Worlds will live. Worlds will die. The DC Universe will be the same again.
Crisis on Infinite Earths celebrates its 35th anniversary this month, so now seems as good a time as any to cover how one could get that granddaddy of all Big Two event comics from the longbox to the bookshelf. Crisis can be a complicated series to bind. The main maxiseries was only 12 issues, but 12 issues preceded by 38 comics featuring foreshadowing cameos (usually limited to a single page) by The Monitor and augmented by 48 contemporaneous tie-in comics.
Reading all those nearly 100 comics is in no way required to enjoy Crisis. But readers cite different combinations of those comics as their ‘definitive’ Crisis: just the maxiseries, the maxiseries and a few tie-ins, no maxiseries and just a few tie-ins, or the whole magilla?
What happens when Crisis‘ near-infinite content combinations meet comic binding’s unlimited possibilities?
Let’s find out!
(Unless otherwise noted, all artwork by George Pérez.)
Comic companies aren’t known for soft-selling their products. But with this story, that ‘Worlds live . . .’ tagline wasn’t hyperbole; it was fact.
Written and drawn by the red-hot New Teen Titans team of Marv Wolfman and George Pérez, Crisis on Infinite Earths did see worlds & heroes live and die (and die and die) as the DC multiverse fought to keep the Anti-Monitor from wiping out its entire existence.
Total annihilation was averted, but with a final body count far higher than anything fans had seen before. A lot of those killed were cannon-fodder Z-listers (did anyone really shed a tear over The Ten-Eyed Man?), true, but Kara Zor-El’s Supergirl and Barry Allen’s Flash also joined the choir invisible. Readers weren’t expecting staid and predictable DC Comics to be THIS merciless, but the publisher was on a mission.
DC had been playing second fiddle to Marvel for years at this point. 1985 was the company’s 50th anniversary and they were looking to change the perception that that history made their comics impenetrable to new readers. Charged with streamlining their superhero line, Crisis was DC’s boldest move to wrest fan attention away from the Marvel-ous competition, and it worked. This story is still an epoch marker for DC history that fans continue to revisit 35 years later.
A FINITE NUMBER OF THINGS YOU MIGHT NOT KNOW ABOUT
CRISIS ON INFINITE EARTHS
1. Why A Crisis Was Necessary
Not all superhero universes are equal.
Marvel’s characters were part of a shared universe almost from the beginning. The Timely Comics roster of Captain America, Namor, and the android Human Torch weren’t created in the same setting but quickly found themselves crossing over with each other. By the early days of the official Marvel Universe, Kirby/Lee/Ditko et al. were explicitly putting characters like the FF and Spider-Man and Cap (again) in the same setting together. Having most of that setting built by a small group of creators under a single editor was crucial in limiting internal contradictions and inconsistencies. Keep that in mind.
DC’s ‘universe’ came less from a Big Bang and more from a patchwork quilt being made from superhero properties. Even DC Comics as we know it today originally started as two different publishers: National Allied Publications (with Superman & Batman) and All-American Publications (with Wonder Woman, Green Lantern, The Flash, The Atom, and Hawkman) that merged in 1944 as National Comics Publications. On top of those characters and other in-house creations, DC’s roster expanded with the acquisition of the Quality Comics line (with Plastic Man and the Blackhawks) in 1956, the Captain Marvel line from Fawcett in late 1960’s and the Charlton Action Heroes in 1985. (The only Marvel equivalent I can think of is their acquisition of Neil Gaiman’s Angela character from Todd McFarlane Productions.)
It didn’t take long for those characters to team-up, but bringing those separate and often-contradictory worlds together took some work, especially once you had multiple versions of the same hero (The Flash’s Jay Garrick & Barry Allen, for example). The idea of multiple earths solved the logistics problem but not the confusion one. That would take the type of editorial cohesion that, frankly, was the opposite of DC’s confederacy-of-fiefdoms model. This laissez faire attitude led to years and years of instances like, to quote an example from the Crisis #1 foreword, Aquaman’s Atlantis not syncing up with Lori Lemaris’ Atlantis from Action Comics, and so on.
After 50 years, DC’s publishing line was due for a revamp.
2. The Cover That Launched A Thousand Imitations!
The cover for Crisis #7 has to be the series’ most iconic image. It also has to be one of the most homaged comic book covers of all time. Don’t believe me? Check out this page for (almost) all the decedents and antecedents of that cover.
Here’s what Pérez himself had to say about the cover’s resonance in his 2003 Modern Masters interview:
- The Last Days of the Justice Society – Starts off just after the end of the maxiseries with the funeral of Earth-2 Robin & Huntress, who were killed in the Crisis. The rest of the special showcases the adventure that takes the JSA off the DC map until Armageddon 2001.
- The History of the DC Universe #1-2 – Prestige Format illustrated prose miniseries by Wolfman & Pérez laying out the new Earth’s timeline.
- Legends of the DC Universe: Crisis on Infinite Earths – Essentially Crisis #4.5 (barring one big continuity goof). Written by Wolfman and drawn by Paul Ryan 20 years after the original maxiseries, this shows the fate of Earth-D, whose mightiest heroes are also the most racially diverse in the multiverse.
- Animal Man (v1988) #23-24 – Crisis ends with only the Psycho-Pirate remembering pre-Crisis DC as he’s locked away in Arkham Asylum. Grant Morrison picks up that thread and runs with it in the way only 80’s Morrison can.
- The Flash (v1987) #149-150 – During the ‘Chain Lightning’ storyline, Wally teams up with Barry for a pre-Crisis adventure, only for Barry to get killed in the process. But if he’s dead, who’s going to blow up that anti-matter cannon from issue #8 and save every one of us?
- Starman Annual #1 – One of the stories in this issue focuses on the tragic fate of Prince Gavyn, expanding on his cameo from issue #10.
- JLA: Incarnations #5 – The main story showing JLA Detroit (Commander Steel, Gypsy, Vibe, Vixen, and Martian Manhunter) stepping up to the challenge of the Crisis is surprisingly good, but the real gem here is the Ostrander/Breyfogle strip focusing on Barry’s last moments against the anti-matter cannon.
- Christmas With The Super-Heroes #2 – Deadman gets a little Christmas visit from a Superghost of Crisis Past.
THE COMPLETIST APPROACH
Whew! That brings the issue count close to 120 comics. How many books do you think it would take to include all those comics?
Volume 1: Pre-Crisis Monitor, Part 1
Volume 2: Pre-Crisis Monitor, Part 2
The Pre-Crisis Monitor appearances can fit into two books if you decide to leave the comics intact. Stripping the pages out is certainly a possibility, in which case these two books would be reduced to around 30 pages that can be added to the beginning of the next volume.
The Crisis maxiseries and all contemporaneous tie-ins can fit in four volumes. I’ve opted to thread the tie-in issues throughout the 12 Crisis issues, but you can just as easily arrange them as one book for the maxiseries and three for the tie-ins. Again, this map precludes leaving the tie-in issues intact.
The remaining post-Crisis and supplemental material can fit in one volume. Though it’s tempting to move the Legends of the DC Universe oneshot to its chronological place in Volume 4, I would avoid doing so spoils a big reveal in the following Crisis issue.
THE CURATED APPROACH
CRISIS ON INFINITE EARTHS
Written by: Marv Wolfman, Grant Morrison, John Ostrander, Mark Waid, James Robinson
Drawn by: George Pérez, Chas Troug, Paul Ryan, Paul Pelletier, Bret Blevins, Val Semeiks, Norm Breyfogle, Dick Giordano
Inked by: Jerry Ordway, George Pérez, Doug Hazlewood, Vince Russell, Bob McLeod, Bret Blevins, Prentis Rollins, Kevin Conrad, Joe Rubinstein, Dick Giordano
Colored by: Adrienne Roy, Tom McCraw, Tatjana Wood, John Kalisz, Kevin Somers
Lettered by: John Costanza, Ken Lopez, Gaspar Saladino, Bill Oakley, Steve Haynie
Cover by: George Pérez
Published by: DC Comics
Collecting:
- Crisis on Infinite Earths #1-12
- The History of the DC Universe #1-2
- Animal Man (v1988) #23-24
- Legends of the DC Universe: Crisis on Infinite Earths
- The Flash (v1987) #149-150
- Starman Annual #1
- JLA: Incarnations #5
- Christmas With The Super-Heroes #2
Technical Details:
- Anthology release
- Hardcover
- 11.2″ x 7.3″
- 70# matte paper stock
- Sewn-binding free from spine
Back Matter:
- The Official Crisis on Infinite Earths Index
- The Official Crisis on Infinite Earths Crossover Index
- Comics Interview (David Anthony Kraft’s) #25
- Amazing Heroes #61, 96
- The completist approach will end up costing more money (either buying the material or binding more volumes to encompass it all) but might be simpler in the long run because you can avoid content-mapping headaches.
- The curated approach flips that dynamic; less upfront cost but more time and mental energy sifting through and selecting specific content from the masses available.
