Books : Crisis on Infinite Earths

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Rating:

- Classic, must have for DC fans and even those that are not
Great story, even better art by a true master. The art by George Perez is truly fantastic. No need to go into the story since most reviews will give you that, just know that if youre a DC fan or just want to read a great story with great art then read "Crisis"

Rating:

- Extraordinary graphic novel
This is one of the greatest graphic novels of the 80s. One by one different Earths in paralel universes vanish. It almost seems hopeless. Reccomended for every comics fan!

Rating:

- The most epic graphic novel of the 80s.
In 1985, DC decided to streamline their continuity by destroying all but one of the many universes and dimensions in the multiverse. What happened was one of the most epic comic book novels of the 80s.....perhaps of all time.

This novel quite literally spands the entire DC universe, and not JUST the superheroes. You'll also have the sci-fi comics (Like Kimandi) and the Westerns (Like Bat Lash). And the massive scale of the over all destruction is almost overwhelming at times.

This story is quite thrilling......and complex. I'd compare it to the Lord of the Rings in its complexity. I've always suggested that their should be a companion volume to this particular book.

I give this my highest reccomendation. Five stars all the way.

Rating:

- This story was much better in my imagination.
I started reading DC comics in the late 1980s, so everything I've ever known has been post-Crisis. I'd often heard that "everything changed" after Crisis, but for me it didn't matter because as far as I was concerned, this was how things had always been.
I've seen countless references to this series over the past two decades, however, so I figured it was finally time to see what all the talk was about.

The Writing:
For some reason, I had formulated the impression that this series was well written. Perhaps that idea was based on the assumption that people don't spend two decades talking about a story that's poorly written. Well, apparently they do. Marv Wolfman's writing is painful to read. Characters constantly refer to themselves in the third person (a horribly awkward way of helping readers learn their names). The heroes give hackneyed soliloquies to explain why they're fighting the good fight. The villains give equally trite speeches to explain their motives. Perhaps all comics had such cheesy writing in the mid-80s; I haven't read much from that era, so for all I know this was just par for the course. But Crisis took place during Alan Moore's run on Swamp Thing, so certainly not all writers were as clumsy and stiff as Wolfman.

The Art:
George Perez has plenty of fans, but I can't count myself as one of them. I won't dispute the fact that he has loads of talent, but his tendency to fill every page with as many panels as possible just leaves the whole thing looking like a cluttered, chaotic mess. (In Perez's defense, there's really no way he could have done it differently, due to the extreme wordiness of Wolfman's script.) While I appreciate the effort to include as many characters in the story as possible (it was, after all, a celebration of DC's 50th anniversary), I wish Perez would have exercised at least a small amount of restraint. Just because you can fit 200 characters on a single page, it doesn't mean you should. By focusing on everybody, the series really focuses on nobody.

Overall Value:
Crisis may have been important in its day, but nostalgia is the only value that this series has anymore. Yet if it's nostalgia you're seeking, you'd be better off looking for the original 12 comics on eBay. At least that way you'll get to read them the way they were originally presented. This collection suffers greatly from its sleekness. The updated coloring and the glossy pages give the collection a feeling of modernity that is completely at odds with the story itself. Read this series on pulpy paper with muddy coloring, and you might be able to appreciate it for what it is: a relic.

Rating:

- Important for DC history, but not a casual read
There was a bit of chaos caused by Flash #123, way back in 1961. The events in that book -- with Jay Garrick and Barry Allen meeting each other for the first time -- spawned what would become known as the DC Multiverse. Some 24 years later, the multiverse and collected histories of the characters within the multiverse got very muddled and confusing. Which Superman was that? And does he know about the events happening on Earth-2?

From the business side of the comics industry, people were having a hard time joining in on comics, because of this confusion, along with almost 50 years of history that may be needed to understand some of the storylines. Because of all this, DC decided to do something. And with the 50 year anniversary looming in 1985, they decided to do something BIG.

This is the series that changed everything, and continues to impact the DC Universe twenty years later with Infinite Crisis. For that reason alone, don't expect to just casually pick this up and enjoy it like "Formerly Known as the Justice League". This is a book that is very involving, encompasing and changing some 50 years of history, and requires the reader's attention to be adequately enjoyed. But for those that want to see how a massive fictional history can be effectively rebooted, this is required reading. After all, characters have been referred to as pre-Crisis and post-Crisis for a reason.

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