Crisis on Infinite Earths

"Explain that to me, Harbinger! What happened to my life? I am flesh and blood... I exist... yet I don't exist."

This is a wild read. Originally intended as a sort of business move for DC Comics, who had by that time created so many different versions of characters on so many different Earths (for example, Earth 1, Earth 2, Earth 3, Earth X, Earth Prime, etc) that their DC Universe had become unwieldy, this comic was supposed to tidy things up and reset everything into one, congruent universe setting. I am not well versed in comics, however, so the effect of reading this book was kind of amazing. I encountered pages and pages of characters I just had to assume meant something to other people. After 100 or so pages of this, the effect was to totally destabilize all notions of centralized, unique "superheros."

The existence of this heterogeneity of superheros, some with other worldly powers, some without even that distinction, causes the reader to follow their collective abstraction, since none have the page space to truly stand out. You follow "superhero-ness" as it fights against the evil... wait for it... Anti-monitor. Awesome name, mostly because it drives an entire dialectical plot towards (strangely) Hegelian concepts.

The Monitor is a character who has functioned throughout the ages as a sort of uber-voyeur/arms dealer. He watches every superhero on every planet and collects data on them (and I gather at one point he was selling this data to villains for cash). One could very easily interpret this character as a stand in for the avid comic book reader, only taller. In this particular story, the main baddy is the Monitor's twin brother, established at the beginning of the Universe's creation yet set in an anti-matter sphere. He is the Anti-monitor and he wants to destroy everything. Insert dramatic music and postmodern irony here.

The binary relationships are set and blurred many times over in this novel: superheros decentralize into the collective, super villains fight to retain their Hegelian dialectical relationships with superhero counterparts, thus calling into question their defining motives, the worldly threat (the anti-monitor's desire to condense all reality into a single anti-matter universe, his own) not only ties indirectly to the comic book reader's identity but underscores a weird sort of "negation of the negation."

In short, 1) all concepts in the DC Universe (characters, settings, origins, etc) are shown to have an opposite and opposing side, 2) as the balance between these sides shifts gradually, then suddenly, gradual changes lead to major turning points, which tumble and shift the nature of reality, and 3) all of these turning points develop as a "negation of the negation" and the DC Universe as well as all its characters are changed forever. In this case, consolidated into a unified universe with separate and unique parts (i.e. only one Earth) among other ways.

I definitely do not recommend this to just anyone. You have to either totally be into the world of comics already (in which case, my reading of it will be as bizarre to you as this novel was for me) or willing to really brave out some strange ideas with a huge collection of characters whom you never even knew existed. I liked reading this but only because I loved how campy it was and I found it intellectually engaging (in my own way).