Crisis Weekly, the sixth week!

Just posted Crisis Weekly #6.

The whole concept of a DC crisis has rich history.  The original, 1985's Crisis on Infinite Earths, remains a huge watershed moment.  It was originally designed to collapse the multiverse back into a coherent, single DC continuity, so that every superhero operated in the same world.  This was a problem since DC had inadvertently created the concept of the multiverse based on how its publishing fortunes had developed since Superman's debut in 1938.  Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman have always been DC's three most important creations, but they originally existed at the same time as the Justice Society of America, several members of which were famously reinvented at the start of the Silver Age, the second wave of DC superheroes in the 1950s.  One of them, the second Flash, met his predecessor in the famous "Flash of Two Worlds" issue, which in effect ushered in the era of the multiverse.  Eventually, the Justice Society was placed in a second continuity, Earth 2, and there were regularly team-ups between the Society and the more famous Justice League.  In Earth 2 continuity, Batman and Catwoman really did officially get married, and their daughter was Huntress, and eventually, Batman was even permanently killed off!

Anyway, so DC got fed up with competing continuities, and so Crisis on Infinite Earths happened.  But then DC decided that the multiverse was a good idea, and so Infinite Crisis happened in 2006, and later Final Crisis in 2008. 

Infinite Crisis was a story predicated on the notion that the grim nature of superhero comics that had developed roughly since Alan Moore's seminal Watchmen twenty years earlier had become toxic.  In it, the characters are fully aware that they're no longer seen in their best light.  Wonder Woman had been forced, like Superman in the real world controversy in 2013's Man of Steel where he snaps the neck of General Zod and audiences watched in horror, to murder a diabolical schemer named Maxwell Lord, and that was used as the main focal point.  DC used the opportunity to also reflect on Superman's periodic relative unpopularity, as well as the massive success of the "Doomsday" arc in which he became the most famous murdered fictional character since Sherlock Holmes. 

And Batman offers this choice observation:

Ouch!

So anyway, this week's Crisis Weekly is very much in the spirit of that particular moment.  There's a brutal verbal takedown, in this case reflecting once again the real world, where confidence in the US seems to be at an all-time low.  Fiction ought to reflect reality, comment on reality, otherwise it's mere escapism.

But this installment also bursts into "mere escapism" by finally unveiling Man-Bat, long teased, as one of the main antagonists of the narrative, thereby plunging a lot of heavy real world issues back into fiction, and as promised, beginning a full-throttle dive into more traditional superhero storytelling.  It's the first big culmination point, equal parts summary of what has come before and an illustration of what it's all meant.

And it's really just getting started...!