Crisis Charting

The aim of this post isn't to prove how impenetrable Infinite Crisis may be. Instead, it's more of an exercise in backtracking.

SPOILERS for recent comics behind the link.

Disparate in style and milieu as they may be, both Gotham Central #40 and the Rann-Thanagar War Special are good examples of what might well be called "pass-through storytelling." Although both ostensibly served as conclusions for their respective series, both clearly fed into the larger plots of 52 and Infinite Crisis. As such, they are mere signposts along the way to the ultimate (no pun intended) version of the DC Universe which Dan Didio has promised for 2007 and beyond. I wasn't surprised that R-TWS felt more like Infinite Crisis #4.5, but I sure didn't expect the last issue of Gotham Central to have been co-opted so blatantly, thereby robbing it of the opportunity for closure. Now Montoya's story will have to wait for 52, while Infinite Crisis has (for now) the exclusive story of Allen's fate.

Since all of this made me picture a big DC Editorial dry-erase board showing various interconnected titles, I thought I'd try to work one out for myself. It's probably far from complete, but I think it gives a good indication of Infinite Crisis' family tree. (And yes, I was thinking about calling this essay “New Map Of Hell.”)

Of course, the immediate foundation for Infinite Crisis was laid by miniseries with which we are all now intimately familiar, but even these had their own "feeders." In order to appreciate the nuances of The OMAC Project, we were encouraged first to read the Countdown special, plus a month’s worth of Superman and Wonder Woman books. However, a little background on Sasha Bordeaux, starting with Greg Rucka's Detective Comics tenure, would also have been helpful, as would knowing the personal and professional connections between Max Lord and the Justice League, from Max's time in Justice League International.

Similarly, Rann-Thanagar War was set up by the Adam Strange miniseries, and has since assimilated much of the cast of The Return of Donna Troy. The latter was an unofficial "fifth feeder," and it too had antecedents in 2002's Graduation Day miniseries and the Wolfman/Perez-era New Teen Titans.

In fact, New Teen Titans' portrayal of Dr. Light as a buffoon, in contrast to the killer he had been in Justice League of America, inspired the backstory of Identity Crisis. (A number of villains made famous by the '80s Suicide Squad were also prominent in Identity Crisis.) In turn, the events of that miniseries led directly into OMAC, Day of Vengeance, and Villains United. The new Secret Society seen in Villains United attacked the Justice League in the JLA arc "Crisis of Conscience," which itself was a sequel to Identity Crisis.

A number of DC's regular books crossed over with Identity Crisis, Infinite Crisis, and the feeders, but two Geoff Johns team books (neither of which I read anymore) seem to have played significant roles in the overall story. Along with its characters and a few Outsiders helping out Donna Troy, Teen Titans set up Superboy's moral dilemma currently on display in Infinite Crisis, and JSA Classified explored Power Girl's twisted history.

Naturally, Power Girl leads us back to the Multiverse, and thus to Crisis on Infinite Earths. (The Multiverse's existence and fate were also revealed to Donna Troy in her miniseries.) It would be silly for me to try and list all the stories which went into the making of the original Crisis, so that's probably as good a place to stop as any. There are other little arcs floating around, like the path Firestorm took from Identity Crisis into his own series and now into Infinite Crisis, or the Flash issues that might inform their "deaths," but I'm trying to keep this fairly simple. (That's also why I haven't diagrammed the Spectre's recent history, but considering its complexity I actually think it’s been handled pretty well.)

Again, the point of this essay is not to say that Infinite Crisis is too complex for the uninitiated. Rather, it’s that “pass-through storytelling” tends to be unsatisfying at the very least, and more often than not feels like the book’s been hijacked. (The reverse was the case with Crisis on Infinite Earths, which set up crossovers with monthly books that never came back around into Crisis. It was a “giver,” and Infinite Crisis seems to be a “taker.”) Pass-through storytelling really turns a series of little stories into one big one, sometimes raising issues about the structure of the result. By contrast, an ending makes a story complete unto itself, allowing the reader to contemplate its meaning and move on. If that sounds elementary, it is.

DC had a good idea going into Infinite Crisis: have a blockbuster miniseries spin off into more specialized miniseries, which would then feed back into another blockbuster miniseries. However, as much as I like stories to be handled in the characters' regular books, this time I think exceptions would have been appropriate. Organizing the various plot threads into a smaller number of titles might have made their resolutions easier to predict, but it would also have given the regular books more control over their own stories, and it might have made the miniseries’ storytelling a little tighter.

Regardless, that kind of analysis probably won’t be possible until after Infinite Crisis is over, and we can see all the lines and arrows connecting the various series on that big DC Editorial dry-erase board.

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