Today is, of course, Wednesday and we all know what day that is, don't we? Why, it's NEW COMICS DAY (except in weeks that have Monday holidays, which is like every other week in the U.S., it seems). Today's big new comics story is DC's Countdown to Infinite Crisis, which was originally announced as plain, ol' Countdown. It sports a spiffy new Alex Ross/Jim Lee cover (which was also the cover to our WonderCon program book this year). Beyond that, it's 80 big pages for only a buck.
I'm not going to talk about the contents of the issue, so if you're looking for a review or some kind of insight into what happens, go look elsewhere. Go on. Nothin' to see here. What am I going to talk about is the traditions involved with this book, traditions both good and bad.
Most of us 40+ something comic readers have a fondness for the words DC and Crisis used in the same sentence (or, in this case, title). The whole Crisis thing goes back all the way to Justice League of America #21, in 1963, when editor Julius Schwartz and writer Gardner Fox had the bright idea of putting the old DC heroes (the Justice Society) together with the new DC heroes (the Justice League) in a 2-part, mind-blowing adventure, titled "Crisis on Earth One" and (part 2) "Crisis on Earth Two." Schwartz had gone here before with his ground-breaking Flash #123, and the revelation that Earth-2 existed. Earth-2 was DC's explanation (and home) for all their heroes of the 40s, including the original incarnations of The Flash, Green Lantern, The Atom, Hawkman and more. For an 8-year old, this was heavy stuff. Here was a whole other universe, vibrating at a slightly different frequency, that co-existed with our world. It was brought up again in Flash #137, a couple of months before JLA #21 hit the stands and changed the face of comics as we knew it.
Because, you see, back then, there was no real continuity. Oh, there were recurring characters, heroes, villians, friends and foes. An occasional 2-part story. But no footnotes, no "see Superman #142 for the whole story." Marvel Comics opened the door for this kind of obsessive-compulsive behavior. It was cool at first, but after 20 years or so of trying to adhere to some kind of semi-religious Bible, things got real messy, especially at DC. Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman, were all, at first, the same ones from the beginning, way back in 1938, 1939 and 1940, respectively. They had no Earth-2 counterparts until a little later. And once they were introduced it got real muddy and mucky. By the time DC's 50th anniversary rolled around in 1985, it was time to do some house-cleaning.
Enter Marv Wolfman and George Pérez who produced Crisis on Infinite Earths, which cleaned the whole thing up. The most controversial "fixes" this series produced were the killing of Supergirl and the Barry Allen Flash character. Earth-2 went buh-bye, along with a number of other Earths (it seemed like there were literally 100s of them by the time Schwartz--and everyone else--was done), and the original JSA members travelled over to our earth, which is, of course, Earth-1. Everyone knows this. I'm shocked and saddened you didn't know this. It's you, isn't it? Not me. I knew this. Everyone knows this. (Actually, if I remember correctly, "our earth" is Earth-Prime, but for comic-reading purposes, the earth where all this stuff REALLY, REALLY happens is Earth-1.)
So, you're getting the picture, if you're a non-comics reader and have made it this far (and if that is the case, GOD BLESS YOU): The comics world is a strange place and requires a great knowledge of all the aspects of the history of the characters and the worlds they live in for you to join in and enjoy. It's kind of like starting to watch Lost with the 18th episode. Who are these people? What's their story? Where did they come from? Why are they on that island? Does that hot girl wear that white tank-top ALL THE TIME? You catch my drift.
Comics have become so mired down in their own continuity, that there's a thing called retro-continuity. For example, that dead Supergirl? NOT DEAD. NOT NOW. They brought her back. There's this thing in DC Comics called the Hyperverse and it basically runs on the assumption that time is like a river, with infinite tributaries branching off from the main flow. Each one of those branches is an alternate existence, a different timeline that is unusual because of a minute change in the course of events. Like Superman lands in Russia as a baby. This happened. I swear to God. (Remind me to explain the "ultimate nullifier" to you sometime.) To paraphrase Harrison Ford, "you can read this shit, but you sure as hell can't explain it to someone else."
But I'm going down one of those tributaries myself, into an alternate blog entry here. This newest addition to the DC Crisis series is something steeped in tradition. Not only because it's a Crisis book, but also because it's an 80-page giant book.
Ahhh...80-page Giants! Is there a more lovely, lilting phrase to describe a comic book? DC cornered the market on this format, and for the most part, filled it with reprints. Marvel did 72-page ANNUALS, and for the first few years utilized both new, big, blow-out stories (the wedding of Reed Richards and Sue Storm of the Fantastic Four) and some select reprints. The fascinating thing about DC's Giants was here were stories that existed BEFORE I DID. How was that possible, I wondered? Didn't the world start with me? (I soon got over that minor misconception...for the most part). So we got to see stories that were "old" and different. And they only cost a quarter! 25 cents! Sure it was twice as much as a regular comic (which were, by and large, 12 cents around the time the 80-pagers captured my attention), but it was like almost, sort-of 3-times as many pages! It was like finding some ancient history picture book which revealed secrets from the past, heretofore unknown to anyone. The 80-page Giants made you one of the comics intelligentsia.
So today brought us a comic which made me nostalgic and wistful and also kinda chapped my hide, if you catch my drift (again). Comics have become, again, so mired in continuity that it's a closed country club. You can scale the fence, but the rules and arcana involved in becoming a member are so long and so rigid, it's mind-numbingly impossible to play a simple round of golf. DC is making an effort to correct that with their new out-of-continuity line, DC All-Stars, which will utilize top talent (Jim Lee and Frank Miller on Batman and Robin, Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely on Superman) to tell stories anyone can read.
As much as I love comics (and I could be on my death bed and someone, somewhere would be picking up my damn comic books on Wednesday for me), and even super-hero comics, this slavish devotion to continuity is like incest. The industry is not breeding new readers. We're just turning more and more insular. The alternative comics world, with wonderful graphic novels like Blankets, Bone, Box Office Poison, Stangers In Paradise (all which have their own continuity issues, but are contained in a much smaller body of work for each), are the true mainstream of comics and the books, you, the non-comics person SHOULD be reading. And, don't get me wrong...there are great super-hero books to read that don't really require a PhD in comicology. Books like Watchmen, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Batman: Year One and many, many more.
So, yeah...this entry is about comics in crisis...I know I've rambled on and off topic. But at least you didn't have to read every other one of my entries since Nov. 27, 2004 to figure out what I'm talking about.
I got into comics seriously around the time of Frank Miller's Dark Knight, and I got lots of different stuff: DC Batman & Superman titles,Love & Rockets, Concrete, The Maze Agency, Ms. Tree, etc. I fell off the bandwagon when DC started to glut the market with Batman stuff, but I still picked up Concrete whenever I saw it. I tried to get back into the second run of Love & Rockets, but found that I couldn't "go home again," so to speak, but I recently picked up the latest Concrete, called "The Human Dilemma," and I was pleased to see that Paul Chadwick still has "it" with this book. It's as nifty as ever.
Posted by: Shell | 03/31/2005 at 08:02 AM