Thursday, August 1, 2019

Crisis on Infinite Earths Deluxe Edition - The 2019 Read

Crisis On Infinite EarthsCrisis On Infinite Earths by Marv Wolfman
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Walls of antimatter are destroying the worlds of the multiverse and it's up to the superheroes of many earths to band stop them and their maker, the villainous Anti-Monitor!

Crisis was created to get rid of the multitude of parallel earths and just have one DC earth in the name of simplification. In retrospect, I don't think kids had nearly as big of a problem with the multiverse as the adults. Anyway, the story had a lot of heavy lifting to do. How do you go about destroying universes, killing off characters, and telling a good story at the same time?

For some reason, I thought the impending birth of my son would be a good time to re-read Crisis. Instead of focusing on all the problems it caused and fun it eliminated from the DC universe, I intended on focusing on the story itself, the creation of a new universe from the ashes of thousands of old ones.

Thirty eight hours later, my son is about to be shot from my wife's loins like a cannonball, as I understand the birthing process, and I finished the story in a haze sometime early this morning.

Crisis is pretty fucking good if you like Bronze Age stories. Marv Wolfman had literally hundreds of characters to work into the mix and he did a fantastic job. The Anti-Monitor is a damn believable threat and the way the story unfolds is masterful. There is nothing I would call filler in this. The premise is worthy of a Doctor Who series finale. One godlike being is destroying universes and another godlike being is assembling a force of heroes and villains to oppose him.

Even with a premise like that, Crisis could have easily shat the bet without George Perez on the art. George Perez is the best artist of the Bronze Age and possibly of 1980 to the present. Every panel is crammed with characters and details and George doesn't skimp. Some panels have over a hundred individual characters in them.

Crisis reads like a loveletter to everything that came before at times. Wolfman and Perez work Anthro, Kamandi, Enemy Ace, and hundreds more characters into the mix, even to just show them in a panel or two. The character deaths that appear on screen are meaningful and powerful. THEY SHOULD NEVER HAVE BROUGHT BARRY ALLEN BACK!

One of the things I loved is that Marv Wolfman didn't build the story around the usual suspects of Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman. Superman gets more screen time than the other two but it's the Superman of Earth-2 that gets his moment in the sun. The Monitor recruits people like Blue Beetle for his initial team rather than Batman and it isn't Batman that saves the day, which seems appropriate since Batman is a detective and not Reed Richards.

Anyway, at the end of the day, this should be the measuring stick for blockbuster events and I shouldn't hold it responsible for all the imitators. I'll go back to my wife's side and get ready to catch the kid as he comes flying out of her uterus.

I did not give Crisis a fair shake on my last read. It's the grand daddy of them all and should be treated as such. 4.5 out of 5 stars.

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