Amazing Heroes #78: Crisis on Infinite Earths #7 Review

I said it just last week ...
Every time I think I am done with covering Crisis on Infinite Earths #7, I get pulled back in.

Blog friend Greg Araujo (@garaujo1on Twitter) recently got a mess of old Amazing Heroes magazines and in that block was Amazing Heroes #78 from September 1985. No big surprise, based on the cover date, the book reviews the issues of Crisis on Infinite Earths which were still on the spinner racks at the time.

My how time flies.

Reviewer R.A. Jones takes a look at Crisis on Infinite Earths #7-9, discussing the major events. And these were the issues where people started to really sit up and take notice. It is one thing for Kid Psycho and the Crime Syndicate to die. It is another thing all together for Supergirl and The Flash to die. The stakes were suddenly real. World would live and die. And some characters would stay dead ... at least for a while.

Part of my research on the topic of Crisis on Infinite Earths #7 has always been the fallout. There was no social media then. The decision that Supergirl was unnecessary and unloved seemed absolute back then. *All* the DC higher ups thought so, right?

So reading reactions and reviews from around the time help me get a wider pulse of what it meant to the comic world for Kara to be killed. Here, Jones does a wonderful job of putting the event into context. And Jones is much more sympathetic than his staff mate Dwight Decker, who wrote a 'damning with faint praise' hatchet job four months earlier.

Jones covers three issues so the climactic seventh issue only gets some of the coverage. But even then the question 'do we even need a Crisis?' was being raised by fans. The review opens up with a jab at continuity being a tempest in a teapot that maybe comics hold up to too high a standard. He even takes a shot at Stan Lee as being the root cause of the continuity bugaboo.

I do wonder what the Marvel Saga was going to be.

And then Jones kind of puts Marv Wolfman's feet to the fire. Sounds like Jones didn't think Supergirl needed to be killed. He wonders if Wolfman decided to kill Kara or was told too. (As we now know, it seems that Dick Giordano was the one driving that ship.) At least in the immediate aftermath, it seems Wolfman was using sales of the Supergirl book as a yardstick towards viability. And, while I love the Paul Kupperberg book, it was a pretty generic title during a time when New Teen Titans, Legion of Super-Heroes, and X-Men were all flourishing creatively.

And yes, I have to agree with Jones that Kara's death scene is extremely powerful, memorable to this day and still riffed on in comics some 30+ years later. If she 'nearly' died, would a new Supergirl book with a hot creative team released post-Crisis sell? We'll never know.

At the very least, Jones was a fan of Supergirl saying she'll be sorely missed. In a time when there seemed to be a preponderance of evidence that no one liked Supergirl, I would have appreciated this review. There were other mourners out there.

Here is the rest of the review, definitely worth reading.

What I find interesting is that all of his arguments for keeping Supergirl alive could have easily been applied to Barry Allen's Flash. And yet Jones calls Barry's death a mercy killing after the ponderous 'Trial of the Flash' sucked the life out of the title. Surely, this is just another case where a hot new direction from a dazzling new team could have revived the character from his doldrums.

But this is what comic book fans are.

Fan of Supergirl? How could you kill her? Who cares if she had a lousy book? Bring in the right people!
Not a fan of the Flash? How could you not kill him? His book was lousy? No one could bring him back.

It still intrigues me that in reviewing the Crisis book from afar, there has been a lot written about Supergirl's death. I haven't run across that much written about the Flash's death. Was there as much consternation about it? Did having another Flash still around soften the blow? Was the major re-write of the Superman mythos a harder thing to swallow? Are there Flash fans out there who can point me anywhere?

Anyways, I am happy that the power of Crisis #7 and the pain of losing Kara wasn't lost on this reviewer. And, as always, I am thankful for generous friends like Greg who I have met via social media and the community that comes here.

Posted in: Reviews