Crisis on Infinite Earths

Rating:
Summary: A great big mess, but I like it
Review: For a storyline that tore the ultra-complex DC Universe apart and streamlined it, Crisis On Infinite Earths is, in retrospect, an oddity in the DCU's overall history. It promised to fix the majority of the inconsistencies that had existed more or less comfortably in the DCU (as long as you didn't think about them too much). After 20 years or so, it appears to hold little relevance, however, as many of its "fixes" became undone or completely ignored, and many more contradictions have occured since. And even more so, did all of this really need to be done? I'm torn... honestly, I prefer inter-dimensional team-ups between Earths-1 and 2, but if not for COIE, then Kingdom Come wouldn't make much sense.

Even still, DC did the right thing by collecting it. It is certainly a classic story, and it was some ambitious and entertaining work for its time. I look at it more as a relic of the times than as gospel. Indeed, since its reprinting led to the publishing of the excellent Crisis On Multiple Earths volumes (which refreshed my memory of how much fun things used to be), I prefer to remain in the pre-Crisis years and view COIE as alternate history. Still, Wolfman does an admirable job of sorting through the various realities of the DCU and making some sense of them, even if his overall story is repetitive and is much longer than it needs to be. George Perez, while not my favorite artist, definitely does an amazing job of capturing the epic scope of the story. DC's getting Alex Ross and Perez to collaborate on the cover of the collection resulted in one of the most amazing pieces of comic art I've ever seen.

If the actual choice of reprinting COIE had any problems, it was definitely in the way DC marketed it. It was originally pushed on us as an expensive, slipcased, limited hardcover edition, and DC swore up and down that there would be no trade edition. Sure enough, along comes a trade at a fraction of the price about a year or so later. This one instance has negatively affected my opinion of DC's marketing practices ever since.

Rating:
Summary: Beautful Eye Candy
Review: I loved this series as a teen but these days while the story grabs me - it just does not do it as much now as it does then. History is the problem. Then it was watching the DCU change into a new form. Now nearly two decades later it is more of a relic than anything else.

However the George Perez art is still breath taking. While I don't love the story as a whole there are some wonderful bits to be read by Marv Wolfman that do entertain even today.

Rating:
Summary: Lets face it..it's gibberish!
Review: I know this is one of the most important episodes to occur in DC comics continuity. I know it is regarded as a high mark in episodic storytelling. I know that it's after effects are still resonating today. I know, I know, I know. BUT..!

I also know that this is convoluted story telling at best. I know that most of what takes place involves characters who, although obviously immensely important to long time comic die-hards and the publishers themselves, are quite unimportant and used so in the story. I know that this whole lumbering juggernaut can be summed up to the following points:
1.) 2 characters of note were killed (although as anyone who has read DC books lately can attest too, that means really does not mean much.)
2.) The Earths (insert combination of numbers and/or letters here) are being destroyed so that the struggle over which Superman came first and whether Batwoman actually existed in continuity can be finally resolved. It really works as a fan boy fantasy to be able to see a redundant argument taken up here and in such yawn inducing detail too.
3.) I know that some friends of mine shelled out big bucks for the incredibly expensive version of the book (under the guise that it would not be reprinted in a cheaper format) and what they got was a poor quality museum version and a book that WAS reprinted later anyway.

The plus side? It has a really nice cover. Perez does his usual great job and Wolfman obviously tries very hard to make sense of what has been asked of him. His efforts do show through, albeit occasionally, but in the end the idea was a poor one and no amount of good scripting can save a poor idea. My advice? Spend your $25 on Watchmen and you'll still have change for a nice snack to go with it.

Rating:
Summary: Crisis on Infinite Pages.
Review: There are few bigger stories than the destruction of all existence. And there are few more complicated stories than Crisis on Infinite Earth. Despite the attempts to make it as dramatic as possible, this is a technical excercise, clearing up the history of the DC universe. Basically, a lot of old characters had to be eliminated, and so, in a huge (but not that huge) battle against the super-supervillain the Anti-Monitor, they do.

There is one intresting aspect; the Anti-Monitor destroys different planets with an all-consuming white ball. These characters are literallly being rubed out, erased, the ultimate threat to a comicbook character.

Sadly, the entire book seems to consist of this. There are a huge ammount of characters, and each have about one or two lines through out. There are a lot of panels on each page, each full of superheroes explaining to each other what has just happened. Repeatedly. The plot is extremely basic, but it takes so long for every character to become involved and be told what to do next, it becomes ridiculously drawn out.

There is no central hero, but since they all talk and act the same way, they could all be the same character. Ultraguy dies? Who cares? We still have three-hundred other superheroes who are virtually indistinguishable from him, plus two parallel universe version of the character.

And if you expect window-smashing, wall-crushing battles - forget it. The fight scenes ammount to little more than good guys shooting laser beams at endless, faceless bad guys. There is so little threat, so little excitement.

And there are over three hundred pages of this. Crisis on Infinite Pages.

Rating:
Summary: A train wreck of a story that ruined comics for a decade.
Review: The two things I can commend about the Crisis are George Perez's art, which is beautiful; and its sheer scope, (involving nearly every DC character invented over 50 years), which although frequently imitated, has never been matched.

That being said, I consider almost everything else about the story an abomination. Most of the blood-splattering, scenery-chewing, plotless nihilism that defined superhero comics from the late 80's to the late 90's can ultimately be traced back to this story.

The Crisis is the story of a massacre on an unimaginable scale. Almost the entire population of a supposedly infinite multiverse dies in terror and hellish agony. A handful of universes survive, and do so only by amalgamating themselves into a single world in which the survivors' identities are warped beyond recognition. And this is labelled a victory.

The thematic wrongness of this, considering the characters used, has always galled me. For better or for worse, the traditional superheroes like Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman are melodrama incarnate. While it is possible write an occasional nihilistic story about such characters as a counterpoint to their usual adventures (and it will be all the more poignant because of the seeming inappropriateness of the characters used), these characters cannot be used for nihilistic stories the majority of the time, or the result is absurdity on the level of Sandy Duncan playing King Lear. (Granted, Sandy could probably play a decent Lear, but what if someone declared it was the only part she would be ever be allowed to play?)

And make no mistake, the Crisis imposed a tone of despair to the DC books that it took them over a decade to climb back out of. Batman fit into this bleak new world fairly well, but Superman floundered for fifteen years while writers tried desperately to make him violent and unhappy enough to be "relevent." Only recently have they finally let him be optimistic and happy again, and his comics are selling better because of it.

I have never believed that a story has to be despairing in order to be intelligent, nor do I believe that making a story hopeless automatically makes it clever. My proof is the Crisis: not only is the tone devoid of light or hope, but the plot is an incoherent hash from start to finish. I sometimes pick up the book in a store and leaf through it in the same way a driver slows down to gaze disbelievingly at a train wreck.

Nice cover art by Alex Ross, anyway.

Rating:
Summary: Caveat Emptor (for the casual reader)
Review: To enjoy this miniseries by Wolfman and Perez, you need not only be steeped in DC lore, but also in the particulars that WERE the DC universe circa 1984-85. I had dropped out of comics by then (only to be brought back by "The Dark Knight Returns" when I read it 2 years later).

While it was nice to see some of my favorite characters from my comic-buying heyday of the early 1980's (Firestorm, Killer Frost, the PsychoPirate), and the story is somewhat compelling and, at least 3 times, strangely touching, this is essentially unnecessary for anyone except the true fan who picked up a Flash comic in the 90's and saw that Jay Garrick and Barry Allen were now from the same earth. If you came to comics before COIE, then, well, DC had some 'splainin' to do!

Now it's explained, and I can keep it on my shelf for occasional reference or to have a gander at George Perez's truly stunning and detailed artwork.

My advice? If you REALLY want a great superhero/villain ensemble piece (using established DC characters), go pick up Mark Waid's excellent "Kingdom Come" or the JLA/JSA Crisis on Multiple Earths archive edition. Until then, reread "Dark Knight" or Alan Moore's "Watchmen." Both are better and don't rely on the reader knowing tons of trivial detail.

That said, I quite enjoyed COIE, but caveat emptor for the casual reader.

Rating:
Summary: Don't believe the hype
Review: The best thing about this comic is the cover, a magnificent Alex Ross/George Perez painting with 562 figures from the DC universe (and which can be explored in more detail at the DC Web site). But what is inside is sadly unsatisfactory. The title is catchy but misleading: only about five or six other worlds figure in the story ' the alternate worlds of the DC universe which this mini-series was intended to tidy up. The cosmology is hokey, especially the conjoined matter-anti-matter good-evil duality. The time travel and other physics are highly arbitrary and powered by buzzwords; and like any villain with ill-defined attributes, the evil Anti-Monitor can apparently come back from being killed any number of times. Anti-Monitor, the primary bad guy, is not particularly charismatic (but then the best villains are all from Marvel, anyway), and is a much more effective presence early on when we don't know anything about him. His good counterpart, The Monitor, is not particularly engaging either (and he should never have been given those sideburns), although Anti-Monitor's sidekick, the craven Psycho-Pirate is OK. Blue Beetle seems to get a disproportionate amount of ice time in the first half, but then inexplicably drops out later on. We also get to see rather a lot of the somewhat anachronistic Uncle Sam, as well as Sgt Rock and Easy Company, who require extra contortions in the already squiggly plot line to be incorporated into the story. Apparently WWII still loomed a little larger in the zeitgeist back in '85 than is the case today. The ending is mostly Superman.
The major shortcoming is the lack of narrative drive. The action cuts from scene to disconnected scene as the story line disintegrates under the requirement that every last character be given a speaking part. Writer Marv Wolfman is overwhelmed by the sheer number of heroes (and villains) he has to fit in. The most dramatic sequence is the death of Supergirl. Much of the rest is pretty flat. The dialogue leans to the stilted old-school comics formula. The art by Georeg Perez is decent but conventional and the layout of panels is highly linear.
The major reasons for buying this are that it has historical value and gives a lot of backstory to the current DC universe in one place. The major reason for not buying it is the exorbitant price. If you don't have to have it, read a friend's. Once will be enough.

Rating:
Summary: A mixed bag depending on the reader
Review: Way back in 1985, the editors at DC Comics realized they had a bit of a problem. Since the the beginning of DC Comics, there had been a huge number of alternate multi-verses containing differing Earth's (Earth 1, Earth 2, Earth X, etc.) and different heroes and villians as well. Enter Marv Wolfman, the writer who would create the villian The Monitor who would destroy the countless universes and change the face of the DC universe for years. This entire huge 12 issue series is collected here and is an epic in every sense of the word. Here we witness the deaths of the original Supergirl and the Barry Allen Flash, along with countless other lesser known older age DC characters. George Perez' art is nicely done, but Wolfman's dialogue among the heroes and the storyline in general is just so cliche for a comic story (then again, I shouldn't expect anything different considering this is a major mainstream comic series) that some readers may be turned off. Not to mention the inclusion of many characters from the 1940's, 50's, and 60's are here as well, and younger comic fans will care less about what happens to them. All in all, Crisis on Infinite Earths is an epic collection that is essential for any DC fanboy, but that's just about it.

Rating:
Summary: In 2003, it's just too random. What's the point?
Review: Back in 1985, when there were hardly any crossovers, and devout readers were even passingly familiar with the hundreds of characters in the DC Universe, CRISIS must have seemed like a Godsend. But for the reader of 2003, who did not grow up with Power Girl, Wildcat, or Dr. Light, there are just too many random storylines and random characters that don't contribute to the greater story. Time and time again, this reader was forced to ask: "What's the point?"

There is, unquestionably, some fantastic art to be found in this work, which should not be downplayed. Furthermore, it is interesting to see the necessary consolidation of the DC Universe into one, single line of continuity (although, a single line with some major plot holes). Unfortunately, these interesting aspects hardly make for a worthwhile read for today's readers. To readers without a vast sense of the DCU's scope before 1985, CRISIS will almost surely boil down to a confusing and overly ambitious work, leaving the reader asking, "What's the point?"

Rating:
Summary: Inconsistent Goodness!!... Maybe... ??
Review: Crisis on Infinite Earths is an interesting read; not so much because of what you're actually reading but because you're not sure what to think of it. The dialogue ranges from hokey to mind-numbingly stupid, and the plot-line is inconsistent at best. The art however is quite fantastic though is slightly docked due to the fact that the comic contains some very stupid and pointless characters who most people have never heard of. On the other hand it introduces some very interesting characters as well, the Psycho Pirate being one of them, who can control peoples emotions, but once he gets going he can't stop. Its an interesting concept, which also seems to summarize the story as a whole. Interesting concept which could have been pulled off much better. For what it's worth, I'm glad I read it, if for no other reason I am now better able to appreciate real epics like "Infinity Gauntlet" and "Watchmen" all the more. If you have already bought this and are feeling kinda' disappointed because you're half way through and not enjoying it like you feel you should be,... well you're not alone. However if you haven't bought it yet, than don't. There are much better epics out there to spend your money on. That is all.