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I've said it before, and I'll say it again: I wish DC and Marvel would release novelizations of their big stories more often! This one's a prime example.
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I own the trade, so I figured I'd buy the novel. It's been a great read thus far.
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Now that it's 20 years later and Marv Wolfman's insanely complex 12-issue comic book series "The Crisis on Infinite Earths" is being sequelized (by DC's current "Infinite Crisis" mini), I figured it was time to try and make a little sense out of the old story. I knew the basic plot outline: these two feuding godlike beings known only as the Monitor and the Anti-Monitor are kind of the god-beings of the matter and anti-matter universes. The Monitor's matter universe had an infinity of variations, as each instant spawned endless new realities in accordance with Einstein's theory of relativity. The antimatter universe was a singular, uninhabited field of antimatter with nothing in it except one desolate planet that couldn't support life. Somehow or other the Anti-Monitor started destroying the universes on the "matter" side, and the end result was that a whole buttload of superheroes had to team up to stop him, eventually resulting in one, unified reality. The new reality created chaos for comic book readers, as the DC Universe (home to Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, The Flash and Green Lantern, among hundreds of other, less well-known characters) now had to cope with reconciling the numerous "realities" it had created over the years. Ever since 1985, DC has been getting farther and farther away from the idea of a single, unified reality, essentially deciding with the 2001 series "The Kingdom" that they would undo the CRISIS without actually undoing it, by introducing a concept called Hypertime, which allows for alternate realities but understands that they exist only with the singular DC Universe timeline as a reference point. No matter how different each reality is from the "main" one, they only exist because they're somehow connected to it.
At any rate, the book. Marv Wolfman recently wrote a novelization of "The Crisis on Infinite Earths," which I read because I thought it might be marginally easier to follow than the graphic novel (released in 2001) by Wolfman and his fellow "New Teen Titans" alum George Perez. I was right; the novel is concise and clear in a way that the "Crisis" comics couldn't be, as they were pandering to the loyal fans of 1985 in the way that, I'm sure, it seemed to most casual readers that stories like "The Final Night" and "Zero Hour: A Crisis in Time" were pandering to people like me in the '90s. Because I didn't read many pre-Crisis DC books, I never really understood a lot of it, but Wolfman's process of building from the ground up, and of using Barry Allen (the Flash, who died in the CRISIS) as a narratorial voice, is inspired. I understand the story in a way that I've never come close to in the past after reading it, and can almost--almost--say that it's as good as the hype has always been. Certainly the new novel is indispensible for any comic geek who really never "got" the CRISIS, because it's a story so important to mainstream DC continuity that you can't ever properly understand a lot of things unless you know what happened in that epic 1985 series. To try would be like studying American history and refusing to acknowledge the Civil War.
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