I’ve been wrestling with whether or not to go back and pick up the Superman Sacrifice arc that ran through the Superman titles and into Wonder Woman. I’ve been interested almost as much by the narrative feat of the Infinite Crisis countdown as I have been by the actual storylines. They’re trying to go big, and it seems like they’re succeeding, but the Sacrifice stunt kind of pisses me off with how remorseless it was.
To back up a moment, DC Comics is going to have a huge event called Infinite Crisis in the fall. Villains will be fought, characters may die, whatever, it’ll be big (or so they claim). They’be been building up to it all year by forshadowing events in various titles, and then launched four mini-series that will all in some way tie into the main storyline. In order to get the point across that the events in the mini-series titles really are important to the universe their characters in which their characters live, they’re also having lots of “tie-in” issues, where, say, Flash will encounter some villain from one of the other stories.
[Spoiler ahead]
So fine, tie-in issues get the point across. But they’re just supposed to tie in, not contain major plot points. The most recent issue of OMAC is basically impossible to read if you didn’t read the month’s Superman books. The main villain of the series dies in a seperate book! At the end of issue 3, Max Lord is alive. At the beginning of issue 4, he’s already been killed, and chaos is going on all around for no apparent reason.
Author Greg Rucka knows that wasn’t cool, and even apologized for it:
I want to say, before anything else that we tried very hard to build OMAC so that you weren’t obligated to buy anything else, and we failed. We really did. I’ll cop to it – I won’t lie about it. And we did it by playing dirty pool too – if you were buying The OMAC Project, you really need the Superman and Wonder Woman books to know what’s happening in issue #4 of the miniseries. If you don’t read them, it’s possible to understand them, but you don’t get the emotional resonance. That was a little bit of dirty pool, but we didn’t plan it out that way – we weren’t looking to spring this on people, but that’s the way it happened, and again, we’re sorry. So instead of a six issue miniseries, you get a ten issue miniseries, and I won’t fault any reader for not picking it up. I’d still suggest them though, because they’re a good story and worth reading, but I’d suggest, if nothing else, you pick up Wonder Woman #219 at the very least – call it issue OMAC #3.5 if you must, because it sets up the events of OMAC #4. So like I said, the narrative tricks are just as interesting to me as the story itself in many ways. OMAC is a story about Checkmate, Sasha, Max Lord, and Batman, yet as plotted much of the major action happens between Max Lord, Superman, and Wonder Woman. Do you pause the main plot to include the Superman stuff, and then pick up where you left off and have him not appear again, since his role is done? Well, no, you plot the story better so that it doesn’t all have to happen at once. For this whole Infinite Crisis event my main question has not been “what’s going to happen?”, but, “are they going to pull it off?” Well, here’s an example where I think they haven’t. They’re trying to tell a very large story using a set of seperate serial titles, and they blew it here. I’m not sure that the loss of the battle costs them the war, but there it is. Still, some of the way they went about it is interesting. Look at even just the covers, and see how the OMAC one includes the Wonder Woman one.
But the most pressing question for me at the moment is: do I go back and pick up Superman 219, Action Comics 829, Adventures of Superman 642 and Wonder Woman 219 so that I’ll know what’s going on, or do I skip them out of spite?