Day 21: Favorite Comic Event? - Main Post

[icon_uk]

These days the words "Comic Book Event" tend to fill me with dread, and not in the good way.

IMHO it translates as somwehere between "Desperate Marketing Ploy" and "We hope you believe that this one WILL have lasting consequences" with subtle tones of "We're also dragging in other titles to derail them completely for marginal returns, so tough luck if you're a fan of secondary titles".

Now they're not ALL bad, many have at least one good tie in, and "Necrosha" did bring Cypher back, but personally I haven't followed an "Event" with anything better than cautious distrust for about 20 years.

So picking one as my spotlight was a little tricky, and my mind kept going back to the beginning, and in some ways, the one that started it all...



In other words "Crisis on Infinite Earths"

Now, I don't personally agree that it was a GREAT event, I don't think that it was actually required to the extent that the DC higher ups thought it was. The separate Earths made sense in the context of their own stories



Now first thing to look at there is that who ISN'T front and centre on the cover... that's right, the Superman we see is the retired Earth-2 version, the Wonder Woman is the Earth-3 Superwoman and Batman is a tiny little figure at the edge... of the back cover.. The rest are a mix and match of heroes and villains from different dimensions (including ones we hadn't seen in DC before, like the Blue Beetle being there) and time periods. (Arion is the distant past, Dawnstar a millenium in the future) so in terms of sheer scale we could see, even pre-Internet, that this was likely going to be BIG.

And big it was... it had had a year long lead up thanks to cameos from "The Monitor" in any number of DC comics, again, set in multiple time periods too, the Monitor himself being first seen in the last issue of "The Losers", a comic set in WWII. The fact that his working as a super villain temp agency didn't really gel with his later revealed purpose didn't really matter.

Marv Wolfman was writing the New Teen Titans at the time, perhaps DC's hottest property, and he DEFINITELY had their hottest artist on the title... George Perez himself, so made crowd scenes REALLY crowded, but drawn in such a way that you could tell who EVERYONE was.



So we had cosmic scale drama, but as this was also a housekeeping exercise from DC, there were also some tragedies...

The deaths STUCK... (Well, for the most part, with that one big exception that came back a few years ago, but I've ranted on that one before...)




and lots and lots of crowd scenes...



Again, because of the scale of it, and the absence of instant info back in those days, it was genuinely hard to know what was going to happen at the end...



So it was flawed, BADLY flawed...and perhaps has a lot to answer for, but it's the one I remember best!

Comments

[halloweenjack]

Well, the pictures are pretty, I'll grant you that. (There's also this picture, which Perez did with Alex Ross, which in turn led to this parody by Dave Willis, who rebooted the "Walkyverse" into a new webcomic (Dumbing of Age) that is actually way more successful than any of its predecessors.) And I agree with much of what you said above, in that it not only started a bad trend, but was based on a pretty problematic premise. Moreover, a lot of what ends up replacing the old continuity seems to be half-baked, at best.

Also, WRT what you said about secondary titles above, I'm reminded of what John Rogers said when Blue Beetle (the original Jaime Reyes version) was cancelled: "Wow. It's almost as if basing your entire business model around a series of must-buy big event crossovers in a market with limited purchasing resources hurts your midlist."

[q99]

-and "We hope you believe that this one WILL have lasting consequences" -

To be fair, they usually do nowadays on the M side. Marvel's events tend to set a status quo that last for 1-2 years, and consequences to characters often last longer.


Though none can really compare to CoIE even to this day.

[bradygirl_12]

God, I hated this event. It blew up the world I knew and it's never been the same since. We lost the Linda Danvers Supergirl and a bunch of other heroes. I never understood why DC didn't just seal off the 'other Earths' with some magical mumbo-jumbo so that there was only one that they would deal with in canon if they were so worried about too many Earths. Destroying Earth-2 and all the other Earths was a real shame.

Since TPTB ignore their own canon more often than not, my headcanon is that pre-COIE still exists with multiple Earths. The rest are just Elseworlds or perhaps Imaginary Stories. ;)

[philippos42]

Right there with you. I like some of what post-COIE DC managed to do, but the event itself was a horrid, obscene premise.

[bradygirl_12]

It was a huge body count when you consider they destroyed so many worlds and left characters like the Earth-2 Superman and Superboy-Prime bitter and in the latter's case, not quite sane! They were made the fall guys for a lot of things and just left a bad taste in my mouth. :(

[icon_uk]

nd left characters like the Earth-2 Superman and Superboy-Prime bitter and in the latter's case, not quite sane!

Well.... no, you can't really lay that at the feet of COIE, that was entirely Infinite Crisis.

In COIE, the Earth-2 Superman was reunited with his (thought lost) Lois and they and the entirely sane Superboy from Earth Prime were given passage into another dimension thanks to Alex Luthor's abilities (Whatever they were at that moment) with the clear indication that it was some sort of paradise.

It took IC to frell that up by revealing that Alex messed things up and took them to somewhere like Apokalips because he made the wrong choice just AFTER COIE ended.

[bradygirl_12]

Technically correct, but COIE was the springboard for IC and all the other 'crises' DC has put out in the last quarter century. COIE took generations of history and cavalierly threw it all in the dumpster. I know that Americans are historically ignorant, but it always aggravates me when the past is overlooked or destroyed for the shiny new bauble. Slap the word 'new' on something and my fellow citizens don't care if it's 'improved'. :)

[philippos42]

I don't know if this counts as the worst event, but I think it was easily the most destructive.

And it encouraged imitators, bizarrely.

[jekylls_salvation]

I'm not sure I'm old enough to have read this and judging by what I'm seeing I'm gathering that I shouldn't try..

[philippos42]

Parts of it are clever.

The problems with it are metafictional in a way. COIE was a giant editorial shift away from parallel world stories, and from the old organization of DC's long history of titles into different arenas, such as there being a world where Superman dated to 1937, and one where he was set in the present day; and toward a single messy universe with lots of integration and supposedly lasting consequences.

It got a bit weird.