Crisis on Infinite Earths

Marv Wolfman & George Pérez Crisis on Infinite Earths (1985)
Sometimes if I find something I'm reading a bit joyless, a bit of a chore, I'll take a break halfway through and read something else for the sake of a breather. This time it's Melville's Moby-Dick which has been kicking my ass, and so much so that I took a short holiday around the halfway mark. I'm now taking another break even though I have just one hundred pages to go, because it's like reading a novel written by William Sanderson's portrayal of E.B. Farnum in HBO's Deadwood. There was an entire chapter discussing maritime rope, for fuck's sake, which is why Crisis is the eighth thing I've read which isn't Moby-Dick even as the same remains glued to my bedside table with the tenacity of that nine-incher which no amount of sink plunging can force around the s-bend.

Anyway, Crisis on Infinite Earths was a little before my time in terms of my comic book habit, and I never really felt the need to backtrack. It was an attempt to rationalise, streamline and reset the DC Comics universe of Superman and the rest so as to spare us the indignity of having to read stories about Krypto the Superdog or Batman drawing his pension, because that would be like, you know, ridiculous. I can see the sense of the idea, although it seems a bit redundant given that the DC Comics universe of Superman and the rest remained pretty fucking ridiculous even without all those alternate realities making the place look untidy. From where I'm stood, this caped stuff tends to work best when emphasising something other than the fact of everyone wearing leotards whilst biffing criminals and returning the stolen wallet to the millionaire, and DC always had a much harder time rising above its inherently wholesome ideals than the competition. Even if the point of Crisis was the excision of talking ducks and crime fighting dogs that we might feel at least a little more grown up when seen reading the thing in mixed company, Wildcat and the Joker still somehow made it past the interview stage. Wildcat is a superhero whose mask features not only cat ears but also whiskers and a cleft upper lip, and this Joker is the guy who leaves comedic clues to his crimes for Batman to solve.

That said, I generally have a lot of time for Marv Wolfman, and he does what he can with the material. I'm not a massive fan of George Pérez and while his art can be occasionally gorgeous, I've always found it a bit too clean somehow. Crisis sort of works in that it deals with events on such epic scale whilst juggling a cast of thousands so that nothing amounts to much more than a passing glimpse of something huge, which probably wouldn't work with a more refined focus; and in keeping everything moving, it tells a story with the tone of hearsay, lending the saga a mythic quality - a tale of war amongst the Gods, which is approximately what it is, despite most of those Gods being essentially ludicrous. There's a problem in so much as that we all know where the story is going so all of those caped types firing rays at one another page after page feels somewhat inconsequential. Much of the story was intended to rewrite its own continuity so that actions would have consequences and couldn't be conveniently written off as having occurred on Earth-180 or wherever; so it's ironic that the epic conflict should feel so arbitrary and lacking in consequence, being just what superheroes do so that we know they're superheroes - an endless repetitive loop of days saved on a Biblical scale.

The inevitable introduction tells us how important Crisis was, how it was the first of its kind, and how it was so much classier than Marvel's Secret Wars; and true enough Secret Wars is pretty fucking stupid and nowhere near so elegant as this, at least in the rendering; but frankly, Secret Wars was a lot more fun with different things happening from one issue to the next, so it didn't really matter that Klaw seemed like a guy who had hit his head and stumbled off the set of Crackerjack. While Crisis on Infinite Earths is readable and reasonably entertaining, or at least more entertaining that Herman Melville describing different types of harpoon, it's kind of underwhelming and it's certainly nothing like so deep as Grant Morrison might have you believe.