Okay, it wasn't a shock to me to read that at the beginning of October when Dan DiDio posted it to his Facebook. I don't know about you, but given the simple fact that Barry Allen was alive AND never had a relationship with Iris West essentially screamed that the Original Crisis could not have happened. Barry could not have perished in the fight against the Anti-Monitor only to be restored from the Speed Force later in "Final Crisis" because that whole swing was predicated on the Allen/West love. That love was the anchor that kept Barry holding on, just as it did for Wally West & Linda Park the times he got lost in the Speed Force. At least that's how I am remembering it =)
So that got my brain rolling around....wondering what the complications, the fallout, the problems that could potentially present themselves with this edict that none of the Crisis events happened. Spin that out even further, and I start to wonder what else could go "wrong" if certain key moments in the original DC Universe never happened in the New 52? This is all purely speculative material on my part as very little about the past of the New 52 has been addressed thus far, and I am sure it will all unravel slowly. What has been confirmed is very little:
- Super heroes have been mainstream for something like 5 years
- JLA takes place around year one of that 5 year plan
- Action Comics takes place 5 years before that
- Brucie has been Batman longer than that by a few years
- Superman did die at some point based on Swamp Thing #1
- Dick Grayson was still Batman for a year
- Jason Todd still died & got rebirthed
- There have still been 4 Robin's
- Hal still got his ring taken
- Sinestro still has his own Corps
- Atrocitus still has the corpse of Krona
- Hell, basically everything tied to the GL-Verse seems the same; I mean Kyle still gets his ring in an alley....
Okay, that is what I know so far that is still the same, but if we go back and start to monkey around with major events let us see how things can unravel. Let start with a fun one, albeit one that was essentially stated has still happened....
Man that's still such an iconic cover...
Anyway, it can be surmised by these couple pages from "Swamp Thing #1":
...that Superman still suffered some form of "death" in this new continuity, maybe not at the hands of Doomsday, but his conversation with Alec Holland certainly implies that Supes died at some point in the last 10 years or however long it's been since he debuted. But what would the ramifications have been (BASED ON OLD CONTINUITY) if Superman's death had never occured??? Well the extended conclusion..at least the part I will choose to focus on...is that the entire Green Lantern-verse could not exist in its present state without the Death/Return of Superman storyline. Here's the play-by-play, in broad strokes:
1) Superman dies
2) 4 Guys looking like Supes run around one being an evil Cyborg
3) Cyborg Superman, along with evil alien Mongul, blow up Hal Jordan's hometown Coast City
4) Real Superman comes back so he, Hal, and the good Supermen beat up Cybory & Mongul for the win
5) Hal goes nuts after The Guardians stop him from recreating Coast City
6) Guardians free Sinestro to stop Hal
7) Hal "kills" Sinestro, destroys Central Power Battery, frees fear entity Parallax who bonds to Hal
8) Hal does a bunch of crazy stuff including trying to reset history & remake the universe
9) Hal sacrifices himself to reignite the sun, becomes Spectre, Parallax tries to take over Spectre
10) Hal is brought back to life, Sinestro is revealed to have never died, Parallax is stopped for now...
So what's that picture there you ask? Well that is the Anti-Monitor bursting out of the Black Lantern Battery towards the end of "Blackest Night". Who the hell is the Anti-Monitor you continue? Well the Anti-Monitor was the Big Bad from the "Original Crisis" who died at the end but whose body parts were used as tuning forks by Alexander Luthor from Earth-3 (a guy who survived the Crisis) during "Infinite Crisis" in a bid to recreate the Multiverse as Alex Luthor saw fit. By the end of "IC", the multiverse was reborn and apparently so was The Anti-Monitor because he popped back up in "Sinestro Corps War". In "SCW" he was eventually decimated by Superboy-Prime (Another survivor of both the "Original Crisis" & "Infinite Crisis") and tossed off into space. Anti-Monitor's broken, dying body eventually landed in Sector 666 on the planet Ryutt and was enveloped by the Black Lantern Battery, which used his Anti-matter energy as fuel I suppose. He's evicted back to the Anti-Matter universe by Nekron, pops up during "Brightest Day", and then we get a whole new 52...so does anyone else see the chain of events if the good old Anti-Monitor didn't exist, or rather if the "Original Crisis" didn't go down.
If Crisis didn't happen, then there's no multiverse dilemma that brings Superboy-Prime, Alexander Luthor, or Anti-Monitor into the storyline. There's no Prime to toss the defeated corpse of Anti-Monitor into space for the Black Lantern Battery to attach itself to, meaning there's no power source for the battery to feed off of, meaning the whole "Blackest Night" story may not have even been possible. And if there's no Crisis well then this moment has no basis for happening either:
The infamous punch from "Infinite Crisis" that DC could conveniently use to explain away any continuity issues from over the years. Here's a list from Wiki of what changes these punches wrought:
- Jason Todd restored to life with everyone remembering his death
- Various origins of Superman
- Various incarnations of the Legion of Super Heroes since the Original Crisis
- Various incarnations of Hawkman
- Various origins of Donna Troy
- Multiple origins of the Metal Men
- Elasti-Girl & Negative Man restored to life; Chief restored to his original body & team's history reboot
- Hal Jordan was never an ex-con who served 90 days in jail for drunk driving
There are more continuity changes from "Infinite Crisis" you can read here, and you can read the ones from "Crisis on Infinite Earths" here, and then there is "Zero Hour" which, while not a crisis, wrought changes of its own you can read here. As you can see, DC loves to use these events to mess about with their own history....
Anyway, back to punching the walls...which may be some metaphorical artistic statement now that I think about it.
The most change for me as a fan has always been Jason Todd and his resurrection. Yeah it's pretty goofy to think that punching the "walls of reality" enacted these cosmic changes, but it's comic books and we are discussing THE WALLS OF REALITY. No stupider than implying that Barry Allen saving his mom would create such utter havoc to the world as we knew it...
So if the crisises never happened, then the wall never got punched, then what brought back Jason Todd? In the "Red Hood & The Outlaws" book it is acknowledged that JT still died at some point and that The Joker did it...
So the question still to answered is if Superboy-Prime destroying the Walls Of Reality didn't resurrect JT then what did? A mystery for the New 52 to answer in the coming months alongside "why is Barbara Gordon walking?" and "who decided to make Mr. Terrific suck?".
I could likely go on for hours pondering the various implications of the history of the New 52 in juxtaposition to the Old DCU, wondering if Bats still got his back broken, if Jack Drake still died the way he did in "Identity Crisis", or for that matter if "Identity Crisis" still happened in any form? How could Wally West apparently never existing make for problems? What about Donna Troy? The Teen Titans? The list of maybe's & what if's is quite endless, and I believe that a lot of the logistical problems that could potentially result from the new continuity in DC Comics stem from the Green Lantern corner of the universe.
The GL-Verse seems, thus far, wholely unaffected by the new status quo of the DCU. From what we have seen in GL, GLC, New Guardians, and Red Lanterns, everything that happened before still happened. The Guardians were slaughtered at some point leading to Kyle getting the ring, Krona still slaughtered Atrocitus' people & and his corpse is still in Atrocitus' possession, which means the War of the GLs arc still happened, which means the New Guardians post-BN still existed, which means BN still happened, blah blah blah blah freakin' blah blah. At least the logistical issues, due to the apparent lack of any real change within the Bat-verse (4 Robins, Damian's age, Batman Inc), only really have an impact on Gotham City. The nightmare that could potentially be the GL-Verse is directly effected by, and in turn directly effects, the rest of the DCU.
I don't find it entirely coincidental that the sub-verse with the least amount of change post-Flashpoint is the one headed up by Geoff Johns, arguably the most powerful creator in the company, but I am looking forward to seeing how the tapestry of this new DCU unfolds over the next few years. And yes I do hope it is years, I want to see DC ride this out and not just cave in to any pressure to return things to pre-Flashpoint status quo. They made the choice, they better stick with it. They more or less rode out the post-Crisis reboot for 26 years until Flashpoint with some tweeks here and there via "Zero Hour" and "Infinite Crisis", so I hope that the New 52 is at least giving some time to tell its story as well.
DC has not given themselves an easy task by trying to have their cake and it eat too in terms of pre- & post-Flashpoint continuity, acknowledging some moments but not others, some heroes but not others. It would likely have been easier on them creatively to start wholely from scratch with a "Year One"/"Man Of Steel" styled origin book for everyone, but that would actually prove far less interesting for me as a fan since I am kind of enjoying the continuity game, AND I am certain it would have resulted in an even louder reaction from the vocal minority. It all makes me wish I could step into the brain of a DC Comics fan circa 1985 and see how they felt post-Crisis....
Oh, and as for DC's competition over there at Marvel, if I was part of that crew I think I would stand up and proudly state that Marvel Comics has never had to restort to whole-heartedly rebooting their continuity a single time, much less 2 or 3. Marvel just creates a billion alternate realities if they want to run roughshod over their own history....
No comments:
Post a Comment