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2020.10.06

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Chris gets it! You never knew how an issue of What If would end!(Except 95% of them ended with the world in flames)But it was the journey!

Tim

Great discussion although I feel like you elided over the ways in which the series was the culmination and apocalypse of DC Silver Age sci-fi worldbuilding. The whole idea of multiple super-hero universes was introduced, I think, in "Flash of Two Worlds" by Gardner Fox & Julie Schwartz, both denizens of sci-fi pulp world, and "crisis" stories became places to bring together large casts as early as 1963 ("Crisis on Earth One") I think the analogy is not so much Finnegans Wake as those medival tales that tried to bring in all known mythologies, so you have a genalogy that includes Romulus and Rebus, Hercules, Jesus, King Arthur etc. It's the childish desire to fit all the pieces of puzzle into one big picture.

Regarding the massive number of characters and the throw-in-everything-but-the-kitchen-sink approach that Wolfman took to the plot...

In the three years between Wolfman submitting his initial proposal to DC publisher Jenette Kahn and the first issue of the series, they had hired Peter Sanderson to do research by reading literally every comic that DC had ever published, taking extensive notes as he went along. Wolfman used this research as a guide when writing the series.
So Crisis is in a very real sense the culmination of fannish obsession with cataloguing and making sense of everything within DC's comics shared-universe narrative.

"Power Pack" about doubled me over with laughter. Great episode as usual.

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