Reviewer: Jesse Baker
Story Title: The Summoning (COIE #1), Time and Time Again (COIE #2), Oblivion Upon Us (COIE #3), And Thus Shall The World Die! (COIE #4), Worlds In Limbo (COIE #5), Three Earths, Three Deaths (COIE #6), Beyond the Silent Night (COIE #7), A Flash of the Lightning (COIE #8), War Zone (COIE #9), Death at the Dawn of Time/The Monitor Files (COIE #10), Aftershocks (COIE #11), The Final Crisis (COIE #12)
Written by: Marv Wolfman
Penciled by: George Perez
Inked by: Dick Giordano, Mike DeCarlo, Jerry Ordway,
Colored by: NA
Lettered by: NA
Editor: NA
Publisher: DC Comics
Note: This is a review of the softcover trade paperback.
The apocalypse has begun. The fate of all that existed, exists, and will ever exist is at stake. A silent but deadly wave of anti-matter is consuming all positive matter in existence and causing time and space to rupture and bleed like an open gunshot wound to the stomach before being purged from existence. The unholy Anti-Monitor has vowed to see the destruction of all positive matter, a vow that has resulted in a plan of utter and complete annihilation beyond all human comprehension or understanding. Everything must die. And the Anti-Monitor’s power is great enough to back up this vow. No one is safe, as entire universes are sent screaming into oblivion by his all-consuming anti-matter onslaught.
The only possible thing standing between life and oblivion are the collective heroic forces from five earths, separated into their own respective universes. The heroes, hailing from five separate Earths: Earth 1 (the home of Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, the New Teen Titans, and the Legion of the Super-Heroes), Earth 2 (home of the Justice Society of America, Infinity Inc and veteran versions of Superman and Wonder Woman that have been active since late 1930s), Earth X (home of the Freedom Fighters and bondage pin-up queen Phantom Lady), Earth 4 (home of Blue Beetle, The Question, and Captain Atom), and Earth S (home of Captain Marvel) are the only ones with the power to stop the Anti-Monitor. But even they will not be enough as billions upon billions of souls will die before the final battle is over. And by the end, the DC Universe will be permanently altered beyond all recognition with the effects still being felt for years and years to come.
DC Comic’s first massive company-wide crossover event, The Crisis on Infinite Earths was their rebuttal to Marvel’s extremely successful Secret Wars mini-series. But while Secret Wars was done by Marvel’s C-Level talent (including a past his prime Jim Shooter), Crisis featured DC Comic’s two top creative talents: Marv Wolfman and George Perez. The twelve issue mini-series itself was launched in 1985 as the centerpiece of DC Comic’s 50th Anniversary celebration. Further adding to the hype for Crisis and it’s overall apocalyptic nature was the leaking to the mainstream media that DC was planning to have Crisis serve as a massive enema for the fifty year old comic company, which had become bogged down with out-dated portrayals of their lead characters and of an endless stream of variations of their core characters. But one of the major, major aspects of Crisis, which separates it from all over the crossovers to come in its wake, was its body count. Trillions and trillions of people die in the course of this story, including two major DC Comics icons.
The Silver-Age Flash was in a state of total stagnation by the 1980s as the book was spinning it’s wheels in a never-ending storyline involving the Flash being put on trial for the murder of the Reverse-Flash after the Reverse-Flash murdered Barry Allen’s wife Iris and nearly killed his new girlfriend. DC had decided to take the bold step of killing off Barry Allen and replace him with a brand new Flash but problems with who would take up the mantle plagued production of Crisis up until the final issue. Finally it was decided by Marv Wolfman that Wally West, who had been unceremoniously given cancer and retired by Wolfman in the pages of the New Teen Titans, would assume the mantle of the Flash in tribute towards his mentor.
Supergirl was one of the major additions made towards the Superman franchise during the 1960s and had become DC Comic’s second most recognizable female hero, right after Wonder Woman. However, Supergirl never had a personality or any real depth to her character and that many at DC felt that her presence cheapened Superman by way of diluting his outsider status. So it was decided Supergirl would die during Crisis. Her death created an outpouring of letters and hate mail which only grew when John Byrne purged Supergirl from the Post-Crisis history of Superman.
One final note of interest: DC went back and totally redid the coloring for the entire series while at the same time inking the originally done in simple pencils back-up story “The Monitor Files”. While the upgrades worked for “The Monitor Files”, the remastered color for the artwork is horribly bad. The grittiness of Perez’s original artwork is gone, replaced with an overly slick and polished color job that takes away from the dark and dirty nature of the series.
