Skip to Main Content
Frequently Asked Questions
Submit an ETD
Global Search Box
Need Help?
Keyword Search
Participating Institutions
Advanced Search
School Logo
Files
File List
bgsu1151329477.pdf (1.78 MB)
ETD Abstract Container
Abstract Header
Worlds Will Live, Worlds Will Die: Myth, Metatext, Continuity and Cataclysm in DC Comics’
Crisis on Infinite Earths
Author Info
Murdough, Adam C.
Permalink:
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=bgsu1151329477
Abstract Details
Year and Degree
2006, Master of Arts (MA), Bowling Green State University, Popular Culture.
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.
Committee
Angela Nelson (Advisor)
Pages
152 p.
Subject Headings
Literature, American
Keywords
Crisis on Infinite Earths
;
DC Comics
;
superhero
;
continuity
;
apocalypticism
;
mythology
;
historicism
Recommended Citations
Refworks
EndNote
RIS
Mendeley
Citations
Murdough, A. C. (2006).
Worlds Will Live, Worlds Will Die: Myth, Metatext, Continuity and Cataclysm in DC Comics’
Crisis on Infinite Earths
[Master's thesis, Bowling Green State University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=bgsu1151329477
APA Style (7th edition)
Murdough, Adam.
Worlds Will Live, Worlds Will Die: Myth, Metatext, Continuity and Cataclysm in DC Comics’
Crisis on Infinite Earths
.
2006. Bowling Green State University, Master's thesis.
OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center
, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=bgsu1151329477.
MLA Style (8th edition)
Murdough, Adam. "Worlds Will Live, Worlds Will Die: Myth, Metatext, Continuity and Cataclysm in DC Comics’
Crisis on Infinite Earths
." Master's thesis, Bowling Green State University, 2006. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=bgsu1151329477
Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)
Abstract Footer
Document number:
bgsu1151329477
Download Count:
6,010
Copyright Info
© 2006, all rights reserved.
This open access ETD is published by Bowling Green State University and OhioLINK.