Rating:  -
I've always appreciated that old adage:"You can't have your cake and eat it too." Thing is, if one of the theories of alternate realities is true, you CAN have your cake AND eat it too! Because in one reality you have it and in the other you eat it! And that's why many of us sci-fi and comic book readers have always loved that concept. Think of H.Beam Piper's series of "Paratime" stories or Keith Laumer's "World's of the Imperium" stories. When comic book writers had that particular device to work with, the results were some of the most enjoyable reading I've ever had. I consider the seminal story in FLASH # 123(Silver Age,Sept.1961)by Gardner Fox, Carmine Infantino and Joe Giella "Flash Of Two Worlds", where Barry Allen encountered Jay Garrick to be nothing short of pure genius! TRUELY INSPIRED, the idea that the heroes of the Golden Age comic books were inhabitants of an alternate reality. (Although I think they mislabeled Earth-1 and Earth-2. Earth-1 should have in all fairness been the original Golden Age world.) I looked forward every year to the annual team-up between the JSA and the JLA. The notion that there were different versions of our beloved heroes in parallel universes was purely exhilirating! I can't imagine what entered into the minds of Marv Wolfman and his minions to try and destroy that wondrous multiplicity of parallel earths. To this day, nearly 20 years after the events of COIE, IT JUST REALLY PISSES ME OFF!In fact it reminds me of the way the Soviets purged their history books every year, actually touching up old photographs, removing or restoring people in them by who was in favor with Stalin and who wasn't. George Orwell also wrote about that kind of revisionism in "1984". Who could have imagined that the editors of DC Comics would resort to such a device? I keep reading the justification for this was to clear up the confusion of all the multiple versions of their characters and restore a sense of "continuity". HUH? I was eleven years old when I read that original FLASH story and I wasn't confused! As for continuity? In a Comic Book Universe? Come on,GIMME A BREAK! Sure, I take my comic books seriouly, but by removing the alternate reality option from the DC Universe, you've taken away the best device writers have for explaining all those inevitable discontiniuties that will arise when you have scores of various writers and artists all chronicling the adventures of a particular character over the course of around 65 years. Anyway, as I see the DC Universe, it's still a mess with plenty of discontinuites and contradictions. And I know they are just dying to do alternate realities and parallel universes at DC: in the Silver Age they were called "Imaginery Stories", now they call them "Elseworlds". How do you classify these stories? Imaginary stories of an already imagined reality? SHEESH! When DC writers were allowed the parallel world option, it was a far more elegant solution than the so-called "Elseworlds" mess they seem to have imposed on themselves. Untie the hands of the DC staff and bring back all our beloved parallel Earths! UNDO the chaos that has existed since the COIE debacle that actually spawned far more confusion than it (supposedly) cleared up. Besides, as all of us lovers of the parallel Earths know: ALL THOSE SUPPOSEDLY ERADICATED WORLDS CONTINUE TO EXIST! If you follow the time-line back to the time of COIE, the time-stream split into at least two or more tributaries: the current DC Universe and those in which THOSE EVENTS NEVER TOOK PLACE! At least that's the case if the theory of alternate time-lines is true. SO COME DC GIVE US ACCESS TO THAT OTHER TIME-LINE, where the chaotic and ill-considered events of COIE never took place! AND WHILE YOU'RE AT IT, SINCE YOU BROUGHT BACK OLIVER QUEEN AND HAL JORDAN, YOU MIGHT AS WELL BRING BACK BARRY ALLEN!!!!!
Rating:  -
How is it possible to review this graphic novel objectively? People seem to either love it or hate it. And both with good reason. It was a story 50 years in the making that still has major ramifications, both positive and negative, for comics today.
Longtime comicbook readers feel that they need "continuity" in the stories they read. Continuity is the idea that a fictional universe, such as the one in which DC's superhero comics take place, operates with a certain logic and is internally consistent. By 1961, however, DC was having trouble with continuity. How could they explain that, twenty years ago, Batman and Robin were fighting Nazis and hanging out with FDR, while in the present they were fighting Commies and hanging out with JFK ... but Robin was still only a teenager???
Since DC's WW2 stories were too fondly remembered to just be ignored, the editors decided that they all took place in an alternate universe, dubbed Earth-2. The present-day DC heroes lived on Earth-1 and were a good deal younger than their Earth-2 counterparts, not having debuted until after WW2. Every year Earth-1's Justice League teamed up with Earth-2's Justice Society, whose Robin was an adult, whose Superman had grey hair, etc., etc.
By the early 1980s, DC decided that the multiplicity of Earths-- of Supermen, Batmen, and Wonder Women--was hurting the company's ability to attract new readers. The DC universes needed to be simplified into a single universe and duplicate characters eliminated. This move has remained controversial ever since, but I maintain that it was the right thing to do, because I only became a DC reader in the aftermath of CRISIS.
When I was growing up, my first knowledge of superheroes came through Saturday morning cartoons, namely Superfriends and Spider-Man. The first comic book I ever bought was a pre-Crisis JLA/JSA teamup. It was confusing as hell because it didn't fit into the template I had picked up from Superfriends: Who was this grown-up Robin? Why did Superman have grey hair? And just what was going on in the WW2 flashbacks? Then I realized that, over at Marvel Comics, Spider-Man was the same guy I saw on TV. I realized that if I bought a Marvel comic, Spider-Man would always be Peter Parker from the cartoons and not some geezer from "Earth-P." Marvel was still a young company, without all of DC's editorial baggage. And so I said, "Make Mine Marvel!"
CRISIS came and went without much notice from my pre-adolescent eyes. So what if they killed Supergirl? Her movie sucked. Adult Robin died? Hey, he was never on "Challenge of the Superfriends," so how important could he be? The good thing about CRISIS was that it swept DC's creative playing field clean. If John Byrne had never written Superman, Frank Miller never revised Batman, and George Perez never graced Wonder Woman, the Marvel zombies of the world would still dismiss these characters as naive throwbacks. It was these titles that made me sit up and notice DC. I became a fan of DC's iconic characters. I dug up that JLA/JSA crossover, reread it, enjoyed it, and even bought more back issues of the '70s Earth-1/Earth-2 teamups.
So in that sense, CRISIS was a success. DC's late '80s relaunches brought new readers to the company and redefined their characters for a new generation. But the editorial staff never really made explicit what had and hadn't changed in the new post-Crisis universe, so contradictions started creeping in. Some writers decided to ignore the Crisis altogether. And now, 20 years later, the DC universe looks more convoluted than it did back in 1961. That means that CRISIS failed in its goal of revising continuity. Rather, it wrecked continuity so badly that DC's creators threw out the concept altogether.
So people who hate CRISIS can blame people like me--Generation X babies brainwashed by too many TV channels--for why DC thought the Crisis was necessary. But now I look through my back issue collection and see stories like "The Freedom Fighters of Earth-X! The Crime Syndicate of Earth-3! The Marvel Family of Earth-S!" and can understand the excitement that those tales must have caused when they first appeared. CRISIS is the last, greatest, and by far the saddest of those classic stories.
If DC's heroes have any resonance in your memory, whether pre- or post-Crisis, buy this book, read it, love it or hate it, and then put it on your shelf knowing that it's a piece of pop culture history.
Rating:  -
Do you remember the 80's? Do you remember DC comics in the 80's? Nothing changed forever and nothing broke the status quo. Storylines spanned one or two issues with maybe a few sub plots spanning multiple issues. When the story arc came to an end everything was as before...
Crisis on Infinite Earths was the first major shake up of the DC universe it was the herald of new strategies for storyline development. Writers could at last permanently affect the characters within the DC universe. It was an event that closed the book on the fanciful heroes and villains of the gold and silver age of comics and opened the doors to the darker and grittier modern day heroes and villains.
Crisis on Infinite Earths came out and tested the boundaries of what the comic buying fans wanted from the DC universe. Crisis on Infinite Earths laid the ground work for the must read graphic novels and story arcs of the late 80's like the works of Alan Moore (Watchmen, V for Vendetta and Killing joke), Frank Miller (The Dark Knight returns and Batman: Year One) and Grant Morrison (Arkham Asylum)
It allowed the darker side of 'reality' to creep into storylines. Heroes didn't need to be perfect all the time and villans could acutally be vile and do the unthinkable.
By todays standards the story seems tame but don't discount it. It is packed full DC universe lore and effectively sinches off the loose ends into a more reasonable DC setting. If you have read the comics of the era the sub pots within the Crisis on Infinite Earths will make more sense to you but don't let that hold you back.
Crisis on Infinite Earths was a major event and needs to be read to draw the connection between the comics of today with the comics of the past.
With the new season of the animated Justice league spotlighting more of the characters from this era Crisis on Infinite Earths will have more relevance.
Rating: -
First things first - if you are looking for comics with real literary merit, you can find them but not here. This is not "The Dark Knight Returns", or "Watchmen". In fact, it's sort of the ulitmate expression of the way comics were before those works - full of overly earnest guys and gals with stupid titles and silly costumes, doing their level best to save the universe.
And if you are a comic reader of today without much interest in how the books got to where they are now, move along - this is a complicated story, and not really that great on its own, self-contained merits.
But, if you have a real love of the DC Universe, both where it was in the past and where it is today, this book is pretty much essential, since it chages so much about the fundamentals of that universe. Not necessarily for the better - it seems to me that DC traded a multiverse concept that looked complicated, but was logical if you understood it, for a single universe that seemed simpler, but only got more confusing the closer you looked. Those issues, though, are somewhat beyond the scope of the book.
At its heart, this book is something of an ode to the rich history of the DC Universe, full of characters with decades of history, many of them long forgotten. Sure, a lot of them get destroyed in the processs, but I think it's done with an appreciation for all that was.
In the long run, this story is a bit of a mess, but it's an important mess, and quite a good looking one. There are better books you can get in the genre, and you should get those first. But if you are interested in comics history, you really ought to read this one eventually.
Rating: -
I missed this when it originally came out in 1985. I did not have the patience to look for copies of this long winded series as specialty comics store were not yet in vogue then. Only now did I have the opportunity to read this tale that changed the DC Universe. After reading a third of the book, I lost interest as it does not have the pizazz that I expected it to have. Perhaps now, the tale appears mundane as visual elements excellently drawn by George Perez, are now so common in the cinemas. What the artists visialized then could now be easily translated to the screen with more verb. Hence, the profligacy of comic based movies. That aside, the attempt to consolidate the universe into one resulted in an aftermath that heroes and villains familiar to us then, now appear (to those who lived the golden and silver age of comics) unfamiliar. This is why I no longer have the addictive tendency to open a Superman or a Batman comics now. The tension, the expectancy, and the longing for the next issue to come out, a feeling I relished then, has long since dissipated; the consequence of COIE. Marvel is no better. But at least their movies, based on the original premise of their silver age characters, are definitley a visual and storytelling pleasure to experience. I hope DC does the same with their rejuvinated BATMAN Begins. Anyone for COIE in cinema?
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