Did someone say Sequel To Crisis On Infinite Earths? No? Well, Geoff Johns wrote one anyway - this is Infinite Convolution!
The story is that the Golden Age DC superheroes, who were retired at the end of the original Crisis, have decided to come back, kill everyone, and destroy all worlds, forming a single perfect new world for them alone. Why? Because the current superheroes are just too dark and gritty for their liking. Right. So killing them all, not to mention countless innocents, isn’t at all hypocritical!
I read one Countdown to Infinite Crisis book - The OMAC Project - two years ago and none of the other various titles so a lot of what makes up Infinite Crisis is a total mystery to me. And that’s a problem because the book assumes you’ve read them all, launching straight into the references to them from the beginning. For me, turning the pages revealed one massive, baffling conflict after another - the reading experience of Infinite Crisis is like having a lunatic grab your shirt and scream into your face every few seconds! Why - what does it mean, and could you please stop? The thing is, even if I had read every Countdown book, I doubt I’d enjoy this any better. Comprehension would not make this noise bearable.
I can’t stress how many characters there are in this book - it’s literally everyone in the DC Universe and then some! Nearly every page is stuffed with scores of heroes, all angsty as hell, and intent on fighting one another for seemingly no reason. I got some of the plots - Wonder Woman killed Maxwell Lord and the world has turned against her; Batman built Brother Eye and the OMACs have gone haywire - but everything else? No clue. And there is a metric fucktonne of everything else!
Superboy Prime, the villain of the piece, is an idiotic twit who wants to be the only Superboy ever and then later the only Superman ever. He does this through yelling his motivations every time he appears and then launching into yet another overblown, overlong big dumb action sequence of punching, punching, shirt-ripping, and more punching. He’s such a boring villain.
But wait, there’s more villainy! Alexander Luthor (there’s a few Lexs here, I think Alexander is a different one from the usual Lex) has harnessed the power of a dead Anti-Monitor to somehow crash together all the various Earths?! And if that wasn’t confusing (why aren’t the gravitational fields of the Earths in such close proximity to each other having any effect on anything?), it’s down to Superboy (another one - don’t ask) and Nightwing to save the day!? This was so underdeveloped and yet it was the whole point of the book!
I appreciate the artists’ efforts - the time it must’ve taken to draw so many superheroes on so many pages alone must’ve been sizeable - but it just looks awful. It really does. Cram the pages with 50 characters per page just looks like shit. There’s no quality here, just excess in a George Lucas/Star Wars Prequels way.
I can understand some people saying Infinite Crisis’ worst crime is that it ruined the legacy of the original Crisis - that the Golden Age characters should’ve remained retired peacefully rather than brought back and given the modern day dark and gritty DC treatment thus tarnishing that legacy. But I don’t really care about the Golden or Silver Age comics so I don’t empathise, though I can see why it’d bother some fans.
There’s no main character to follow, no real story - to call Infinite Crisis a mess would be generous. Johns’ writing and the overall art showcases the worst qualities of the superhero genre in a single volume. It is simply just stupidly loud and obnoxious gibberish. If an eggy fart could be a comic, it would be Infinite Crisis.
Infinite Crisis
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