The principal problem with this book is that it makes a lot more sense if you already know a great deal about how the DC Universe had developed over the previous half-century. The corollary is that I'm going to spend a lot of time talking about "Before" and "After" in an effort to help you see why what actually happens During the book was ever important to begin with. Don't say I didn't warn you!

This storyline was originally one ongoing epic, a comic book "limited series" which ran for twelve months and then stopped, called of course Crisis on Infinite Earths. When it started coming out around January 1985, it was not unreasonable to assume that virtually anyone who might be interested in spending money on it had already been reading the occasional superhero comic in the DC Universe for at least a year or two, and knew something about the different parallel Earths whic were being dealt with in this story. However, DC did not decide it would be worth the trouble of reprinting this baby as a single volume, available in conventional bookstores as well as those specializing in comics, until it finally hit the stores in 1999 (actually a first edition began to come out in late 98 and was instantly recalled due to a printing error). That meant there had been a 14-year gap since the days when this series constituted "current events" that could be understood in the context of what had recently been happening in other monthly books published by DC. New waves of comic book fans have arisen in the late 80s and 90s, and while they might have seen the occasional reference to the Crisis days, with the use of such terms as "the pre-Crisis version" and the "post-Crisis continuty" for a certain character being used in the letter column of a comic book, nevertheless they are now apt to be rather baffled by all the different Earths and variations of key characters that pop up in the pages of this book.

Since it is my duty to assume that anyone who stumbles across this review may not know anything about what had been happening in the DC Universe prior to 1985, I'm going to have to take a few paragraphs to give you a very sketchy outline.

The term "DC Universe" refers to all the fictional characters who have been published by DC in comic books and supposedly share the same universe - or, more properly, multiverse. Most of the really famous members of the DC Universe are "superheroes" - Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Green Lantern, the Flash, and so forth. However, the DCU (I'm going to use that acronym for DC Universe from now on) has also included comic books about World War II military personnel, gunslingers of the late 19th Century American West, various science fiction concepts set in future centuries, fantasy stories largely set in alternate realities that don't particularly resemble planet Earth, and so forth. An old gimmick was to have Superman (or Batman, or whoever) travel back and forth in time to team up with characters who lived generations ago or several hundred years into the future, thus nailing down the idea that virtually all comic books published by DC were supposed to fit together into one huge multiverse. Heck, back when DC got the franchise to do a few comics about "He-Man and the Masters of the Universe" action figures, they had Superman bump into He-Man first in order to whet people's appetites for the Masters of the Universe comics that would be coming soon, so you can see that they were even trying to incorporate He-Man into their multiverse in a vague sort of way, despite not owning him :)

The company which later became known as DC had already been printing comic books for a few years before they published the original comic book "superhero" and started a new genre in the industry, but most people (if they worry about it all) would point to his debut appearance as the event that really kicked off the birth of the DCU. It is definitely called the beginning of the Golden Age of Superheroes. The first was Superman, of course, first appearing in Action Comics #1 in 1938 (now the most valuable comic book on the planet - partially because I think there are only a couple of mint-condition copies known to exist). He was quickly followed by such characters as the first versions of Batman, Green Lantern, Wonder Woman, the Flash, and I don't know how many others. In addition, the success of Superman quickly sparked a flood of imitators published by many other companies. Fortunately, we can afford to ignore most of those imitators in this review. Except perhaps to mention that some of those imitators were eventually purchased by DC later on to be integrated into the DCU. Those acquired characters also got their faces into this story.

After Pearl Harbor brought the USA in World War II, Superman and his ilk were often shown fighting bad guys who were supposed to be in the employ of the Axis Powers, either overseas or here at home. In other words, it was firmly established by dozens of stories of that era that Superman, Batman, et al. were bona fide World War II veterans. Which was no big problem in the short run. In the long run - say, as 1960 was creeping up on us, I gather there was some degree of concern over this because comic books were normally expected to appeal to young people, and by the time the war had been over for fifteen years it was hard to expect sufficient "suspension of disbelief" from your audience to have them believe that WWII veterans still looked so youthful and might still be in their 20s, scarcely older than the schoolkids, high school and college students who were the target audience.

Someone came up with a clever compromise. It was decided that all of the WWII-era heroes existed on a world which would now be known as Earth-2. Some of the old reliable names were going to get new face lifts however, as younger "contemporary" characters who weren't all that old. Most of these reboots of superhero names that had begun in the 1938-1945 period were quickly banded together into a group called the Justice League of America. The JLA (and nearly any other superhero subsequently created for the DCU, whether or not he was ever offered membership in the League) all lived on Earth-1. These new characters first appearing in the late 50s and early 60s (though in Superman and Batman's case they looked almost exactly the same as the earlier versions, since those costumes had already become so recognizable) are considered to represent the beginning of the Silver Age of Superheroes. If you want to round off a little, you could think of the Sixties as being the classic decade for the Silver Age, though it began a little sooner and lasted longer.

In the 1940s, it had been established that most of the popular DC heroes (Superman, Batman, etc.) had formed their own club: the Justice Society of America. The Justice League was thus the "New Generation" version of that concept, the young upstarts who were following in the footsteps of the now-getting-middle-aged versions on a parallel world. In order to keep people reminded of the Golden Age/Silver Age distinction, it became customary that each year in the Justice League's ongoing comic book, there would be a JLA/JSA teamup which gave everybody a chance to catch up on superhero gossip, gave the writer a chance to lecture new writers on who everybody was and which world they came from, and occasionally was a golden opportunity to have another superhero team entirely guest-star in a big "crossover" to attract more attention to whatever comic book that particular group of heroes was currently featured in.

Many of the story titles dealing with superheroes from two or more worlds had titles in the form of: "Crisis on (fill in the blank)." So when this storyline was announced as "Crisis on Infinite Earths," veteral readers of the Justice League (with their annual "Crisis" team-ups with the JSA) instantly knew the name was a tribute to a long-standing tradition, only this time all the parallel worlds were in terrible peril simultaneously! You can't beat those venerable traditions :)

Just for the heck of it, I'm going to list some of the "major" versions of Earth before we go any further:

Earth-Prime: This is where we live. It is the slum of the parallel earths, the sad place where superheroes simply don't exist. I mean, when was the last time you shook hands with one? (Note: Actually it turned out there was a teenaged Last Son of Krypton on this planet too, living as a normal human being until Crisis - he hadn't previously realized he had superpowers, or something . . . and by the end of this story he had faded out and will never be heard from again. Oh well.) Earth-Prime's existence had previously given DC's editors, writers, and artists an excuse to do crossover stories in which they got to feature themselves meeting their own favorite superhero characters face to face. On the sad side, I believe Earth-Prime was totally obliterated during the course of this book, which of course means that you and I don't exist anymore either! I'm sorry to have to break this tragic news to you, but what can I say? It's not my fault!

Earth-1: The "mainstream" DCU world of the Silver Age. Comic books starring Superman, Batman, etc., in the 60s, 70s, and early 80s were usually set in this world unless stated otherwise.

Earth-2: The Golden Age world, where any DC comics from 1938 to the late 50s had been set. The heroes of those dusty old stories had been young men and women in the WWII days and were actually looking middle-aged to elderly as time went past.

Earth-3: A world where there were no superheroes - just villains, analogs of some of the good guys who had gone terribly bad in this version. Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Green Lantern, and the Flash were represented by skewed versions of themselves called Ultraman, Owlman, Superwoman, Power Ring, and Johnny Quick. A couple of years before Crisis, Marv Wolfman wrote a story in which the local version of Lex Luthor became the first "superhero" on this planet, actually, using his brilliant inventions to simulate superpowers. Remember that: It's important to the plot of the opening scenes of this book.

Earth-S: The world of Shazam. Captain Marvel (teenage boy who turns into a big guy in a red suit with a gold lightning bolt on his chest when he says "Shazam!"), his sister Mary Marvel, his sidekick Captain Marvel Jr., and so forth. Those characters were originally published in the 40s and 50s by a company called Fawcett. DC hounded them out of business in the 50s with a lawsuit based on the theory that Captain Marvel was too blatantly a copy of Superman (I think they overreacted), then - about two decades later - bought the rights to those now-long-out-of-print characters and incorporated them into the DCU, the new leadership having apparently decided that Captain Marvel wasn't just a total ripoff of Superman after all, as long as the same company that owned Superman got to control this guy too!

Earth-X: The world of the superheroes DC had eventually bought from a company called Quality that published superhero comics during WWII.

And many others which might only have been featured in one or two stories apiece. All of the Earths I just listed will get their fair share of attention in this book - Earth-Prime at least being represented by its Superboy character.

By the early 80s, it was all getting very convoluted. An awful lot to ask a new reader to assimilate. And it was a lot worse than just getting the different Earths straight. To give one example, someone allegedly wrote in a letter complaining about the Multiple Versions of Atlantis issue.

Aquaman, a member in good standing of the JLA, was supposed to be the rightful king of Atlantis, a city located at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. Judging by Aquaman himself, as well as his wife and sidekick and so forth, it appeared that his Atlantis was inhabited by people who looked exactly like surface-dwelling human beings at first glance, only they had the ability to breathe underwater. So far so good . . .

On the other hand, in an old Superman story it had been established that when Clark Kent was still just a journalism major in college, he fell madly in love with a coed named Lori Lemaris who happened to be confined to a wheelchair. After he proposed to her, however, he learned that she wasn't exactly crippled . . . she was a mermaid visiting the campus from Atlantis to investigate the current condition of the United States (and by extension, all of the surface world). In other words, a spy. I think it says fine things for Clark Kent's high moral standards that he was shocked by this realization, proving he had never tried to use his X-ray vision to see what she really looked like underneath her clothes and the loose blanket across her "legs", but that's not really the point. The point is that in Superman comics, Atlantis was inhabited by mermaids and mermen with fish-tails. I am told that other DCU characters had bumped into other places called "Atlantis" whenever a particular comic book writer felt like using some version of the "underwater city" concept, and no one was trying to make them all stay consistent with one another.

There were other problems regarding several different science fiction or superhero concepts in the DCU which were all set in the future, but sometimes in futures that were so radically different that they couldn't possibly all be part of a single coherent timeline. Yet Superman, Batman, etc., would rub shoulders with one of these possible futures in one crossover story, and then a radically different future and its denizens in another crossover a year or two later.

Something had to be done. Somehow Marv Wolfman managed to get himself appointed as the writer who would do one big all-encompassing event that would collapse several parallel worlds into a single mainstream Earth where all the superheroes lived together. It was also decided to drastically reduce the frequency with which 20th Century superheroes travelled back and forth in time for colorful stories in the past or future. A couple of years before Crisis started coming out, Wolfman began dropping references into other comics concerning a mysterious character called the Monitor who lived in his own private satellite in Earth orbit. The Monitor appeared to be obsessed with gathering as much information as possible about various superhero and supervillain types, and in at least one of Wolfman's stories (I bought it when it came out in 1983) the Monitor was running a supervillian temp agency, acting as the middleman in finding half-a-dozen freelance villains who would agree to fight hero group the New Teen Titans on behalf of a Mafia boss who was getting scared of them. The villains got trounced, naturally,

In Crisis on Infinite EArths, however, we are suddenly supposed to accept the Monitor as being a good guy who has the best interests of the entire human race (and multiverse of other inhabitants) at stake. A little thing like running a job service for supervillains in his spare time is a laughable peccadillo that need not be dwelt upon.

The Monitor's opposite number is the Anti-Monitor, the embodiment of the Anti-Matter Universe which exists separately from the normal multiverse of worlds composed of normal matter. The Anti-Monitor is somehow dissolving one universe after another (and there's a heck of alot of universes for him to work his way through).

As doom approaches, signs of strain are appearing on Earth-1 and elsewhere. People from one time era suddenly find themselves in the 20th Century (or somewhen else). Natural disasters increase. Monitor starts gathering teams of champions together from various parallel Earths at various times throughout history - although it appeared that the main problem was affecting 1985 Earth, so that's where people from past and future ended up. You see, Wolfman had decided to give every significant character who ever was featured in a DC comic book at least a cameo appearance. That included caveman characters, 19th century gunfighters, World War II soldiers, extraterrestrials from I don't know how many planets, and so on and so forth. Word has it that DC paid a man to spend two years reading through every comic book they'd ever published, taking notes, so that Marv Wolfman could be sure to include everybody. (I imagine they had to draw the line somewhere - if a petty burglar named Joe Schmo from Kokomo had once been arrested by Batman in a story in 1950 and hadn't been heard from since, he wouldn't appear in Crisis. But any "regular" enemy who had fought Batman ten or twenty times, i.e. the Joker, the Riddler, Catwoman, and so forth, was bound to get mentioned.)

Beyond the general idea that hordes of costumed weirdoes are running around trying to do one thing or another to stave off total destruction of the multiverse, the plot is almost indescribable. If you aren't already obsessed with the DCU and aren't panting at the chance to find out how many costumed characters the brilliant artist George Perez could squeeze into a single picture covering two pages, then I'm not sure this book is for you. As I said, it is saturated in the context of all the stuff the DCU had previously done, and you're likely to find yourself scratching your head from time to time and saying "Killer Frost? Who's she?" I hope you have a high tolerance for that sort of thing if you decide to read this as your first introduction to the DCU of the Silver Age.

Aside from entire universes in which nearly every intelligent being, human or non, had perished, here's some of the death toll:

Barry Allen, the Silver Age Flash, had died. And after the whole mess wound down, everybody remembered that he had died. In fact, he died a few years before the TV series titled "The Flash" that starred police scientist Barry Allen as the title character ever commenced. The Flash comics coming out at the time starred a man in an identical suit who was actually Wally West, Barry's nephew, the former "Kid Flash" when he was just a teenage sidekick. (On the other hand, in his new Intro to this collected edition of the series, Wolfman comments that somewhere in its pages he carefully hid a clue to a way in which Barry Allen might someday be restored to us if DC decided this simply had to be done. He does not say just what the clue was or where to look for it, and I haven't tried yet. Even so, having now been consistently dead for about 16 years and counting without ever being dragged back into the living world as a Big Surprise For Us, Barry Allen has surely set some sort of superhero record!)

Supergirl, Superman's first cousin, died. And while he was extremely upset at the time - the cover of one episode of the series showed him cradling her dead body in his arms and grieving - after the whole time-and-space-twisting storyline ran down, he no longer remembered she had ever existed . . . because, of course, she hadn't. The general idea on the Superman Mythos subject was to throw out anyone else who had allegedly survived the explosion of Krypton. During the Silver Age it had appeared that Superman was the "last survivor of Krypton" except for the following:

1 Monkey (Beppo the Super-Monkey, I think)
1 Dog (Krypto the Super-Dog)
1 cute blond cousin (Kara, called Supergirl)
1 bottled city of Kandor, with lots of Kryptonian inhabitants shrunk down to a tiny size (long story)
3 thugs trapped in the Phantom Zone (you may recall them from the second Superman movie)
1 grandfather of Superman who had travelled to Earth 100 years ago, then forward in time to the modern era, without Superman knowing he was here. Yes, it was a lousy idea and I think it was only mentioned once before the Crisis days, then quickly swept under the rug.

And I may very well be missing a few, since I haven't read every single pre-Crisis Silver Age Superman comic book.

Post-Crisis, none of those other people had ever survived Krypton's death at all. A character called Matrix who eventually became known as the superheroine "Supergirl" was introduced a few years later, but she was no genetic relation to Superman at all. Her powers are quite different, but he and his foster parents have come to see her as part of the family - like his little sister - and he tolerates her wearing a feminine version of his own costume, complete with the big S on the chest. I recently bought a trade paperback collecting the first several issues of her monthly comic book and I'll review it for you one of these days to provide more details.

Note: In a comment at the start of this book, Wolfman comments that the death of the original Supergirl has gotten a lot of angry reactions over the years. But he also claims that many fans have admitted that the portion of this storyline which focused on Supergirl up through the point of her death in battle was so well-written as to make it the best Supergirl story they had ever seen. You could take this to mean that Wolfman has a marvellous gift for characterization on a good day, and you'd be right. (He's also had some bad days, over the years.) You could also take this to mean that most of the stories DC had done over the last two decades or so starring Supergirl had been pretty lame, and you'd be right about that too. (I've read several of the ones from the early 80s, and I hear she wasn't any better in previous appearances, as when she had her own comic book series for awhile in the 70s.)

Golden Age versions of Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman were erased. None of them had ever fought in World War II no matter what your valuable comics from the 1940s might say. Most other Golden Age heroes were still around, but now they had all fought the good fight in the 40s and 50s in the same world which was now populated by a new generation of superheroes (the modern Superman, etc.) following in their footsteps.

About three and a half years of continuity in Batman's life (the issues of Batman and Detective Comics written by Doug Moench in the mid-80s) were erased. I don't know why. I was buying those titles when Moench started writing, and I still think his Batman scripts of the mid-80s were some of the best "regular" Batman material I have ever seen. As opposed to one-shot "Elseworlds" projects various talented writers have done which are not part of the mainstream continuity, including Frank Miller's legendary Batman: The Dark Knight Returns.

Many DC superheroes have received "reboots" since Crisis, sometimes blatantly ignoring inconvenient aspects of their past continuity, and any new version of one of the old reliables is generally called the Post-Crisis version. Since history was getting all snarled up in knots during this story, it's a convenient excuse to rewrite anything you please. Hawkman in particular has suffered badly from this sort of thing, but I'm not going into that!

Hmmm. Maybe I should have titled this review "Abandon Hope, All Ye Who Enter Here" or words to that effect. I think it's a fantastic story but I keep warning you how hard it is to keep everybody straight. Can we say "mixed signals"? Well, now that I've tried to explain to you what all the fuss was about, you're on your own in deciding whether to buy it! As I said in my Pros, the dialogue is often brilliant and the detailed art is beautiful, so reading it is not inherently a painful experience as long as you can cope with all the names and faces being thrown at you one after another. That's for you to decide.

Recommended: Yes