Oooh man this had DC clusterfuckery written all over it. While not being nearly as ridiculous as the Marvel universe has gotten at some points (infinity gauntlet, anybody?), this multiverse-shadow-creatures-monitor-antimatter-antisuperhero-heroes business is a little too much for me. I've always been more of a fan of the straightforward "here's your hero, here's the setting, let's watch as some bad guys get beaten up" formula. The furthest I'm willing to go as far as crossovers go is the Justice League, and by that measure I'm pretty tame compared to what I would guess is a majority of the comic-reading public.
I have an immense respect for the amount of thought that must go into the crafting of these things, though. I mean really, there must be pages upon pages upon binders upon file cabinets upon storage units of raw fucking data keeping track of everything in these multiverses. Which heroes are called what, which still exist and which have died, which were never born, who runs the world, whose costume has changed, what time period is it, etc. all must be hell to keep up with. Creating a multi-issue (according to wikipedia, 50+) epic that spans over many universes and many doubles of heroes in a cataclysmic event affecting everyone must be borderline impossible. I know I couldn't do it.
One good thing though: dat art. I've always been a fan of the retro-comic style. Particularly three things: 1) the color palettes -- SO many purples, yellows, and reds. Everything is warmly lit (almost constantly) and even the blues struggle to become a balancing cool tone. It's crazy. 2) The stippling. I know that it's technically not stippling and it's really just the way these things happened to be printed, but I just love being able to see all of those tiny little dots. Hell, Roy Lichtenstein is one of my all-time favorite artists. The concept of having the spacing of equally-saturated circles affect the perceived color and brightness of the much larger image used to boggle my mind as a child. 3) The way that sparkles and flares are illustrated. It seems weird (and it's pretty minor, I assure you -- most of what I like is the stippling and the palette), but using a white splotch with a bunch of thin black lines radiating from the center to illustrate a gleaming surface just baffles me. It seems like it wouldn't but it just works so well.
-Will Avery
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