Dan Liebke's Astonishing Tales

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Whew! Look at that title! A mouthful of self-evident tautological emptiness. Still, let’s not let that get us down, huh kids? What we have here is Infinite Crisis. It’s the sequel to Crisis On Infinite Earths and the prequel to Final Crisis, both of which I’ve reviewed on this site before and, hence, it makes a coherent kind of robust sense to cover this series also.

So, what’s going down, muchachas? Supes and Bats and Wonder Woman have arrived at the moon to squabble. At this delicious point in DC continuity, Wonder Woman is accusing Bats of too much spying on his fellow heroes. Wonder Woman, in turn, is being dissed by Supes for too much neck-breaking of mind-controlling supervillain, uh, Maxwell Lord (yes, Maxwell Lord. Deal with it, people). And, of course, Bats is making fun of Supes for selling more comics when he was dead than when he was alive. Or some damn thing. Ha ha ha! Suck on that, big blue. It’s all pretty tedious, so the alien conqueror Mongul shows up to beat the snot out of all three of them. However, after several pages of mindless fisticuffs and forced dialogue, it suddenly becomes very clear to Mongul that this isn’t Alan Moore’s Whatever Happened To The Man Of Tomorrow? (heck, it’s not even close), so he departs for that book instead.

Nightwing notices something's not… quite… right about the night sky. What could it be?

So while The Big Three squabble on (next item of squabbling on the agenda: ‘Does Being Known As ‘The Big Three’ Imply We’re Fat?’ Also, ‘How, Exactly, Is Bats Breathing On The Moon?’), the rest of the DC Universe has larger fish to fry. And by ‘larger fish’, I’m not referring to Starro The Starfish Conqueror. I mean, obviously. Because, heck, starfish are echinoderms, not fish. Duh!. No, the larger fish are far more metaphorical. For example, Nightwing has used the incredible deductive skills instilled in him by Bats, honed through countless hours of training and he’s noticed that the sky is filled with thousands of nano-technology based OMACs (OMAC = ‘Oh My Achin’ Cranium’) come to destroy all superheroes.

He begins to fervently wish for other heroes to show up. Not so much to help fight the OMACs, but to give them somebody serious to pick on. Heck, all he’s got, superhero-wise, are the longjohns and an old Teen Titans membership card. If, say, a Green Lantern or two showed their faces (or, indeed, any other part of their anatomy), then surely the OMACs would pick on them instead. But no, the Green Lanterns (and every other spaced out hero) are off-planet, flashing their rings all over the Rann-Thanagar War. The selfish pricks.

But that’s not all in terms of strife. Because it also turns out The Spectre is on a rampage. He’s killed the wizard Shazam and released uncontrolled magic into the universe, with obvious results (ie the inexorable rise of David Blaine). And, if that’s not enough (and let us assume for the sake of argument, that it is not), all the supervillains have joined forces. Their first target? Why, obviously, the amazing force for justice known as The Freedom Fighters!! (Oh, come on, people. The Freedom Fighters!! Y’know. The Human Bomb! Doll Man! Phantom Lady! Black, uh, Condor? Exactly, those guys.) Anyways, the supervillains murder the criminy out of vast chunks of The Freedom Fighters, before they kidnap Uncle Sam (oh, sure, Uncle Sam is a member of The Freedom Fighters – I mean, what superhero team doesn’t need a bearded, red-white and blue-suited old dude in a top hat?) and skulk off mysteriously.

MVP: The Golden Age Superman. He’s watched this entire issue from his vantage point within a magic crystal in which he’s lived for the past twenty years. But no longer! He busts out and flies straight out into Issue Two! Nobody messes with freakin’ Doll Man! Not on his watch.

Next Issue: Hints of troubling cousinly infatuation! PLUS the ever-changing monicker of Donna Freakin’ Troy

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