Amazing Heroes #91 (Mar 15, 1986)

Making a Crisis of It
The Creators Reflect...

by Mark Waid

Last year, I sat down with Mary Wolfman, George Perez and Bob Greenberger and interviewed them about their latest project, a maxi-series to be called Crisis on Infinite Earths. Set to be published during DC's golden anniversary year, the series was touted as a major event in comics, one that would add a new chapter to DC history.

What little doubt I had that Crisis would be able to live up to its own press was quickly dispelled. Once I realized that DC had a hit on its hands, I made arrangements with AH to do a follow-up article, I conducted another interview with co-plotter/ writer Mary Wolfman, co-plotter/ penciller George Perez, and inker Jerry Ordway once they had finished with Crisis, and encouraged each of them to look back on the series and talk candidly about its strengths and weaknesses.

The resultant retrospective revealed some intriguing insights into what became the comic book event of 1985. All three gentlemen spoke enthusiastically about Crisis, sharing anecdotes and untold stories, providing answers to some of the most-asked questions about the book...

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MARV WOLFMAN

"There were several things about Crisis that I am proud of. First, the story made sense-which, over a 12-issue period, with as many characters and as many plot twists as we set up into the story, the fact that everything works is delightful to me Moreover, I think the characters were in character-which was very painful to do, because I don't read all their books. I'm pleased that the readers feel that everyone acted in character.

"Finally, I'm pleased with the handling of Supergirl's death, especially with the fact that [Crisis #7] gave all the information about the character necessary to appreciate who she was and how she died.

"I'm happy that, generally, you did not have to know who all the characters were in order to appreciate the book. I tried to write [Crisis] so that even if you didn't fully know who these characters were, you at least knew they existed, they mattered Those that I wanted you to know about, you knew. There are places that I failed and places where i didn't get across as much information as l wanted to, but, with a story with that magnitude, I'm surprised it worked as well as it did."

Bring on the Bad Guys

"I think that the issue I liked least was the Villain War' issue [#9]. It was the most typical comic-book issue. However, it was put into the series specifically to have a one-issue story that answered the question, Are the villains going to do something to sabotage the heroes? Well, yes, they were and did, until they realized that they had to cooperate or die. I always have a knee-jerk reaction against stories in which the villain says, I don't care what's happening, I'm going to do what I want!"

Was there ever a point where Wolfman just wanted to throw his hands up and run away screaming into the night? "Yeah. About issue #4. I had outlined the first ten issues-which was actually, at the time, the complete story-months beforehand, so 1 knew that was coming and I just couldn't wait to get to the next section. Issue #4 looked like it wasn't going anywhere, though it was necessary for the rest of the story. It was a hard one to write, because I wanted it over with "

Crisis With Infinite Crossovers

Readers of last year's Amazing Heroes Crisis preview will remember that the main storyline of the series originally planned to run through issue #10, with the New History of the DC Universe comprising the final two books. However, the series expanded to fill 12 issues, says Wolfman, "specifically and totally because of the crossovers. There were no crossovers planned when we created the series, because nothing like this had ever been done. Before [Crisis came out, there had been talk among the other writers, some of whom felt that we were going to make money off their characters. So I came up with the concept of doing the crossovers as a way for them to make some money with Crisis as well. It's a mercenary thing, and one of the many compromises that had to be made on the book, and the thing that hurt me the most, schedule wise. If I hadn't done it, the rest of the book would have been well, not a snap, but the job 1 had expected it to be. Once we added in the crossovers and dealt with the political situations, it became a chore and was almost not worth it.

"Essentially, I would be told 'to do a crossover with this character' and 'set this up, and it would be up' to me to figure out how. Those were hard, but some of them were well worth it. For instance, the crossover sequences in issue #8 tied in so smoothly that I didn't think anyone realized that they were all setups, because they all led into one another so nicely and forwarded the story in Crisis itself. Often, these intrusions all got turned around so that they benefited the book."

Compromises

"The concept I was playing with right from the very beginning was that nobody would remember [the Crisis]. One of the ideas that we got rid of pretty fast was that everybody would retain the memory of every-thing. What would happen would be that, for the next 20 years, you'd have people talking about all the discrepancies on the reformed earth. No, thank you.

"My feeling was that, if anyone remembered, there'd be somebody discussing it, and, once you discuss it, you have to refer to it, and once you refer to it, you keep bringing up the Spectre of Multiple Earths. It bothered me greatly. To me, that was the worst part of the whole book, the fact that I had to compromise on that Issue. However, the editorial staff at the time felt that the heroes, at least, should remember Crisis.

"In order to make that work, I had the heroes going back to the dawn of time, which was where the Earth was recreated. That was always a part of our plan. What we did differently was have the world created after the dawn of time. The heroes would then remember the multiple Earths], but the villains, who only went back ten billion years, would have forgotten along with everyone else.

"Then, to further make it work, because we did want some memory of the Crisis known, we had the Anti-Monitor come to Earth. That way, people would know that the Earth was invaded, that heroes went out to fight them, and that some died. They wouldn't know the full extent of it.

"I think it's an excellent compromise, I just would have preferred it the other way."

Life With George

Fortunately, the best part about working on the Crisis was working with George Perez. When he came in as co-plotter, it took a lot of the worry off of me. The first four issues were really difficult to do because l did full plots on them, and it was starting to get quite confusing. My memory is quite poor and George's is quite good. He wanted to take on the project as just an artist, but I think, as usual, the two of us functioned better as co-plotters. I only have good things to say about George.

"What was incredible was that he'd stick in characters I never heard of. He managed to get all the research sent to him, and hed find all these obscure characters and put them in the background. The decision I made almost from the beginning is that, if they aren't germane to the story, I won't do anything with them except use them as wallpaper. If I had to actually identify them all, it would have bogged the story down incredibly.

"Had we had more time, I would love to have had the letter column list all the characters and very briefly tell who they were, but there was no time. We were always late. We never missed a schedule, but we were always right on the heels of it!" Wolfman found Perez's pacing particularly notable. "The thing I want to make clear to everyone was that George's work on the Supergirl issue, specifically more than any other issue, really made the story work The way he set up the scenes is just so great. When we worked out the whole thing, we didn't go panel by panel-he really did a lot of it and it was great. I knew how I wanted it and George gave me what I wanted plus 1000 percent more.

"If George hadn't been there, I think I would have left the book part of the way through. He was the only thing that could keep it going."

Power Girl and Huntress

One of the paradoxes of Crisis lies with the choice of which Superman and Batman spin-off characters would survive the catastrophe. Eighteen months ago, given the choice, fandom at large would likely have predicted Batgirl and Power Girl to be the distaff superdoers most likely to vanish.

Needless to say, that's not what happened. Wolfman explains: "The view on Power Girl is that DC is going to change her origin. I was told that she would not be a Kryptonian. Consequently, George and I established that she would still be around. She exists because she has a past that she's not aware of "The Huntress was the sticking problem from the beginning anc was the one character we recognized would be the most difficult to deal with. I didn't want to kill her. Paul Levitz" who co-created the Huntress, "never volunteered this information, but it came to my attention that he had some ideas concerning her. We talked to him, and he said he'd be just as willing to see the current Huntress die and eventually create a new Huntress with Joe Staton that does not tie into the Batman legend. That cleared up a major problem."

Summing Up

"Even though Crisis was announced years ago, it came out after Secret Wars, and because Secret Wars was really lambasted by the fans - we were approached with twice the suspicion we expected. The fans expected this to be the same sort of project. It was real nice that they decided that it was a book on its own, and not a copy.

"My major happiness with the book is that we got an awful lot of letters saying, I never bought DC books, but I decided to give this one a try, and now I'm starting to read other DC books, The fact that so many people have come to DC because of Crisis is a source of pride to me."

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GEORGE PEREZ

"I was hired for the sense of grandeur that [Crisis] required, and because I'm capable of juggling as many characters as it took to tell the story." Perez will admit that when he first agreed to illustrate Crisis on Infinite Earths, "it was to get revenge for not being able to do the JLA-Avengers book, as well as a way of getting back at Secret Wars, which did phenomenally well for a minimum of effort. I thought, 'fine, even if I'm going to lose money on this book by giving up other work, including Teen Titans], I can make it up to the fans and to myself!

Thanks to being able to work with Marv and everyone else, we managed to make it an aesthetically pleasing book as well as a good seller. What it didn't do in sales compared to Secret Wars, it made up for in popular reaction. It definitely provided DC with a real amount of glory"

The Cast of Thousands

Everyone will admit that one of the amazing things about Perez's Crisis pages was the sheer number of superdoers running around on them. AH asked the artist how he went about selecting the hundreds of characters he used.

"I pretty much had carte blanche. If Mary told me that I had to use certain characters in certain scenes, then that would be a limit, but for the most part Mary would suggest certain characters that he definitely wanted in there, and any charters I wanted to add on were fine as long as they were in the DC universe. 

"I couldn't put in the 'funny' characters, but I managed to sneak them in in other ways," such as by having Ambush Bug pop up as a poster in an alleyway, or by including photographs of Sugar and Spike. "I asked about Warlord before putting him in. I asked about Arak, and Roy [Thomas] requested that he not be put in. Mary trusted me enough to know I wouldn't put someone 'wrong' in there, "Essentially, I was going after a representation of DC Comics as a whole, which is why I put in heroes like Firehair, Shining Knight, and other characters from different eras. The essence of [Crisis] being a historical storyline was very important, and I took advantage of that by putting characters in from different time frames."

Surely Perez couldn't have drawn each and every character completely from memory-how did he go about getting visual reference? "As far as the actual research went, I would usually call up Bob Greenberger and tell him either specific characters I'd like referenced, or tell him some thing like 'go around the office and ask people who they'd like to see! He'd take smart shortcuts sometimes, like when he sent me a copy of Showcase #100" which featured nearly every character who ever appeared during that book's long run.

"A joke started coming around that you could tell when a new issue of Who's Who came out by who was in Crisis. In trying to avoid that, I'd sometimes make a list of characters who specifically had not been in Who's Who yet. The Wizard appeared for that very reason, as did the Question.

"I also wanted a representation of the groups, which is why the Challengers are there, the Blackhawks, Easy Company, the Secret Six, and so forth. Angel and the Ape, I included because i knew they didn't have a listing in Who's Who. By separating them, putting Angel in at a detectives convention and San Simeon in Gorilla City, I managed to get them in without it looking too silly.

"Even if I have no interest in a particular character, I will still draw him as if he were my favorite. I treated the Sea Devils with as much affection as I treated Superman and Batman Every character was drawn with love."

The Little Men Who Weren't There

Despite the care taken by everyone else involved with the book, some of Perez' characters were occasionally-understandably-misinterpreted by Jerry Ordway, by the colorists-and even Wolfman. "As far as the Green Arrow of Earth-Two goes, for instance, a lot of his appearances are by mistake. Marv, even though I left notes, inadvertently wrote him as Green Arrow even though it was supposed to be Speedy. Looking at how I broke up the teams on those pages, you can see that the Teen Titans are there, not the Justice Society.

"Another problem was Clayface, who was invariably colored as Plasmus, Until I saw his scenes in print, I didn't realize there was going to be confusion. I should have realized that there'd be some-after all, they do look a lot alike!'

Finally, the one character whose presence was the biggest anomaly in the Crisis was Mento, who, at the time, was appearing both as a hero in Crisis and as a villain in Titans and in two different costumes, yet! Explains Perez, "That was a lot because the [current yellow-and-blue Mento] costume was one I had originally designed to be used only once, during Mento and Changeling's hunt for the Doom Patrol's killers [New Teen Titans #13-15]. After that, he was going to go back to either no costume or his original costume. Since, in the Who's Who Doom Patrol entry, John Byrne drew him in the old costume, I stuck with that. It wasn't until I saw recent issues of Titans that I found out that Marv had him back in the blue and yellow costume."

From Reader to Writer 

Perez came on as co-plotter with issue #5. "Bob Greenberger was brand-new at DC and probably, quite understandably, felt a little ill-at-ease in trying to correct Marv. As a result, Marv was lacking feedback on the book, and a lot of stuff started slipping through the cracks, mistakes that should have been caught. In the end of issue #3, we have a sequence, as it was originally drawn, were Harbinger comes in behind Monitor say-ing. I'm going to kill you" When I got the plot for #4, that whole scene was totally forgotten about, and the end of issue #4 had the same thing Mary had totally forgotten what hed had in the issue before! Since the art work on #3 was already in-house, I told Bob about the problem, but he didn't have time to get it back to me, so we compromised-and unfortunately this wasn't made clear enough—by saying that Harbinger was looking at Monitor through a viewscreen The curving of the panel borders there was to indicate that.

At that point, I talked to Marv, who was grateful when I pointed out some of the mistakes I'd caught, of which that was the most major I said, 'If you want me to co-plot the book with you, I will, and he was more than happy to let me come on.  He wanted someone who knows when he is mistaken and when he's creating a deliberate ambiguity as a plot element. After working with him for so long on Titans, I fit the bill" Unfortunately, an error resulted in Perez not being credited as co-plotter; when it was noticed, Wolfman sent a letter to be printed in Amazing Heroes letter column that fully credited Perez. "I appreciated his letter. He agreed that he shouldn't be the one getting all the praise, but I agreed that he shouldn't be the one getting all the blame.

"Working from a full plot in the beginning served its purpose - it allowed me to act from the perspective of a reader." It was from that perspective that Perez then ques tioned the entire premise and direction of the Crisis, "just to clarify it to myself, and, from that point on, even though the basic direction was still the same, the whole book changed "There were some characters I had questions about immediately-which is why you didn't see them." Particularly memorable to Perez was the problem of Amazo and the Composite Superman, two characters who had the combined powers of, respectively, the Justice League and the Legion of Super-Heroes. "If the Monitor wanted to use the Legion and the JLA, why not just pull these characters and not bother with the rest? We left them out deliberately because of that question."

Another puzzle for Wolfman and Perez became how to work the Spectre into the storyline. "In fact, he wasn't even scheduled to appear in Crisis before I came onto the book. The man is practically omnipotent-we can't ignore him, but how could we handle him? At first it was a problem-then he became a much more pivotal character than he was originally intended to be," in Crisis #10. "The whole thing about the Anti-Monitor tying in with the origin of the universe didn't come until we plotted that issue. Marv had had some idea of a big arm-wrestling match between the Spectre and the Hand at the Dawn of Time, and it worked out perfectly. The same synergy that had made us a partnership on the Titans worked out again when I jumped in with issue #5."

Lows and Highs

Perez spoke freely about some of the problems with Crisis. "The one thing that I think everyone would be in agreement on is that I wish the series had somehow had more space. DC kidded about doing a 13th issue-half-kidded, actually-but Marv and I nixed that idea.

"I regret not being able to use the Jack Kirby's Fourth World characters more"-Mr. Miracle, the New Gods, the Forever People "because of things that Jack is planning to do with them." Remembering "The Monitor Tapes" the 1/4-page strip that ran in Crisis #10, Perez adds, also regret that my pencils in that sequence were screened. A lot of the fine detail was broken up that way, and it was hard to see who was who.

"And, of course-how could we forget?  The one thing that almost took me off the book was the flexograph printing in #1. I threatened to quit the book on the spot if issue #2 was as bad as the first one. But when I saw the first shot of Anthro on page one, I knew I was safe; that particular issue reproduced perfectly. I was never so happy to see regular comic book printing."

Perez's misgivings about minor points, though, were more than made up for by what he considers the highlights of Crisis. "The handling of Supergirl up to and including her death is something that [Marv and I] are both proud of. I tried to remember that she was a teenager, built differently from Wonder Woman.

"The entire last-issue sequence involving the destruction of the Anti-Monitor was very hard to do, but it worked out very nicely."

"l also thought the death of the Flash was handled well. The only thing I can remember Bob Greenberger saying that anyone regretted about the cover of Crisis #8 featuring the final fate of the Flash] is that, starting from his trial, in all the issues of The Flash up to and including the last one, Flash was never shown running. Unfortunately, I couldn't find a way to design such a cover.

(Incidentally, Perez takes credit for having the Flash appear—in various stages of decay-all throughout the series, as he was catapulted randomly through the time stream during his death. "Technically, the Flash died in issue #2, but we didn't see how until issue #8. Even Marv didn't know what I was doing with that shot of Kid Flash. I put him in and said 'Don't worry Marv, just have him say something and I'll tie it in later.")

"Something that I think will surprise a lot of people, though, is that I think my favorite issues of the lot was issue #11, a character issue where everyone's reacting to all that has happened. The title ["After-shock] was mine, and I convinced Mary that we had to slow down and do a character issue, scenes with Helena Wayne, with Superman of Earth-Two, those kinds of things. That whole first sequence is straight out of the Twilight Zone!"

The Challenge of Crisis

"It was a lot of work, but the reaction has been very gratifying. The incredible amount of characters to be drawn, and trying to make a coherent storyline with a cast of hundreds, was a true challenge.

"I think we did the right thing by not taking the 'easy way out! A book like that, but its very nature, will be a good seller, and we could have done a lowest common denominator kind of book. But [Crisis) has merits as a story as well. Mary worked very hard not to make a bland book.

"DC was very appreciative Marv and I received a surprise bonus from DC when it was over. It was a labor of love that was worth the time and effort."

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JERRY ORDWAY