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Underground > Comic Books >

Infinite Crisis

  
  

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Aertho
10:51 / 11.11.05
Tom and Booster should double with Brian Braddock and I.
 
 
Mister Six, whom all the girls
11:57 / 11.11.05
matsya, I agree it is a different ballgame.

There's a DC Editorial guy at another board I've been meaning to ask about this. Maybe I will... maybe he'll even tell me a few things.

But I do think that while DCU has gotten far more dangerous than ever before and driven characters to make decisions that cost them the trust of their team-mates, it's core was in the post-Crisis world. It was here that Luthor became a businessman rather than a wacky mad scientist, where we saw Gotham as a real gritty world and the JLA as a bumbling group of fools who stumbled blindly from one adventure to the other (which I LOVED as a kid and still find fascinating). The former stoic no-nonsense DCU had been altered to become a rather twisted picture of itself. Hardly equivalent to the recent antics, but there was a decisive shift in the style and makeup of the characters.

Was the post-Crisis DCU closer to reality? I dunno about that, but definitely different.

And I think that 8C is connecting the dots in much the same way Geoff Johns has done with Rebirth and Hawkman.
 
 
Matthew Fluxington
12:15 / 11.11.05
The shift is the 80s is really that the comics became postmodern. Some people went for deconstruction, others went for humorous irony. The push in the past few years is basically an awkward blend of neoconservative classicism and the shock tactics of the grim-and-gritty persuasion. Essentially, we're dealing with a group of writers/editors and an audience who desperately want to read old school superheroes, but need (NEED!) to believe that what they are reading is SERIOUS and SOPHISTICATED, even though the majority of them have an immature notion of what that would entail. This is why irony and humor is shunned by this lot - they are convinced that no one could ever take that stuff to be MATURE art. It's rather like the Academy Awards, actually. Self-conciously "important" overblown middlebrow epics always have the edge.
 
 
Mario
15:24 / 11.11.05
So, basically, the DCU has gone Goth?
 
 
Mario
16:01 / 11.11.05
http://www.newsarama.com/dcnew/JSA/LevitzJSA.htm

Definitely puts a topspin on the situation, don't you think?
 
 
Mister Six, whom all the girls
17:23 / 11.11.05
Well... I'm not 100% sold on Levitz as a writer, it's like my Dad wooing my mom and playing football again 30 years later, you know? How long has it been since Paul wrote what were actually not very great comics?

The concept and sales pitch is ace but... Oh Hell, I'll give in and be excited.

(everyone can have a laugh at seeing the words developed and Power Girl in the same sentence over in the article)
 
 
FinderWolf
19:36 / 11.11.05
Hopefully it'll be better than Stan Lee's comics writing efforts over the past, oh, 10 years.
 
 
FinderWolf
19:38 / 11.11.05
Not that Levitz and Stan Lee are truly parallels, but I say it only in the sense of 'reasonably well-known comics writers who were active and fan favorites in the 70s and haven't written anything since then.'
 
 
SiliconDream
20:37 / 11.11.05
I think that may have been done on purpose. If, as we seem to be thinking, Alexander is not on the side of the angels, it's possible that those are the only images Kal-L has seen. So, from his perspective, the DCU has become an evil place.
It could be. Since most of the brainwashing and rape horribleness was retconned into the past--the pre-Crisis era of the Post-Crisis universe, I suppose--Alexander could have been pointing out that stuff to Kal-L all along.
 
 
Mario
21:23 / 11.11.05
Well, the last thing Levitz wrote that had any real acclaim was probably the Great Darkness Saga. But he wrote Legion for 7 years (1982-1989). So he's hardly a "70's writer".
 
 
Aertho
00:12 / 12.11.05
Okay, so I'm sure some of you may have already figured this out, but the reason the Post-Crisis universe is in such bad shape is because Ye Olde Superman didn't merge with it on a fundamental level.
 
 
Triplets
01:09 / 12.11.05
That's lovely, Chad. I'm just hoping Golden Supes can punch his way to the firmament of existence and give it a big hug.
 
 
Mario
01:16 / 12.11.05
Chad may be onto something. What if the fact that Alexander took him and Lois (and Superboy-Prime, perhaps) "off-the-board" prevented the merger of Earths from occuring correctly? Maybe he was SUPPOSED to be a part of the new DCU?
 
 
Matthew Fluxington
01:36 / 12.11.05
Yeah, yeah. Let's not forget all the evidence that we have to support the notion that Ye Olde Superman is a DICK.
 
 
Mario
02:30 / 12.11.05
That's the Silver Age Superman, not the Golden Age one...
 
 
Matthew Fluxington
12:35 / 12.11.05
Fair enough, but I've got some Golden Age-era Superman comics where he's just as much of a dick.
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
11:50 / 13.11.05
Back on Infinite Crisis, what do people think about the art on issue 2?
 
 
The Falcon
13:00 / 13.11.05
I think it looks real good, yo.

Jiminez is definitely in the heritage of Perez (obvs.) and Garcia-Lopez; I remember seeing the latter doing those kind've Escher/Athenian mashup structures like the one Buddy travels to and being really struck by it. His multifarious panelling has always been a strength, and continues to be one here. Cosmic. Seems a natural choice, really, and I'm not too keen to imagine a lesser light handling the book.

Power Girl's extreme buffness is not without precedent (scroll down to Fabry pic), although it doesn't quite match her cousin's physiology.
 
 
miss wonderstarr
15:44 / 13.11.05
I'm kind of surprised that this thread is so much about the general issues of continuity and long-term knock-on effects, and so little about the specific issue: usually a new monthly prompts focused, specific discussion of dialogue, frames, moments, but here the debate is all really big-scale and sometimes doesn't seem to touch much on 8C #2 at all.

I'm not going to buck that trend entirely here, but the second thing I'm surprised about is how unmoved many people seem to be by what's going on in these first two issues. Maybe I'm a bit innocent and unspoiled, having not read any of the lead-in series or the multitude of spin-off, tangentially-related titles (crucially, it all works just fine and mostly makes sense for me nonetheless) but on almost every page here there's the feeling that something momentous is happening. I mean, "multiverse" has been a taboo word in the fictional DCU for 20 years! Here are characters saying the utterly unsayable, about Earth-One and vibrating frequencies, and those characters are people I grew up with in 1970s comics (that Superboy looks immediately retro) but who haven't been seen since I was 16. They're actually there again, in continuity. Stuff is changing... things are really happening. Things that matter. And I'm even talking like I'm in the middle of Crisis.

But this is one of the biggest news stories in the DCU I've ever witnessed, making that Hypertime episode seem like a hoax. It feels like living through the closest you come to a world-changing event in superhero comics.

I'm reluctant to make a comment about breasts as I've been doing that on the Bulleteer thread, but anyone who mocked the depiction of Alix Harrower as unrealistically T&A should really check out that ludicrous rack on Power Girl. She looks like she's overbalancing into Superman's arms.

Also, she doesn't seem to look much like Supergirl in terms of face or figure... or have I missed something, and there's no reason why she should?
 
 
miss wonderstarr
16:01 / 13.11.05
I see from that very well-illustrated and witty article, linked to above, that Power Girl canonically has a large bust. The evidence in that article makes it less ridiculous somehow ... if she's the Katie Price of the DCU, and it's recognised, joked about and occasionally drooled over by other characters, that seems less silly than every female character having the same build, and Power Girl simply inheriting stock-superheroine boobs.
 
 
Mark Parsons
17:05 / 13.11.05
I'm enjoying the series so far. It's nice seeing hte Earth-2 cast again, but hopefully, they will not be the primary antagonists here: that'd cheapen their legacy.

Am I alone in finding Jiminez's depiction of Power Girl kida sorta repulsive. She looks like a Soviet-era bodybuilder: all she lacks is a peach fuzz mustache! Yuk!
 
 
Aertho
17:30 / 13.11.05
8C#2:

page1: Animal Man says bye to his family.
page2: Animal Man meets the rest of Troia's team
page3: The universe is off kilter, aliens are screaming, and Firestrom meets Supergirl.
page4: Power Girl is attacked by agents of VU. Luthor needs her alive.
page5: Power Girl is saved by...
page6: ...Ye Olde Superman
page7: Perry White wants Lois Lane to get back to work. Fit's hit the Shan!
page8: Clark Kent changes into Superman to fight the Fit in the Shan.
page9: VU decides to use Black Adam for a mind-controlling device.
page10: Armored Luthor has a headache and is in Alaska.
page11: Ye Olde Superman and Power Girl are flying to the North Pole.
page12: Power Girl meets Superboy-Prime and Alexander Luthor.
page13: Fit in Shans affect Power Girl's mind in certain ways.
page14: Summary of Crisis part 1
page15: Summary of Crisis part 2
page16: Summary of Crisis part 3
page17: Summary of Crisis part 4
page18: Summary of Post-Crisis with Fit in the Shan.
page19: Power Girl meets Lois Kent.
page20: Booster is back from the future and after Blue Beetle's scarab.
page21: Joker is sad at not being invited into VU.
page22: Lois Kent cleans up Power Girl's mind.
page23: Power Girl is happy.
page24: Batman and Alfred bicker.
page25: Batman and Brother Eye bicker.
page26: Wonder Woman is over Themyscira fighting OMACs.
page27: same
page28: same
page29: Ye Olde Superman explains his plan part 1
page29: Ye Olde Superman explains his plan part 2

It's not that we don't want to talk about the issue, but that nothing really happened in it. The book felt all over the place. Page after page of chaos. Fit's in the Shan, and the only thing worth talking about is Ye Olde Superman's idiot plan.
 
 
Triplets
19:24 / 13.11.05
For those who like visual aids, peep this:

Image hosted by Photobucket.com


That's all the subplots in issue 2. I wouldn't even call most of them subplots because there's only 1/2 threads that actually last more than a scene or move things forwards: Grand Daddy Supes and his Plan and the summary of the Crisis which just feeds into the former, really.

Notice how many of them don't actually GO anywhere? I count five threads at least that could've been jettisoned or - as Supes Plan isn't really enough to carry a whole issue - dump three and turn the remaining into something worth reading. Baaad baaad writing.
 
 
miss wonderstarr
19:47 / 13.11.05
I wasn't complaining about the way the book was being discussed, just giving my gush of response to it. As for those subplots, interesting exercise but the tone is maybe a little over-critical from the start, and I wonder if it wouldn't be possible to rubbish or trivialise the narratives of most monthly comics in this way. It's true that tons of things are going on -- personally, I like that sense of huge span and mosaic. Surely many of these subplots that you're treating as redundant dead-ends either feed in from somewhere else (again, I don't mind feeling that events were going on behind my back) and/or are going to be picked up in future issues? This series is trying to tell stories across the universe... if it sometimes seems fragmented and wild in its shifts of perspective, I think that's understandable and I think it's possible to enjoy that as a rush... at least, as an unusual type of story. You say "bad" story; I'm finding it pretty exciting, a cornball epic.
 
 
A
05:57 / 14.11.05
A couple of asides-

Firstly, I'd love to see more pictures of Superman punching a horse.

Secondly, Geoff Johns is like the Pat Boone to Grant Morrison's Little Richard.

Carry On.
 
 
Mario
10:57 / 14.11.05
Does this mean Johns will eventually do a hardcore splatterpunk title?

(Pat Boone released a heavy metal album, a couple of years ago...it was scary)
 
 
Matthew Fluxington
11:01 / 14.11.05
Kovacs, you seem like such an apologist!

Emily Triplets is correct - this book is trying to be the hub for this vast storyline that does not actually tie together in any kind of graceful way. Having key bits of other storylines pop up for a page in this miniseries only confuses the other storylines and makes this issue incoherent. It would have been been better to leave the the Power Girl/Ye Olde Superman storyline unique to this miniseries, and let the other storylines exist in the other ongoing series. That way, Infinite Crisis gets to seem like a real story rather than just a random assortment of plot points. As it is, it's incomprehensible to people who do not read/know about every other thing in the DC Universe, and it's just amazingly crass, designed solely for the purpose of encouraging other purchases.
 
 
miss wonderstarr
11:52 / 14.11.05
Kovacs, you seem like such an apologist!

I think it's Barbelith itself that lends me this humble tone... a culture of conflict avoidance



Emily Triplets is correct - this book is trying to be the hub for this vast storyline that does not actually tie together in any kind of graceful way. Having key bits of other storylines pop up for a page in this miniseries only confuses the other storylines and makes this issue incoherent. It would have been been better to leave the the Power Girl/Ye Olde Superman storyline unique to this miniseries, and let the other storylines exist in the other ongoing series.

I agree it's not graceful, but I dig the sense that so much is going on, and all we can do is dip into it. It's giving me a really old-skool sense of a busy, vibrant, messy fictional universe... the feeling I get when I read a wikipedia entry on Supergirl or drop in on one of this forum's trivia threads and realise there's so much history and arcana I didn't know. I don't care if it's messy! I think that's fun! I think it's hilarious that Power Girl's bust size is canonical and in-continuity, that she was retconned as an Atlantean (!? the fuck ?!), that she's called something so outrageously lame as Power Girl but that we're so used to it we don't much notice.

This is what makes the DCU such stupid fun to me; the mixed-up mythology, the pseudo-science, the half-assed attempts to make things make sense when they never will (rules about how susceptible "Superman" is to "magic" ... the very idea of rationalising two fairytale concepts is appealingly doomed). I love the way team members refer to each other by their stupid codenames in conversation, and in capital letters. I like seeing all the third-stringers and Z-listers coming out of the woodwork, being zipped off to some cosmic splash page and picked off as cannon fodder, with a tearjerking farewell if they're lucky. When Joker pops up for a page, that feels like some melodramatic old big-shot like Pacino suddenly appearing for a cameo: hey, it's the fucking Joker! He's been around since 1940 and here he is killing off all that gang made up of playing cards, and I guess they're all out of continuity forever now!

I don't know, man... maybe I've just got the "Eyes of a Child" and you've left that way behind! But this is what the DCU is all about to me... daft, huge-cast, world-shattering, cornball bad science fiction taking itself dead seriously and being crazy fun as a result.

As it is, it's incomprehensible to people who do not read/know about every other thing in the DC Universe, and it's just amazingly crass, designed solely for the purpose of encouraging other purchases.

You can't really say this reading is "correct" when I've enjoyed it and understood it, but not bought any of the spin-offs and clearly exhibit a great deal of ignorance about the surrounding lore and logic of the DCU.
 
 
Aertho
11:57 / 14.11.05
kovacs- I'm enjoying it too, for the messy aspect you describe. But it's so EMPTY. It feels like I'm reading an issue of Spawn.
 
 
Aertho
12:02 / 14.11.05
I'd retcon the Superman vulnerable-to-magic-thing as Krypton being an imaginal realm, orbiting the Sun on Path 20. Makes the Nietzsche stuff more accessible, too. But then, I'd also make J'onn a daimon.
 
 
Mister Six, whom all the girls
12:03 / 14.11.05
Seems to be a schism between those who have no idea whta's what with issue two being a jumping on point even and doing fine versus those who have no idea and are angry.

Could be numerous things and I'm sure sundry ones, but it reminds me of extensively explaing the fan reaction to a certain Dr Who story as being problematic.

She calmly listened to all I had to say and at the end shrugged, sayong 'Weird monsters, lots of talking, over acting and sock puppets... I was entertained... that was Dr Who.'

I wager if I brought up the weak plot threads to her she'd shrug and say 'Well yeah, but it's a comic. Nothing makes sense in one issue, that's just the nature of the beast' or something.
 
 
Aertho
19:15 / 14.11.05
Cover for issue five.


Looks like our guy loses.
 
 
miss wonderstarr
20:12 / 14.11.05
I wish they wouldn't allow these spoiler-heavy images online so far in advance, to be honest.
 
 
LDones
20:15 / 14.11.05
The preview pages for that Levitz JSA business show Earth-2 Lois remembering an old adventure when E-2 Supes was younger, involving Power Girl, a smiling Batman, and the Gentleman Ghost. One of the pages shows a sad Ma Hunkel cleaning the empty JSA base full of statues of the JSAers.

So either Ye Olde Superman takes the cake, or they learn to coexist, or they learn that The Other Worlds Were Never Gone. *Insert Music and Rainbow*

The prospects of what they may or may not do here are fascinating. Abandon Post-Crisis Continuity? Insane! Open up the Multiverse completely again? Gloriously Confusing!


I get the feeling that a lot of misdirection is coming out of DC here. I don't necessarily think the JSA announcement is a fake, but it may be.

Didio's gone on record saying Darkseid will not be showing up at all in 8C, which I have a hard time believing, especially considering he was using Alex Luthor as a viewing room and power conduit in the first one...
 
 
FinderWolf
20:18 / 14.11.05
So it's clear (esp. from that cover) that Ye Olde Superman is effectively the antagonist -- he's trying to push his worldview on us and the heroes of 'our DCU.'

But it's not a picture of Superman punching a horse, I'll say that much. (what prompted the 'more pictures of Superman punching horses comment above...? I must admit I'm befuddled by that. Maybe there was a pic. of Supes punching a horse in 8C #2 that I missed/don't remember...?)
 
  

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