June 26, 2015

My Continuing Crisis: Writing on CRISIS ON INFINITE EARTHS 6


IT CONTINUES...

As some sort of "self-flagellation psychological experiment", I agreed to take part in Comics Bulletin's celebration of the 30th anniversary of DC Comics' FIRST MAJOR CROSSOVER EVENT, Crisis on Infinite Earths.


I was really about to light this shit on fire in order to warm my balls while I pissed on it (which, I realize, wouldn’t actually work, but I’m dabbling in metaphor so get off my back), when Comics Bulletin Grand Poobah Jason Sacks said to me, “Think of it as an exercise in automatic writing.”
What?
An exercise in automatic writing?
BOOM!
It was a moment of satori for me.
My friends, all this time I’ve been looking at Crisis on Infinite Earths from the wrong perspective. Up until now, I’ve been drunkenly reading it as a failure of traditional narrative and character exploration. I’ve been bewildered by why fanboys like Zack Davisson have been fawning over this obviously flawed and misguided attempt at some sort of epic poem (featuring superheroes no less). I’ve been questioning whether or not I am so out of touch with the mainstream that, in essence, I’ve become the cranky old man of Comics Bulletin.
But then Sacks set me straight.
As Cassius says in Julius Caesar, “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves…
All it takes is a change in perspective, a reading through a different lens as it were, for everything to fall in place.

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