Tagged: Infinite Crisis

Review: This Week in ‘Trinity’ #7

This issue is titled "A third symbol now…" but a more accurate one would be "OK, so here’s exactly what’s going on."

For six issues, Trinity was a fairly opaque book, with several seemingly disparate storylines and a completely mysterious large threat — the one screaming "Let me out!" in issue one.

What do we know now?

All the "disturbances" from issue two are an unknown form of primal energy. "Creation energies." The heroes quickly put two and two together and check on Krona, that Oan who tried to manipulate the beginning of the universe and accidentally created the multiverse (check out Crisis on Infinite Earths or Infinite Crisis for more on this).

Later in the book, it’s revealed that Krona is in fact the mysterious shouter of "Let me out!" that the trinity has been hearing. And, it’s a bit hard to decipher, but it appears that he’s getting close to escaping from the cosmic egg, if he hasn’t already.

The heroes are gathered to talk about all the goings on. They figure out the rash of museum robberies has all been to obtain wands, swords, pentacles and cups, which happen to be the four suits of the Tarot. Which leads them to Tarot, the girl who was kidnapped last issue by Morgaine Le Fey’s monsters.

They also have a third symbol appearing on Wonder Woman’s scar. The three are ancient Egyptian symbols: Strength, the high priestess and the world. Three symbols tied to our three heroes.

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GraphicAudio Adapts Three ‘Justice League’ Novels

  • News
  • April 5, 2008

We’ve opined previously on GraphicAudio’s full-cast adaptations of DC Comics’ Infinite Crisis and 52. Well, actually, of Greg Cox’s novelizations adapting DC Comics’ Infinite Crisis and 52. They must have sold pretty well, as they’re expanding their offerings to include at least three more projects.

They’ll be adapting a trio of Justice League paperback novels from a couple years ago: Christopher Golden’s JLA: Exterminators, Alan Grant’s Batman: The Stone King and Roger Stern’s Superman: The Never-Ending Battle. These adaptations feature a full case with music and sound effects, not quite like Big Finish’s original Doctor Who offerings in the sense that the stories are driven by each book’s narrative voice. While they fall slightly short of being full-blown audio dramas, I’ve enjoyed their work on Infinite Crisis and 52 and I hope they are able to maintain the same cast members for these CD presentations.

JLA: Exterminators comes out in May; the others follow in two-month intervals. They are released on CD and mp3 discs and are readily available at Interstate truck stops. Previous DC adaptations were distributed by Diamond to knowing comics shops, so you might want to do a pre-order. Of course, they’ll also be available at GraphicAudio’s website, where you have the option of buying them as downloads.

Happy Birthday: Night Girl

Lydda Jath was born on the planet Kathoon, a world that lives in permanent darkness. Her scientist father found a way to give her super-strength but didn’t realize it would only work at night or in deep shadows.

Lydda applied for the Legion of Super-Heroes but was turned down because they felt her power’s limitation made it impractical. She met Brek Bannin, Polar Boy, at the tryouts and together they formed the Legion of Substitute Heroes.

After the events of Infinite Crisis, it appears that future history has been rewritten and Lydda has become a member of the Legion of Super-Heroes instead.

Review: ‘Secret Invasion Saga’

secinv-4353522A few years back, DC released the super-thick, super-cheap Countdown to Infinite Crisis to lead into the company’s massive Infinite Crisis event. In addition to recapping the years’ worth of hints that led to Crisis, the issue also contained some crucially important events, including the death of Ted Kord (Blue Beetle).

Marvel now has pulled that page out of the summer-event book, releasing Secret Invasion Saga last week as a free lead-in to the looming Secret Invasion of the Skrulls. While I can’t argue about the price, the content was more than a little underwhelming. In fact, I fell asleep while reading it. Twice.

Instead of actually telling a story, this issue is essentially a whole bunch of material culled from the Marvel Encyclopedia (look under "Skrull"). In one of the world’s longest internal monologues, Iron Man thinks over all the events that have led to this point (the reveal of Elektra as a Skrull, etc.). He covers the latest interstellar goings on from Annihilation and Skrull history as well.

While it’s nice to get a primer on things, the issue is extremely high on text and completely bereft of any new developments. If Marvel was planning on hooking new readers to the event, there’s no big eye-grabber here. They may have made some fans among insomniacs.

Between this, the grammar-unfriendly "Who do you trust?" marketing blitz and that bizarre Blair Witch-like video, Marvel’s off to a bit of a rough start to the Skrull invasion. Of course, they could probably shoot themselves in the foot and it would still sell like hot cakes with golden frosting.

John Ostrander: Obit the Living

  • News
  • October 11, 2007

tp1902-5593800Obits – obituaries – are tough things to write. Their purpose is to commemorate the life of someone recently deceased, to list their accomplishments and achievements, to take note that someone has passed out of our lives. A last fanfare to the life of someone who is gone. Generally speaking, they are valedictory and complimentary.

Why do we wait until after a person has passed away to stand up and say these things? Okay, it might embarrass the person we’re talking about to hear the nice things we might say – and mean – about them but they’ll get over it. And they might like to hear them.

All of which is prelude to the fact that I am about to embarrass someone – a fellow member of ComicMix. Ladies and germs, let’s talk about Mr. Dennis O’Neil.

ComicMix readers tend to be a pretty knowledgeable lot, I’ve discovered. Unlike some comic book fans, they know their comic book history and know it extends prior to Marvel’s Civil War or DC’s Infinite Crisis. If you already know most of what I’m about to tell you, sorry – but I’m speaking for the record and for people who may not know Denny as well as they might or should.

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MIKE GOLD: The Sound of Crisis

mikegold100-8278367If you’ve been taking careful notes while reading my sundry ComicMix entries, no doubt you’ve noticed I’m quite a fan of audio drama. There are a lot of reasons for this, the least of which is that I prefer driving to all locations within a thousand mile radius instead of subjecting myself to the massively frustrating incompetence and arrogance of our air transportation industry.

Ergo, I have a lot of time to listen to stuff in my car, particularly around convention season (May through April, each year). I’ve got a six-disc mp3 player buried in my little 2005 Ford Focus hatchback, which means I can program enough sound to drive from Connecticut to California without actually changing discs. I (literally) just got back from a round-trip to Chicago, my most frequent location, accompanied by my patient wife Linda and my beautiful daughter Adriane. All three of us are comics fans.

Usually, I program a Nero Wolfe adaptation – brilliant stuff, wonderfully produced – and one of Big Finish Productions’ full-cast original Doctor Who shows. And some other stuff – lots of music, some comedy (Firesign Theater, Jack Benny, or in this case The Marx Brothers), maybe a podcast or six. But this time, I was armed with GraphicAudio’s adaptation of Greg Cox’s novelization of the DC Comics miniseries Infinite Crisis.

All three of us had read the original miniseries, all three of us had read much of the sundry miniseries that lead up to Infinite Crisis, and all three of us figured that by listening to this adaptation we might, this time, actually figure out what happened in the miniseries. Not that it really matters, as we’ve lived through 52 and One Year Later and World War III and now Countdown and we’ll probably sucker down and read Final Crisis after that. After all these years, DC still has problems maintaining a cohesive thought.

The GraphicAudio adaptation is only the first half of Cox’s book, and is clearly labeled as such. The second half will be out soon; it was listed in last month’s Diamond catalog. The adaptation is neither full-cast audio nor a straight-forward spoken word reading. There is a narrator who dramatizes the narrative (hence his title), but when it comes to the actual dialog each character has his or her own voice. With original music and full sound effects, it works quite nicely… although I did have to get over my initial disappointment that it wasn’t a full-cast audio theatrical production.

I hadn’t heard any of GraphicAudio’s other work, although there is a heck of a lot of it. They adapt many paperback action-hero series such as The Destroyer and The Executioner (and others), and if the quality of these productions matches their Infinite Crisis, I might check a few out.

We were particularly impressed by the production itself: the original music and the sound effects were appropriate and gave the two-dimensional world of original audio much needed depth. They summarized all of the various miniseries that led up to Infinite Crisis in the three minutes before the opening credits, which was all that was necessary to provide the backstory.

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ROBERT GREENBERGER: On continuity

bobgreenberger100-8996530I like continuity. Always have, always will. It enriches serialized fiction as found in pulp magazines, comic books, movies and television.  In an ideal world, things would be consistent from the beginning of any new creation, but it rarely is.

Johnston McCulley altered his own reality after one Zorro novel because he decided more people saw the Douglas Fairbanks silent film than read his book and anyone coming to the second book should recognize elements.

Gene Roddenberry was building his worldview for Star Trek so details such as the name of Starfleet and the United Federation of Planets evolved over the course of the first season. Unlike many of its peers, it actually had more episode to episode continuity than the majority of prime time in the 1960s.

In comic books, after 60+ years of publishing, even I recognize that it’s impossible for a singular continuity to exist for long-running characters from Captain America to Superman. What editors need to strive for, today, is consistency so the reader isn’t left scratching his head week after week.

During my tenure at Marvel, I pointed out to the editorial team that three different titles released the same week gave Henry Peter Gyrich three different jobs. That serves no one well and meant no one was paying attention at a company that prided itself on its shared universe.

More recently, DC Comics released, a week apart, a Nightwing Annual and an Outsiders Annual. Both were solid stories that wrapped up some long-standing threads and filled in gaps left by the time between Infinite Crisis’s conclusion and the “One Year Later” re-set. Read separately, they were fine, but read against the largest context of the DC Universe they massively contradicted one another.

At the conclusion of Infinite Crisis, Nightwing was completely zapped and left for dead. In his own annual, we’re told he was in a coma for three weeks and then so badly banged up he needed additional time to recover and retrain his body.  Finally, when he was deemed ready, he left Gotham City with Batman and Robin for what we know to be six months of bonding. And from there, he returned in time to meet the new Batwoman in the pages of 52.

A week later, though, we get the Outsiders Annual where Nightwing is running around with his teammates to break Black Lightning out of Iron Heights prison and once that’s done, he goes with the team for an underground mission that lasts the better part of a year.

OK, so what is the reader to accept as the actual sequence of events? He cannot be in two places at once, yet these annuals ask us to believe exactly that.

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Infinite Crisis goes audio

  • News
  • April 23, 2007

Doctor Who fans have been getting all-new full-cast audio adventures for years. Recently, Dark Shadows has been invited into the club. And now, GraphicAudio has signed DC Comics up for the ride.

Purveyors of full cast audio adaptations of such well-known action paperback series as Stony Man, The Destroyer and The Executioner, the Graphic Audio corporation will be releasing DC’s Infinite Crisis miniseries in two box sets, each containing six hours of programming. The first will be released in May, the second in June. They describe the plot thusly:

"Superman, the Man of Steel. Wonder Woman, Amazon Princess. Batman, the Dark Knight. Together, they are the greatest super heroes of all. But they have turned away from each other in Earth”s hour of greatest need. As space is ripped apart, super-villains unite, and four mysterious strangers threaten reality itself. Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman must put aside their differences to save the world, but even the combined might of all Earth”s heroes might not be enough to stop the coming crisis…"

Actually, the CD sets are an adaptation of Greg Cox’s novelization of Infinite Crisis, buy why quibble. I’m a fan of such original audio shows, and I’m looking forward to reviewing the series. GraphicAudio CDs are widely available at truck stops and Interstate rest areas, and through the manufacturer.

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