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Infinite Crisis kind of sucks
kenoyer130
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
I just bought the Infinite Crisis hardbound book and companion book. The artwork was good, but the actual story was pretty flawed. Note this contains extensive spoilers so don’t read if you haven’t read Infinite Crisis.
All in all the major problems was the hardbound book being impossible to follow since so many cross ins and lead ups were missing, and lack of focus on one major threat.
To be fair there was several cool scenes.
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The original Crisis could easily be read stand alone. This is almost incompressible. I picked up the companion which did explain some of the stories, and without that I would have been totally lost. It seemed like we had a collection of set ups for other comics not included. I would have rather had to buy a collection of 3-4 graphic novels with each story fully explained. For example, Chemo is dropped on a city but then the full implications are never explained.
The bad guy’s motivation is very unclear. Why does the good Lex Luthor turn evil when he was good in the first series? Why would Super Man from Earth two be that easy to manipulate.
Repetitive death scenes. Both the cloned Super Boy and Super Man from Earth 2 die in exactly the same melodramatic way.
Too obvious “we need to do some house cleaning†killing off of minor characters. The deaths also seemed to have an “X-Men 3†with Cyclops effect, where no one seems to really acknowledge these people being killed. It really feels like the main characters share the reader’s contempt for these minor characters.
The main plot seemed like the editors sat around and came up with a bunch of cool ideas – “what if magic was killed? What if a city was nuked? What if the villains all united and worked as a team?†- and instead of narrowing these ideas down just went with them all. This made the story very hard to follow, and the final explanation that Lex and Super Boy Prime were behind it all seemed a bit of a stretch. They should have focused on one main plot and fleshed it out instead. Also, it was never really clear who Lex needed captured and why.
The whole "we can't trust batman" thing has been done to death. Give it a rest already. His super computer going crazy and trying to destroy all meta humans again seemed like a stand along story and forced into Infinite Crisis.
The ending with Superboy Prime was a mixed bag. The main thing ruining it was the too obvious homage to Smallville with Superboy carving the S symbol in his chest.
All in all the major problems was the hardbound book being impossible to follow since so many cross ins and lead ups were missing, and lack of focus on one major threat.
To be fair there was several cool scenes.
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The final showdown with Super Boy Prime.
The whole multiple earths mixing and matching and trying to find the perfect one.
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PSN: OrneryRooster
JordynNolz.com <- All my blogs (Shepard, Wasted, J'onn, DCAU) are here now!
PSN: OrneryRooster
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And that's about it.
So, you save the universe. And as thanks, you get to go chill in this tiny crystal place with two dudes you don't even know, and a dame that you can't put it in because she's married to a guy who could break you in five. By looking at you. And the kid, well, you had that one awkward night, but now he pretends like that never went down.
It's only natural that, in such a situation, you'd spend a lot of time looking in on the universe you totally saved. Except that universe is now really shitty. Dr. Light's a rapist now. Batgirl's in a wheelchair. Robin got beaten to death with a crowbar. Hawkman...who even knows what the fuck his deal is. Superboy wears a goddamn earring.
This is not my beautiful house, you'd proclaim. And this is not my beautiful wife.
Now, if you had the power to destroy and recreate the universe, a genius intellect, the mental/moral maturity of a rabid Barney the dinosaur fanboy, and the knowledge that a bunch of dickheads were wrecking the universe you just fucking saved, I don't think it's much of a stretch to say that you'd probably try to do a better job the next time around. It's like playing with Legos.
As far as Superman, if you believe for one second that he didn't go along with Luthor's flawed and stupid plan just because it was the only way he could rationalize to save Lois's life, AND if you don't think that saving his wife's life was sufficient motivation, then I don't know what to tell you.
All minor threads, except maybe the space plot, but the missteps there detract from what was a pretty decent blockbuster of a main story.
Superman.
PSN: OrneryRooster
Luthor isn't presented as having noble reasons for trying to recreate the universe. He just becomes your standard eeeevil villian with no real explanation of why his personality changed to such a degree.
Again I think the core problem was waaay too many plots needing attention. If they had trimmed it down to just the Luthor/Superman 2/Superboy parts and saved the batman AI going crazy, Spectre going craaazy, the villians all working together, the two space civilizations going to war plots for some other time, I bet they could of presented a much stronger series. Even just focusing on a few like the the space war and the villians united would of worked much better.
I don't mind a TPB having some missing parts due to cross overs, but in comparision the original Crisis I also read stand alone and never had any problem following the plot. This one it seemed like 3/4's of the comic was missing. I was constantly asking "whose this, why are they here, whats going on."
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He didn't turn into a "villain". He saw that the heroes were turning into dicks, brainwashing each other and all that, so he tried to do what he thought was right: destroy the Earth and make one that was good.
Pretty much all of the assault on Brother Eye stuff near the end, mostly involving Batman and people with the word Green in their names.
"I just wanted to see if you'd come."
The bit with Hal saving Batman.
All of that stuff was spot-the-fuck-on.
Having Luthor list off the actual changes with the new Earth felt very,very forced. Like he had a copy of the meeting notes from DC he was reading off. The whole earth changes and he has an instant list of very minor changes to the time stream (batman's killer being caught etc).
What about the other 6 billion people on the planet. Did they all suffer minor changes? Jerry Stoneby of Wisconsion did not move in with his dad after their parents divorce etc.
The scene very jarringly reminded us that we are reading a comic with an agenda to make yet another round of corrections to the DC universe. Stuff like that should either be shown in flashback or otherwise presented to the reader in some way then having someone tick them off.
~"The Ballad of Morgan Brown"
As far as lacking understanding about what was happening, you have to understand that this was a huge event with a ton of tie-in's... it's kind of like watching the The Two Towers without seeing Fellowship first (geek alert). Your real issue is with the almost mandatory tie-in's, not the story itself.
The other thing is your issue with character motivations... you keep asking when Lex or Superman II became villains... you have to understand that they saw themselves as the only real heroes left. To them, almost everyone on earth was a villain... I liked Superman's line about how a perfect Earth doesn't need a Superman... it was cool.
Anyway, I'm not saying this series was perfect, it was flawed. But it did have a lot of good moments, and overall I really enjoyed it.
JordynNolz.com <- All my blogs (Shepard, Wasted, J'onn, DCAU) are here now!
I think my favorite parts of the crisis were the Spectre going nuts and the Society. I did like how many major things were going on at once, because even if you couldn't figure out how they were related, it really did feel like a crisis.
In other news, should I read Crisis on Infinite Earths?
Because there's a dude who does that a lot in it.
JordynNolz.com <- All my blogs (Shepard, Wasted, J'onn, DCAU) are here now!
That was Marvel.
Clever girl.
The immortal guy that is somehow taken out by a single bullet?
soaked in the blood of 12 Robins for 107 days.
Forged with the hammer of mighty Hephaestus in the bowels of Surtur's domain. And also the Dreaming. From precious vibranium ore from another universe entirely and Alan Scott's missing eye from the future.
I'm just trying to rationalize.
Biding. When this 'Watch the Skies' nonsense goes down, I bet he'll pop out of an alley on the last page of Firestorm or something and be all
Infinite Crisis really did suck.
And very complicated.
Anally.
The point was that things were better in the silver age, and the best way to get back to those days is to kill off or rape all those old characters.
I'm sure it made DC some money
Edit: I me my mine...do'h
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Behold the annhilation of the extraterrestrial and the rise of the machines.
Hail Satan!
WISHLIST
That seems to make sense.
You know what would make more sense? Spinning stuff back out into parallel earths again.
I mean, we know it still exists, just one corner of it collapsed (ref Planetary with Elijah Snow referring to a "partial multiverse collapse" and then the Captain Atom Wildstorm crossover).
There have been hints that this is how it's going to go down after 52, of course. Indeed, perhaps it has already gone down thus and the reader is just yet to know.
I know I'm not the only one who feels uncomfortable with Alan Scott existing in the same Universe as the Green Lantern Corps, for example.
Anally.