30 Days of Scans: Day 22: Favorite event

[recognitions]

I'll be honest, when I think of a comics event, there's really one thing that comes to mind.

You know what I'm talking about.



I'd heard the rumblings for months. Something fundamentally different was going to happen. I didn't put too much stock in it until I picked up the first issue, and was instantly shaken like I'd almost never been by a comic book before.





Holy fuck. This was serious shit. I knew about Earth-3. I knew the Crime Syndicate. I'd thrilled as I'd read them team up with Per Degaton in "Crisis on Earth-Prime!" (which is another mindfuck of a story for another day). For them to be killed off this quickly and impersonally, only a few pages into the story? I wasn't sure I could handle it. I liked my superheroes saving the day and living happily ever after. Not that the Syndicate were heroes, but I didn't want to see them die like that. I put the issue down and left the comic store. It'd be years before I read the whole thing.

Anyway, that's the impact it had. I'm assuming most people are familiar with the story, so I won't do too much recap here. Rather, I'll just pick out some of my favorite bits. I've got 37 pages of a 360pp trade; that should sneak me under the legality wire, right?

We start with Anthro, DC's then-requisite prehistoric superhero, blissfully unaware of the danger facing creation. Wolfman went very far out of his way to include every aspect of DC history.



Anthro, watch out for that...tree...



You know things are taking an ominous turn when the Joker sounds scared.



The Outsiders at work. Metamorpho can hold up a freaking collapsing building.





The heroes of the Old West meet.





Barbara's come a long, long way.



Gotta ding Wolfman here; he demonstrates a thorough knowledge of DC history throughout, but this is one place where he hit a bum note. John Constantine in a green sport jacket and blow-dried hair, talking like Jason Blood? Not bloody likely.



One of the most famous splash pages in comics history. Superman and Dawnstar look cozy.



You're going to have to look hard to find a better entrance than that. The Anti-Monitor may be the single most effective one-shot villian to date. I always suspected that he looked like Lou Reed under that mask.



The Anti-Monitor's lair, or, Perez outdoes himself.



The first time it became clear that things really would never be the same again.



Darkseid ain't even hating.



Oh, Brainy.



Morrow's motto must be "Never stop being a smug prick, even in the face of Armageddon."



The Flash has had enough of your shit.



Decision time.



Nobody'd be foolish enough to try and undermine this part of the story, would they?



The way the Flash's empty costume keeps spouting platitudes is ridiculous and insanely creepy at the same time, like a combination of narm and nightmare fuel. Crisis in a nutshell.





That Guy Gardner seems like a nice, earnest young man.



Ladies and gentlemen, your textbook for Badass Villianry 101. There are no words for how much I love the Crisis-era Brainiac. Totally logical, amoral, and ruthless. And incredibly cool-looking. Up there with the modern-day Joker for all-time scariest bad guy, in my opinion. And love how Luthor doesn't miss a beat.



The Joker's 80s personality is a curiosity. He's definitely dangerous, and far from the harmless nuisance of the 60s, but he's also not even close to the bloodthirsty psychotic that he is today. He basically comes off as a standard, albeit highly intelligent, amoral thug with a bit more flair and charisma than most. He still feels closer to Cesar Romero here, rather than Heath or even Nicholson.



In that case, why don't you talk about it some more?



Luthor's relationship with Brainiac fascinates me. It's obvious that he genuinely considers the robot a friend; I didn't scan it, but the look of distress on his face a few pages back when he thinks that Psimon blew Brainiac up is almost comic. Of course, Luthor permits himself few friends. But it's amazing that someone of his intelligence just doesn't get what Brainiac has become. On some level, he needs a friend and companion who is also his equal so badly that he won't let himself realize that Brainiac would dispose of him more easily than anything if it served his purposes. (He'd find this out for himself in "Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?", of course.)



Watching Cliff Steele casually contemplate cold-blooded murder is something of an oddity.



Buddy Baker and Lyta Hall; two people who have no idea what the universe has in store for them. You wonder if they've run into each other since.



Doctor Occult saves Princess Amethyst. The 80s were a wondrous time.



Don't feel bad, Lana. Objectivity is a dying concept. Let me tell you about a little man named Glenn Beck.



More nightmare narm.



He seems like a nice young man.



Darkseid decides that the end of everything ever is enough reason for him to bother to lift a finger. If he'd actually wanted to work, the Anti-Monitor would have been defeated by issue 1, page 5.



No narm here; the Anti-Monitor's disintegrating head is just plain spooky as fuck.



Not with a bang but with a Skrablamm! Seriously though, the very first hero gets to administer the final blow. Nobody can say that Wolfman didn't respect the history. And I'm sure there weren't any living creatures within that million-mile radius.



Call him Ishmael Hayden.

And that's it. Thanks for coming!

Comments

[thehefner]

Okay. I need to get something off my chest, after all the years of reading people espouse their love for CRISIS.

Speaking as a 27-year-old with an encyclopedic knowledge of DC Comics lore and characters but who didn't actually read this when it came out... I honestly find CRISIS to be one of the most overblown, convoluted, and kinda boring crossovers I've ever read.

Anyone else feel this way? Was this something that only really hits people who were reading this when it came out, or are younger folks like me able to read this and enjoy it?

[pyrotwilight]

I'm 21 and I find COIE to be pure epicness in all its forms referencing tons of stuff but still keeping it straightforward enough to follow and be amazed by.

[thehefner]

I know that feeling. I got that from JLA/AVENGERS, a book which many disliked or didn't care about at all./

Maybe it's just Wolfman's writing itself. He's always left me cold, even in TITANS.

[silverzeo]

I am working on a fanfic involvong Johnny Quick (bad one) trying to chase down Bart, who is training with Hunter from Road Rovers in the way of speed, by the orders of a great evil...

[silverzeo]

How come Marv didn't write Final Crisis?

[buns134.livejournal.com]

batmans "death"
and i have never really read this

[ulf_boehnke]

I have to admit I didn't like the plot twist of the Anti-Monitor returning from the dead when I first read the TPB.

It might depend on how much people know about the outcome in advance. And if they've read the whole story in one, instead of reading the single issues.

[ulf_boehnke]

Gotta ding Wolfman here; he demonstrates a thorough knowledge of DC history throughout, but this is one place where he hit a bum note. John Constantine in a green sport jacket and blow-dried hair, talking like Jason Blood? Not bloody likely.
To be fair, John probably only had a single appearance in Swamp Thing when Wolfman wrote that part. He might have even written it before he had a chance to read that story.

[perletwo]

Superman and Dawnstar look cozy.

So do Changeling and Cyborg. Ho-yay! And I love how Cosmic Boy and half of Easy Company are gawking at Swamp Thing. Poor Alec.

Buddy Baker and Lyta Hall; two people who have no idea what the universe has in store for them. You wonder if they've run into each other since.

I think that's Dolphin, Atlantis' second-favorite outsider royal concubine, not Fury. Although the principle still holds, given that she didn't get to be easy interesting until around Zero Hour and thereafter.

On another note, I loved the black and white "Harbinger Recordings" strip-panels across the bottom of that one issue's pages.

[joasakura]

I think part of it might be that when Crisis came out, at least for me, there had never been anything so.. immense happen in comics.

We get world-shattering OMG NOTHING WILL EVER BE THE SAME AGAIN UNTIL WE DO ANOTHER ONE shit every season now from publishers.

But Crisis? Crisis was HUGE and it was new and waiting for new installments of it was like waiting for the next breathless episode in a serial.

[filkertom]

I remember when this came out how utterly I didn't care about Supergirl's demise... and how very, very hard the death of the Flash hit me. I mean, cah-mon. It was The Flash. And ultimately, he died for nothing, because the Monitor had back-up plans on his back-up plans. But Barry, dying alone like that... brrrrr.

On another note, I love how Darkseid "talks" with "excessive" "quotation marks", as if "Jack 'King' Kirby" was still "word jazzing" his "dialogue".

[retro_nouveau]

Sure, it's a good read and the art is awesome. But they killed Kara, killed Barry, and destroyed the multiverse, so I hate it with the fire of a thousand an infinite number of suns.

[cuntfucius]

I'm so glad someone else noticed that Vic and Gar seem to be in the middle of an intense love confession :)

[cuntfucius]

I liked this event! I mean, all DC events suck to me in the end, haven't really liked one of them, but each has their moment(s) that made me get all excited and WOOHOOO or whatever. This had plenty! At the end I felt like I was rushed into a party, then rushed out, and only realized hours after it was all done that the party was kind of messed up.

:'( Don. You were so poorly used before they just killed you off :'(

[cuntfucius]

Oh, and I must say ... coming second to this event (WHICH I ADMIT IS HOKEY AND BAD IN SOME PLACES but I still like it -- heck, I still like most events and they aren't really constructed all that well in pacing or execution) is Zero Hour. Yes, that's how bad my taste is. I absolutely adore Zero Hour and revisit it regularly. I won't even try to defend it...

[kaleidoscope]

Ok, I admit fully that I don't follow comics. So my forthcoming comment will probably make everybody "oh good grief how could you think that?"

So Superman "skrablamming" the hell out of that thing, is that kind of similar to how Superboy punched time? (I have a pic saved from LJ scans_daily dated March '06. So whatever issue, time frame that was I don't remember.)

[icon_uk]

I was sort of torn, I liked the concept, but I didn't like the requirement to have read umpteen crossovers to make sense of it (Though it wasn't nearly as bad as the likes of Millennium in that regard). I had loved the idea of the Monitor, an employment agency for villains, and found his sudden gear-shift into cosmic entity was something of a "Hunh?" moment, especially as he wasn't nearly as interesting in that role, and "The Anti-Monitor" remains one of the dumbest names of all time.

The scale of it was grand and sweeping, but they were clearly having issues in some cases in telling the story they wanted. Wolfman has always said he wanted the heroic and villainous bodycounts to be a LOT bigger, and the casualties Brainiac calculates on both sides don't come close to materialising... for no particular reason as the fighting WAS taking place.

I do wonder how things might have gone if they'd just done what they wanted to do in the first place and rather than wipe out the worlds, just solidify the barriers between them, and possibly just started a new DCU on Earth 0 where the Byrne Superman, Miller Batman and Perez Wonder Woman would establish a new start to the heroic era in the present, no Golden Age heroes to "dilute" to impact of them on the world (Seriously, it's one of the most annoying parts of the post-Crisis Universe, that Superman is so venerated when by no means the first or even the strongest hero around)

[icon_uk]

Not really, Superman here was defeating a villain who was destroying space-time. Superboy-Prime was punching the walls of his limbo because he was bored.

[nezchan]

Supergirl wasn't a character I knew well, or even cared about whether I got to know her. And yet, when she died it definitely made a mark. Here was a hero who went out like a hero should, pouring her heart into it when she knew she wouldn't come out of it intact, because that's what heroes do. Which was a stark contrast to the very impersonal death that met most of the heroes up to that point, she died actively fighting it directly.

Flash, well, I'm totally on board with you there. Which is one reason why, even though I liked Barry a lot, I never did agree with bringing him back.

[nezchan]

My icon likes your icon.

[dreamreaver]

I have the Absolute hardcover >_>

Does that make me greedy?

[punishermax]

I've always liked how cramped the comic was. Something about how there were like almost 10 panels in a row and almost 20 on a page sometimes really appealed to me. I love that setup.

I mean, I like open, wide panels as well, but I really hate when comics are very open. It's sort of why I hate Bleach, a lot of the pages are like one or two panels but they just have so much empty space sometimes that an issue takes like a minute to read.

As for my favorite event I have to go with Dark Reign. I know people here hated how Marvel went on an event tear and DR was just the final straw, but I loved the whole thing really. Dark Avengers is one of my favorite comics ever and the eventual defeat of Norman was made sweeter by all the buildup.

[perletwo]

Yes. Definitely. You should renounce your sinful ways and give the object of temptation to ME. Right away. :D

[perletwo]

Motto. Blackest Night and Cry for Justice were driving me nuts with the double-page spread after double-page spread - sometimes literally one right after the other. In my day, young whippersnappers, spreads were dear, and we saved the doubles for when we really needed 'em!

[nezchan]

That's actually one of the things I really love about the Eurpoean books. There's so much that goes on, and usually in a fairly formal panel layout. Very few of those "bleeds" you get in the Japanese stuff. And yet, there's no feeling of being cramped, like the scans up top there. I guess it's something that comes from being really comfortable with the format.

[wonderwomanhero]

I love it! It's like Evangelion and Space Runaway Iedon...Americanized!

[psychopathicus_rex]

That WOULD have been nice, yeah - it'd mean we could have kept the old stuff, but with a simplified version for the new readers, without all the extra baggage. The baggage would've still been there, for those who liked it - it just wouldn't have been in the way.

[psychopathicus_rex]

Crisis is a damned good read as a stand-alone thing, but as the gigantic universe-changer that it was intended as, it's lost a considerable amount of its power, what with nearly every single damn change it initiated being reversed or messed around with these days. It's not like I have a problem with Pre-Crisis continuity - hell, I actually prefer it in some ways - but if you're going to have a great big table-clearing event in order to simplify things and make them less confusing to the casual fan, DON'T MAKE THEM CONFUSING ALL OVER AGAIN. I mean, it's gotten to the point where I don't even TRY to keep track of what the current state of things actually is, because I know if I did, I'd get a headache.

[silicone_soul]

I can't decide if that's a cool nod to the original Fourth World comics or just silly.

Maybe because I can't help but to image him constantly doing "air quotes."

[ormardu.blogspot.com]

For me one of the more interesting things about Crisis is that the Heroes lost the battle for the multiverse. Sure all of creation was not destroyed but they failed to save anything but the 1 Earth.

[recognitions]

That's true; Constantine appeared in June 85, which was about three months into the Crisis, and god knows how far ahead of time those issues were scripted, so Marv may just have had to punt. Moore must have had a fit, though.

[recognitions]

I wouldn't say he died for nothing; the Anti-Monitor had his cannon ready to wipe out the five remaining universes with the touch of a button. After Barry destroyed it, he had to resort to going back into the dawn of time to change history and give them a chance to defeat him there.

[bradhanon]

And in his early Swamp Thing appearances, he looks pretty much exactly as he's represented here, except that his suit was blue, not green. The diction's a little off, but yes, John Constantine used to dress neatly.

[comicoz]

You've summed it up well - it was the big change, and because it was fresh and new it was an Event. Capital letter deserving.

Now, it's like "What, world's ending? Must be Tuesday."