Critical-Hits pwns Infinite Crisis

Watch as we ramble our way through DC’s mega-crossover event, years in the making. We assume that you’ve read Infinite Crisis, so beware of spoilers if that matters to you.

Our reviewers are:

Bartoneus: Buys primarily Marvel. “The Civil War open was 3x more refined then the entire run of Infinite Crisis. That’s right, that one issue in my opinion was better then all seven Crisis issues.”

The Game: Buys primarily DC. “I’m such a big geek that there’s no way it could have not appealed to me. Still, I had plenty to nitpick.”

Main Event: Enjoys both DC and Marvel, but buys mostly Marvel. “IC wrapped up nicely, an excellent crossover that should be the template for future big company endeavors.”

Main Event: I’m so glad Joker did in Luthor. I was waiting for that part of Issue 1 or 2 to come into play.

The Game: I thought it’d be more elaborate, not as straightforward, but I liked it nonetheless.

Main Event: Yeah, and it’s kinda silly that Real Luthor just basically walked up and showed Joker where he was.

The Game: There’s a LOT of inconsistencies/nonsensical moments in that issue, but I’m willing to let it slide.

Main Event: What other problems stood out for you? I think the action was cramped. Some of the small panels I had no idea what was going on.

The Game: I agree with that. The worst offender was the Superboy/Superman/Superman fight on Mogo (even Mogo’s inclusion was kind of random- let’s throw Alan Moore’s sentient Green Lantern planet in here.) It was hard to tell who was fighting who, and saying what.

There’s also the nonsensical problems, that show up in 7 mos. Villians that showed up in the Villians United Special not a week earlier are now somewhere else, in a different outfit, with different facial hair (in the case of The Riddler.) I also read that people were upset that Superboy’s powers now seemed to include: being able to freeze people in Space (which is already as cold as it’s gonna get) and being able to fly many times faster than the speed of light to go from Earth to Krypton that quick.

Bartoneus: My main beef is with the fact that in order to get more then 35% of Infinite Crisis you have to read the connected runs like Villains United and especially the OMAC Project, which was escalated by the fact that it wasn’t originally solicited as part of the IC deal so stores drastically under-ordered it and it sold out within an hour at many places. I realize that it’s easy enough to pick up the trade for each and every single one of these, but I’m not looking to give these companies a ton of money just to get a good story out of something.

The main event story should be almost entirely comprehensible if you only purchase the core run. ie – House of M 1-8, IC 1-7, etc. etc. This is where I think Marvel managed to beat DC by a long shot. I read a few of the connected House of M titles and they were on average not very good, but the House of M run was great considering the things they had been doing lately in Avengers beforehand and in many of the other comics throughout their mutant comics. It was definitely not necessary to buy all, or even any, of the off-shoot runs to understand or get close to 80% out of House of M.

Obviously they’re all going to advertise these as a huge run over 20 some comics and try to get you to buy as many as possible, which is one of the reasons that huge crossovers like these are horrible in almost every way aside from marketing and business. It seems like both companies have been trying to fix this, but my main argument is that DC has done a worse job at it.

The Game: I don’t know how much I can argue this since I DID read nearly all the lead in series (but not all the “tie-ins”) but 35% is definitely an exaggeration. In fact, most of what happened in those series was not important to IC. OMAC was probably the least useful: there’s a big satellite that Batman made, and OMACs which are generic bad guys, and they’re attacking Superheroes. That’s pretty much the extent of it. Day of Vengeance was just to get magic all wackified, Rann-Thanager was just… uhh, there’s a war in space, and a big hole. Villians United (which was by far the best one) was the most important- it tells you that there are two Luthors running around, one of whom is from somewhere else is the one running a massive society of super-villians. You get the rundown of everything in issue 1. Maybe it wasn’t communicated as well as it could there, but those issues were NOT important, just stage setting.

Without getting too far into the actual strengths/weaknesses of Marvel’s megacrossovers, I enjoy having the “shared universe” feel. While there were some snafus is making random stuff required reading, overall, I liked being immersed, I liked being able to pick up issues of stuff I don’t normally buy for another piece of the big picture, and for any comic company, it’s the only way that makes business sense.

Bartoneus: I’ll admit that 35% was an exaggeration; it would more realistically be in the 60-75% range of understanding IC without reading any of the tie-ins. But because of that lack of understanding, which is still a decent chunk, I only ended up liking about 35% of what happened. You admit that the first issue of Infinite Crisis is not very good at introducing things, and that’s a huge problem with it. Back while I was reading them, issues 2 and 4 of IC were my favorites because they served to actually explain in a semi-reasonable way what was going on. With Earth 2, the Multiverse, Power Girl, the old Superman, and these new villains they’d never really introduced. Therein lies a huge problem, these new villains were never really introduced in Infinite Crisis in a way that would be fitting for them or the series. Several of the large revelations of the series, typically in issues 1, 3, 5, 6, or 7 were completely inconsequential to me. I didn’t care about them at all. On the other hand, the moments that were meant to be ‘holy crap that’s cool’ moments read through no matter what I knew about the characters or series. When all of the Flashes join together to get rid of the unexplained new Superboy, despite not knowing his motivations at all, I still thought this was kickass. The results of it were cool too, but when it came to plot and it involved Uncle Sam, or some group of characters that I have no idea about getting killed, there’s just no point in it.

In Marvel’s crossovers you get a lot of the same cameos from small-time characters, but they -rarely- take center stage in any part of the story. DC dealt masterfully with Blue Beetle, a character I’d never really known anything about, in the IC prelude. They made me love him, and then they killed him. Everything they did with that was marvelous, even introducing a new Blue Beetle in a way that I like and not just resurrecting him. Too bad I know that they just did the same thing with Firestorm, another character I don’t really know, but from what I’ve seen they quickly replaced the new kid with an older Firestorm, or the original one, or something. That’s as whack as Claremont writing off Psylocke’s death like it was some huge plan to bring her back. She was great as a dead character, almost as good as Ultimate Beast, a character who’s so good that their death is even better. Ongoing series have a lot of problems, one of the largest of which is character death. Superboy’s dead now? Watch some other writer crap all over Infinite Crisis in a year or two (hell, probably less) and bring back the Luthor-bred Superboy. If DC is smart they’ll keep him dead and replace him with the new EVIL-superboy that they hint at becoming a spectacular villain in the end.

My main views of these crossovers is how they stand up on their own with no tie-ins or anything. Aftermath, Decimation, Preludes, they may have important plot points but they cannot be essential to the main story, they must be additive. These crossovers must gain something from their tie-ins, not be bound to them in order to be coherent and complete.

The Game: I thought DC did a good job of summing up all of Crisis on Infinite Earths within 2 pages. I think you just focused on stuff that wasn’t important-Uncle Sam and his team was just another D-list team.

Really, now that I think about it, I think we’re both hopelessly colored by what we read, because we more easily adjust to the characters since we read all the books that gives us a better idea of what’s going on. It’s difficult for either of us to be objective.

Overall, though, I think it’s sloppy that the way to start a big crossover is to kill off a superteam.

Bartoneus: I’ll agree with you 100% on that, they’re starting to try and make character death mean something and in doing so they’re losing some characters that most likely -won’t- come back that could have done great for them by staying alive.

We are definitely not objective, but in the end the writers, artists, and every single reader is subjective based on what they read/have seen. How can we begin to look at these cross-overs objectively? Or should we just stick to our personal opinions on them, because I can still admit that there were parts of IC that were good, but overall I thought it was a lot of continuity fluff and crap that wasn’t dealt with. This also stems from the fact that I -HATE- DC’s history and continuity. I can barely deal with Mr. Myxylpytl or whatever being involved in the crap going on in Superman-Batman, whereas the Joker’s involvement is just plain confusing. There are a large number of comics from both companies these days that you just cannot read without knowing a ton about it.

The Game: Main point here: DC writes things that appeals to DC fans, Marvel writes things that appeals to Marvel fans. And I don’t see any way that the current Batman/Superman storyline can be in continuity at all. It’s a wreck of a story, and doesn’t make any sense based on developments with either Mr. Myx or Joker in other books. That, in and of itself (the fact that crappy stories exist) is not a reason to hate DC history and continuity.

And if you just hate the DCU in general, I recommend NOT BUYING THEM :).

Bartoneus: I like the DCU, primarily the characters of Batman and Superman, and the Teen Titans, Green Arrow, etc. I just hate some of their past continuity decisions which made things like the JSU, JSA, whatever the hell else. It’s along the same lines as the X-Men group history, it’s just painful to look at. I only buy a select number of DC books, and I loved Identity Crisis as you know, so I figured Infinite Crisis would only naturally progress with that, and it did on a few very faint levels. The prelude to IC was the best issue of it, unfortunately.

I feel very strongly that the best parts of Infinite Crisis were not in the series at all, but in the offshoot stories. I read quite a lot about the aftermath of what Wonder Woman did, which I can assume was killing the guy who took over the OMAC or whatever and killed the Blue Beetle, but I didn’t know anything about it first hand and would have been very interested in reading it. The creation of the OMAC project also fits in there, as a great story idea that wasn’t a part of the main IC run, also the whole thing with Villains United seems like it was integral to the story, and I wish that it had been included in the main run of Infinite Crisis.

Main Event: First off, DC has its shit togther. That’s a fact. From Identity Crisis to Countdown to Infiinite Crisis to the Mini’s all of it was slick, smooth, and exciting. Then, contrast with Marvel’s shot out of a cannon crapfest. House of M was SLOPPY and Drawn Out. Period. They alter the universe with Deus Ex Scarlett Witch, having her change things and the heroes left with no other option but to scratch their collective heads. That then goes into DECIMATION which deals with the ramifications of the event that was only concieved of to rival DC’s mega-crossover. The funny thing about House of M is that NONE OF IT MATTERED EXCEPT HOUSE OF M #7.

So, right off the bat, I have an interest in DC’s Infinite Crisis. It, to me seems like a slick operation. And it was. I know nothing about old DC continuity, but I understand that Superboy Prime, Old Supes, Lois, and Alexander Luthor all got written out of it. And now they’re unhappy. That makes sense. Throughout the whole thing it was exciting and action-packed. In fact, my only complaint might be that they could have strung out the series MORE, whereas House of M was basically a waste of time.

The DC tie in books, in my mind, added richness and depth, but seemed hardly necessary. They were perfect companions, in that they shed more light on things but were hardly necessary. The deaths in the books were great, either clearing out chaff characters that were cluttering up DCU or significant. The death of Superboy and the current Flash absence were both poignant in the circumstances in which they occured, and last in their impact. Danny is right, Superboy will be back, but he is a character that has a GOOD REASON to come back, and come back different. He was a clone to start, and he can be a clone once again. That does not diminish his sacrifice. Overall, Crisis is going to be regarded as the NEW template for mega crossovers. Sure, it has momentary flaws, but it was an amazing, exciting read that shook up the DCU in a real way.

The Game: Well, I guess the main conclusion to draw is that it appealed to some (those who read the lead-ins), but not others (those who wanted it to be a self contained story.) Then there are those who didn’t read the lead-ins and didn’t have a strong grasp on DCU history, but enjoyed it for what it was nonetheless. Personally, I thought it was a worthy successor to Crisis on Infinite Earths: a big event that also gave them room to clean up some continuity and tell new, awesome stories.

Bartoneus: I think it was indeed, and should have been blatantly marketed as a, sequel to the old Crisis. I took it as a standalone saga, a great story that absolutely had to involve all of the major and even the minor players in the DCU, which it very much was -except- for the standalone part. In this sense I really cannot judge it much more then to say that I enjoyed several parts of it, but as a whole it seemed poorly explained, badly done in few places, and worse then the tie-ins leading up to it.