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DC and The Matter of Crisis, Part I

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You’ve heard the word. You know the story.

Crisis.

The iconic, defining, definitive word of DC stories.

The word Crisis feels inseparable from the fabric of DC. It holds sway over its past, it informs its present, and it will certainly influence the future. You can’t think of DC and not think of Crisis at some point. The very idea of it has been bound to the very idea of DC that tightly.

And the response to the word and its invocation is intense as well. It comes with a lot of assumptions and baggage. Given that is the case, given it has become ubiquitous, inevitable, and all-pervading with DC itself, it’s worth discussing what has become of it. What has emerged from this focusing and this obsession over Crisis in DC? What has it led to?

The matter of Crisis must be unpacked, and that’s what we’re here to do.

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Knights of X #1-5 in Review

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Credits: Tini Howard writes; Bob Quinn draws; Erick Arciniega colors; Ariana Maher letters; stunningly gorgeous covers, the real highlight here, from Yanick Paquette and Alejandra Sanchez Rodriguez.

To whatever degree you do or don’t enjoy the foundational Claremont-and-Davis Excalibur run (1988-90), as a mash-up of various genre settings and modes, it was unusual in the mainstream comics landscape. For readers who grokked to it, Claremont and Davis were playfully subverting the superhero genre while allowing in outside genre elements and, of course, a playful but earnest exploration of sexuality—apparently too subtle for some fans to pick up on, while that apparent subtlety dazzled others with its colorful boldness. Excalibur has even inspired a fun reread podcast, Oh Gosh, Oh Golly, Oh Wow!, hosted by a trio of academics enthused by the iconic title’s sexually coded antics.

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The Nine Major Modes Of The Big DC Story

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The DC Universe remains a strange setting and object. A tattered together tapestry that feels more like an archipelago than a unified land mass like the Marvel Universe. It’s a strange beast. It’s an assembly from the various acquisitions and power grabs that united a disparate number of publishers under one banner. The DCU is a place of paper and ink that defies and slips out of any attempts to create a ‘clean’ and contradiction-free tapestry. It’s a setting where ‘continuity’ and ‘canon’ feel like loaded and dangerous words, as the crisis-afflicted setting resists any certainty those imply. It feels like a taped-together mess that barely holds, and yet when it does, it can be magnificent. Astonishing tales can be woven from its tendrils of impossible absurdity. It’s a reality operating on vibrations, wherein Superman sings to save existence.

There’s something broken and yet beautiful about it.

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Who Watched the Watchmen? Justice League Unlimited

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It is often said that Watchmen is the most influential comic ever to be released. That comics wouldn’t be where they are without it, for good and for ill. But how did we get here, exactly? More to the point, just what influence did Watchmen provide to the larger world of comics? What, ultimately, is the legacy of Watchmen? Who watched the Watchmen?

The simple version: our topic series has The Question as one of its main characters exposing an apocalyptic conspiracy aimed at the superhero community, prominently features Captain Atom, partially climaxes in a false flag disaster engineered by the world’s smartest man posing as hero, and ends on the question “Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?” (even if the response offers up the fig leaf translation “Who guards the guardians?”). By that metric alone, the widely beloved ‘Cadmus arc’ of Justice League Unlimited is indisputably A Watchmen. Plus Alan Moore liked the one episode. Case closed.

The more significant answer is that to a substantial cross-generational section of the pop culture viewership, the Cadmus arc is Superhero TV Watchmen.

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