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Crisis on Infinite Earths | 
 enlarge | Author: Marv Wolfman
Publisher: IBooks, Inc.
Category: Book
List Price: $22.95
Buy New: $17.40
You Save: $5.55 (24%)
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Rating:  11 reviews
Sales Rank: 1095360
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 320
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.2
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 6 x 1.3
ISBN: 159687290X
Dewey Decimal Number: 741
EAN: 9781596872905
ASIN: 159687290X
Publication Date: May 25, 2005
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Shipping: Expedited shipping available
Condition: New, Excellent Condition, Clean Text, Never Been Read, Tight Binding , Immediate Shipping, Email Notification, Professional Service, MILLIONS Served, SATISFACTION GUARANTEED!
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Product Description
A mysterious force is moving through reality, destroying all life in its wake. The world's greatest superheroes, Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, the Flash, and thousands of others are confronted with their greatest challenge: stopping this interdimensional threat before it destroys all life everywhere! To stop this threat, they must ally themselves with the most dangerous super-villains. If they fail, more than 3,000 universes and untold trillions of living beings will die!
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| Customer Reviews: Read 6 more reviews...
 Pretty strong, concise version of COIE for new fans. October 22, 2007
Now that it's 20 years later and Marv Wolfman's insanely complex 12-issue comic book series "The Crisis on Infinite Earths" is being sequelized (by DC's current "Infinite Crisis" mini), I figured it was time to try and make a little sense out of the old story. I knew the basic plot outline: these two feuding godlike beings known only as the Monitor and the Anti-Monitor are kind of the god-beings of the matter and anti-matter universes. The Monitor's matter universe had an infinity of variations, as each instant spawned endless new realities in accordance with Einstein's theory of relativity. The antimatter universe was a singular, uninhabited field of antimatter with nothing in it except one desolate planet that couldn't support life. Somehow or other the Anti-Monitor started destroying the universes on the "matter" side, and the end result was that a whole buttload of superheroes had to team up to stop him, eventually resulting in one, unified reality. The new reality created chaos for comic book readers, as the DC Universe (home to Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, The Flash and Green Lantern, among hundreds of other, less well-known characters) now had to cope with reconciling the numerous "realities" it had created over the years. Ever since 1985, DC has been getting farther and farther away from the idea of a single, unified reality, essentially deciding with the 2001 series "The Kingdom" that they would undo the CRISIS without actually undoing it, by introducing a concept called Hypertime, which allows for alternate realities but understands that they exist only with the singular DC Universe timeline as a reference point. No matter how different each reality is from the "main" one, they only exist because they're somehow connected to it.
At any rate, the book. Marv Wolfman recently wrote a novelization of "The Crisis on Infinite Earths," which I read because I thought it might be marginally easier to follow than the graphic novel (released in 2001) by Wolfman and his fellow "New Teen Titans" alum George Perez. I was right; the novel is concise and clear in a way that the "Crisis" comics couldn't be, as they were pandering to the loyal fans of 1985 in the way that, I'm sure, it seemed to most casual readers that stories like "The Final Night" and "Zero Hour: A Crisis in Time" were pandering to people like me in the '90s. Because I didn't read many pre-Crisis DC books, I never really understood a lot of it, but Wolfman's process of building from the ground up, and of using Barry Allen (the Flash, who died in the CRISIS) as a narratorial voice, is inspired. I understand the story in a way that I've never come close to in the past after reading it, and can almost--almost--say that it's as good as the hype has always been. Certainly the new novel is indispensible for any comic geek who really never "got" the CRISIS, because it's a story so important to mainstream DC continuity that you can't ever properly understand a lot of things unless you know what happened in that epic 1985 series. To try would be like studying American history and refusing to acknowledge the Civil War.
 Super Reader September 1, 2007
This book, unfortunately, has one of the worst jobs of editing that I have ever seen. Egregious spelling mistakes like 'coat hangar', misplaced full stops, words reversed in phrases and other bad things.
It did improve in the second half of the book, luckily.
I also think this is too short. It was based on a dense, 12 issue maxi-series, and suffered from being in two minds.
The main part of the novel is from the point of view of The Flash. He is a pivotal character, with his ability to travel between the various parts of the Universe, so The Monitor is trying to use him to help, and the Anti-Monitor to get rid of him.
He is also dead at the time, and being so far, he is still travelling the multiverse and helping out before this catches up with him.
This part of the book is by far the best, seeing what The Flash is thinking, and how he is involved in the Crisis behind the scenes, where the other heroes don't know.
There are some cursory attempts at some of the other important scenes - the death of Supergirl, the heroes controlled by the Psycho Pirate on the last few Earths that are left, and that sort of thing. To do justice to all those, the book needed to be longer. If it had have just stuck The Flash, it would have been ok.
For some reason, there was some pseudo-updating. Mentions of cell phones, and internet map services that didn't exist in the 1980s, when this happened. This is somewhat jarring, and DC's influence on trying to make everything always 'current time' for Superman, et. al., I suppose.
So, rather disappointing as a whole. I can't recommend buying this as a hardback, or trade or oversized-and-hence-more expensive paperback.
I would wait for a cheap paperback, or get it second hand. If you have no interest in collecting books like this, just get it from the library.
Weak adaptation December 31, 2006
One of the most phenomenal comic book events of all time was the classic 1985 maxiseries "Crisis on Infinite Earths." In this book, Marv Wolfman and George Perez told an epic, universe-spanning saga, explaining the DC Comics Multiverse and merging all the various worlds into one. The idea was to streamline the line and make it easier to understand. Now personally, even at the time I didn't find the concept of multiple realities hard to comprehend. But the fact remains that the comic was a seminal work and is the base against which all crossovers since have been measured.
So when word came out that Marv Wolfman was releasing a novel based on the comic, I knew I'd have to read it. Most of the book is written from the point of view of Barry Allen, the second Flash, which makes for an interesting read since he knows from the first page that he's going to die during the course of the story. That interesting perspective is probably the biggest thing going for it. The story is a bit too widespread, pulling in a myriad characters that I'm familiar with, but that the casual fan wouldn't recognize, and Wolfman doesn't really give any character other than Barry much development at all. This isn't as big a deal in a comic, where it's presumed that the readers have followed them and know who they are, but in a novel you can't make that assumption. In the long run, it's an okay book, but not a great one. Some comic-to-novel projects have worked very well - Elliot S. Maggin's "Kingdom Come" and Greg Rucka's "Batman: No Man's Land" for example. But this may have been a story better left in comic form.
The Vengeful Concept: Lambs to the Slaughter of the Wolf, A Hook in the Eye of the Fisherman September 27, 2006
The book is absolutely innocuous. Anyone who reads the novelization is obviously a "superfan", someone who has dissected and digested every other Crisis on Infinite Earths-related media of the past 20 years. The book tells a different perspective and isn't particularly outstanding. However, let's face the rigid truth, worms...we're gonna buy it, anyway, because THAT'S WHAT WE DO.
The proofreaders were negligent; a multitude of grammatical inconsistencies litter this book. I'm an English teacher, and I hope my students think I'm a damn good one. I live by the code. I'm SPRACHGEFUHL.
I recommend the book to the collectors. JUST GO BUY IT. STOP READING THE REVIEW AND RESIGN YOURSELF TO THE INTANGIBLE AND INEXTRICABLE REALITY THAT YOU CANNOT BREATHE COMFORTABLY UNTIL YOU HAVE FULFILLED YOUR MONOMANIACAL INSENSIBILITIES. Life's short...blah blah blah...
I do not recommend the book to tyros. Tyros can read The DaVinci Code. Trust me, you'll be more comfortable.
An interesting look at the events of the Crisis through the eyes of its greatest sacrifice January 16, 2006
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
While my parents grew up remembering where they were when JFK died, I grew up with a slightly different life-changing memory: where I was when the Flash died. I still vividly remember that spot on the floor in front of the magazine rack at the drug store as I watched my little world crashing around me with the death of my favorite super-hero. But he didn't die in his own series. He was just one of the many casualties of Crisis on Infinite Earths, a comic book mini-series put out by DC Comics in an attempt to "clean up the mess they'd made" by creating hundreds of alternate Earths with different heroes on each one. The mini-series was ground-breaking because it was the first time any comic book publisher had decided to kill off dozens of major characters in one book. Before they were through, heroes like Earth-2's Superman and Wonder Woman, Superboy, Dove, Supergirl (yes, the series was rough on the Kryptonians), and of course, The Flash were all dead just to name a few.
Now on the twentieth anniversary of the series, the original writer Marv Wolfman has come up with a novelization of the events that rocked the DC universe. But instead of telling the story linearly and in great detail (as was done with the awesome Kingdom Come novel), he's told the story from the perspective of its greatest sacrifice: the Flash. Barry Allen narrates the story of his death and life during the cataclysmic moments of the crisis. For some unknown reason, the Flash is thrown into an ethereal state and must watch helplessly as worlds and heroes die around him. Told from this perspective, we see how the Flash actually shaped some of the events from "behind the scenes". How in the world does a dead guy get to describe his moment of death in detail and the things that occurred afterward? Time-travel, dimension-hopping, and all the other little quirks that make comics so much fun.
The chapters in this book are extremely short (literally one or two pages on average), which makes the flow a little disjointed at times. And since this isn't a blow-by-blow retelling of the story (imagine how thick that novel would have to be!), there are numerous highlights of the comic series that either never get mentioned or are just touched upon briefly. Still, the book could be considered essential reading for a complete picture of what really happened, and why the story truly was a "crisis". There are a few chapters describing events involving other heroes, slowing the breakneck pace otherwise permeating the book.
If you've never read the comic book, you'll definitely want to read it first. Some of the major twists and jaw-dropping moments (and deaths) will only get a cursory nod here. Savor the depth of the story in comic form, then read this book for the icing on the cake.
The Flash's death has always been considered a sacred moment for DC Comics. He's one of the only major characters who've ever died that hasn't returned (Green Arrow, Green Lantern, Superman, and Supergirl have all come back), showing just how monumental the event truly was. After reading this, you'll see why. Recommended for any true comics fan.
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