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Hooray for spandex!
May 6, 2006
By Douglas Wolk
(excerpt)
At least "Civil War" is fairly self-explanatory. The same can't be said for DC's mammoth crossover "Infinite Crisis," written by Geoff Johns and drawn by a posse headed by Phil Jimenez; its final installment also appeared May 3. If you are not already deeply immersed in the last 30 years' worth of DC Comics, it might be possible -- but not easy -- to enjoy "Infinite Crisis" as an enormous show of sound and fury, crammed to bursting with incidents and explosions and carnage and hundreds upon hundreds of characters whose presence Johns rarely bothers to explain. The impossibly convoluted plot, foreshadowed for years before it began, has spilled over into four other miniseries, a slew of one-shots and innumerable crossovers in ongoing series, and still feels breathless, dense and desperately unclear.
INFINITE CRISIS #7 (Perez Cover) (May 2006)
The miniseries' theme, though, chomps right on its own tail: "Infinite Crisis" is a superhero comic book about superhero comics as a genre and what's going on with them right now. As the title suggests, it's a sequel to Marv Wolfman and George Pérez's mid-1980s crossover "Crisis on Infinite Earths," a well-intentioned miniseries that, in an attempt to clean up the confusing elements of its fictional corporate universe, wiped out one of its most resonant concepts: that there were multiple, parallel Earths, whose histories weren't quite the same, occupying the same space and time, and that they could sometimes bleed into each other. Johns' story teases readers with the return of the parallel-Earths gimmick, but concludes that there's really only one world.
