And from this point of view, we learn many interesting things that the comic held back from us. None of that has changed in this version of the story - we just have a different point of view. I don't really need to re-iterate what the Crisis was about, why it happened and who the main players were. There's too much for The Flash to do, and suddenly the fastest man alive doesn't have enough time. So who better to narrate our alternate view of the Crisis than he? The fact that he's dead by the time the book begins doesn't really make much of a difference. If the writers had ever taken his powers seriously, The Flash never would have had a challenge.

How any villain ever got the best of this man is beyond me.

He can run fast enough to travel through time, and vibrate the very molecules of his body to a point where he can not only ghost through solid matter but pass between the dimensional barriers that separate the multiple Earths. He can alter his subjective view of time to the point where a hummingbird in flight becomes a still life. Even on an ordinary day, we're talking about a man who can race laser beams - and win. The thing about The Flash, though, is that he's hard to pin down. Yes, his death saved billions of people, but still - for someone as important as he was, you would have thought he'd have gotten a few more pages. After all, he didn't get all that much page time in the comics - a few ghostly visitations, some taunting and then he was dead. He decided to let is see the Crisis on Infinite Earths through the eyes of Barry Allen, The Flash.Īs I said in my review of the comic series, Barry Allen was (more or less) the beginning of the Multiverse in DC Comics, so it was fitting that he be the one to narrate the end in this book. But whereas mine was a straight page-by-page translation of the comic to text, Wolfman decided to tell the story from a very different angle. To his credit, though, since Marv Wolfman was the guy who wrote the comics, I think he has far more right to put it into novel form than I ever did. I am not the only one who gave that some thought, it seems. If I ever run across it, I'll either marvel at my innocent youth or cringe at my fumbling attempt to do the unnecessary. To my memory, it was pretty good, though it's no doubt lost to the ages by now. I tried to fill in things like expressions, reactions, to bridge the gap between the kind of story you can tell in a comic and the kind you tell in a novel. I sat down with the comics and went through them, panel-by-panel, trying to put them into a narrative form. Is there something wrong with that?Īctually, here's a Little Known Fact about me: when I was in, maybe, junior high school I tried to novelize Crisis. Why yes, I own both the comic and the novelization.

Marv wolfman crisis on infinite earths