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Thursday, March 31, 2005
Countdown to Infinite Crisis
I read Countdown to Infinite Crisis - the one-dollar eighty-page giant from DC Comics - and enjoyed it thoroughly. The cheap bastard in me enjoyed the bargain of three comics' worth of story for the price of one-third of one comic. The fanboy in me enjoyed the excellent artwork and strong story - and even the fact that this issue is spinning off into four different (and mostly exciting) miniseries.
As far as the cover that first piqued the interest of DC fanboys, the dead guy being held by Batman is Blue Beetle. The first page makes clear he's the target. But as with Identity Crisis, the choice of sacrificial character isn't as important as the way the character is handled. The second-string status of Blue Beetle is explored in-depth: when Justice League was rebooted as a humor book in the mid-eightes, Blue Beetle and Booster Gold were often the focus of the jokes, acting like sitcom wacky-neighbors more than superheroes. The book was often funny, but those characters in particular haven't been taken seriously by fans ever since. Apparently, the same held true within the DC universe as well.
What's better and more surprising is the choice of the murderer - it makes sense within the logic of the DC Universe, explains something that needed explaining in some people's minds, and manages to pack something of a wallop. It reminds me of the big reveal in Green Lantern: Rebirth: if a writer wants something hard enough - to explain why Hal Jordan can still be redeemed, or to show how secret identities really worked when they were constantly being compromised, or to explain a whole run of a comic that seems out-of-synch with what happened before and after - then you can come up with an answer that both draws upon existing continuity and gives it unexpected depth. The current generation of workhorse writers for DC - including the three writers of Countdown, Greg Rucka, Geoff Johns, and Judd Winick, as well as Identity Crisis writer Brad Meltzer - seem especially interested in these kinds of projects. Well, more power to them, given the results.
The full title of this one-shot - the "to Infinite Crisis" part - was held back for as long as possible. But apparently, this means that there'll be another event in the near future that will go back to the 1984 classic Crisis on Infinite Earths. More likely than not, it will involve restoring the DC multiverse, which the original Crisis was precisely designed to eradicate. Before Crisis on Infinite Earths, there was an infinite number of multiverses with different variations of DC characters - a world where the Axis powers won World War II, a world where superheroes debuted in the 1940s, one where the debuted in the 1960s, a world run by super-villains, and so on. The powers-that-be deemed that the infinite earths - and infinite variations of key characters, like Batman and Superman - was too confusing for casual readers, so Crisis destroyed the multiverse and had one single DC universe with one definitive history.
Except.
Except soon enough - fueled by the success of The Dark Knight Returns with its future-era Batman's second coming - stories of alternate DC universes began popping up under the rubric of "Elseworlds" tales. Batman fights Jack the Ripper in Victorian London. Superman becomes a Green Lantern. The Justice League are a posse of the Old West. These Elseworld stories weren't considered a part of DC continuity and there was no admission of a new multiverse forming. (Most all Elseworld stories have been single-story premises, though some of the popular ones spawned sequels.) But for all intents and purposes, this provided the same situation for casual readers that existed pre-Crisis. Lots of different kinds of Batman and Superman and the JLA, but now there was no need to explain where it fit into the "bigger" picture of the DC Universe.
That said, the notion of casual comic book readers had disappeared by this point anyway. That's a topic that can fill pages upon pages, but in this specific case, it's made the issue of a clear, singular continuity less of a concern. Marvel has proven it with their different superhero universes - the standard one, the edgier Ultimate one, and now the all-ages Marvel Age universe - and there's been no confusion there. Part of it is a very clear branding for each line. Part of it is that, yes, casual readers in comics don't exist, and if you're going to read comics nowadays you'll make the effort to sort through such intricacies. And another part of it is that having multiverses really isn't all that confusing - not nowadays, with pop postmodernity and pop quantum theory as much a fabric of our lives as television and traffic.
The return of infinite DC universes? Well. I'm excited, a little, but I'll also admit - it's something only a dedicated fanboy reader such as myself would give a damn about. Luckily, comics nowadays has nothing but fanboy readers.
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As far as the cover that first piqued the interest of DC fanboys, the dead guy being held by Batman is Blue Beetle. The first page makes clear he's the target. But as with Identity Crisis, the choice of sacrificial character isn't as important as the way the character is handled. The second-string status of Blue Beetle is explored in-depth: when Justice League was rebooted as a humor book in the mid-eightes, Blue Beetle and Booster Gold were often the focus of the jokes, acting like sitcom wacky-neighbors more than superheroes. The book was often funny, but those characters in particular haven't been taken seriously by fans ever since. Apparently, the same held true within the DC universe as well.
What's better and more surprising is the choice of the murderer - it makes sense within the logic of the DC Universe, explains something that needed explaining in some people's minds, and manages to pack something of a wallop. It reminds me of the big reveal in Green Lantern: Rebirth: if a writer wants something hard enough - to explain why Hal Jordan can still be redeemed, or to show how secret identities really worked when they were constantly being compromised, or to explain a whole run of a comic that seems out-of-synch with what happened before and after - then you can come up with an answer that both draws upon existing continuity and gives it unexpected depth. The current generation of workhorse writers for DC - including the three writers of Countdown, Greg Rucka, Geoff Johns, and Judd Winick, as well as Identity Crisis writer Brad Meltzer - seem especially interested in these kinds of projects. Well, more power to them, given the results.
The full title of this one-shot - the "to Infinite Crisis" part - was held back for as long as possible. But apparently, this means that there'll be another event in the near future that will go back to the 1984 classic Crisis on Infinite Earths. More likely than not, it will involve restoring the DC multiverse, which the original Crisis was precisely designed to eradicate. Before Crisis on Infinite Earths, there was an infinite number of multiverses with different variations of DC characters - a world where the Axis powers won World War II, a world where superheroes debuted in the 1940s, one where the debuted in the 1960s, a world run by super-villains, and so on. The powers-that-be deemed that the infinite earths - and infinite variations of key characters, like Batman and Superman - was too confusing for casual readers, so Crisis destroyed the multiverse and had one single DC universe with one definitive history.
Except.
Except soon enough - fueled by the success of The Dark Knight Returns with its future-era Batman's second coming - stories of alternate DC universes began popping up under the rubric of "Elseworlds" tales. Batman fights Jack the Ripper in Victorian London. Superman becomes a Green Lantern. The Justice League are a posse of the Old West. These Elseworld stories weren't considered a part of DC continuity and there was no admission of a new multiverse forming. (Most all Elseworld stories have been single-story premises, though some of the popular ones spawned sequels.) But for all intents and purposes, this provided the same situation for casual readers that existed pre-Crisis. Lots of different kinds of Batman and Superman and the JLA, but now there was no need to explain where it fit into the "bigger" picture of the DC Universe.
That said, the notion of casual comic book readers had disappeared by this point anyway. That's a topic that can fill pages upon pages, but in this specific case, it's made the issue of a clear, singular continuity less of a concern. Marvel has proven it with their different superhero universes - the standard one, the edgier Ultimate one, and now the all-ages Marvel Age universe - and there's been no confusion there. Part of it is a very clear branding for each line. Part of it is that, yes, casual readers in comics don't exist, and if you're going to read comics nowadays you'll make the effort to sort through such intricacies. And another part of it is that having multiverses really isn't all that confusing - not nowadays, with pop postmodernity and pop quantum theory as much a fabric of our lives as television and traffic.
The return of infinite DC universes? Well. I'm excited, a little, but I'll also admit - it's something only a dedicated fanboy reader such as myself would give a damn about. Luckily, comics nowadays has nothing but fanboy readers.
Post a Comment
great review, I felt the same way about the comic and look forward to reading the rest of the story. started my own comic blog today, check it out:
http://thecomicsblog.blogspot.com