Whifffff!!!

I think the hardest thing to do Wednesday night was find a replay that actually made the umpire look remotely accurate. So he called strike 3 and even gestured to confirm it, yet it was still a live play?? Huh. It's not any surprise that this happened in Chicago, home of The Curse (I use that term broadly because there are too many Windy City curses to go around), but when a freak occurrence like a controversial call happens here, it's typically at the expense of the home team. Not this time.

Should be an interesting weekend in Anaheim.


So we're 24 hours removed from the DC event of the decade, and I am intrigued and excited with a tinge of melancholy. The first issue of the seven-part INFINITE CRISIS is in stores now, and it's been a fucking howl so far. Theories have been espoused for months as to what will go down in this universe-shattering series. For one, it does act as a sequel to the legendary maxi-series CRISIS ON INFINITE EARTHS which in 1985 served as a 50th anniversary celebration as well as a means to clean house and start from scratch with its most iconic characters. Back in the 1960s going into the 1980s, DC creatively explained that each generation's version of Superman, the Flash, Green Lantern, Wonder Woman, Batman & Robin, etc. were all, along with acquired properties from the defunct publishers of Shazam! and Blue Beetle & Captain Atom, functioning on separate universes. The Crisis served as a cataclymic event that allowed all the characters in DC's stable to operate in one distinct universe with fresh integrated histories. With INFINITE CRISIS, a sequel of sorts is being produced twenty years later, and the editorial ramifications promise to be spectacular if not altogether controversial.

An epic of this nature is usually accompanied by a high body count, and so far the creative team behind INFINITE CRISIS is off to a rollicking start. The current version of the super-team, the Freedom Fighters, is decimated in a gruesome fashion. For sure, we know that Black Condor is ruthlessly and abruptly taken out by Green Lantern foe Sinestro, Human Bomb is pounded into mush by a particularly vicious Bizarro, and Phantom Lady gets torn apart by the Cheetah and Deathstroke the Terminator.


Far be it from me to complain about well written, well drawn material that doesn't let up, but it never hurts less as a fan when you see characters you've grown attached to take one for the team. Writer Geoff Johns and artists Phil Jimenez & Andy Lanning I'm sure would appreciate that this first issue of INFINITE CRISIS has me hankerin' for more big time. If you read the first CRISIS series, especially if you read it when it first came out, I would never believe you if you told me the very last page of the first chapter didn't move you.