The Crisis of Crises

Allow me to start off by saying that crises is a difficult word to determine if it is spelled correctly. I figured dictionary.com was a good source...

I am getting very tired of DC (the comic company that owns Batman, Superman, JLA, ect.) releasing these "Universe Changing" story arcs that never end with an ending that supports the hype they promoted. I understand that DC has a history with the term Crisis and I appreciate that they want to continue to use it, but enough is enough. Allow me to explain.

In the 1980's DC had a very fractured continuity. They had mutliple version of the same character that were living on "different Earths". For example Golden age superman (indicated by his grey temples) lived on Earth 2 and was part of the Justice Soceity of America while modern Superman lived on Earth 1 and was a member of the Justice League. As you can imagine this was very difficult for new readers to understand. DC came up with a solution, combine all of the continuties and get rid of the duplicates. In order to do this they released a 12 issue story arc known as Crisis on Infinite Earths. It was a huge success and many people still consider a "must read" for anyone who enjoys comic books. This was also the series that killed the Silver Age Flash Barry Allen. In the end all the Earths merged and any duplicates of characters disappeared or where killed. The only notable exceptions were GA (Golden Age) Superman, GA Lois Lane, Superboy Prime, and Alexander Luthor.

So about a year or 2 ago DC revived this story line in Infinite Crisis. There was a lot of hype for this story line, villains had joined in an alliance, nanotechnology had transformed people into a superhero police force, the Spectre was out of control, ect. However, the plot was seriously lacking. The four special "survivors" of the original Crisis decided that they had saved the wrong Earth in the original crisis and set forth to "fix" this world. It didn't work. Superboy Prime went crazy and killed a ton of people before finally being defeated by Modern Superman and GA Superman, Alexander Luthor recreated the multiverse... it totally undid all of thye important and intellegent decisions made by DC during the 80s. They also killed Superboy, how was a really neat character. However, I was still entertained by the story.

Now.... it hurts a little.... they just finished up Final Crisis. I don't even know what the heck happened here. I've read it... I don't understand it. Apparently the New Gods all died and were reincarnated as humans? And then Darksied was able to learn the Anti-Life Equations and enslave humanity, and Cain (yeah from the Bible) came back and fought against God's servants, and they collected all the Supermen from the other Earths, and.... You see where this is going? No? Good, me either. They also KILLED BATMAN for no good reason. I'm going to make an attempt to read it again, but I figure I'll still leave the story widely unfufilled and confused.

Overall, Crisis was great. It will always be great, it's a classic. Don't keep trying to use it. Let it go. Try something different! And DC wonders why it doesn't have the same reader following as Marvel...