Myth, Metatext, Continuity and Cataclysm in Dc Comics’ Crisis on Infinite Earths

WORLDS WILL LIVE, WORLDS WILL DIE: MYTH, METATEXT, CONTINUITY AND CATACLYSM IN DC COMICS’ CRISIS ON INFINITE EARTHS Adam C. Murdough A Thesis Submitted to the Graduate College of Bowling Green State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of MASTER OF ARTS August 2006 Committee: Angela Nelson, Advisor Marilyn Motz Jeremy Wallach ii ABSTRACT Angela Nelson, Advisor In 1985-86, DC Comics launched an extensive campaign to revamp and revise its most important superhero characters for a new era. In many cases, this involved streamlining, retouching, or completely overhauling the characters’ fictional back-stories, while similarly renovating the shared fictional context in which their adventures take place, “the DC Universe.” To accomplish this act of revisionist history, DC resorted to a text-based performative gesture, Crisis on Infinite Earths. This thesis analyzes the impact of this singular text and the phenomena it inspired on the comic-book industry and the DC Comics fan community. The first chapter explains the nature and importance of the convention of “continuity” (i.e., intertextual diegetic storytelling, unfolding progressively over time) in superhero comics, identifying superhero fans’ attachment to continuity as a source of reading pleasure and cultural expressivity as the key factor informing the creation of the Crisis on Infinite Earths text. The second chapter consists of an eschatological reading of the text itself, in which it is argued that Crisis on Infinite Earths combines self-reflexive metafiction with the ideologically inflected symbolic language of apocalypse myth to provide DC Comics fans with a textual "rite of transition," to win their acceptance for DC’s mid-1980s project of self- rehistoricization and renewal. The third chapter enumerates developments in the comic-book industry and superhero fandom in the past twenty years that are attributable to the influence of Crisis on Infinite Earths. My final assessment is that although Crisis on Infinite Earths failed in some respects to have its intended effect on “the DC Universe” and its readership, it did serve as a powerful mythological mediator in the introduction of new ways for superhero stories to interact with their own fictional and historical contexts and with their audience, and it fostered new generic expectations and reading practices among the superhero fan community. iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank the members of my faculty committee--Marilyn Motz, Angela Nelson, and Jeremy Wallach--for their kindness, patience, and willingness to help in my time of exigent need. Without their indulgence, this project could not have been completed. I am likewise indebted to Chuck Coletta, a valued colleague and fellow superhero fan, for his sympathetic ear, for his offers of knowledgeable assistance, and for the opportunity he provided me to share my research in an appreciative forum; and to Bernice Aguilar, department secretary, whose patience and efficiency in rescuing poor, clueless graduate students from their own ineptitude is beyond our deserving. Thanks are also due to my fellow graduate students in the Department of Popular Culture, especially Kieran Blasingim, for bringing a valuable source manuscript to my attention, and Chris Martin, for his wise counsel and words of reassurance. A finer group of classmates and friends I have never known. Without the mutual social support system we established for the communal maintenance of our sanity, I suspect that more than one Master's thesis would not have been completed in our department this year. Reaching back into my academic past, I wish to thank Profs. John Moore and Michael Anesko, who guided me through my last attempt at addressing superhero comics in a thesis format when I was an undergraduate, and Dr. Patrick Trimble, whose teachings convinced me that a postgraduate degree in popular culture studies was worth pursuing. Finally, I would like to thank Marv Wolfman, George Pérez, Jerry Ordway, Dick Giordano, Roy Thomas, and everyone else who worked for DC Comics in the mid-1980s and contributed to Crisis on Infinite Earths, even if only tangentially (or unwillingly), for giving me something to write about. Even if the superheroes of the DC Universe remain unaware of the role these creative individuals played in destroying and rebuilding the heroes' lives, there are legions of comics fans, including myself, who acknowledge (or blame) these individuals for the fine apocalyptic tale they gave to fandom, and for the new ways of seeing superheroes that resulted from it. iv DEDICATION This work is respectfully dedicated... ...to the good people of the Comic Geek Speak Forum, for their interest and encouragement; ...to the countless trillions of fictional beings whose very lives were rendered null and void by the cataclysmic events herein described (lest we forget...); ...and, of course, to my ever-loving parents, Jim and Janice, who are the “secret origin” of everything I am and do, regardless of what parallel universe I’m in. v TABLE OF CONTENTS Page INTRODUCTION ...........................................................................………………………. 1 I. CONTINUITY AND CHANGE: A BRIEF HISTORY OF TIME IN SUPERHERO COMICS .............................................................................……………………………. 14 A. In the Beginning... ....................................................………………………….… 14 B. The Birth of the Superhero “Universe” ...................................………………… 20 C. Continuity in Theory: Mythic Time and Eco’s “Oneiric Climate” ........……….. 24 D. Continuity, Community, and Superhero Fandom .................………......………... 31 E. Last Days: The Historical Moment of Crisis on Infinite Earths …….....………... 38 II. THE SELF-CONSCIOUS CATACLYSM: A TEXTUAL ANALYSIS OF CRISIS ON INFINITE EARTHS AS MODERN (META)MYTH OF APOCALYPSE …..………... 46 A. Eschatology and History: The Apocalyptic Underpinnings of Crisis ….……….. 46 B. First Movement: “And Thus Shall the World Die!” .................……....……….. 55 C. Second Movement: The Many Deaths of the DC Multiverse .....….........……….. 65 D. Third Movement: The Beginning of the Future ...................……….......……….. 76 E. The Apocalyptic Eighties: Crisis as a Myth of Its Time ..........……........……….. 82 F. Revisionist Mythology: The Metatextual Aspect of Crisis ...........……...……….. 88 III. POST-CRISIS: REPERCUSSIONS OF CRISIS ON INFINITE EARTHS FOR DC COMICS AND THEIR FANS ..............................................…………...……….. 95 A. Infinite Drawbacks: Crisis as Mixed Blessing ........................………....……….. 96 B. Myths About Myths About Myths: Crisis-Inspired Texts ..........……………….. 101 C. The New Cyclicality of the DC Universe .................................…………………. 109 D. A Fandom Menace: Crisis and DC Comics Readers .....................…...………… 112 CONCLUSION........................................................................……………………………. 116 ENDNOTES ............................................................................……………………………. 120 BIBLIOGRAPHY ......................................................................………………...………… 148 1 INTRODUCTION Crisis, of course, entails both chaos and possibility.... - Richard E. Lee The Life and Times of Cultural Studies Worlds will live. Worlds will die. And the DC Universe will never be the same! - slogan featured in DC Comics house ads for Crisis on Infinite Earths At the age of fourteen, when I, an avid reader and collector of Marvel Comics with three years’ experience, decided to expand my horizons and familiarize myself with the superhero characters of the DC Comics line, I first learned of a comic series called Crisis on Infinite Earths. The title was repeatedly mentioned in the text of Who’s Who: The Definitive Directory of the DC Universe, a modestly exhaustive multivolume reference work that was published in the mid-1980s by DC Comics as a sort of informal reader’s guide to the hundreds of heroes, villains, and supporting characters that had appeared in DC publications over the years. I had bought a few back issues of Who’s Who, hoping that reading them would help me in my bid to “break in” to DC Comics fandom, and as I skimmed over the dossier-style entries--which included summaries of the fictional “life stories” of various characters, accumulated over several decades’ worth of comic- book history--I was struck by the number and diversity of characters whose fictional lives had been drastically affected “due to the recent events of the so-called crisis on infinite earths.” All types of character DC Comics had ever published, across an impossibly diverse range of genres--from cowboys to space rangers to private eyes to magicians to monsters to barbarians to garden-variety superheroes--were seemingly united in their vulnerability to the chaos sown by this mysterious and terrible event, this “crisis” in their midst. Many of them actually died (including a few major 2 cultural icons, such as the Flash and Supergirl, that even a DC Comics neophyte like myself had heard of), while a handful of new heroes and villains emerged to take their place. Other characters sustained crippling injuries or other radical changes to their long-established status quo. Still other characters, in the language of Who’s Who, had their personal histories “revised” such that they became entirely different characters or, most bewildering of all, simply “never existed” to begin with, not even in the fictional world wherein their adventures had erstwhile taken

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