Did Clark Kent letter in shadow boxing?

Well, last week's exploration was... okay, that was a thing that happened. But now it's time to get to what this blog is really meant for: comic books.             

I’m starting of with DC’s landmark maxi-series, Crisis On Infinite Earths because it really helps establish this blog's mission statement. This isn’t one of my long-beloved books, although someday I may revisit some of them to see how well their logic holds us or if they have some meaning to them that was lost to me when I first read them. No, the purpose of this blog is to venture down the rabbit hole of comics outside my comfort zone. Continuity snarls, stories I only know through their (dubious) reputations, the deep weirds, forgotten gems, and diamonds in the rough. Crisis on Infinite Earths is very much at the center of all that. I only occasionally dip my toe into DC comics, and even then only for specific characters and runs, not the expansive cosmology. For the casual DC fan, the elements and vast canvass of the DC multiverse and its cosmic primordial deities might as well be like reading The Silmarillion after only reading a few chapters of The Hobbit. Now that I’ve made this little preamble on the basic nature of this blog, although there will be some deviation as time goes on. Onto Issue #1…

              We start off with imagery evocative of the Greek origin myth by way of the Big Bang. In one instant nothing, then in a burst of energy and purple narration, the multiverse is born. A future issue in this same maxi-series will contradict this in exhaustive detail, but that’s a moot point for the time being. For now, we need to fast forward from the birth of the multiverse to halfway through its destruction.

 

Earth-03, don't get attached

              Arriving on Earth-3, we are treated to the baleful, green-cloaked Pariah. Get used to him because he’s going to be front and center A LOT in this title. A white field of destructive energy descends upon Earth-3. Textually, it functions like The Nothing in The Neverending Story. Extra-textually, it functions like the eraser from MS Paint. Pariah laments that he lives eternally and is forever being drawn to dimensionally cataclysmic events. From the way he describes it, though, one would think he’d be used to it by now.  It makes me question his coping skills. I mean, appearing at the site of extinction level events is essentially what he does and has been doing it for centuries, possibly even millennia. He should be used to it by now. Or at least numbed to it. Imagine working at a customer service call center and having an episode of despair and panic every time someone calls in with a complaint.

              The defining characteristic about Earth-3 is that its sole hero is Lex Luthor, while the traditional heroes of main continuity are all members of The Crime Syndicate. Whether this is an evil dimension or one where morality is simply flip-flopped is unknown. Ultra Man and Power Ring, Earth-3’s versions of Super Man and Green Lantern are fighting off the natural disasters that seem to accompany the White Eraser Nothing. Ultra Man’a shoulder pad game is on point. Ultra Man tells Power Ring to summon the rest of the Crime Syndicate, but he doesn’t see the point since they’re all going to die. Meanwhile Owlman and Johnny Quick lament their impotence in protecting the world they’ve conquered. I’ve mentioned these guys aren’t heroes, right?

             

I HAVE to believe this already looked silly in the mid-80s

Meanwhile, Lex Luthor is wearing the worst costume ever. Okay, maybe not the worst, but it’s pretty embarrassing. Ever hear of the short-lived Marvel property, NFL Pro? Filter that through an old issue of Flash Gordon and you have Lex Luthor’s costume. Also he has a 70’s space pirate goatee. Ginger, naturally. He attempts to save Super-Woman (Wonder Woman’s analogue) only to see her evaporate absorbed by the White Eraser Nothing, unwritten from reality.

             

Is there a rule somewhere that in alt. realities where Lois and

Clark don't end up together, her fallback guy must be Lex?

Luthor returns to his home where his wife, Lois Luthor, and their newborn child Alexander. Luthor knows that the  end of all things is incontrovertible, but wait… he has a plan. He, being an omni-disciplinary comic book scientist worth his salt, is aware of the existence of the multiverse and accurately predicted that their world was doomed. Lucky guess? To that end, he built a rocket designed to travel the multiverse and usher its occupant to safety. Occupant. Singular. Why don’t these narratives ever plan for groups of five or six in their escape pods? Highly inefficient. They decide that the only one who can go in the rocket is wee baby Alexander, who is blasts away to safety just in time to escape the holocaust of Earth-3. Baby Alexander is in heavy competition with Superman for the title of Space Moses.



Pariah is your high school livejournal account given human form

              As this is happening, Pariah meets Ultra Man and he bemoans to them in his patently emo style about his basic MO. He lives eternally and is eternally drawn to suffering and death. Blah blah blah. Cry me a river. You have all the coping skills of the Bubble Boy, Pariah. Get it together. Ultra Man is having none of Pariah’s pity party and declares that he would rather die fighting. He may be a villain on Earth-3, but this moment really makes you forget this fact. It’s actually a pretty inspirational moment.

Ultra Man makes a pretty inspirational bad guy.

              Alexander rockets away as Lois and Lex declare their love for each other and in a flash of white light, Earth-3 ceases to be. Alexander’s rocket arrives in Earth-1 which is the main universe (not the Prime Universe, which is its own little continuity headache), landing in the apparently long-abandoned satellite space station of the Justice League.

Meet Lyla. Get used to Lyla. She's kind of a big deal.

It's like if Kirby had designed Rainbow Brite.

              We see that this has been observed as we cut to the observation deck of another space vessel, where a blonde woman in a pink dress is addressed by an unseen figure, telling her that in order to save the world, they must act now, reminding her that she knows what to do and who to summon. While she does that, he will retrieve the newly arrived Alexander Luthor. To accomplish her task, Lyla needs to “energize” which occurs in a page where she seems to meditate until her body expounds a serious amount of Kirby cosmicness while she contemplates the gravity of the situation—until she is transformed into The Harbinger. Skipping ahead a few pages, we see Harbinger basically wears an asymmetrical cosmic unitard with a red piece of headgear that allows her face full exposure and her long blond locks to flow. Imagine if the Captain Britain Corps put out a swimwear line and you’ll be off to a good start.

             

What follows is a sequence of Harbinger visiting various locations and/or time periods across Earth-1 and Earth-2 recruiting. King Solovar from Gorilla City {hint—he’s a gorilla), Dawnstar, a winged member of the Legion of Superheroes from the 30^th Century. Firebrand is a fire bender from the 1940s of Earth-2. Ted Kord, the second Blue Beetle is a Batmanesque gadget hero with a buggy theme. He is from an undisclosed city on an undisclosed earth.

              Next we arrive in a psychiatric ward on Earth-2. Here we meet Roger Hayden, aka Psycho Pirate II. Considering Earth-2 seems to be WWII-era inflected, I’ll give this guy a pass on that dubious choice of code names. He has been driven mad by his powers, but this doesn’t deter Harbinger even when he warns her that using his powers makes him want to use them more. I’ve deduced that he feeds on and manipulates people’s feelings. Harbinger convinces him that he is needed and gives him his gold faceplate of a mask. Apparently  Psy-Pi is impressed with shiny things because this wins him over.

There is something undeniably creepy about a psychiatric patient who wears

a faceless mask and manipulates emotions.

              Returning to the less important recruits. Arrion is a Sigfried/Roy lookalike sorcerer from 45,000 years ago. Firestorm is a atomic powered fire/flyer guy, and Killer Frost is his cryo-powered nemesis. How do we get Killer Frost on board with this plan? Why by Psy-Pi putting a whammy on her, making her utterly infatuated with and submissive to Firestorm. I am really uncomfortable with this. Even in its own time, this was not okay. The enforced deprivation of a woman's agency feels very much like a Golden or Silver age plot contrivance, but by the mid-80s, we should know better.

This single page is a Women's Studies term paper waiting to happen.

The writer seems to realize by now that recruiting all these characters one by one is getting tedious and is really just padding, so everyone else is introduced in a sprawling splash panel. This is a company event, so we should just get used to these things now. It is chock full of “as you know, Bobs” so everyone knows who’s who. Representing the villains is Dr. Polaris and Psimon. Among the heroes, we have Cyborg of the Teen Titans, Obsidian, the son of Earth-2’s Green Lantern, John Stewart, the second Green Lantern of Earth-1, the Superman of Earth-2 (distinguishable from the main Superman by the fact that he is depicted as a man of a certain age), and Geo Force. Geo Force is another character with some dubious ideas about superhero design.

If this series were a game, these characters would be your players for the tutorial stage.

Let’s just take a moment now to talk about superhero chest emblems. They are a great way to make your character memorable. Superman’s S shield is iconic, for instance. It is impressive, well-incorporated into the design of the costume, and is stylized to the point where it is the defining feature of any of Superman’s redesigns. It’s also important to note that not all superheroes need emblems. But when you have to, make it impressive. Granted tectonic abilities don’t lend them well to a visual symbol, I’m sure you could do something better than slapping a “G F” on your chest and calling it a day. Adding insult to injury is the fact that they’re very much cartoon bubble letters. It’s just very, very sad.

Before things get too chummy for our heroes, they are attacked by a cadre of shadow creatures. Someone notes that Harbinger went missing when they appeared, but they’re too busy fighting to follow up on the observation. Nobody proves that effective. Superman is aghast that punching doesn’t solve his problems. Killer Frost won’t stop addressing Firestorm affectionately and Firestorm’s thought balloons prove he’d be a terrible boyfriend, Killer Frost’s villainy notwithstanding.

Superman is the master of observation

            

A blinding flash of light sends the shadow creatures packing and on the final page of the comic we finally meet Lyla’s boss, The Monitor, who is only here to do two things: save the multiverse and have excellent mutton chops.

Meet the Monitor and his Kang the Conqueror-meets-Kirby Cosplay