Crisis Cavalries

Obviously any writer working on a big time comic book event looks to end their story in the most innovative and unexpected way they can. If you’re not looking to surprise your readers and keep them guessing until the end, you’re in the wrong game.

However, in our medium—I’ll call it “ours,” that’s cool, right?—just as in action movies or genre TV shows, there are certain tricks that will always work if done right. A good tragic sacrifice brings the emotion. A well-choreographed battle scene boosts folks out of their seats. A final act babyface turn from a heel elicits a grin. These are things you kinda see coming, but if they’re well executed, you don’t mind.

And one of my personal favorites: The cavalry charges in to save the day.

There are many variations on bringing in the cavalry to help resolve a global or universal peril when it comes to comics. Crisis On Infinite Earths was so big you needed essentially the whole friggin’ multiverse as the cavalry, but there were also several moments where individual heroes got a chance to shine, whether it was The Spectre arm-wrestling The Anti-Monitor at the dawn of time or Golden Age Superman throwing his Earth-1 counterpart back to reality and landing the final blow.

Sometimes events can be used to remind why certain iconic characters in particular groupings have the place they do. I remember talking to Geoff Johns when he was breaking the end of Infinite Crisis and a major goal was to make sure each member of the DC Trinity got their moment—Batman shuts down Brother Eye, Wonder Woman stops him from killing Alex Luthor to reaffirm her morality, Superman takes down Superboy Prime—and also elevate Green Lantern and the Green Lantern Corps back up. Siege was a similar deal for the big three of the Avengers, as they reunite in battle for the first time since they disassembled and all get their shots in on Norman Osborn before he goes down, with Cap leading the charge of heroes, Iron Man crashing the Helicarrier into the villains and Thor being the guy to finally halt the rampage of an out-of-control Sentry.

Other times one hero gets to step up and earn their place as a world beater. Hal Jordan got to do it twice with Final Night and Blackest Night. Captain America managed to get the power of The Beyonder away from Doctor Doom in Secret Wars. Batman put an end to Darkseid in Final Crisis. Jean Grey took down Madelyne Pryor and then Cyclops blasted Mister Sinister to bits to put a bow on Inferno.

My favorites are when the guys you don’t suspect pull off the win though.

The Justice League is totally screwed at the end of Underworld Unleashed until The Trickster of all people outsmarted the devil and saved reality. Nova was a B-lister at best—I can admit it—until the galaxy needed him to rip Annihilus’ guts out in order to prevent Annihilation from going any further.

However, even better than that is when the last folks responsible for pulling everybody’s fat out of the fire are the most mismatched band of misfits whoever’s writing can come up with.

In Infinity Gauntlet, Thanos gets his hands on the combined Infinity Gems, becomes omnipotent, kills half the universe, and does generally horrible things. With many of Earth’s heroes out of the picture, Adam Warlock works with what he has left, pulling together Captain America, Thor, Iron Man, The Hulk, Spider-Man, Wolverine, Namor, Cyclops, She-Hulk, Quasar, Drax, Firelord, The Scarlet Witch, Nova, The Vision and Cloak. The good guys get their asses handed to them, but it’s a pretty fierce battle and the ways Thanos comes up with to dispatch his foes—turning Wolverine’s skeleton to rubber, suffocating Cyclops with a ruby quartz box around his head—are wickedly clever. It’s also neat to see a dude like Cloak hanging in there alongside Thor despite how terrified he is. And of course, the sight of Captain America, the most mortal of all heroes, defiantly standing up to the bad guy even after all his allies have fallen, is classic. Ultimately, Thanos beats even the most powerful cosmic entities opposing him but gets the Gauntlet stripped from him by Nebula, necessitating an even more surprising white knight to come to the rescue: Thanos himself.

Before he hit those last minute homers a few years later, Hal Jordan was the guy tossing strikes down the middle, trying to wipe the universe clean and rebuild it the way he wanted during Zero Hour when he was going by the handle Parallax. The former Green Lantern actually succeeds and does erase reality, himself fading into a blank white page at the conclusion of Zero Hour #1, a visual effect I always dug, especially as it was mirrored in all other DC books that month. However Zero Hour #0 opens with Parallax giving a sermon to Batgirl, Guy Gardner, Alpha Centurion, Triumph and Extant about his next phase, while over at Vanishing Point, Waverider has managed to preserve a team of his own in hopes of setting things right: Superman, Captain Atom, Kyle Rayner, Hawkman, The Ray, Donna Troy, Green Arrow and Damage. It was such a wacky mix and match of big name heroes with no names as well as folks being pushed, plus traditional impact players like Batman and Wonder Woman left off to the side that it had me riveted; it was a great primer for the DC Universe and what they were trying to do in 1994. It’s the barely-powered Green Arrow who hits the agonizing “kill” shot on his former best friend Hal, and then relative nobody Damage who jump starts the big bang—a great fun fact he’d later harp on in Titans—so perhaps the ultimate example of unexpected saviors playing the true cavalry.

Stuff like that stands out to me because I love genuine attempts to elevate new and overlooked characters, and there’s perhaps no better place to do it than a big event. Don’t get me wrong: I still get plenty tingly—bad word choice, oh well—when Superman or Thor show why they’re the undisputed big guns of their respective universes, but there’s an untouchable satisfaction you get when the last person you expected hits the one in a million shot or figures out the unbeatable villain’s weakness.

So while the best ending is a well-written ending regardless of who saves the day, I certainly wouldn’t mind if Booster Gold does turn the tide in Flashpoint or Black Widow knocks out The Serpent in Fear Itself—I would not see that coming, but I’d love it.

Art Attack: Ben & Rickey's Infinite Crisis Jam

In the summer of 2006, Rickey and I were struck by a bolt of artistic inspiration with the conclusion after over a year of build and execution of DC's Infinite Crisis. Having both done our fair share of promotional work on the book for Wizard, we decided to express our satisfaction with its success while also congratulating our buddy and the event's writer, Geoff Johns, by drawing as many characters featured in the story as we could and turn that into a card for him.

Our process was to trade the card back and forth, each of us doing two or three characters then passing it along to the other guy. We didn't set out with any assigned list of who would draw who, so it was a free for all to nab the folks you wanted most on your first pass and then hope the next batch wasn't taken when it came back to you.

Not surprisingly, I believe I went for the Suicide Squad guys and Flashes first. Rickey took the Big Three of Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman as well as showing a perhaps unhealthy amount of enthusiasm for dead Teen Titans and villains with big heads. I'm not sure if he just got to Superboy before me, really wanted to draw sideburns, or I was still grieving.

Here's what we came back with...


I'd say I'm most pleased with how I did on Captain Cold, Bizarro, the Blue Beetles, Hawkman, Killowog and my random addition of Brother Eye. I was pleasantly surprised with how I managed details in a small space, which I think is pretty well represented in most of the characters I just named. I also appreciate that I drew Bushido with X's for eyes to indicate he was killed by Superboy Prime. I think my Zoom and Sinestro turned horribly wrong.

I love Rickey's Chemo and Wildebeest for how crazy they are and also how he used his style to turn out unique but faithful takes on characters like Golden Age Superman, Dr. Psycho, Hector Hammond, Black Hand, Alan Scott and Mongul; he made the villains look way creepy and the older heroes dignified yet clearly aged. And it goes without saying that his decapitated Pantha is a thing of beauty. However, Aquaman with the little fish swimming by aside, my overall favorite of Rickey's characters is definitely his bone-bearded Doomsday, who just looks cool as hell.

We've certainly got very different styles of drawing, as Rickey is way more comfortable than I am and can cut loose a lot easier while I tend to trip myself up in too many details, but I think we meshed pretty nicely here for a nice little collage. If I could do it over again, I'd have even more of our buds contribute for variety.

Back to 2006, we had our boy Jairo scan in the card so we could keep in in our records, then sent it off to California c/o Geoff.

Somehow it never got there and to this day he's never seen the darn thing.

But a week or so ago, Rickey was going through old files from Wizard and voila: there it was.

So happy fourth anniversary of finishing Infinite Crisis, Geoff! You did great!

Wizard Features That Never Were: Infinite Crisis Director's Commentary

Started re-reading Infinite Crisis for the first time in awhile earlier this week, and I was reminded of a question I haven't been asked in quite some time, but got all the time from message boards and elsewhere back around 2006-2007: When is that Infinite Crisis Director's Commentary coming?

It was a fair question.

For one thing, an Infinite Crisis Director's Commentary was actually advertised in the next issue box for an issue of Wizard during the summer of 2006 as well as in Previews and elsewhere. For another, as the guy who had done the previous two Director's Commentaries for big DC events--those being Green Lantern: Rebirth and the original Crisis On Infinite Earths, two of my very favorite features I did for Wizard for entirely different reasons--it made sense that I would be the guy to ask.

It wasn't a question I could really answer back then, other than to say, "Stay tuned," but I figure enough time has passed now that the story can be told.

See, an Infinite Crisis Director's Commentary does exist--and I'm not talking about the one DC did for the trade, I'm talking about a bonafide Wizard version that was conducted by yours truly with writer Geoff Johns and artist Phil Jimenez (I believe I may have even gotten a quote or two from George Perez, who ended up drawing portions of the book, but I'm not entirely certain). Unfortunately, it doesn't exist as a written document anywhere, just on a bunch of audio tapes that I'm pretty sure I don't even have in my possession anymore.

Here's the skinny...

A month or two after I had completed the Crisis On Infinite Earths Director's Commentary, then-Wizard editor supreme Brian Cunningham assigned me the Infinite Crisis gig. I was grateful to BC for putting a bit of time between the two articles, because those fuckers were exhausting (they generally involved at least five-six hours of phone interviews, then going through upwards of 80 pages of transcript highlighting the stuff you wanted to cut/keep, then massaging the "keep" text, then usually up to a dozen rounds of revisions and more cuts because there was never enough room, not to mention tagging art, writing an intro, working on sidebars, etc.). At the time, working on the Director's Commentaries was a bit of a badge of honor for me, as I believe only myself and my predecessor as a staff writer, Rich Ho, had ever actually done them. Eventually, the wealth got spread around a bit, particularly once I started doing the equally time-consuming Wizard Retrospective (which I invented, so toot toot)...but I'm digressing.

I was excited to work on the IC Director's Commentary in particular because Geoff and Phil were (and are) two of my closest friends in the comics industry, so I was looking forward to the three of us getting on the phone and goofing off. I also saw it as a kind of neat bookend to my career at Wizard up to that point, since my very first writing assignment the week I was hired as a research assistant was speaking with Dan DiDio, Judd Winick, Greg Rucka and Geoff about what would eventually become the Countdown to Infinite Crisis one-shot, and then I had done a large chunk of the IC coverage that followed, including the rad Secret History of Infinite Crisis, which was kind of a warm-up for the Director's Commentary. I was jazzed.

So of course Murphy's Law kicked in and everything that could go wrong, did go wrong.

To begin with, Geoff was entering one of the busiest phases of his career (it's still going), getting 52 up and running while also working on three ongoing books and doing that Hollywood stuff he does. Phil was in transition mode, picking out his next project and also teaching art classes as well as dong Hollywood stuff of his own. So suffice to say, getting either of them pinned down for a long enough period of time was difficult enough--getting both of them on the phone for more than a half hour was next to impossible.

We scheduled and rescheduled the call a number of times. It was nobody's fault really that we had so much trouble getting things going, that's just the nature of working in an industry like comics, where nobody works 9-5 days and priorities have to be in constant flux.

While we were playing phone tag, the feature was scheduled and advertisements were placed in Previews despite me not actually having anything on tape or paper.

The deadline for getting something done was fast approaching, so we ended up scheduling two separate two-three hour calls for a Saturday and Sunday (which was not typical protocol at Wizard, as we didn't like to bug creators on weekends--also, I liked to sleep--but this shit had to get done). However, to further complicate matters, Megan and I were still in a long distance relationship at the time and I was driving to Connecticut to stay with her in her dorm that weekend. Something that actually simplified things was that Geoff was visiting his parents in Michigan that weekend, so at the very least we didn't have to negotiate east coast/west coast time, but it also meant we would all bit the bullet and do the interview as early as possible.

So that's how I ended up spending a Saturday morning on the Connecticut College campus before any of the hung over students in the surrounding rooms were mobile sitting up in bed with an earpiece in using the Wizard company cellphone telling Phil Jimenez to stop laughing so loudly because he was going to wake up my girlfriend.

Against all odds, we got the first interview done, but something went wrong and we had to cancel the Sunday session. I got back to work and the issue we had been working on was already off to the printer with an Infinite Crisis Director's Commentary I only had half-done being touted in the next issue box. I was getting a bit nervous and so was Brian.

Later that week (I think), we finally finished up the interview and I sent it off to be transcribed. That took another week.

Then Brian told me we weren't doing the article anymore.

More accurately, he told me we couldn't do the article anymore in that issue. During the time I had been wrangling the interview, provisions had to be made in case it didn't come together (and for awhile there it wasn't looking good). At this stage in the game, those back-up plans were ready to go, and neither Brian nor I were confident enough in our ability to turn the IC story around quickly enough to shut those down. So we decided to take a mulligan on the advertisements and push the story back a month.

Except we forgot the next issue was the year ender.

And then the issue after that was the year preview.

We tried to justify fitting the feature into both of those issues ("The best of 2006!" "Before you get your first look at 2007, say goodbye to 2006 in style!"), but in both cases, we were already way over page count. Eventually we resigned ourselves to the fact that we had missed our window and the Infinite Crisis Director's Commentary was not going to see the light of day--at least not in Wizard proper.

See, we had just done a collected edition of all the other Director's Commentaries to that point (including the two I had worked on), and figured when we did a second volume, we'd include the Infinite Crisis one as a never-before-seen feature that would really sell the book.

Then we never did a second volume.

After the crunch of getting the back-to-back year ender/year preview died down, it hit me how much time not only I, but Geoff and Phil, had devoted to this feature that now seemed to be DOA. It was frustrating. Geoff and I actually got into a bit of a shouting match over the phone--something that had never happened before that and never has since--about the feature not getting printed, but it took all of about ten minutes for us to settle down and apologize to one another.

And that was that.

It sucks too, because that would have been a great Director's Commentary. There was some cool stuff about everything from the original fate of Nightwing to what real-life cathedrls Phil used as design templates for the scene where all the heroes go to church before the big fight.

C'iest la vie. Maybe someday I'll find those tapes and do something with them. Until then, I hope everybody who asked me this question now knows the answer.