Crisis on Infinite Earths #2

[history79]

9 pages of 27

Comments

[scorntx]

"I'm being called away! No time to attempt to explain things, only time to overemoooooooooottt*"

Good going there, Pariah.


-"The only movie you'll be making is a sequel to the Prisoner, and I don't meant the one about the village."-
Batman trained for years to be the best at belabouring jokes.
Though I suppose managing to apparently say that in the scant seconds it takes to smash dramatically through a window and still be coherent is a neat trick.
And you can tell it's the Bronze Age of Comics because Batman gets a detail wrong, rather than automatically knowing everything about everything.

... you know, I have this strange, inexplicable feeling that Harbinger may, may well, just be Up To Something Against Her Will.
But oh, if only there were some way to know for sure...
Not Wolfman's most solid writing, that.
Yes, we get it. She's being controlled and is going to betray the Monitor. You don't need to remind us every five seconds.

[tcampbell1000]

I think that last bit with her here would've been fine if Wolfman had just left out the thought balloons. Perez's pan in to her tearful eye, and the pained way he has her bite her lip, is foreshadowy enough without any text.

[matrix_dragon]

"I don't have time to explain why I don't have time to explain."

Thank you Pariah.

[cygnia]

Y'know, if DC & Marvel ever kissed & made up, I could see Pariah being a herald of Galactus for Secret Crisis of Infinite Wars...

[q99]

This is some good build up.

Crisis really was a singular event. "Worlds Live, Worlds Die, Nothing will ever be the same!"

It really did reshape the DC universe, change it's sales fortunes, and leave a lasting story impact that left an impression like no other comic event before or since.

[katefan]

In other words, it did what an Event comic is supposed to do.

[q99]

On a truly grand scale! Even those who are willing to do a major change, don't have aspirations on this level.

[byc]

It's weird to see Batman not know exactly what is happening.

And I don't think that really started until Morrison's BatGod.

[tcampbell1000]

What's really odd is that he's "not knowing" without being given the idiot ball. He's actually doing really well with the information he's got: it's just not nearly enough, and even the World's Greatest Detective can't find a multiversal mass-murderer from the ramblings of two PTSD-addled screamers.

[scorntx]

Feh! Some Batman he is, then!
Modern Batman could probably figure out what's going on from the sentence fragments of ONE PTSD-addled screamer.
Before they'd finished speaking, even.

[sarahnewlin]

I miss Firebrand. :(

Her costume reminds me of another comic. It was a dress but those colors. Hmmm......

[tcampbell1000]

Oh no, it turns out the Guardians of the Universe, who have, well, guarded the universe against cosmic threats since way before it was cool, are now instantly helpless to prevent the thing!

This gets a pass from me here because I hadn't seen it before and Crisis has established a rhythm of Really Big Things happening real fast, but it seemed like the Guardians got nerfed way too frequently in other events after this. I mean, I get why: nobody wants to identify with a Jedi Council Composed Entirely of Yodas except maybe that small octogenarian audience, so the fate of the world falls into the hands of people with star power. That's similar to the reason why the Monitor here was never, ever going to make it to issue #12 of Crisis.

It just seems like there's a discrepancy between how important and powerful we're told the Guardians are and how important and powerful they usually turn out to be.

[daningram.insanejournal.com]

In fairness, it was a premeditated, coordinated attack. And relatively speaking, the easiest way to disable the greatest force aligned against you

[tcampbell1000]

The attack on the power battery implies some forethought, but TBH, there's not a really great excuse for the inaction on both sides leading up to this.

Since the Anti-Monitor actually owes the Guardians (well, one rogue Guardian) his current existence, it's reasonable for him to consider them a special threat. What's not reasonable is that he's only getting around to dealing with them now after eating his way through "more than a thousand"/"infinite(?!?!!?!)" worlds before this. And yet that's balanced in a way by the Guardians' "How could [the destruction of AN UNBELIEVABLE NUMBER OF ENTIRE UNIVERSES] escape our attention before now?," a question which never gets anything close to a decent answer. I mean, does anything else about the Crisis say "subtlety" to you?

Really, strategically speaking, the Anti-Monitor should have consumed Earth-1's universe first, which would deal with the Guardians pretty decisively. But of course, letting that happen really would be suicide on DC Comics' part ("The Super Powers toy line is cancelled, kids! Instead, pour this jug of milk on the floor and pretend it's the all-destroying antimatter cloud!"), so we kind of have to assume that the Anti-Monitor cloaked his actions from the G-Unis somehow until now, in order for this part of the story to work at all. And it still doesn't pay to think about it too much.

Hey, suspension of disbelief, it's a thing. Generous assumptions are necessary if you're going to believe a man can fly. Still, this kicked off about thirty years of the Guardians either getting pwned or making really, really bad decisions, to the point where they started to look like the universe's Travis Kalanicks. "Thanks for your hard work setting up this Lantern stuff, but maybe it's time to transition to new management."