8 comments on “Tape #8 – Crisis on Infinite Earths #2”

1. Anj says:

   August 28, 2025 at 9:03 am

   Another great discussion!
   You might remember in my guest spot, I discussed ‘pacing’ as my problem with the book and this issue shows it. As you say, did we really need 8 pages of Anthro and the Legion stopping mammoths? Could that have been better used for plot?

   But I do wonder if part of the purpose of this book was to explore the DCU to try to remind people what we might be losing. I had not read any Anthro before nor have I since.

   But these first four issue in particular feel like Wolfman/Perez trying to find their feet a little.

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2. Martin Gray says:

   August 28, 2025 at 2:28 pm

   Well done Lila on the latest report from the files of the Monitor… sorry, I mean Gene and Dave and Doug.

   I certainly wasn’t sad to see a few pages of fun with Anthro – he starred in the first DC comic we ever bought, from a junk shop in the early Seventies, and my big brother’s name is Anth, so it was like he was in a comic. And it’s not seven pages, it’s just three, then the mammoths are in the 30th century. I loved this issue – so many characters, so much mystery! And it looks amazing.

   Now, it’s years since I’ve looked at my physical copies of Crisis but I don’t recall having a problem with the WOB text… white on black has long been a favourite among publishing folk, it’s a fun contrast to the norm.

   Wee Doug (that’s one for the Scottish listeners), I’m surprised you missed Arion, I bought them as they came out in the local newsagents; I think the ballast bit must have been done by the early Eighties, as my Mam worked in a paper shop and every month she’d bring a pile of every new DC comic and only the Baxter books were missing, we even got the annuals.

   I’m surprised Gene liked The Nail but wasn’t moved to try the follow-up by the same team. It’s fantastic, maybe even better than the first story.

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3. Frank says:

   August 29, 2025 at 11:22 pm

   I did a skim through of Anthro for Siskoid’s Who’s Editing challenge. I think Crisis offered fair representation. You’ve got a cave-teen having misadventures in a savage time. They were okay, but not anything I’d devote time to without purpose. I think the time disturbances were pretty essential to explain how everyone in DC continuity were going to be interacting, so why not contrast some of the furthest past and future heroes? If you want to see Marv Wolfman do this way worse, read Total Eclipse.

   Remember that Crisis was pre-Batgod, so the dude could be felled by a clown like The Joker. I guess Zack Snyder was borrowing from Crisis too– just so terribly as to be nigh unrecognizable. Then again, this issue also looks terrible, with an inscrutable character selection and seemingly little happening to advance a… whatchacallit– plot? On second thought, maybe the differences from Total Eclipse was that it wasn’t drawn by George Perez and didn’t offer the novelty of obscure (and bad) DC characters of yore?

   To be a balloon buster, I don’t think things would have played out much differently if DC had bought Malibu or CrossGen. While I’m not privy to the legal details, let’s just make some simple suppositions…

   The Quality and Charlton characters were already in the public domain at the time of Crisis, but DC had bought the trademarks from the publishers, so they were fully integrated into the DC Universe. DC was still licensing The Marvel Family until around 1986, which is why only the Captains Marvel and their main villains appear in Crisis. Fawcett did not properly renew their copyrights, so I’m not sure if DC even had to “buy” the rest of their characters. Maybe they started appearing once DC’s lawyers realized that nobody had to pay for the rights anymore, or maybe DC properly secured the full trademarks/”copyrights” by the ’90s, but there was still a rational for their exclusion from DC Comics until the ’90s.

   If you look at Wildstorm, their usage is very particular. This was an Image Comics/creator rights line, and there were a lot of side deals where their “hired hands” retained some rights or participation. That’s why Chap Yaep’s Dutch character was still available for use in the years Rob Liefeld refused to allow Youngblood comics to be published, because Yaep was allowed to retain the copyright on that character. Shady as Rob can be, he was actually very generous in that regard, because there are a number of such characters that were incorporated into his line. This happened less at Wildstorm, but as a for instance, Whilce Portacio had a copyright on Wetworks before they were incorporated into Wildstorm. Notice how Wetworks has never appeared in a DC Comic, or even in non-Wetworks branded titles after Wildstorm’s sale to DC? The characters you see in the DC line are the ones either created by Jim Lee and Brandon Choi, the owners of Wildstorm, or the ones that were entirely work for hire, like The Authority.

   The Ultraverse had all kinds of rights issues, including partial “silent” ownership of characters and concepts by a convicted rapist and child porn aficionado whose work was left out of the recent DC/Marvel hardcovers. Further, Scott Mitchell Rosenberg has producer rights over any exploitation of the Malibu properties, so there are simply too many parties with their hands out and/or up.

   CrossGen is probably another matter. Since that company was sold in bankruptcy, I’m not sure that Mark Alessi has any remaining stake, or that there are any rights extended to anybody from the compound. That may be more a combination of it technically being a Disney asset, rather than a Marvel one, and that there’s markedly less interest in CrossGen properties. Ultraverse had ’90s peak sales and nostalgia behind it, plus it was a super-hero line. CrossGen was a money-loser nearly a decade out from the bust, and a sci-fi/fantasy line with a comparatively niche reader base. Let me say, I sold more Ultraverse copies in the post-Black September period than I ever sold any CrossGen titles, which I think even had a free overship program in the early days. CrossGen blew the doors off Helix sales, but DC almost never reprinted that stuff (Transmetropolitan excluded.) Even if CrossGen sold 50-100% better than Helix, they were still in the realm of Vertigo sales, not X-Men. Marvel did put out some collections, but I don’t think they made any money off them, even with talents like Brandon Peterson and Mark Waid involved. They simply can’t reach any potential market for that material.

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4. Symbol Pending says:

   August 31, 2025 at 5:14 am

   I hate to do this but the first person who suggested Power Girl should have been a Daxamite post-Crisis was again that little scamp Shag! Personally, I have no strong opinion on the topic, having only really got in DC around ’05, by which time the whole thing was rather moot!

   Shag’s comment about the fiftieth got me thinking, would Crisis have been better if it were a six-part series celebrating the anniversary and then six months of the Crisis leading to the post-Crisis universe?

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5. Siskoid says:

   August 31, 2025 at 11:33 am

   Gene’s always good and I find myself in agreement with him more than not. I really liked your previous guest too, but I almost never did! Takes all kinds.

   I guess that while Arion, Lord of Atlantis ended on its “Death Knell” Special (Nov 1985) DURING Crisis, DC let Kupperberg and Duursema end the series on their own terms, no red skies required, even though it could have easily tied into the sinking of Atlantis. But imagine reading Arion at a later date, and suddenly there’s shadow-demons and, I dunno, Aquaman and Lori Lemaris are there… it would skunk the grand finale to the series.

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6. Bucky749 says:

   September 1, 2025 at 1:00 am

   Well here I am to quote the great red Skelton.
   Long time listener first time writer .
   I first read the crisis in graphic novel form I was member of book club at the time I believe I got this and watch men as two of my starting books I think the other ones where the batmanga and Batman year one .

   In case your wondering you also may know me as my alter ego Rocky Star wind and I run the YouTube channel bucky749 . With my brother where we go by the American Samurai and the Ice-man we do comic book , graphic novel , movie reviews, toy unboxings , travel videos , food videos etc.
   any ways great show and keep up the good work.

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   1. DC Dave says:

      September 1, 2025 at 1:49 pm

      Welcome Bucky! Fantastic timing, as I heard your name on Who’s Who this past weekend. So glad to have you joining us!

      Reply
7. Alexander M Osias says:

   September 2, 2025 at 9:04 pm

   Great episode again!

   I suppose I’m in the minority for liking the Anthro / LSH introduction to issue 2. I liked how it quickly established that the threat was already growing and experienced across the breadth of human existence (Anthro to the ‘then far future’ LSGH) with certain characters. Perhaps because I was a collector of Who’s Who, I was thrilled to see Anthro in a comic and see him linked to the Legion, which I also collected at the time.

   The Batman-Joker-Flash scene was great. We saw a scene that could easily have been the confrontation scene in an archetypal Batman story suddenly upended by a Flash that apparently dies in front of the World’s Greatest Detective, showing that the disruption is happening in the present as well.

   Geo-Force had a bit of personality whiplash in the next scene. He berates Psimon for attacking the Monitor (“– what if he’s telling the truth?”) and on the very next page, after a short three word balloon speech from the Monitor, is ready to leave (“I am not convinced.”)

   The page about the Guardians on Oa was terrifying to my young fanboy mind at the time.

   Pariah knows Superman AND Batman? The Pre-Crisis World’s Finest was truly the Worlds’ Finest.

   The Kamandi & Solovar battle against the Shadow demons raised one of my great issues with those sometimes disposable threats. They can be driven away by bright flashes of light or lasers, but that burning touch is sometimes deadly and sometimes not. I wish it’d been more explicit that it’s a power they have to activate (or is only through their hands?) rather than something always on. Coz Dawnstar and others punch them, wail that it’s not doing anything, but don’t get burned when they do.

   The betrayal from the Psycho Pirate was not unexpected, but the comment that “The menace that we deal with is one of emotion.” from the Monitor was never fully explained. Annoyed me greatly.

   However, overall I felt the comic gave a sense of increasing threat, expanded areas impacted, and fun glimpses at other places and times in the DC universe.

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