Every year I read at least one “classic” book, despite knowing it’ll probably stink, because sometimes they surprise me by showing why they’re considered classics in the first place. So I picked up the granddaddy of event comics, Crisis on Infinite Earths, and unfortunately it didn’t surprise me. In fact, it wasn’t just bad – I think this is the worst superhero comic I’ve ever read. Classic piece of shit more like!
The DC Universe at the time of this book was a mess of confusing, mind-numbingly tortuous continuity - NOT LIKE TODAY AMIRITE?!?1 So, hack writer Marv Wolfman masterminded this storyline which would smoosh everything together into place, kind of like cramming the contents of a buffet onto a single plate, hoping it’d bring coherence and uniformity to DC’s line. It didn’t. It just looked like pigslop.
This is how creative Wolfman was: his approach took the form of the blandest, most overwrought, ironically most incoherent, bloated, moronic storyline ever. The various Earths are literally colliding into one another for some reason; a dude called The Monitor is doing something while another dude called The Anti-Monitor is the Big Bad. He’s after ultimate power over the universe or something. I can’t make sense of this twaddle and I refuse to go back and re-read any of it – it was horrible enough the first time!
An annoying weeny called Pariah shows up to uselessly warn everyone of impending doom, then a vague, all-powerful menace appears and heroes everywhere gather to punch it. This mindless scenario – each time stretched beyond tedium by Wolfman – repeats itself throughout the book and it never gets interesting once. The target switches from vague menace - like an ever-advancing cosmic fog - to The Anti-Monitor, who’s invincible until the plot needs him to be vulnerable, and the heroes similarly take the same unimaginative approach to every obstacle they encounter in this book: hit it. Hard. Didn’t work? Do it again you idiot, we got pages to fill!
Along the way are some utterly pointless sub-plots like: Killer Frost falling in love with Firestorm because Psycho Pirate; Sgt Rock fights Nazis; heroes climb a tower; heroes fight in a castle; there’s a new Wildcat; Psimon is up to something pstupid. And that’s when you realise: DC has a metric shit-ton of embarrassing characters, all written in pretty much the same style, and they’ve all been included in this book, regardless of relevance! Harbinger, Doctor Polaris, Geo-Force, Wildcat, The Creeper, Aquaman, to name just a few. They even literally have an Uncle Sam walking about talking in a punch-worthy folksy voice!
Oh and the dialogue, the worthless, corny, stream-of-diarrhea ‘80s dialogue! There’s way, way, wayyyy too much exposition in general and the pages are bursting with captions and speech and thought bubbles, redundantly stating the obvious and/or repeating themselves over and over. Any page is an example of its irredeemable awfulness. Here’s The Anti-Monitor spouting standard cartoony supervillain crap: “You whimpering fool, it already is too late! From the moment you set foot on Qward --- you sealed your own fates! This is the day the universe dies!” Here’s Aquaman thinking things he’d never be thinking during a fight but needs to for the reader’s benefit: (Thought bubble) “The JLA wants me on the surface… but I won’t abandon Atlantis, not again. I’m not sure there’s going to be an Atlantis left, but if necessary I’ll defend its last ruins with my life”. Useless rubbish. Then Mera: (Thought bubble): “Arthur and Lori aren’t having any greater success than I am --- even with my ability to form hard water. I can drive these things away for a moment, but they come back with a vengeance.” It’s like a child wrote this drivel.
Characters die in an attempt to provoke a completely unearned emotional response, which is ineffective anyway given the joke every reader is in on that nobody in superhero comics stays dead but Uncle Ben. And the main characters who die here have come back to life, died and returned again at least once more since this book was published anyway!
This nonsense is around 350 pages long and feels 10 times that thanks to the shocking abundance of Marv Wolfman’s inept writing splattered across nearly every page. The only way I could get through this book was to read a few pages a day and it took WEEKS to slog through! And it didn’t need to be this long given how wafer-thin the story is – it’s your bog standard “superheroes punch supervillain” formula. Even more agonisingly, there are numerous “endings” and a never-ending epilogue like it’s Return of the bloody King! But then the longer it is, the more money DC made due to its supposed-“importance” at the time to suckers, sorry, “fans”, everywhere, a method DC/Marvel are still following to this day.
No wonder event comics are so bad if this and the first Secret Wars are the template! I can understand nostalgia so I appreciate that older readers who read this when they were wee will like this regardless, but I can’t see how anyone else – particularly modern readers – could possibly enjoy something so convoluted, boring, repetitive, contrived and obnoxiously overlong; I certainly didn’t!
