Crisis on Infinite Earths #10

[history79]

9 pages of 27

Comments

[beyondthefringe]

Even now, there's just something fucking epic about this whole sequence, that set a really high bar for all Events to come. I mean look at it... literally hundreds of heroes and villains, fighting for the sake of -everything-. And the Spectre being as badass and terrifyingly powerful as ever.

Honestly, this just feels more honest than any of the reality-altering events that either DC or Marvel have attempted in many years.

Pretty sure this was, and will always be, one of George Perez's true masterpieces. When he did the cover for the collected edition hardcover, he managed to get 562 characters on it. o.0

[cygnia]

Dangit, where's the like button?

[icon_uk]

562 characters AND I'll bet you can tell each of them apart from the other 561.

[wizardru]

Well, I mean...it's George Perez, innit?

[q99]

Oh, that reminds me! I saw a puzzle the other day of one of Perez's works and I was shocked, *shocked* to find there was a single character I didn't recognize at a glance.

Then I realized it was just a villain I knew in a long-forgotten look, but it was so weird to see a huge group pic by Perez and not recognize *everyone*.

[icon_uk]

Fun puzzle, but I suspect it's not by GP.

Batman, Robin and the Joker, at the very least, are Jose-Luis Garcia-Lopez and Dick Giordano (they're all taken from the legendary DC Livensing manual that those two did) and I think I spot a Paris Cullins vibe on a couple of them.

[q99]

Ah, maybe, yea.

[thatnickguy]

Man, Perez has so much amazing work on his resume, but it's hard to argue this is one of his masterpieces. But then you have his Wonder Woman run, his Avengers run with Kurt Busiek, JLA/Avengers. The dude is amazing. JLA/Avengers is my personal favourite. The whole thing, especially the final issue, is jam-packed with little details only long-time fans would recognize.

[q99]

It pays a lot to be the first *and* aim the highest at the same time, and appear at a time when a company really is going to do a major reworking of how it works in a way that hasn't happened since (and may not happen again).

[scorntx]

You had one job, supervillains. One job!

[zylly]

You know, maybe it's just my petty reaction after years and years of Bat-God Batman, but I really freaking love the panel of Batman basically just flat out admitting that there's not a damn thing he can do here.

It's a nice reminder of an era where Batman was popular, but could actually be completely outclassed in certain scenarios.

These days, Batman probably would have been the one to come up with a plan to beat the Anti-Monitor, despite there being both more powerful and far smarter people around.

[katefan]

It's a valid point. I think it started with Grant Morrison's Bat God era begun during his run on JLA and perpetuated with the likes of Mark Waid (i.e. Tower of Babel), although to be fair to Waid he wasn't the only one to do it. Then Morrison wrote Batman and it just got ridiculous.

[zylly]

Some of the Bat-writers of the same era took it up pretty badly too. Chuck Dixon's Batman was pretty high in the Bat-Jerk era of personality too.

[agharta75]

Psimon. Hell yeah.

[thatnickguy]

You spelled Kite-Man wrong. =p

[tcampbell1000]

Epic, yes. The sheer moxie of this scene, coupled with the fact that by now the Anti-Monitor has personally killed a couple of great heroes, gives all this an emotional resonance that's hard to deny.

Good thing, too, because CRISIS hasn't picked now to start making an overabundance of sense. I mean, this entire battle takes place "outside of time" and space, which essentially means George and Jerry can take five on the backgrounds, and we're basically handwaving away all these quasi-ordinary humans speaking and breathing in a vacuum with "Alexander Luthor did something, don't worry about it" (as we did in the Supergirl battle and will again in the finale).

On another level, it is interesting that the forces of evil are essentially the forces of "undrawing." A-M was a silhouette or a voice in blackness for the first five issues and his main weapons are an antimatter wall of white or the shadow demons in solid black. Contrast with Perez's endless crowds of heroes, all full of detail and expression and body language because that's the stuff of life. So this does fit the motif.

I understand how I'm supposed to feel about Pariah's absolution, but I don't see how his responsibility shifts much here: either his experiment ended his world or it let the Anti-Monitor find his way in, which... ended Pariah's world. It wasn't exactly his fault, but it wasn't exactly his fault the way he told it either, except for the way he Sought That Which Man Was Not Meant To Know. Then again, Lady Quark clearly needs a friend who's got some idea of what she's been through, so I guess we had to do something to get her to call off the blood oath.

"End of all that was..." I know that used to be "end of all that is" in the original edition.

[icon_uk]

I still hold "Anti-Monitor" to be the WORST cosmic supervillain name ever. To define yourself by your good counterpart, whose connection with monitoring was nebulous at best, and your own mission has absolutely NOTHING to do with monitoring is just... weird.

"So you're the Anti-Monitor? You've got something against computer displays or something?"

"No, I embody the opposite concepts of my positive-matter-universe counterpart, the Monitor"

"So... you purposefully don't watch things? Or do you watch them and then leave bad reviews on youtube?"

"Fool, youtube won't be a thing for another twenty years!"

"Look, it's not my fault we're outside time and space at the moment Anachronistic references are the least of our problems..."

[tcampbell1000]

Ha ha srsly.

"Thanos" ain't bad, got some classical jazz to it; "Galactus" and "the Beyonder" are kinda lazy but at least get the point across; "Adam Warlock" is... at least obscure enough to be mysterious; but A-M brings up the rear.

Not to mention the series changes its mind multiple times about what to call him. Remember his intro? "CALL ME... THE MONITOR!" Then, one page later: "THE MONITOR IS DEAD!" Usually when I make a statement like that, it's time to go to Best Buy.

[icon_uk]

Galactus was amongst the first such beings to be created, so I'll always give him a past (even when he wears his summer outfit with the short sleeves, but still has the hat)

Thanos has links to Thanatos, god of Death, so that's fine.

The Beyonder is actually pretty good as a name, because it implies some sort of cosmicness but doesn't tie him down to anything specific.

[thatnickguy]

I don't know. I was never a fan of The Reverse Flash name, either.

[icon_uk]

Oh, the day to day villains having silly names is one thing, The Reverse Flash, Paste Pot Pete, Egg-Fu... Not every one can be a winner.

But when we're talking about beings on a power level capable of wiping out universes, you'd be hoping for something a little more... impressive, or at least coherent, than "Anti-Monitor"

[zylly]

The Reverse Flash is especially bad, because he's got the much better name of Professor Zoom to go by.

[donnblake]

What about a timeline where Barry Allen was inspired to a life of crimefighting to defeat a time travelling Professor Zoom and called himself the Reverse Reverse Flash?

[daningram.insanejournal.com]

Yeah, Anti-Monitor might have started as a lame name, but lets be honest, he gave it some gravitas ;)

[tcampbell1000]

On another note, I like the blink-and-you'll-miss-it slip when Brainiac is killing Psimon ("Nor shall you"), where he pretty much spells out that he plans on, er, transitioning from his partnership with Luthor to a sole proprietorship. At first I wasn't sure if Luthor picked up on that (the flop-sweat is because of what Psimon was doing to him), but looking at those baby blues of his when he says "We can't lose!," I'm pretty sure he's starting to wake up to how untenable his situation is.

Either way, this ends up foreshadowing the ugly end of their association in their next appearance together, the "Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?" story.

[wizardru]

The thing that's always interesting about these huge mega cross-overs when read years or decades later is who has changed, who has NOT and who is no longer relevant or even recognizable.

For example, the DC trinity looks virtually unchanged (other than Supes still having his red trunks), but folks like the Legion look very different. Then we've got people like the ill-fated and short-lived 'new' Doom Patrol, introduced in 1977 for three issues and then promptly got a new series TEN YEARS LATER. This was one of their few appearances in the gap, mostly showing up for cameos. Or someone like Firehawk, once a major supporting character for Firestorm and then a bit player in other series. Has she appeared post New-52 or Rebirth? Nothing wrong with that, it's just an interesting snapshot (not unlike the game: what armor was Iron Man wearing in THIS era?).

[thatnickguy]

Heh, speaking of Iron Man's armors, a friend of mine is a HUGE Iron Man fan. I joked with him once, "Literally every single major Iron Man story is he gets man-handled by the latest villain and comes back with a new armor." And he laughed because he knew I wasn't exactly wrong.