I just finished reading the novelization of Infinite Crisis. Which probably makes me the only person within 500 miles to have done so.
This was an impossible task... write a novel that literally translates at least sixteen recent comic books, in a storyline that is a direct sequel to a 12-issue series from twenty years ago, containing allusions to seven decades of comic book history, starring hundreds of characters. It's nuts. It could not be done. It wasn't done.
What happened was this novel pretty much describes every panel from the original Infinite Crisis miniseries. It's like reading a comic to a blind person.
What probably should have happened is that the saga was broken up into several novels, to afford the room for the backstory and drama that longtime fans such as myself natively insert into contemporary comics as we read them. I mean, who exactly is intended to read this novel? A comics fan already owns the IC comics, and, judging from the online buzz, is about 50/50 on liking it anyway. A non-comics fan is not going to understand a damn bit of it, will be confused senseless on all the hundreds of names that are thrown out in mindless deference to the source, and will be left with a ton of questions concerning holes and threads that you'd need to read another year's worth of books to resolve. This was a crazy, unreasonable project.
Marvel's Civil War, because of the less-complicated concept and lower character count, will probably make a pretty cool novel. Infinite Crisis The Novel is a valiant mess.
Mark Waid does a fine introduction to the novel, although it's mostly about the original comics event. And he includes this summary, after noting how DC's iconic characters have changed from the 1940s through the 1980s to today:
"[Infinite Crisis is] what happens the day Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman all realize how lost in darkness they've become - and how, if they don't find their balance fast, that darkness will consume the world."
He's right. That does happen within the original series. The major beat is that today's heroes have become somehow sullied, darker, no longer pure. Which is an interesting take, because it cuts to the heart of the issues that currently divide comics fans. But it's only barely touched on in this novel. Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman are not even given enough physical pages to "live" as real literary creations. You get a retelling of their word balloons, and some appropriate staging and descriptors, but you do not get a deep inspection of what has happened to the trio. Their fractured friendship is as important as the origin of the new Blue Beetle, the destruction of the Rock of Eternity, or the metaphysical adventure of Donna Troy's outer space team of finger exploders. There is too much else going on, taking up all the page count.
Not that those events and others aren't important... just that there's so much chaos here that any section devoted to chartacter developed is lost. There are no separate tones here; it's all static. It's not just the Big Three who get the half-assed soap opera treatment... it's everybody. And there is a LOT of everybody. After page upon page of word-for-word dialogue from character after character, peppered with little expository asides, it just all runs together. One paragraph explaining that Kyle Rayner is fighting alongside his most recent ex-girlfriend (Jade) with another ex close by (Donna) is not doing a damn thing to add to the drama of the scene, because this is pretty much the first and only time we're going to see these characters in a scene. I could not believe that the novel mentions Kyle's transformation into Ion. Doomsday shows up as the big tipping point of the villain battle scene and is dispatched in under one page. Why bother? Why waste our time with faux layers of emotion and too-quick panels-cum-paragraphs? Like a reader fresh off the street is supposed to care about freaking Air Wave biting it? It's pedantic, is what it is. As a novel reader, my time should be spent inside the minds of the main characters... of which Infinite Crisis The Novel unfortunately has none.
You cannot recreate a fantastical story of this scale inside one thick novel. Not without sucking, anyway. It's exactly the kind of thing that comics simply do better than other books. Either give me a gigantic multi-book epic with the characterization that a good novel series should have, or streamline the whole thing down to something much more digestible.
I should find a non-comics fan to read this and report back to me after every chapter.
I can't hate the author too much - he really has no other option, given that he has to do this in one Borders-friendly paperback and somebody somewhere decreed that it had to be tediously comics-accurate. Plus, according to his website, Greg Cox only lives about an hour and a half away from me. He's apparently the go-to guy for comics and sci-fi novel adaptations, but he was sure hung out to dry on this one. The scenes that are fun to read are not good because of his efforts, but because they were undeniably good in the first place.
There is a noticeably weird overuse of the words "gorget" (whenever Batman is getting strangled, which happens more often than you'd think) "chitinous" (describing Blue Beetle) and "ceramic" (every single bloody time an OMAC shows up). I'm always surprised when I read an author hanging onto specific unusual words like that. Maybe it's just me, but that drives me up the wall. Like Robert Jordan using the word "rictus" about a million times in the first few Wheel of Time books.
Amusingly, IC has only 51 chapters. You mean to tell me they couldn't have done it in 52?
