Countdown to Multiple Infinite Identity Crises!Due to some screwy, madcap mix-up with Blogspot, this post got lost in the shuffle. In manually restoring this post, however, the newest post involving me and a comics exhibit at a museum got bumped down beneath this one. So, to read the NEWEST post, scroll down to the post beneath this one. I hope that confuses everybody.(NOTE: I'm not going to check for any grammatical or spelling errors because I'm hungry. Please excuse any mistakes because my attention was divided between writing this post, ignoring my grumblimg stomach and watching the "Battlestar Galactica" miniseries [which is badass].)
I recommend to anyone that loves the comics medium to read the precursors to DC 1985
Crisis on Infinite Earths, the three volume series (and more coming) of
Crisis on Multiple Earths.
The story goes like this: Garner Fox, writer of both DC's Golden Age of superheroes--which were discontinued as Western, war, crime, romance and other genre comics gained in popularity as interest in the superhero genre faded--and DC's Silver Age superheroes waxed nostalgic and wanted to combine both sets of heroes into one universe. Gardner Fox ran into a problem, however, when trying to combine the Golden and Silver Age universes; he'd already established the Golden Age superheroes as fictional within the Silver Age universe.
Will Fox be able to combine his two groups of heroes in time?? Stay tuned to find out...!
Meanwhile...
(Why did superheroes rise again in popularity, you ask? The short answer is The Bomb. After Little Boy and Fat Man hit, it became evident that no mere human could fight against forces of that magnitude. Remarkably, the Silver Age heroes still defeated such powerful forces by punching them. It's low-tech, but apparently it got the job done at the time.)
Back at the ranch...
We left our hero, Gardner Fox, on the brink of combining two different ages of the very universe!
Fox's ingenious work-around to the problem was to propose that there were two Earths, and they occupied the same points in space but vibrated at different frequencies. The Silver Age heroes occupied Earth-1 while the Golden Agers occupied Earth-2. Not only did the Earths exist in the same space at different frequencies, both Earths resided in two distinct universes that occupied the same space at different vibrational frequencies. By altering the vibrational pattern of one's own being, one could travel to this other Earth by matching one's own vibrational pattern to that of the alternate Earth. Follow? Good.
Fox further supposed (eventually) that one could have an infinite amount of Earths/universes "stacked" within the same points in space that all vibrated at their own respective frequencies and had their own respective versions of DC superheroes. (To my limited knowledge of the DC multiverse, there was only one Earth without DC heroes. Ours, Earth-Prime.)
Of course, in Crisis on Infinite Earths the DC multiverse collapsed down to a universe, but that's another story (one I, sadly, have yet to read).
And despite that little tangent, anyone who loves comics should read Fox's Crisis on Multiple Earths. It's cheesy, sure, but the scripting is also ingenious and the artist, Mike Sekowsky, with his almost woodblock style composes every frame perfectly and allows the narrative flow with great economy and grace. Go read it.
Watching:"Battlestar Galactica: The Miniseries"
11:14
"Paranoia Agent - Enter Lil Slugger"
"Paranoia Agent - True Believers"
Reading:
DC Universe: The Stories of Alan Moore (Finished.)
Swamp Thing Vol. 1: Saga of the Swamp Thing (Finished.)
Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth
Crisis On Multiple Earths, Vol. 1
The Comics Journal, no. 271
D
