Crisis on Infinite Earths is a totally "inside" story that is utterly meaningless unless you're plugged into the whole DC universe as a phenomenon. Because of some odd writing choices and decades of DC buying other comic-book companies, there were several parallel Earths in the DCU. The continuity was extremely hard to follow, the back stories were full of contradictions, and that made them less approachable to new readers (and that's a mantra you'll hear over and over again in American comics since the late 70s). In an attempt to make things simpler, they took all of their various parallel Earths and squished them together into one big story that would, in theory, be easier to understand.
The irony, of course, is that it made things exponentially harder to understand because instead of making one thing out of many things, in the minds and the discourse of fans, they actually just created another thing on top of the pile. Before 1986, we talked about Earth-1 (Silver Age), Earth-2 (Golden Age), Earth-S (Shazam/Capt Marvel), Earth-X (Chartlon Comics), Earth-Prime (supposedly the world of the reader, but quickly just another superhero setting), and many, many others. After 1986, those Earths all basically remained in our consciousness, but then we also had Pre-Crisis and Post-Crisis. Superman's history might have been one way in 1985, but by 1987, it was something else entirely, and there was no clear indication of what stories took precedent (and like a lot of sci-fi, fans took on the concept of "the canon" to talk about what "really" happened and what is no longer in the official history). What's quasi-metacomical (and therefore "merely" self-referential) about Crisis is that it's entirely based on wink-wink, nudge-nudge with the readers. The creators will declare, by virtue of artistic fiat and big glitzy mini-series, that history has changed. It's about the equivalent of a director rushing on stage during a performance and yelling, "You didn't see that! That didn't happen! We're going to back to top of Act I and try again." This works only if the audience agrees to it, and even then, you can't scrub their memories clean, so it works only in so far as (magic word!) they suspend their disbelief, once again. Crisis asked a lot of its readers, and there are some long-time fans who are still angry about it, so it didn't even totally "work," at that.
But then Crisis was followed up by two sequels, Zero Hour (1993) and Infinite Crisis (2006). Zero Hour took the premise that the first Crisis sent "shockwaves through reality" (or something like that), and that they created little fissures that needed to be fixed. There was a whole premise behind it with Hal Jordan/Green Lantern II trying to "remake the universe without pain or injustice," which is counter to American political discourses of freedom and rugged individualism, so of course he is the villain of the piece. The point is that Zero Hour asked for a very similar kind of willingness on the part of the reader. It tacitly admitted that the original Crisis didn't quite "work," in the sense that the story wasn't fixed yet, there was not yet a closed, definitive narrative in which all things were explained. Zero Hour attempted to fill the gaps that Crisis had opened up (is any of this sounding familiar? I hope it does, because this is the self-referential American comicbook).
However, once again, it didn't work. There were, inevitably and by definition, cracks in the story and both Crisis and Zero Hour served as mere reminders of those cracks (i.e., "patching the holes with corrosive materials"). Just last year, DC tried to do the whole thing again, partly under the narrative logic that if they did it a third time, it was now, magically, a trilogy! Infinite Crisis, conceived and executed as a blatant reference to the original Crisis, did it all again. Cracks in the narrative. Things don't make sense. A bunch of heroes battling it out. The difference was that the villains of this piece were less blatantly evil. They were working to find a perfect world, some combination of everything that came before that would actually be good and decent and true, and they're definition of "good and decent and true" is, quite explicitly, the Silver Age, which was dominated by the CCA, and therefore couldn't be anything other than "good and decent and true." As the story unfolds, what we see is a projection of the creators' struggle onto the characters. "Comics used to be fun and light. Now they're dark and angry. What the hell do we do? We can't go back to being children. That time has passed. But we hate where we live now, and we can't escape it."
I'll spare you all the cosmic explanations for how it all happens (for now), but the upshot is that at the end of this story, instead of resetting the continuity yet again, instead of trying to present a story whose holes had all been filled in, this narrative not only admits that it's "broken" (in the sense that things go unexplained) but didn't actually try to reset everything. Some changes were made, certainly, but for the first time, the characters remember the difference, and the bulk of "broken" elements of the story are allowed to stay, unchanged. The only way to fix, for example, the utterly bizarre history of the character Power Girl is to write her narrative brokenness into her history. For the first time, a character's canonical history is "She's all fucked up," and also for the first time, that's going to have to be good enough. Not because it's fully satisfying and answers all of our questions, but because it's all we get. It's all that's available. There's an admittance, no matter how tacit, that we don't always get what we want, and (perhaps I'm reaching now) that a truly mature reader/human just learns to live with that.
This haphazard trilogy moves from a blatant, if not successful, attempt to close off the narrative, through a tacit admittance that it didn't work the first time, finally to a narrative that all but openly admits that it didn't work and it actually can't work. That, to me, is the perfect model of the transition from self-referential comics to metacomics.
Posted by orion at January 23, 2007 1:07 PM