Infinite Crisis #7

[history79]

12 pages of 38

Comments

[dc2houseofmystery]

Such AWFUL dialogue. Johns with his "one sentence summation of character" is the worst Johns can get. "I've read his mind SO YOU HAVE TOO" ugh get out.

[aperturedreams]

I don't understand what you think is wrong with that line?

[starwolf_oakley]

J'Onn often does the psychic switchboard in combat. This was just poorly worded.

[mrstatham]

The only thing I like about this is the 'you didn't let the Joker play' bit, although I would have much preferred to see that as some sort of bigger moment rather than just an epilogue.

And again, this event is just so.. it's incredibly loathsome - perhaps not on the ugly level of Identity Crisis, to be fair - that Johns felt the need to prop up the versions of the characters he and his contemporaries were so used to writing by shitting on Superboy Prime and murdering Kal-L. It really says a lot that the final pages shown here are not ones of optimism, of the world getting better and maybe Clark, Diana and Bruce reconciling now that the madness is over, but of two villains cruelly murdering another, and a psychopath carving a bloody symbol into his chest. The New52 was, in that sense, never that much worse than the Preboot stuff - the ugliness was there all along. Worse, in some cases.

[icon_uk]

The Joker's bit was a reference to a part of an earlier scene, where King of the Royal Flush Gang taunts him that NO ONE wanted the Joker to work with them as he would never follow an order and was a too much of a wild card.

Of course the fact the scene shows the Joker killing King (after murdering the rest of the Gang in gruesome fashion), despite the fact that the whole point of King's power is that HE IS IMMORTAL, just highlights how poor this thing was.

[locuatico]

i Love Lex at the end, too.
"First rule, child, DO NOT get Joker's undivided attention"

[q99]

The late preboot. And even then I feel there was more holdover optimism from prior times.

I mean, for it's problems one of the books that came out of this was Blue Beetle, Booster Gold came not much later, yadda yadda.

The nu52 was made from the ground up by the people who were constantly pushing darkness in the pre reboot era.

[beyondthefringe]

And the bloodbath continues.
I don't know who gets it worse in this series, the Titans or the "New Blood" heroes.
For the sake of morbid curiosity, here's the Wiki article on just how many people were killed or otherwise "altered" throughout this whole storyline:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Character_changes_during_Infinite_Crisis
Yeesh.

[jcgamer78]

Holy crud... didn't realize there were THAT many. I don't understand the purpose of killing off so many B and C list characters. People who don't recognize them won't care and the ones that do will be upset and probably won't continue reading.

[reveen]

Why are some of those guys fighting in a random-ass suburb? That's like some Trailer Park Boys shit.

"FUCK OFF WITH THE POWERS!"

"DON'T FUCKIN' STOP ON MY ACCOUNT!"

[silicondream]

I never understood the "You didn't let the Joker play" line. How would it have helped Alex to recruit the Joker? The guy has no skills, knowledge or powers relevant to cosmic universe-rebuilding shit, he can't fight the high-level superpeople, and he's too unstable to help the Secret Society.

He didn't even hunt down Alex on his own at the end, right? Lex just brought him along for the sake of irony, or something.

Being a really popular villain doesn't actually make the Joker important in-universe.

[beardedjellybean]

The problem with inviting Joker to supervillian team-ups is that he'll probably kill a few people in the group and do crazy things for the hell of it. If you don't invite him, he'll be very upset and will track you down and painfully murder you.

That is why Lex generally invites Joker to his team-ups, he may be largely uncontrollable but he at least will be mostly wailing on heroes instead of you if you think you snubbed him. I imagine if you gave him enough time Joker could have tracked down Alex by himself.

[silicondream]

He might have tracked Alex down by himself, but he might also have gotten distracted and started trying to crush random people under mounds of turnips. Or he might have gotten caught by Batman again and stuck in Arkham until he forgot about Alex. Or he might have shown up a little later, when Alex had recovered his powers or built a few weapons, and gotten vaporized.

I mean, there's lots of people in the DCU who have pissed off the Joker and survived. It's not exactly a safe thing to do as a hobby, to be sure--but considering that Alex's master plan involved screwing with two starfaring civilizations, the Green Lanterns, the Spectre, Superboy Prime, Lex Luthor, Black Adam, and more or less the entire population of Earth, I don't think snubbing the Joker added very much additional risk. If Alex succeeded, the Joker wouldn't even exist, and if he failed, he'd have far more dangerous people than the Joker out to get him...which is what actually happened.

[beardedjellybean]

I'm not disagreeing with you that Alex probably would have much more powerful people to worry about if his plan failed, but when Joker is wronged he tends to get rather fixated with giving the person who wronged a very painful and brutal death even if he is insane. Remember, this is the guy that other villains tell stories about to scare themselves.

Not the best ending, and it's hardly the first mistake that Alex made. Pissing off Joker was just the one that ended up killing him.

He's the bad fairy.

[7dialsmystery]

Nobody wants them at their kid's christening party but they invite him anyway to avoid getting hit with a nasty curse.

[icon_uk]

That's sort of the point of the scene though.

It's nothing to do with what the Joker would offer, it's just that the Joker is completely pissed off that no one asked him to join.

His vanity has been wounded and he tends to react badly to that.

But yeah, not a good end scene.

[silicondream]

Oh, I'm fine with the Joker being pissed off. I just don't get Lex saying that that was some sort of critical mistake on Alex's part.

Now, I could get behind a story where it was a critical mistake, because the Joker helped defeat Alex in some meaningful way...infiltrating the Secret Society and sowing dissension, or passing important info onto heroes or something like that. As it is, the consequence of snubbing the Joker was pretty much just that Alex eventually died from novelty pranks, instead of Lex's death rays or something.

(It would also have made more sense if Alex had snubbed the Joker because he underestimated the guy's abilities, rather than because he was too "wild." When your Society includes Zoom II, Dr. Psycho, Solomon Grundy, Murmur, Bizarro, and most of the Gotham crowd, you're clearly not that bothered by unstable behavior.)

[icon_uk]

Oh the slaughter, I am so moved and impressed by the sheer scale of the megadeath that makes this series so edgy and important.... No... wait.... what's the exact opposite of that sentiment?

[beyondthefringe]

I wonder how the logistics of this whole thing worked, anyway. Did J'Onn be all "Okay, the Madmen are over here. They're just a bunch of idiots in greasepaint, so um... some of you guntoting guys go over there and shoot a few. You New Blood heroes, you're a dime a dozen. Go dogpile Solomon Grundy for a while."

Or was it just a weird free-for-all where everyone on both sides piled in without regard for strategy? I can see it now, heroes and villains both prowling around trying to find someone in their weight class. Penguin desperately trying to find someone who won't fry him with heat vision, Judomaster going "Bane's a wrestler, I'm a martial artist, this sounds like a good matchup!"

And what's up with Sivana in the first image? He looks like he's about to orgasm--is someone giving him a blowjob where we can't see it?

[icon_uk]

The New Bloods sticking together actually makes a little sense, as when they gather en masse their powers were amplified for some reason.

I actively dislike Bane, but even I felt that "Hurr hurr I break people" was something of a disservice to the work that had been done with the character in the years since Knightfall.

[lego_joker]

You actively dislike Bane? Brother! I welcome you!

Now if you'll only agree that Ra's is an equally big waste of space, we'd be golden.

[flint_marko]

That line was added in the trade (along with several other changes); in the original version he didn't say anything.

My guess was Johns put him there with the rest of the villains without really thinking about it, and then tried adding a quick fix later to explain how he had gone back to being bad again when in his last prior appearance he left with a clean slate after saving Batman's life.

[silicondream]

Yeah, I'm not sure what's funnier in this scene--Penguin getting knocked into the air by a Flash/Superboy Prime brawl, or Riddler taking a freaking MORNING STAR TO THE FACE from the super-strong Shining Knight.

I figure the other criminal mastermind types are all huddled behind a big banner saying "PSYCHOLOGICAL WARFARE ONLY, PLEASE"

[lego_joker]

I believe said morningstar was what put Riddler in his convenient I-forgot-who-Batman-is coma, One Year Later.

[jlbarnett]

Well, I'm going to be different here. I liked this series. I understood Superboy Prime breaking down, and it's not like he had some long term glorious career. He fought one battle, watched his world die and then was stuck outside reality for years. I get why Kal-L didn't think he was really doing anything wrong and was just trying to help

[icon_uk]

I can sort of see it too, but have to view it in the knowledge that his being stuck outside reality was a retcon and a knee in the groin to Crisis on Infinite Earths at the same time, and only done so to set up this scenario.

[jlbarnett]

I'm not sure if the CoIE panel with their fate is still around here or it was part of the old SD, but it wasn't like they were going to some distant part of the universe though when they traveled through Alexander's portals

[icon_uk]

They were going to somewhere beautiful, where there would be only peace, a paradise dimension outside of any concept of reality that now existed.



The notion that "Actually Alex is somehow going to make a wrong turn at Apokalips" is just.... not a fitting end to that scene.

It also depends on Alex Luthor going full-on EEEEEVIIIILLLLLL supervillain solely because he's a Luthor (again with the "blood will always out" crap which obsessed DC at the time, and indeed since), when the Earth HE was from was the Crime Syndicate Earth where Alexi Luthor had become that worlds only superHERO.

[amaniwolf]

I thought this was a beautiful end to that scene, I'm going to ignore the rest of this garbage and remember this, thank you.

[jlbarnett]

He was also a native of Earth-3

also, I'm pretty sure IC basically said he could have made a "wrong turn at Apokalips" but that he didn't. However he'd have preferred to because then he could have entered the main universe and done things

And thinking about it, didn't the concept of Kal-L pounding on the walls of reality come from The Kingdom or Kingdom COme?

[daningram.insanejournal.com]

"He was also a native of Earth-3"

Yes, as the son of the world's only hero, Lex Luthor. So what;s your point?

[lordultimus]

Well, nowadays Earth-3 isn't the mirror universe world, it's the "everybody's a sociopath" world, and Luthor is just as bad as Ultraman now.

[jaybee3]

In its way Infinite Crisis is just as distasteful and gross as Identity Crisis - except Johns has no excuses. He couldn't pretend, like Meltzer who wasn't a pro comics writer with years at DC, that he didn't KNOW these characters. Instead he basically turned the HEROES of COIE (still the best "Crisis" or attempt at ending a universe DC ever produced) into the VILLIANS of Infinite Crisis all to show that the grimdark "edgy" DC of the Didio-era was the right one all along. I know people loved to hate Superboy-Prime and I did too but then I remembered that Superboy-Prime literally gave up everything to save the universe, Alexander Luthor was proof that just being a Luthor didn't make you a bad guy and the original giants of the DC Universe - Golden Age Kal-L and Lois Lane get to be saved and lived together forever. And Johns basically destroyed that to prop up the 90-00s DCU (a universe that became so nihlistic and convoluted that it didn't last a decade until a reboot), all with his trademark blood and gore and needless killing of characters for short-term dramatic effect.

Sometimes its hard to picture that this is the same guy as the one who wrote Emerald Rebirth, Aquaman, Superman introducing Chris Kent, or Flash Rebirth or most of JSA.

[jlbarnett]

Alexander Luthor was actualy the son of the guy who showed that being a Luthor didn't make you a bad guy. Plus Lena Thorul existed in the Silver Age, but I'm not sure when she stopped howing up. And you could make the argument that Kal-L and Lois were trapped almost completely alone away from everyone they ever loved.

I guess I didn't see the same nihilism that everyone else saw post IC. And I like detail in continuity as long as it's explained

[fredneil.livejournal.com]

She didn't appear that often even in the silver age, but she did show up at least once in a late 70s Supergirl story..

[lego_joker]

Of course CoiE is the best "Crisis" event. It had Alan Moore writing tie-ins, and honestly, that alone puts it heads and shoulders above the rest.

[starwolf_oakley]

Is this story saying grimdark is the way to go? It can seem that way.

Joe Chill getting caught (or driven to suicide) might make Batman less of an insufferable bastard. Sort of. Not really.

[informationgeek]

And that certainly was Infinite Crisis. Despite the problems and gore, I liked it personally.

I still hold up Blackest Night as my favorite event of his and general. Gory, but appropriate considering the zombie/Blackest Night (only one scene ever bothered me and I'm pretty sure you all could easily guess which one it was). I really need to reread it again at some point. It's been too long.

[acethepug]

And Kal-L dies at the hands of what has become one of the worst characters ever, Superboy Prime, the mouthpiece for what Johns and DC think of their fans.

I had really hoped this, and then Blackest Night, were going to lead into a kinder, gentler, less mean-spirited DCU, but that was not the case.

I actually dislike this more looking back than I did when it was coming out, fustercluck though it was, because of what I thought it might be leading to. Now, it's just another in the line of Crisis "homages" better left unwritten (all IMHO, and I really, honestly envy people who liked it, because I really wanted to as well).

Thanks for posting the series.

[jaybee3]

One of the worst parts is that DC and Johns KNEW that readers/fans expected a "brighter", less grimdark world after both this event and Blackest Night (remember all the rampant speculation that the end of Blackest Night would see the resurrection of most of the characters DC just spend the decade killing?) - but nope, nada, nothing BOTH times! Heck, they even made a series called "Brightest Day" coming out of Blackest Night and hyped that to pieces and that was absolutely nothing that "bright" about it (it was also filled with more blood and gore including an issue 1 massacre by Black Manta).

[captainbellman]

I do love that first page though.

"Everything's comin' up SIVANA!"

[bradygirl_12]

I still can't tell the heroes from the villains!"

Well said.

[bruinsfan]

This comic was the last straw for me. I haven't bought a DC comic since unless Neil Gaiman had a writing credit on the issue. (Theoretically my embargo also has an Alan Moore exception, but if that ever happens I'll know that I'm in a parallel universe!)

[lyricalswagger]

That's the most boring Green Lantern assignment EVER.

I feel sorry for all the sectors that aren't getting patrolled while 50 of them are standing around staring at Superboy.