Legion World Forums LEGION COMPANION Dr. Gym'll's Cultural Rarities A Look Back: Crisis on Infinite Earths #1-12

I agree with the majority of thoth's post. The only thing I have to comment on is that it is plausible that Kimiyo either 1) Has a limited knowledge of English, being a highly-educated scientist or 2) One of the 31st century heroes gave her a translator off-panel.

Sorry Emily, but Kimiyo’s own dialogue makes it clear that she is surprised at suddenly being able to understand English. And the other heroes are too. It must have been Harbinger or Alex Luthor’s doing.

Though I agree, I would expect Kimiyo to know some very basic English at least. I imagine a scientist of her caliber would have gone to some international conferences already.

Comments



Some of the panels and compositions in this issue are among my favourites. From panel inserts on the satellite; Harbinger flying between head shots of every character there; the view of Flash reaching out to the foreground with Pirate and AM behind him; to the whole of the Earth 4 scene – the choreography of the Katana fight to the Cap Atom one you mention, from the weather to the terror of Beetle and Question and Blok and MM holding back the Bug. Harbingers expression before she knocks out Alex is also a favourite as is her glowing hologram form.


All of them stand out and they work very well together as a team. It’s a real shame that it would be a very short lived one.


The realm of Handwavium Good spot on the lettering. Very odd.



The dialogue could certainly have helped fill in some of the plot holes.



Pirate does seem to have been given control over just the Earths of three universes. That allowed the superpowered Force Thanagar of Universe 4 to attack and destroy the AM unhindered… or sit on their butts and do nothing like pretty much everyone not on Earth during the Crisis.



He was a bit confused over whether he got the power or not over the last couple of issues. It couldn’t be more flawed if Flaw from Flaw and Child turned up to be an assistant.



Oh, good point. Just thinking about all the comics before/after Crisis, and even now, that are caped slugfests at the first opportunity. Ugh!



While I put a little thought into what was behind the initial mission lineups, as Wolfman had plotted out the first couple of issues more fully, I think he was winging it (ouch, Hawk pun) here. I think some of them were earmarked for appearances in earlier versions. There are some setups. Steel as a lead into his Crisis crossover; Hawkman due to events in a future issue; Supergirl is prominent throughout this part of the series ahead of next issue; Azrael as I think Wolfman was planning to do something with him before the writer’s block (not Blok) closed in; Changeling as comic relief is important in a Crisis.



About to die, the Monitor was trying to keep in with as many angel-type characters as possible

The Thunderbolt appearance is considered by Perez to be an error. He thought Cannon had superspeed, rather than being more of a “perfect” human.



This is the first sign that OCD Alex Luthor would try and rearrange things in Infinite Crisis!



The Monitor probably gave Pariah the next bit of the Precognitive Plot Map, and they have to wait for him to show up again.



As long as we don’t fall into one!

I don't know how many times I've thought to myself, "Hey, didn't Earth-4 have a speedster?" only to have to be reminded that that was a mistaken portrayal of a character DC didn't completely have the rights to!

Ah, that helps clear up the Thunderbolt confusion. I remember his eponymous series after Crisis, and he definitely did not have super speed then

You don't really see Thunderbolt's face either, which is another nod to him not being a character DC fully owned.

Apparently Thunderbolts powers originally were to "tap into the unused portions of the human brain".

Peter Morisi was originally trying to buy the rights to the original Lev Gleason Daredevil, and when that fell through he created Thunderbolt as an alternative. He shares a similar split color costume to Daredevil, minus the full face mask.

Curiously, the tapping unused portions of the brain idea makes him sound similar to Deathstroke, who, as pointed out in another thread, wears a full face mask with split colors similar to Daredevil's...

and thanks to Teeds….

And we're finally getting to the issue we've all been waiting for...

CoIE #7 review tonite!

I think Crisis # 6 suffers from its obvious intent to homage the classic JLA trope of splitting the larger group into three smaller groups on separate parts of the larger mission. Here, it doesn't work well at all because the three missions are to entirely different Earths, and each Earth and its characters get short shrift. For example, Uncle Marvel appears in one panel without his name really even being dropped, and even the Perez art makes it hard to identify him. If not for the dialogue, I might not even have guessed that was him. In the balance these worlds are important to the eventual resolution to this story in that they are all incorporated into the new singular Earth, so they should have gotten more of a spotlight than they did.

And of course, on each Earth its characters are controlled by Psycho Pirate to give us the other trope of hero fighting hero, so that feels tired, too. In the small amount of pages this limited one-sided role for those characters contributes to their marginalization in this issue. Handful of pages. Barely cameos. A few fight scenes. That's it for those worlds in this issue. And it all ends with suped-up Harbinger saving the day (for now) by partially merging them with Earths-1 and 2 in their limbo area.

There were some nice scenes and match-ups in those portions, though. I liked Kara against Captain Marvel giving her some equal footing, and I liked E2 Hawkman showing concern for Norda. But I think I liked the brief Aquaman/Atlantis scene the best. Marv likes to insert these vignettes throughout the issues so far that touch on some major characters and how their worlds are affected. I'm sure a larger purpose was to cameo Tula, but I enjoyed it anyway.

The Wildcat scenes were touching, showing a more personal impact that the Crisis has had. But it's hard not to feel lessened knowing that Yolanda Montoya doesn't turn out to have any impact on the DCU, eventually becoming a random, meaningless death in a group massacre of underwhelming characters.

Anyhow, I'm curious how I will react to revisiting Crisis #7. Will it hold up? To be continued.....

In deference to Ann's forthcoming review, I will refrain from saying anything in depth yet, but having just finished the re-read, I'll say: damn, it really DOES hold up, in my opinion. I got all choked up, all over again.

…and possibly because the side missions achieved absolutely nothing in resolving the overall issue.

I don't know. The writing made me feel like the three teams did make a difference in terms of buying Harbinger enough time to do her stuff. I always felt that without them, she would not have had enough time to save the three universes.

If they did, the plot certainly didn't make that clear. I mean, how does fighting emotion-controlled heroes of those respective worlds give Harbi the time she needs? Unless they would have been able to stop her somehow? She seemed pretty ethereal and nigh-omnipotent, though, leading up to the snatching.

I'm with Paladin on this one. If the teams hadn't got there, then the heroes of those Earths would have run into the anti matter cloud along with a bunch of people and been killed. Harbinger would still have appeared and saved the Earths. None of them played a vital role in defeating the AM in the end that I recall. Nothing that couldn't have been replaced.

ah, but as you say thoth, the heroes from Earth-1 and Earth-2 delayed the heroes from Earth-4, X and S from killing themselves! Jay Garrick shows it best by stopping Earth-4 Thunderbolt from running into the anti-matter cloud

I would say that saving the Marvel Family, Captain Atom, The Ray, Blue Beetle etc. was a big accomplishment in itself!

I think Earth-4 was the only one shown where the heroes were suicidal as a result of Psycho Pirate's manipulation. Certainly, the teams saved those heroes and prevented a lot of death on those worlds. There's just no evidence they really made saving the worlds themselves possible.

It just felt like these three worlds, which would eventually be integrated with the other two, didn't get much attention. Honestly, if you came in with little or no knowledge of these characters and worlds, you really wouldn't have gotten a sense of what makes them or their heroes special from their appearances this issue. I certainly came in knowing very little about them when I first read Crisis, so I didn't learn much when I read the issue. I probably already knew the most about captain Marvel, but I still wasn't really all that up on the Marvel family.

hmmm I always approached it from a perspective that these Earths just happened to be the last ones standing. they weren’t more special than other Earths, but the fact they were the last ones made them worth saving, you know?

On CoIE #7:

The real star of this issue, as far as I'm concerned, is not any of the fictional characters. It's Jerry Ordway. Even though Dick Giordano is co-credited on inks along with Ordway, I can tell that the sequences I find most visually exciting are embellished in the Ordway style (to reiterate, his lines are not as smooth as Giordano's, but he's better at conveying intensity and impact.) The scenes of which I speak are...well, I could be mean and call them a 10-page info-dump, or I could be nicer and call them the secret origins of the Monitor, the Anti-Monitor, Harbinger, Pariah, and the Anti-Matter Universe (kudos to Marv for making explicit the connection to Green Lantern v1 #40, the first appearance of Krona and one of DC's single greatest Silver Age stories in my opinion.)

That I didn't find any of the other origin scenes nearly as interesting on a purely narrative level basically sums up the main problem I've been having with this series as a whole. IIRC, some earlier posts in this thread opine that the characters created especially for this event storyline inevitably had the shelf life of peanut-butter candy. I have to disagree. Lady Quark took a few years to come into her own, but she made a significant impression during the middle years of L.E.G.I.O.N., and accumulated enough of a loyal following that she was brought back to life in the mid-2000s. Yet of all the new characters, it is she who gets the least amount of panels in CoIE. There's all that wasted space with the summoning of the Z-Team, and Yolanda, and Solovar the Fascist Ape, to the point where after 7 issues, I still cannot feel anything other than indifference for the new characters (or, in the case of Pariah, contempt) while at the same time very few of the old characters do anything beyond their familiar schticks. That, I believe, is a profound creative failing on the part of Marv and Friends.

I wasn't surprised at all when Thoth recently shared some behind-the-scenes scuttlebutt about how George Perez suddenly became a full-fledge co-plotted with issue 6. It's like, despite the years of prep time for this story, it was only half-formed by the time it got under way. And here is where I have to wonder how much of this has to do with a lack of editorial firmness. When Dick Giordano was promoted in 1983 from Special Projects Editor to Exec Vice President, one of his first actions was to make several writers their own editors...including Marv. Looking objectively at DC's overall output from that point on, there is a serious decline in coherent, well-paced storylines -- for every one Swamp Thing, there were a dozen Trials of the Flash.

CoIE is no exception. That DC would execute their most crucial event up to that date in such a seat-of-the-pants, catch-as-catch-can way seems utterly puzzling to me in hindsight.

As for Supergirl's death...sorry, folks, but while it *almost* works for me, Marv and George torpedo it with that last-second distraction from Kimiyo which allows Anti-Monitor the chance to fatally zap Kara. Even by superhero comic book standards, that's over-the-top in the worst, most gratuitous way. Better, in my opinion, had we gotten mere glimpses of the battle's outcome, then a blur of the Anti-Monitor escaping, and then the horrible confirmation that Kara's best was not quite enough.

One final caveat -- as I alluded to earlier in this thread, I didn't get into superhero comics until 1991-1992, and didn't get around to reading Crisis until about the middle of the 90s. It all comes back to something I've been thinking about a lot lately: Superhero comics from about 1983 on have tended to be "You Had To Be There" type events. I can accept that CoIE means as much to many of you as certain early-90s events mean to me. I can accept that the early-90s events mean little or nothing to many of you. What I find to be a real pity is the erosion, over the past 35 years or so, of superhero stories with truly timeless qualities. Or maybe it's just me, I don't really know anymore.

Question: Is there any good explanation as to why it takes the Monitor so long to actually do anything? I mean... he fools around for a couple of years selling weapons to super-villains and "monitoring" the heroes. It seems like if he'd started doing something a couple of months sooner he could saved at least a couple of dozen more Earths...

AND counterpoint!

Well, I read Crisis # 7 earlier today, and I found it to be the strongest issue of the series to this point. I think this is not only because of the issue's obvious big moment, but also because I thoroughly enjoyed the other aspects of the issue, as well. I will attempt to elaborate!

First, I completely LOVED the historical sequence (i.e. "info-dump") that opens the story. I love a good history lesson, and this one particularly works for me in how it ties into and expands upon existing continuity involving Krona, Oa, the GLC and Qward, among other things. Nothing here really negates or alters the pre-existing stories, so I like how this feels like it simply gives a bigger picture of those events and their consequences to suit the epic story we're in the midst of. And then, we finally learn the story of Pariah and how he ties in to all of this. I think there's some value in the story of an arrogant, self-absorbed character only realizing what he's lost when it's all gone, even if we've seen it before. It informs the character well, I think.

I also like the idea of our heroes finally taking offensive action after all of this time. The line-up of heroes is interesting, even if many of them don't get a lot to do. While some may decry the use of four members of the extended Superman family, including 2 Kals, I like it. Sometimes, it just makes sense to send a team of heavy-hitters to face a Big Bad, and this is one of those occasions, even if it seems a little homogenous with some samey characters. It's a pretty exciting and somewhat ominous battle as just the terrain alone seems enough to do our heroes in.

(Side-note: Can't help but feel Perez ends up copying Perez a few years later. This rocky space battlefield bears at least a passing resemblance to Thanos's asteroid in Infinity Gauntlet a few years later on which Perez is an artist.)

This battle then leads to E1 Superman and Dr. Light being the only ones to break through to the place where the Anti-Monitor awaits. They prove to be little match for their foe, which leads to the issue's tragic sequence.

I like pretty much every bit of how this sequence is executed. Kara hears her cousin cry out in pain and races to his aid. When she arrives, she fearlessly comes to Kal's rescue and then is swept up by her contempt for this enemy who has taken so many lives. In those moments she looks like the most powerful, most righteous hero in the multiverse. She is a woman, a hero all her own...finally...and she will not let her cousin die there. And she's determined to do all she can to end the threat right there if she possibly can. You get the feeling that she may kill the Anti-Monitor right there, and we want her to--or at least I do.

When I look at character deaths done right, this is one of the gold standards, I feel. She's shown in all her glory going down fighting, and there's a purpose to it. She saves someone she loves and she saves the multiverse--what's left of it--at least for now. All of her heroism is own display, along with everything that made her special as a character. There are only two things that lessen this somewhat, one in-story and one in a larger sense. The in-story issue is the implication that Kimiyo distracts her and causes her death, It was unnecessary because it made Kara look weak for a second. Plus, I doubt that the distraction really did Kara in.

The larger issue is that, in my opinion, Kara's last story is her best. Like many female heroes to that point, Kara had been largely marginalized throughout her existence. This is even truer for her as she was also a female version of a male character, which was a larger problem in the industry. So while it's amazing to see her go out as a total bad-ass, it's a shame that we really only see her full potential as she dies.

But when the moment came, I felt the tears coming. Her final moments with Kal are so sad and so beautiful. There's a tenderness here that is touching and hits all the right notes for me. Kara's strength and her humanity just shine in all of her final moments, and that's why I hold this up as such an affecting and well-done death. Perez and friends really knock all of this out of the park in the art department, too.

And, yeah, it's pretty melodramatic, but I do like how Kimiyo recognizes Kara's heroism in the moments and realize that she can do no less.

Then, there are the pages that follow. Kal-L is there to soothe and console his counterpart. Just another reason I love E2 Superman. The world hears of Supergirl's death, and I love that Batgirl is there to eulogize her. It's short but just perfect. And that panel of Brainy mourning is heartbreaking.

Finally Kal takes his cousin's cape-enshrouded body into space for a private burial after saying his own beautiful parting words to her. I want to say he either cremated her in a star (ours?) or possibly left her remains among those of Krypton, but I can't remember if this was ever actually elaborated upon. If it wasn't, I'm okay with that being left out.

In the end if "you had to be there" to really connect emotionally to crisis in general or this story in particular, then I'm glad I was there and can still do so. I now know I will always look back fondly on "Beyond the Silent Night". I shared this story with my dad after I read it, and it was only one of a handful of experiences where we shared some kind of emotional connection over anything, even if it was small. He told me, "I almost wish I was still reading comics," after he read it. I'll never forget that.

BTW, back in 2011, I shared the story of sharing this comic with my dad:

that’s a lovely story and a lovely memory, Lardy. thanks for sharing it

good point. I skimmed through the earlier issues to find an answer.In issue 2, Monny says he has been testing the heroes and villains to understand their abilities better. Through the first 4 issues he makes vague references to Anti-Monny moving faster than he does, and to not being ready. but it’s not explicitly explained or anything

Behind the curtain, the Monitor was originally supposed to be a villain. So it’s just as well that all those early appearances allowed for drastic changes. As Ibby said, Monny said he was testing heroes. That doesn’t have much bearing on the current plot, but those starting teams were supposed to be doing a lot more than we see.

From what we’ve seen, Monny spent a lot of off panel time training Alex Luthor and telling him about events to come; doing the same for Harbinger, but telling her all the bits he didn’t mention to Alex as well as not doing anything to stop her being taken over and watching Pariah weep his way across the multiverse like Sodam Yat on an extended holiday. Monny also made some videos to autoplay after his death.

One reason why he didn’t act sooner could be because he knew he was going to lose. There might have only been so much he could save with his personal energies. So he was working to that, rather than making a futile attempt to save more Earths.

Why he didn’t have more in place to save those might be down to not wanting to give too much away to the enemy. Not that the enemy had bothered about such things before obliterating other universes. But it’s an in-plot theory