DC and The Matter Of Crisis- Part III

You’ve heard the word. You know the story.

Crisis.

The iconic, defining, definitive word of DC stories.

The word Crisis feels inseparable from the fabric of DC. It holds sway over its past, it informs its present, and it will certainly influence the future. You can’t think of DC and not think of Crisis at some point. The very idea of it has been bound to the very idea of DC that tightly.

And the response to the word and its invocation is intense as well. It comes with a lot of assumptions and baggage. Given that is the case, given it has become ubiquitous, inevitable, and all-pervading with DC itself, it’s worth discussing what has become of it. What has emerged from this focusing and this obsession over Crisis in DC? What has it led to?

The matter of Crisis must be unpacked, and that’s what we’re here to do.

Picking up where we left off…

The Multiverse + Diversity = The Multiversity

While Convergence was already being signed into the bin of irrelevance, something else had just recently finished publication.

Grant Morrison had taken ages to work on their successor project to both the seminal 52 weekly series and Final Crisis. It was a much-hyped and long gestating, sprawling work that would structurally draw upon Morrison’s own previous structurally bold epic Seven Soldiers, which preceded Final Crisis. It was the aptheosis of a great deal of their work. And the thing that made it all the more juicier? It was a work that would explore the 52-universes of The Multiverse that had returned in the 52 weekly series, and had been spotlighted in fun ways in their Final Crisis series. The Multiversity was a project long-awaited and postponed for years.

A portmanteau of ‘The Multiverse’ and ‘Diversity’, it would center on a legion of new, varied iterations on familiar classic ideas, like a Black Superman and a Gay Flash, which modernized the ancient 60’s archetypes for a new age. It would boast a whole new multiversal Justice League, allowed to be more varied and interesting than the usual ‘Big 7’ definitive Justice League of the 1960’s and the modern age. It would treat them as the all-important leads, and do something new. It was a book all the different things that could be done with the superhero ideas, all the ways it could be twisted and tweaked to make up something fresh.

There was a long and sustained fan-wait and attention for The Multiversity, the precise opposite of an enterprise like Convergence. This was something planned for literal years, whereas Convergence was just thrown together at the last second without any thought. This was a grand coda of sorts by a legendary creator, and all eyes were on it, waiting patiently. This would be remembered, not forgotten.

The Multiversity would boast a plethora of brilliant artistic talent, from chief designer Rian Hughes to Frank Quitely, Jim Lee, Ivan Reis, Doug Mahnke and plenty more. It would be a 9 issue maxi-series, wherein each would be a one-shot, except for the final issue. The book chronicled the tale of the multiversal assembly of heroes and their conflict against the Cosmic Horrors known simply as The Gentry, who represented Gentrification, but on a celestial scale, which feels all too relevant. The Gentry led on by The Empty Hand (the opposite of ‘The Full Hand’ that in DC lore creates all of existence).

The book was informed by a lot of existentialist and nihilist texts and philosophy Morrison was immersing themselves in at the time (they would also publish the bleak cosmic horror book Nameless around this same period), particularly the work of Thomas Ligotti. It was, of course, deeply personal and deeply Morrison- a work rooted in the obsession with the relationship between creator, creation, critic, and the audience, and the whole mechanism that makes the whole thing go around. It was not about Fan Arguments as it much as it was a natural evolution of Morrison’s obsession with Kirbyian endeavors, as ‘The Oblivion Machine’ became their own personal metaphor and equivalent to Kirby’s Anti-Life Equation, symbolizing pure empty consumption for consumption’s sake, wherein by the end one is left with nothing.

But for all of that, for all its many Morrisonisms, in many ways, it was a return to the classical JLA Silver Age school of Crisis, prior to the Wolfman/Perez event. Perhaps best signaled by the fact that the whole story is really split between The Multiversity #1 and The Multiversity #2, with the one-shots chronicling everything in-between. It was a classic Crisis two-parter, and one rooted hard and deep in that classic Gardner Fox sentiment of ‘every reality is a comic book you can read,’ just taken to a Morrisonian extremity. And if it felt like an alternative and counter-option to the Wolfman/Perez vision of Crisis, it certainly dedicated itself to that ethos with its finale. In the final issue, the book reveals that everything we know is Multiverse-One, and that The Empty Hand and The Gentry are here after wreaking havoc on Multiverse-Two.

It was, in effect, recreating that classic original Crisis story 2-part idea and its Earth-One/Earth-Two notion but on an even wider scale. Applying such designations to not just Earths, but whole Multiverses. And if there’s a Multiverse-One, and a Multiverse-Two, then that means…

Yes.

Grant Morrison had brought back The Infinite Multiverse, and they’d done so without doing another ‘fix-it’ or ‘house-cleaning’ story or another Continuity Porn comic or waging Comics sagas steeped in Fan Arguments. They’d expanded the toy-box for the fun of it, and the expansion now came with explicit structure and a worked out systems for how each of these Multiverses could perhaps work or operate. As Morrison explained:

All the current models of the multiverse from cosmologists and actual physics and science suggest that there are multiple bubble universes and they give birth to one another like how bubbles arise from bubbles. I suggested to Dan if you imagine like a champagne glass and you picture all these bubbles rising and giving form to each other, that’s what the real multiverse looks like. It’s a much bigger scale. It’s infinite. – Grant Morrison

If Wolfman and Perez’s Crisis ended by shrinking DC down to a universe, then The Multiversity would be the opposite- it would end by expanding DC down to a colossal omniverse with infinite multiverses. Fitting, given The Multiversity was a book so built around moving beyond the past that it evokes the iconic Barry Allen Flash scene of heroic sacrifice and death, but with Morrison’s modern update of that archetype in Red Racer – a queer comics nerd in a relationship with his equivalent of Hal Jordan Green Lantern. And if a Flash dies in a crisis, Morrison and Reis as a duo evoke that visual iconography with this queer hero to subvert that expectation and also to shatter the common ‘bury your gays’ trapping of so many genre stories. It fits with both Morrison’s long history with queer characters and themes as well as both an interest in moving forward, as even a scene that would be an ‘homage’ in most hands becomes a brutal rejection and subversion.

And that sort of sensibility is all over the whole story, as it is trying to push onward, to clear space for people to make and do new things unconstrained by the limitations of what had come before. As Morrison described it:

“I’ve always wanted the infinite multiverse of DC to come back. The multiverse we set up in 52 had 52 universes and that didn’t seem like enough so we managed via The Multiversity to sneak an infinite multiverse through the back door,” Morrison joked with reporters earlier. “The idea is we’ve been looking at some of the latest idea of string and particle physics. We wanted to actually reflect that. DC was ahead of the curve and ahead of science when they came up with the multiverse. We kind of want to pay that back and create this beyond infinite multiverse.”

And because it was here, and not in something like Convergence, something useful might come of it. Or so one would hope.

But that…didn’t quite happen.

Ma! Manhattan Messed Up My Multiverse!

After the debacle of Convergence, when audiences largely dropped off DC comics and apathy was at its highest, DC took a hit. Its new DCYou initiative wasn’t the success it was hoping it might be, and so immediately they did what these publishers always do – get scared and bank on cynical maneuvers. And that led to DC Rebirth, the Geoff Johns takeover of the entire DC Line and universe, building up to the Doomsday Clock event with his collaborator Gary Frank. Johns would reveal that all the messes and the ‘breaking’ of DC Continuity, history and all the problems and criticisms one had or held towards were actually deliberate things done by Doctor Manhattan as part of a sinister plot. Everything wrong with DC Comics was now directly linked to the influence and impact of Watchmen.

Manhattan was played as the antagonistic force standing philosophically against Hope, Heroism, Optimism, Faith, and all that jazz we like, and by the end of this whole affair, he’d be forced to give up his side and lose in Fan Argument event comics by Geoff Johns. Only this time rather than doing it with Crisis, Johns was doing it with Watchmen, its 1980’s 12-issue maxi-series peer. And by the end? When Manhattan loses? He (and thus Geoff Johns) recreates the DC reality per his vision. Morrison had used The Multiverse to represent Diversity, with the title of The Multiversity literally being a portmanteau of ‘The Multiverse’ and ‘Diversity,’ celebrating the new, the queer, and the future. Johns on the other hand seemed to treat and handle The Multiverse as a box and a bin to store all his back-issues, and be a showcase for the old, a construct that justified his collector’s brain and collection. A mechanism by which to preserve and ossify everything for all time, like a toy in a glass box.

And thus once again under Johns and Frank, the DC omniverse/multiverse, whatever you wish to call it now, would once again be recreated and redefined, with The Infinite Earths system coming back once again. Now, you may be wondering ‘Is that the 3rd time that’s happened, and they’ve presented it like something bold and new and fresh?’

The answer is yes.

Grant Morrison’s The Multiversity was the first to bring back the Infinite Multiverse, when it was still novel and fresh and had not been done. And then the Scott Lobdell/Jeff King Convergence was the second to do it, and because it was an Editorial Vehicle, as opposed to an actual creative artist’s passion project like Multiversity, they made way more noise about it. And then Johns here, ignoring both those cases, just does it all over again. And while he’s at it, he even goes ahead and grants the ‘main’ DC universe we follow (commonly dubbed Earth-Zero) an official title/designation of ‘The Metaverse.’

It seems The Infinite Earths will keep being restored, on and on, until morale improves.

But beyond these shenanigans, there was something else going around too. There was another avenue where this was all being looked at and explored.

Let’s Get Metal

Dark Nights: Metal by Scott Snyder and Greg Capullo is not titled a Crisis. But it very much is one, and certainly reads like it. It returns to that ‘Crisis On Earth-Three’ conceit of ‘Evil Doppelgangers’ but broaches that strictly through a Batman-lens, wherein you get a Batman-ified version of each of the iconic Justice League heroes.

If Morrison and their collaborators had opened up the space for Infinite Multiverses, creating even a detailed map, then Snyder and his collaborators asked ‘Well, what’s beneath all that?’ That led to the creation of The Dark Multiverse and The Dark Knights, and in classic Snyder fashion, it reads like a big bombastic 80’s action blockbuster. It is Snyder leaning to his horror impulses while upping the bombast and campy absurdity, whilst Capullo goes all in on his heavy metal aesthetic and obsession, honed in the pages of Spawn. And building on Morrison’s own Bat-Epic and Final Crisis work, they would recast Barbatos as a gigantic Cosmic Dragon and Big Bad who ruled over his domain of The Dark Multiverse. And Barbatos would look like a sick villain from the cover of a Heavy Metal Album.

And in Barbatos’ employ would be The Dark Knights, Evil Batmen who were all Bruce Wayne if ‘they’d gone bad’ and had acquired the powers/attributes of their Super Friends and Foes. So you had Bat-Flash, Bat-Green Lantern, so forth, and they’d all be led by The Batman Who Laughs, aka ‘What if Batman became The Joker?’. It was Snyder’s modern bombastic horror take on a classic ensemble of enemies like The Crime Syndicate. It was a horror-tinged vision of a warped DC wherein everything was Batman.

If the tradition of Crisis-styled events had become to get caught up in dumb universe/continuity/timeline ‘fixing’ or Fan Arguments as Fiction, with only Final Crisis being an exception and concerned with any kind of real personal vision, then Metal would attempt to be the next exception. Free from the burden of ever bearing the official Crisis title, thus letting Final Crisis be the final one to bear that title and burden, Metal would in effect be a big, silly cartoon. It followed a child-like logic of ‘And then this happened…and then…’ It was an event dedicated to Scott Snyder and Greg Capullo’s Rule Of Cool. If it seemed sick and could make devil horns or conceivably be seen as ‘metal?’ It was going in. It was to be an event opening on the Justice League forming a Voltron, and featuring a Dudebro Starro The Conqueror. It was a big, silly, stupid, dumb action comic drawn by one of the absolute masters of superhero art.

It was akin to a DC Music Video of cartoonish absurdity, mayhem, and violence that the creative team got to produce. And you could tell they were having a blast doing it. Metal worked. It was a hit, and it would lead into the Snyder era of Justice League, with him as the new DC architect leading the line.

And this is where things would get…tricky.

Next: The World Ends Everyday

Previous: Part II