Crisis about Crisis, part Two
Cover Date: October 1985 to March 1986
Release Date: 4th July to 19th December 1985
Infinity Inc #24-25, 27
Cover Date: March 1986 to June 1986
Release Date: 19th December 1985 to 20th March 1986
A quick apology here but this one get's a little long, and a little ranty, with issue #7 being so important it didn't seem fair to tack it onto the end of the last blog. And being the end obviously the more important stuff comes towards the end.
And for the first time, of many, here I do really like this series. It's obviously flawed, and I will mention a few of the here, but overall it tells the tale it was tasked with doing competently.
Crisis on Infinite Earths #7 - "Beyond the Silent Night" (October 1985)
Have you ever watched a show and suddenly an underused character gets all the action and the best lines, before being killed off? This is what happens with Supergirl here, no use burying the lead here it's probably the second most well-known fact about the series.
And yes Kara is amazing here giving it her all and driving the Anti-Monitor away, the only problem here is that it's only just over the halfway point so her sacrifice is basically pointless. She's not quite fridged here, a character (mostly female) who is killed to motivate the (mostly male) character, but it's a fairly close thing.
And it's all famously because they wanted post-Crisis Superman to be the last Kryptonian, thing is Supergirl was, as far as I know, a popular character. And whilst character deaths tended to stick in the 80s, it's fuzzy as Supergirl return doesn't follow a linear path but let's say the late 90s, within two years we'd get a new Supergirl one of several stands in for Kara.
I have more feelings about this and how other characters are handled, but for now, let's move on to...
Infinity Inc. #24 - "Back from the Future" (March 1986)
The rest of the issue is basically introducing another reinvention of a new character, in this case, Jonni Thunder an obvious replacement for her namesake. I must admit the white suit look she has rocks and it's an interesting character, but not whilst we're elbow deep in multiverse ending shenanigans!
Crisis on Infinite Earths #8 - "A Flash of the Lightning!" (November 1985)
This is what issue 7 did for Supergirl, but instead Barry's Flash. And whilst I'm not as massive a Flash fan as Kara(s), my taste in Flash runs (heh) more towards Avery Ho or Lia Nelson than Barry or Wally, but it's more or less the same problem with killing a character for almost no good reason. At least here his death echoes throughout the whole Crisis and beyond, and the Flash comics will take time to look at the fallout of Barry's death. Something that Supergirl doesn't get, apart from a good but generally unknown cameo.
Crisis on Infinite Earths #9 - "War Zone" (December 1985)
Really a filler issue with the heroes getting ready for what they need to do, and the villains finally revealing their sudden but inevitable betrayal. At this point, I think, like a lot of event comics it seems, that the decision for it to be twelve issues long is holding the story back. I may be biased here, but ending at #7 and allowing the rest of the issues to deal with the fallout of everything (as we get soon) would have been probably had been better.
And don't get me wrong the comic is always really well written and gorgeously illustrated, I might sound negative here (and it'll get worse) but I can't fault the creative type here for the decision they made. After all, this hadn't been tried before and no one knew quite how this all worked!
Crisis on Infinite Earths #10 - "Death at the Dawn of Time!" (January 1986)
But this comic almost makes up for all that padding, the heavy hitters, including Power Girl, get to fight the Anti-Monitor. She doesn't get to speak much, none of the characters really do, but she's there throughout the entire fight and it seems that they've finally defeated the Anti-Monitor.
Spoiler, it's not!
Crisis on Infinite Earths #11 - "Aftershock" (February 1986)
Remember how I said that Crisis should have had an issue dealing with the fallout? Well, this is it, dealing with how the few remaining heroes from Earth-2 (Superman, Huntress, Robin and Power Girl). And it's a good look at how they've lost everything. The problem is the focus isn't shared equally, Superman gets a good chunk of this, with Huntress and Robin only having a few pages (which are really effective) and poor Power Girl gets a single panel wondering why people remember her and not the others.
And the problem is confounded by the fate of these characters. Power Girl's single panel is fine as she's got a long future ahead of her, but poor Huntress and Robin's days are numbered and their send-off is the worse. And whilst I like Earth-2 Superman he gets the full range of man's pain and a happy ending, whilst still pulling off a heroic sacrifice.
Crisis on Infinite Earths #12 - "Final Crisis" (March 1986)
The Anti-Monitor is still alive, then he's not! All the unneeded characters are shuffled off stage and we have the New Earth for the relaunch in 1986. And yes I'm summing up because I have an issue here to deal with!
A lot of characters have been killed off, some of them in just a single panel, and ignominiously. I'm sure fans of Dove are royally pissed that he's taken out with just a single shot. But I'm going to indulge in a moan about how Huntress (and Robin) is killed off. They literally drop a building on her! She's not in the comic up to this point she just appears in the issue to be dead. Now whilst I would have liked to have kept Helena around, having her maybe rebuild her life from almost literally nothing (something that both Superman and another Earth-2 Huntress will do down the line), I'm not against the idea of killing off Helena Wayne. The thing is they could have fixed it with just a single panel, just have her sacrifice her life to save someone you could even have it be Helena Bertinelli to pass the torch (though she wasn't introduced in '89, but it could have been retrofitted).
The thing is, to sum up, DC Comics really had a problem not knowing what to do with their female superheroes, Power Girl I suspect only survived because she was on a team. Huntress and Supergirl were killed off, only to be reintroduced pretty quickly, and Batgirl was (for now, it'd get worse) retired. Obviously, I have the advantage of all the time in between, but it's still frustrating to see these missteps that will trickle down, some of it to be fair for the better, through the years.
Infinity Inc. #25 - "Business as Usual..." (April 1986)
Infinity Inc. #27 - "Memories" (June 1986)
Issue #27 shouldn't really be here, but let me indulge a little here and I'll explain at the end. Fury, Lyta, was the daughter of Earth-2's Wonder Woman and Steve Trevor, but with the Crisis and the two ascending to Olympus, her background has been re-written. Now she's the daughter of Helena Kosmatos Fury of World War Two. The problem is she remembers both versions and it's causing her to (obviously) fall apart. In the end, Silver Scarab does a Spock and makes her forget her previous origin so she can carry on with her life. Yes, the idea of using mind control in this manner, is a little dubious and never (as far as I know) challenged, but the rest of the story is really well handled. This is the kind of story that I wished we got for those other Earth-2 characters before they were shunted off to wherever out of the way of the New Earth heroes.
The fate of these two characters is also fascinating but I've gone on long enough so we'll leave it for another time...
As we're not quite done cleaning up the fallout from the Crisis.
And finally to sum up, for all its faults Crisis is a good story for the time. Whilst I can complain about some of the dubious decisions for the female characters, I can't really do the same for the destruction of the multiverse. Whilst time has shown the DC universe is probably better with one, they couldn't know that and did lead to around twenty-five years of the DC Universe.
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