Comic Bookin'

I am pleased to report that I've spent the last few days wallowing in wacky comic continuity foolishness. See, my comic book grounding is mostly Marvel; not DC. That's not a hard-and-fast rule; obviously I know the basics of the big DC guys. And there are some Marvel heroes, like Silver Surfer and Daredevil, that I just don't get. But for the most part, I don't really know the DC heroes.

So I wanted to change that, or at least to know exactly what "Pre-Crisis" and "Post-Crisis" meant. Because really, most of what I know about DC comics is probably obsolete by now anyway.

So I loaded up on the graphic novels. First, obviously, I had to get Crisis on Infinite Earths, the whopping big story where they collapsed all the alternate universes and theoretically wiped out all the continuity problems so they could get started on putting in a lot of new ones. They also theoretically powered down a few heroes, but that was back in 1985, and in the twenty years since, power creep has done what it does. Like how the Flash at the end of the series (Wally West) could run barely the speed of sound, but now he's back up to "run so fast he can travel in time or vibrate his molecules through things or whatever."

But before I read that, I wanted to get acquainted with the basics of the alternate-universe stuff they were clearing up, so I also got the three volumes of Crisis on Multiple Earths -- note that now I'm talking about "multiple" Earths. Got that? "Infinite" is the big thing in 1985; "Multiple" is what I'm talking about right now. It's a collection of Justice League of America ("JLA") stories that started in the early 1970s, crossing over with an alternate earth (called "Earth-2", which seems like kind of a put-down) where the Golden Age DC heroes are still around.

Did that explanation make sense? I have no confidence that it did, because the thing I'm trying to explain makes very little sense to begin with. So here's a brief DC Comics history lesson (most of which I learned in the last week, although I knew the general outline already). Basically, they started with Superman a long time ago and quickly followed up with Batman, Wonder Woman, the Flash, Green Lantern, and a bunch of really goofy guys. That was the "Golden Age," which is officially 1938 through 1945. Right. Eventually, the comic book market crashed and hardly any comics were left, although Superman and Batman soldiered on.

Then you get the "Silver Age", starting in the mid-1950s. As comic books pick back up, new versions of old heroes are introduced, which is where it gets weird. The new Green Lantern has never heard of the old guy, who had an entirely different background (although he still had the green ring). The new Flash names himself that after reading about the old Flash in a comic book -- which apparently means that the old Flash is fictional. But it's still the same Superman that it's always been, and in theory, he should remember all the old guys and say things like "You're Green Lantern? Do you know Alan Scott?"

So like I say, eventually they decided that the Golden Age guys were actually on "Earth-2", including an alternate Superman, which frankly makes no sense, because it implies that somewhere along the way, DC switched from Earth-2 to Earth-1. But whatever, the point is that starting in 1963, they did regular crossovers where the JLA (the Earth-1 guys with Superman, Wonder Woman, Aquaman, and so on) met up with the "Justice Society of America" of Earth-2. Aside from the heroes with equivalents on both sides (which was eventually almost all of the JLA) there were guys like Hourman (he takes a Miraclo pill and gains superpowers -- for exactly sixty minutes) and Johnny Thunder (a guy with power over a wisecracking genie).

The fun of these stories is that first you have the general goofiness of Silver Age (or as I like to think of them, "mid-sixties") comics, where every character narrates all their actions in thought balloons: "My only chance is to hit his hand exactly right with a judo throw! Here I go . . . got him! Good thing I was trained in the martial arts when I was young!" And then you also have the Golden Ago ("old-timey") superheroes, albeit filtered through the Silver Age writers.

Okay, so that's the background on the "Crisis on Multiple (not Infinite) Earths. There are three collected volumes and I read all three, so I could watch the art and layout styles change through the years. I was also pleased that I got to see a lot of (to me) obscure DC heroes that I recognized from Neil Gaiman's Sandman. Like, for example, both versions of the original The Sandman. Neat!

So you've got a cheerfully incomprehensible backstory and lots of alternate Earths. Having gotten away with Earth-1 and Earth-2, the writers went understandably nuts. Not only were there new Earths for every set of superheroes not otherwise in continuity (when DC picked up Captain Marvel from Fawcett, he and his whole mythos were eventually retrofitted into "Earth-S"), but sometimes it's just fun to say "Look! A world where WWII went on for fifty years and the main superhero is a guy called Uncle Sam!" And this is where Crisis on Infinite Earths comes in: the overall effect was to collapse the DC multiiverse down to one universe with a semi-coherent storyline and also sell a lot of comic books while killing off a few heroes. Your basic Total Continuity Reset.

The story of the Crisis was . . . okay, I guess. I don't have much invested in the characters, so I'm not overwrought when they die, especially in a twenty-year-old comic. I approve of the scale on which the story was told, although there's no denying that the huge multi-issue crossover led to some poor imitations (as a Marvel reader, I didn't really mind Secret Wars. However, Secret Wars 2 was just silly).

So now, as you can see, I feel like I have a fairly thorough grounding in DC Comics history, which should mean that I'll get more of the jokes in the Justice League Unlimited cartoon. However, I'm a little worried that this thing called Countdown to Infinite Crisis is going to negate everything I just learned. I wouldn't be surprised.