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Murdough, Adam C. "Worlds Will Live, Worlds Will Die: Myth, Metatext, Continuity and Cataclysm in DC Comics’ Crisis on Infinite Earths." Thesis Master of Arts. Bowling Green State Univ. Popular Culture, 2006. 
Added by: joachim (06/04/2011, 00:02)   Last edited by: joachim (22/06/2011, 13:57)
Resource type: Thesis/Dissertation
Language: en: English
BibTeX citation key: Murdough2006a
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Categories: General
Keywords: "Crisis on Infinite Earths", Comic book industry, DC, Fandom, Myth, Seriality, Superhero, USA
Creators: Murdough
Publisher: Bowling Green State Univ. Popular Culture
Views: 20/630
Attachments   URLs   http://rave.ohioli ... num=bgsu1151329477
Abstract
In 1985–86, DC Comics launched an extensive campaign to revamp and revise its most important superhero characters for a new era. In many cases, this involved streamlining, retouching, or completely overhauling the characters’ fictional back-stories, while similarly renovating the shared fictional context in which their adventures take place, “the DC Universe.” To accomplish this act of revisionist history, DC resorted to a text-based performative gesture, Crisis on Infinite Earths. This thesis analyzes the impact of this singular text and the phenomena it inspired on the comic-book industry and the DC Comics fan community. The first chapter explains the nature and importance of the convention of “continuity” (i.e., intertextual diegetic storytelling, unfolding progressively over time) in superhero comics, identifying superhero fans’ attachment to continuity as a source of reading pleasure and cultural expressivity as the key factor informing the creation of the Crisis on Infinite Earths text. The second chapter consists of an eschatological reading of the text itself, in which it is argued that Crisis on Infinite Earths combines self-reflexive metafiction with the ideologically inflected symbolic language of apocalypse myth to provide DC Comics fans with a textual “rite of transition,” to win their acceptance for DC’s mid-1980s project of self-rehistoricization and renewal. The third chapter enumerates developments in the comic-book industry and superhero fandom in the past twenty years that are attributable to the influence of Crisis on Infinite Earths. My final assessment is that although Crisis on Infinite Earths failed in some respects to have its intended effect on “the DC Universe” and its readership, it did serve as a powerful mythological mediator in the introduction of new ways for superhero stories to interact with their own fictional and historical contexts and with their audience, and it fostered new generic expectations and reading practices among the superhero fan community.

Table Of Contents

Introduction (1)

I. Continuity and Change: A Brief History of Time in Superhero Comics (14)
A. In the Beginning (14)
B. The Birth of the Superhero “Universe” (20)
C. Continuity in Theory: Mythic Time and Eco’s “Oneiric Climate” (24)
D. Continuity, Community, and Superhero Fandom (31)
E. Last Days: The Historical Moment of Crisis on Infinite Earths (38)

II. The Self-Conscious Cataclysm: A Textual Analysis of Crisis on Infinite Earths as Modern (Meta)Myth of Apocalypse (46)
A. Eschatology and History: The Apocalyptic Underpinnings of Crisis (46)
B. First Movement: “And Thus Shall the World Die!” (55)
C. Second Movement: The Many Deaths of the DC Multiverse (65)
D. Third Movement: The Beginning of the Future (76)
E. The Apocalyptic Eighties: Crisis as a Myth of Its Time (82)
F. Revisionist Mythology: The Metatextual Aspect of Crisis (88)

III. Post-Crisis: Repercussions of Crisis on Infinite Earths for DC Comics and their Fans (95)
A. Infinite Drawbacks: Crisis as Mixed Blessing (96)
B. Myths About Myths About Myths: Crisis-Inspired Texts (101)
C. The New Cyclicality of the DC Universe (109)
D. A Fandom Menace: Crisis and DC Comics Readers (112)
Conclusion (116)

Endnotes (120)
Bibliography (148)
Added by: joachim  Last edited by: joachim
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