I bet he’s home making out with his handmade Silver Age font catalog.

Seriously.

Jim: I’m very much looking forward to what you have to say on the series. In your first essay on IC, you wrote, “Wolfman and Perez’s Crisis ended up projecting a fairly conservative ethical vision in its reduction of the multiverse to a single universe, represented synecdochally by the singularity of earth itself. Johns and Jiminez’s Crisis promises a restored multiverse, or perhaps something even better: a single universe that is more internally riven, contradictory, and multiple than ever before.” My fear is that both of these options have turned out to be mere carrots to keep us reading, and that what we’ve been left with is a new DCU that is, at least for the moment, less contradictory and multiple than even what we had before. (Although it’ll be interesting to see how Seven Soldiers plays into this: my favorite moments about IC#7 were seeing various of the SS in battle with the rest of the DCU’s heroes. In SS, Morrison seems to be creating that single-but-internally-riven world that you spoke of—the Shining Knight and Zatanna inhabit the same world and are part of the same grand narrative, but their worlds look nothing alike, etc.)

It’s that “when done well” that you mention that might be where you and I differ a bit; for me, that temporary, contingent coherence is a sign of doing it well. There’s never a question that something radical is going to happen next issue or the next, or may be happening right “now” in an issue of another series, that will totally destroy whatever status quo happens to be in place at the end of a given comic. But in a good-to-my-tastes comic, there’s a balance between resolution and dissolution that IC simply lacked.

Me too, Prof! Me too! (Still waiting for inspiration to strike…) I loved Infinite Crisis, all of it and its tributaries, but in a pathetic and slavish way that (it’s becoming increasingly clear to me) I can’t really defend except in mainly formalist, increasingly abstract, and possibly psychoanalytical terms. I completely take your point that even in the endless serial format good stories “usually achieve at least a temporary and contingent coherence,” but for some reason, even “temporary and contingent coherence” feels like too much coherence for me these days. The comparison of Johns’s writing to a Previews catalogue is pointed to say the least, but even though I don’t completely agree (his stories bring tears to my eyes for Pete’s sake!), I secretly find the idea of “pomo-funhouse capitalism, in which every book is merely an advertisement for a bunch of other books that are themselves advertisements for other books” deeply, deeply thrilling—when done well. I’m not certain if this is a reading preference, a sign of ideological blindness, an actual pathology, or all three… No doubt, I’ll pursue this all further at some point. By the way: The Thing #6—awesome!

i won’t buy civil war. the title just lets me know what to avoid until its gone. if i’m wrong i’ll go to the dollar bin or get a trade paperback. and i’m pretty safe in thinking i’m not missing out on the next hypervaluable comic…which i DO still concern myself with in a way, but usually not in that sense.

[Howerver, if you have a VF or better copy of All Star Comics #58 from 1976, i may be able to take that off your hands]

…all that being said, i’ve been reading Infinity Crisis (but i’m WAY behind) and i’m trying to decide if i want to read that 52 series that DC is putting out. anyone have any thought on 52?