Rating:  -
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:  -
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:  -
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:  -
It's difficult to convey to somebody who didn't grow up obsessed with the detail of comic book universes, and who didn't spend their days poring over issues of `Who's Who in DC Comics' and `The Encyclopaedia of the Marvel Universe', what a joyous experience reading `Crisis on Infinite Earths' is.
The original thinking behind this 12-issue maxi-series is common knowledge. The system of multiple universes that DC Comics had used to rationalise various conflicts in continuity had become cumbersome, and the aim was to use a crisis of cosmic proportions as a pretext for amalgamating all of the different DC universes into one.
`Crisis on Infinite Earths' completely failed to achieve this aim. It failed at an emotional level - a number of comic book fans (myself included) were nostalgic for the `pre-crisis' stories, and found it hard to adjust to characters being reintroduced from scratch. And it failed logistically - conflicts in continuity persisted, and new stories such as the sequel `Zero Hour: Crisis in Time' (nowhere near as good as this, but still worth buying) were required to mop up the mess.
That aside, the research that writer Marv Wolfman and artist George Pérez put into `Crisis on Infinite Earths' is phenomenal. They made it their duty to include and do justice to 50 years of complex comic book history, trawling through the DC archives and making sure that every character and era got a look-in. Wolfman's love for these characters is evident, and Pérez's painstaking renditions - down to the different-shaped `S's on the chests of the Supermans of Earth-1 and Earth-2 - are a real achievement.
`Crisis on Infinite Earths' concerns a conflict between two cosmic beings (the heroic Monitor and the evil anti-Monitor), that threatens the existence of every DC Comics universe and the multiple Earths residing within them. These include Earth-1 (home of Silver Age characters), Earth-2 (home of Golden Age characters), Earth-3 (where heroes are villains and the only hero is Lex Luthor), Earth-4 (Charlton Comics characters), Earth-S (Fawcett Comics characters), and Earth X (where the Second World War lasted for 40 years).
Anyone confused by all of this (and it is very confusing), who wants to understand the intricacies of the various Earths, would be well-advised to buy the two companion volumes to this: `Crisis on Multiple Earths' (which collects some early landmark `crossover' stories in which characters from different Earths joined forces), and `The History of the DC Universe' (which explains how the histories of the various Earths are reconciled into the single history of the Earth seen at the end of `Crisis on Infinite Earths').
I can understand why some people don't like `Crisis on Infinite Earths'. The plot is hyperbolic and nonsensical, and relies too heavily upon endless pseudo-science and ever-increasing explosions. The dialogue is goofy as hell, intended more to give every character a look-in than to make the story credible. And the story's subtext - the entire crisis is precipitated by two characters who seek to understand the origins of the universe, ignoring the warnings of their peers - is offensively anti-science.
But you have to put the series in context. This is the historical pinnacle of corny, larger-than-life comic book storytelling. It is the culmination of 50 years of superhero adventures, from a time when comic book readers were expected to suspend their disbelief, when superheroes constantly explained the obvious to one another, and when superheroes never failed to address one another by their full superhero names - no matter how silly those names were.
From a broader perspective, `Crisis on Infinite Earths' represents the end of a political era, and of the kind of superheroes that were possible in that era. American superhero comics were born in the Second World War and nurtured by the Cold War, but by 1985, the Cold War was winding down and `Crisis on Infinite Earths' was the last time American superheroes upholding American values could claim to speak not just on behalf of humanity, but on behalf of the entire universe. (Yes, there have been attempts to revive this political spirit in comic books since the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, but these are superficial and mawkish.)
In fact, in a strange way `Crisis on Infinite Earths' is a companion piece to Alan Moore's `Watchmen' - another 12-issue DC maxi-series, which was published shortly after `Crisis'. `Watchmen' confronts the political realities that undermine American superheroism by adopting a mature, unsentimental tone - its three key characters are Dr Manhattan (who represents American atomic weapons), Ozymandias (who represents the ruthlessly healthy, intelligent and dominating American businessman), and the Comedian (who represents American thuggery, misogyny, and Vietnam massacre). `Crisis on Infinite Earths', on the other hand, evades the political realities that undermine American superheroism by adopting an exuberant, childish manner - its three key characters are Superman of Earth-2 (who represents the American confidence of the Second World War), Superman of Earth-1 (who represents the American confidence of the Cold War), and Uncle Sam of the Freedom Fighters (who represents timeless apple-pie values and wisdom).
And yet while `Watchmen' is bleak, it is informed by the same love for superhero lore that is evident on every page of `Crisis on Infinite Earths'. And while `Crisis on Infinite Earths' is larger-than-life, it is informed by the same melancholy recognition that an age of comics has come to a close that is evident on every page of `Watchmen'.
This melancholy is particularly evident in the final two issues of `Crisis', as character inconsistencies on the single recombined Earth are ironed out. You can even put your finger on the precise moment when the original raison d'être of American comic books died. It's in the final issue of `Crisis', when the Superman of Earth-2, stranded in the abyss with Superboy after defeating the Anti-Monitor one last time, sees a vision of Lois Lane in the afterlife, asking him to join her - and steps off the pages of comic books forever.
Rating: -
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.
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