How Critical Was the Crisis?
Robert M. Price
Soon the twentieth anniversary of DC’s Crisis on Infinite Earths will be upon us. DC was my first love
when I encountered comic books in the late 1950s. But I had dropped out for a
number of years after 1970, and from what I was later able to reconstruct, I
didn’t miss a whole lot in the Bronze Age, either at DC or Marvel during those
years. It was the Crisis series that
brought me back to avid comics reading. It was great to see people who cared enough
about the past history of the DC Universe to lay it to rest with respect on the
eve of a new era. Which leads me, first, to reflect on the DC tradition of
harmonizing contradictions, since this was, after all, the eventual point of
the whole Crisis on a large scale.
Unlike
Marvel, who would humbly award “No-Prizes” to perceptive pests if they spotted
a glitch, DC could match the most desperate fundamentalist Bible-quoters in
concocting wild rationalizations of “apparent contradictions” in a story. “Superman
once turned a diamond back into coal, even though some earlier issue of Superboy said he couldn’t? Well, Johnny,
you see, it was really a diamond from the Bizarro world, and…” The biggest
harmonization patched up the contradiction between the Golden Age cosmos of the
JSA and the Silver Age universe of the JLA. The latter had negated the former
as “mere” comic book lore. Barry Allen got the idea for his Flash persona from
reading Flash Comics starring the
completely fictional Jay Garrick! Clever! But trouble began once Barry and Jay
met in person! The solution? Earth 2, of course! It was the beginning of the
somewhat unwieldy “parallel world” doctrine. And it was great! You had to be
pretty stupid not to get it. If you were new to the whole thing, you could
catch up fast, because every year the JLA/JSA crossover would begin with a
reiteration of the whole rationale.
The
parallel earths multiplied. Earth Prime was the real world, our world, in which
DC Comics were published and there were no superheroes. On Earth 3 the Justice
League was replaced with their evil counterparts, the Crime Syndicate of
America (a terribly mundane name. I guess “Injustice League,” “Injustice
Society,” and “Injustice Gang” were already taken. Wouldn’t something like the “Injustice
Syndicate” or maybe the “Crime League” have sounded better?). Earth S was the
Fawcett Comics Universe, “S” standing for “Shazam,” I guess. Earth X (which
started out as “Earth Swastika,” vetoed by Julius Schwartz) was the home of the
Quality Comics characters, where the Second World War was still going on. Earth
4 was the Charlton Universe, once Dick Giordano bought up his former protégés
for DC.
If you want to get picky, there
must have been at least one more Earth in which Marvel and DC heroes co-existed,
as in the Superman/Spider-Man team-ups, unlike the later crossovers in which
Marvel’s heroes and DC’s met by breaching dimensional barriers. At any rate,
the tendency of harmonization up to this point was complication, embellishment,
ever greater complexity.
Years
later, it seemed that things had become too
complicated, downright baroque, so a new regime at DC decided to simplify and
streamline, and again, the method was harmonization. The result was the
12-issue series Crisis on Infinite Earths,
a masterpiece of ingenuity in many ways. But the Crisis also brought to an end
one of the most creative periods of DC Comics! DC was scoring points with the Legion of Superheroes, the New Teen Titans, Infinity, Inc., the All-Star
Squadron, etc. Don Heck was drawing Wonder
Woman! Gil Kane was penciling Superman!
There were great campy villains like the Atomic Skull! It didn’t really seem to
be broke, but they decided to fix it anyway.
Look at the
carnage! As if DC had unleashed the Red Guard for a Cultural Revolution to
destroy every monument of the past. I just couldn’t believe my eyes when I read
The Last Days of the Justice Society.
Having them fight the Battle of Ragnarok again and again throughout eternity?
What the hell? And the retconning of the All-Star Squadron into the Young
All-Stars with Neptune Perkins…? Wasn’t he the host of
Wild Kingdom? Roy Thomas could see what a
mistake it all was, but nobody listened to him.
Another
thing that amazed me was how, having spent so much creative energy eliminating
the continuity flaws (or at least complications), the new regime promptly
flushed the whole thing down the toilet! The reboot of DC continuity was
anything but what one should have expected from the way Crisis ended. The new origins of Superman, Captain Marvel, the
Justice League, Batman, etc., grossly contradicted not only pre-Crisis
continuity but also Crisis itself! For
example, Captain Marvel survived the Crisis, but in Shazam # 1, the wizard Shazam declares that he didn’t! According to Crisis,
Superman remembered Supergirl, but in the John Byrne reboot, there was never a
Supergirl to remember. She died in the Crisis, fighting the Anti-Monitor, and
so she wasn’t there at the reboot of the universe. The same was true of Barry
Allen, but everybody remembered him in the new Flash comics. He had existed retroactively when Supergirl and
Wonder Woman hadn’t!
Worse yet,
the reintroduction of Superboy (not the clone, before that) promptly
reintroduced the parallel universe schema before the ink on Crisis had had a chance to dry! The
Byrne Superman entered into a “pocket universe” created by the Time-Trapper, in
which the pre-Crisis Legion existed, along with Superboy, who was as powerful
as his pre-Crisis comics made him, and therefore much stronger than the Byrne
Superman, who got his head handed to him by his retro-eliminated younger self!
At this point one had to suspect Byrne was poking fun at Crisis, as well he might.
As I have
pondered the matter over the years, here is the only sense I can make of the
mess. I believe the lords of DC wrapped up the Silver and Bronze Age continuity
not in Crisis alone, but also in Alan
Moore’s masterpiece, Whatever Happened to
the Man of Tomorrow? (Superman #
423; Action # 583). The Golden Age
continuity (“Earth 2”) was concluded in Crisis
with the passage of the 30s Superman with Lois into some sort of heaven. The
Silver/Bronze Age continuity was similarly brought to a proper conclusion in Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?
When Brainiac, Luthor, Jimmy, Lana, etc., were killed, and Superman lost his
powers to marry Lois and live incognito. End of story. Superman remembered the
Crisis as well as the death of Supergirl. There was but a single universe. And
the whole saga ended right then and there.
Implicitly
the Byrne reboot of the DC Universe, in which Lex Luthor was a millionaire
industrialist, there had never been a Supergirl, Black Canary was a founding
member of the Justice League, the inhabitants of Krypton were hyper-cerebral
wonks with crystalline architecture, and Superman and Batman appeared long
after the heyday of the JSA—was a whole new DC saga, owing nothing either to the Crisis or to pre-Crisis
continuity. And it would have run smoothly if Byrne and others had
refrained from making occasional mention of the Crisis as if these versions of
the heroes had experienced it.
Of course,
it’s all moot now, since DC decided to dump the whole single-universe model at
the end of the execrable The Kingdom
series, which was every bit as bad as the earlier Kingdom Come was good. They now call it Hyper-Time, the coexistence
of parallel historical continuities, in which every DC, Quality, Fawcett,
Charlton, Golden Age, Silver Age, Bronze Age, and Elseworlds story can be said
to have happened after all. My only point, that I want to insist on, is: it was
not the introduction of Hyper-Time that put an end to the post-Crisis
continuity. No, that happened between the end of Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow? and the beginning of
Byrne’s miniseries The Man of Steel. The Kingdom put an end to the Byrne
Universe continuity.
This means
the new age heralded by the Crisis
didn’t last long. We did see a piece of it, for instance, in the comic where
Superman discovered that Firestorm and Captain Atom, essentially the same character,
couldn’t team up because they had opposite polarities that cancelled one
another out—or something! At any rate, that story did depict the real Captain
Atom as drawn by Steve Ditko, just as we had seen him drawn in Crisis. But this post-Crisis universe/history/continuity
did not last. Captain Atom appeared after the reboot in that absurd “Captain
Aluminum Foil” glaze. It was obvious to me they were just trying to combine
Captain Atom with Dr. Manhattan, who had appeared in Watchmen in the meantime, and he was no longer the Charlton/Ditko
character.
Inevitably,
I think of a theological parallel to the whole business. The same thing
happened in 19th Century Iran
when a prophet named Mirza Ali Muhammad appeared, claiming to be the Bab, the
Gate to the Hidden Imam of Shi’ite expectation. Shortly thereafter, he
announced that he himself was the Mahdi, or Hidden Imam. He established an
elaborate code of beliefs and practices to supercede the Koran and the Shariah
for a new age that should last some thousands of years before yet another Mahdi
should arise to replace him, starting yet another new age. Well, the Bab soon
died as a martyr. His followers were ready to carry on with his new scripture
(the Bayan) and his new laws, under the leadership of his brother Subh-i-Azal.
But in only a few weeks’ time, one of the Bab’s disciples, Hussein Ali,
proclaimed himself already the new
Manifestation of Allah and took the name Baha’u’llah (“Glory of God”). He set
about penning new scriptures, promulgating new laws and revelations. Why so soon, thousands of years earlier than
predicted? If you were a Bab’i, a follower of the Bab and his brother, you
saw the new prophet as an opportunist and a fake. If you accepted Baha’u’llah’s
claims (which most Bab’is actually did, thus becoming Baha’is), you chalked it
up as one of the great mysteries of history.
I am never
surprised when I notice the logic of genuine religion and mythology recurring
in comic books, because, as I have so often argued, comic books are our modern
myths. They are not merely like myths
or analogous to myths. They are our myths, and the mythopoeic
imagination, as Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell taught us, is everywhere the
same.