The Power of the Meme Compels You

1. Go here.
2. Pass it on.
( My answers . . . )

-Besides, once I started coming up with funny answers, it was hard to stop . . .

The Meme So Nice, I Did It Twice

1. Go here.
2. Pass it on.
( My answers . . . )

-Same questions, different people . . .

Books: Crisis on Infinite Earths Novelization, by Marv Wolfman

-While writing this book, the author used a webpage of mine for reference. (As chronicled here, a few paragraphs down.) So, even if I wasn't one of the world's greatest experts on the Crisis (read: "enormous geek who had a lot of free time back in the 20th century"), it would have been a must-read.

(For the non-comics-readers of my LJ, Crisis was a 12-issue comic that came out in the mid-80s. In the history of superhero comics — in particular, DC Comics — it's pretty darn significant.)

-If I have one major problem with the book, it's that the editing stinks. Obsidian's name is misspelled, there's its/it's confusion, punctuation is missing, etc. Yech.

-Apart from that, [shrug], it was interesting. The story is mostly told from the point of view of the Flash, Barry Allen, who is skipping back and forth through time as an intangible, invisible ghost. It doesn't cover the whole Crisis (the Villain War is left out, for example), and some bits are glossed over (like the fact that the last time Barry saw Iris, it was in the distant future).

-Two things it attempts to do are noteworthy. First, it attempts to explain some of the minor plot holes in Crisis by crediting certain events to the influence of the ghost-Flash, who can affect the material world in a limited way. E.g., the burst of light that drives away the shadow-demons in issue #1 was caused by the Flash. This is, overall, a success, and fixes more things than it breaks.

-Second, Wolfman includes a fair amount of romance, particularly in the relationships between Barry Allen and Iris West, between Luthor III and Lois Lane-Luthor, and between Superman I and Lois Lane-Kent. We learn about the early stages of all three relationships, about the depths of the feelings involved, and we also see the final fate of all three relationships. This is a good use of the novel format, and it shores up some of the weaknesses of the superhero comic formula. Overall, however, it felt a bit repetitive. (Not helped by the fact that two of the women involved are alternate versions of Lois Lane.) The flip side of that is that the action sequences are more boring than in the comic (though also a little more gory, oddly).

-So, my overall reaction is that it adds some good stuff to the original Crisis, but is not much more than tepid by itself. Recommended to extreme comics geeks only.