? Which ones, and why? What is the value of these deluxe hardcover collections?
Meeting #33
Kick-Ass
Scott Pilgrim’s Precious Little Life