One thing I didn't fully realize until this issue. it's nice to see Classic Spectre back in action. Visually, anyway. For the last couple years, it's been Hal Jordan clad in a cutesy amalgam of the usual Spectre togs and a GL uniform. I look forward to him cleaning up his act, getting re-bonded with Jim Corrigan, taking his old chair at the JSA brownstone and returning the status quo to circa 1951.

Speaking of hometown kids making good, it's nice to see Jean "Mrs. Eclipso" Loring safely set up for resurrection by any future villain with a spaceship. Talk about a leaving the door wide open.

If the Shadowpact graduate to their own title, my only request is for a better regular artist. Justiniano has an unfinished, scratchy style that lacks characterization. I could not read him on a no-end-in-sight monthly. His style reminds me of when Adobe Streamline 2.0 would over-vector your art and take all the detail out.

OMAC Project #6 I'm really over the OMAC computer text that invades almost every panel in this series. I get the feeling that it's hiding clues that I'm too stupid to decipher.

I'm amused that Evil Max Lord's plan was scuttled by the US Postal Service. According to Batman, Max broke into Beetle's warehouse to steal an EMP generator - the only thing that could wipe out the OMACs - but he didn't find it because it "hadn't been delivered yet." Has Max never used online package tracking before?

So we still have plenty of OMACs out there, plus Times Square is endlessly looping the footage of Wonder Woman killing Max Lord in another book. I would have enjoyed this series better had it not been balanced on one single unbelievable concept: that Max Lord was a secret supervillain all this time.

Rann-Thanagar War #6 This has been $15 I will never get back. Want a summary? Hawkwoman is dead. Another one of those B-movie outerspace megavillains showed up and was killed by being drawn-and-quartered with teleporters. And at the very end - the very smegging end - some giant white hole popped in out of nowhere and started eating planets.

That white hole will be the only meaningful plot point taken from this abortion of a miniseries into Infinite Crisis, you watch.

Villains United #6 I just loved the hell out of this series. And about 10 pages in, it raises the stakes even further with the multiverse discussion between Pariah and Luthor. Now we have to find out which Luthor! Let's see... Earth-2 Luthor was killed in Crisis and he was a small-minded gang shlub anyway, not really worthy of the name. Same with the heroic Earth-3 Luthor, but that really has no bearing on the revamped Antimatter version of the former E3 Crime Syndicaters. I completely forget how the Superman books handled the transition from Fat Kryptonite Poisoned Luthor to Australian Michael Bolton Luthor to Skinny Bald Luthor, so maybe there's some good old fashioned Earth-1 Clone Luthors still hanging around.

Again, there's just so many great lines. This has been the best component of the Infinite Crisis wind-up, no question. It also ends indeterminately, but does set up Catman and Deadshot as the DCU's new Starsky and Hutch.

Infinite Crisis #1 After the spotty quality of the prequels and the unceasing hype associated with it, Infinite Crisis has been taking a beating on most comics-based weblogs I read. Well, I enjoyed it. I liked the George Perez-inspired layouts. I liked the introduction of the four crisispoints spilling in from the prequels. I liked the argument between Batman, Superman and Wonder Woman. I even liked the tortuous takedown of the Freedom Fighters.

I've seen a lot of complaints that this series is going to require too much previous DCU knowledge to read. At first I was inclined to agree - after all, this issue's narrator walks directly out of pre-Crisis continuity! (Confession: when I first saw the narrator thought balloons, I suspected it was Barry Allen talking. It's not.) But then I thought back to my own entry into comics, and how one of the first stock superhero books I collected was none other than Crisis on Infinite Earths. I didn't know who half the characters were. I had to learn the multiple Earth concept on the fly. I had to forage through those densely packed Perez panels like a babe in the woods. I had not read (at that point) much of anything from DC's superhero library; my familiarity with the main characters came from Super Friends.

My point is, as a kid, I stepped into Crisis on Infinite Earths with only a random selection of Who's Whos under my belt and I totally got it. I adored it. I memorized it. It added a dramatic weight to comic books that carried me into the hobby. It was a maxiseries positioned to reward longtime readers while still making sense to new ones. Of course, reading it now, it comes off stilted and neutered... but maybe this new iteration, this heavily marketed sequel Infinite Crisis, will do the same for the new kids out there... looking, as I was, for a big story featuring characters I already knew. There are prospective readers out there who know Superman from the 90's animated series, who know Batman from the movies, who maybe just discovered Teen Titans and Justice League... and they're browsing through comic shops wondering if the books can be just as good as any of that. Any one of them can pick up Infinite Crisis. Don't hold it back from them because they don't know who the Freedom Fighters are (were). I had no idea about Earth 3 when I saw the Crime Syndicate die in Crisis #1, but I still understood the drama, I still saw the story.

I'm sure the next issue of Infinite Crisis will explain the four characters who are finally revealed in the final page. New fans will be brought up to date.

I know who they are, but only because I took a chance and read Crisis on Infinite Earths 15 years ago. Nobody back then was out there telling people not to buy Crisis because you had to have read 50 years of National Periodical Publications to understand it.