Episode 170 - Crisis on Infinite Earths - with Dr. Ryan Haupt

Before DC could reboot its universe, it had to destroy an infinite number of them. Case Aiken, Jmike Folson, and Dr. Ryan Haupt take on Crisis on Infinite Earths, Marv Wolfman and George Pérez’s monumental attempt to reshape decades of DC continuity. From Supergirl’s iconic final battle and Barry Allen’s sacrifice to the two Supermen standing at the heart of the story, they look at why Crisis remains both a masterclass in superhero comics and the source of decades of continuity headaches.

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Men of Steel Full Episode

Originally aired: October 30, 2026

Edited by Sophia Ricciardi

Scored by Gen Moonen

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⏱️ Chapters

00:00 Cold Open

00:52 Welcome and Introduction

01:10 Introducing Crisis on Infinite Earths

01:38 Meet Dr. Ryan Haupt

02:47 First Experiences with Crisis

04:41 Case’s History with the Book

06:08 Jmike Recaps Crisis

09:43 Why DC Wanted to Collapse the Multiverse

10:24 The Origins of DC’s Multiverse

13:26 Using the Multiverse to Expand DC

15:32 Cleaning Up DC Continuity

16:24 Wolfman and Pérez Go All Out

16:44 Did Crisis Actually Fix Continuity?

18:49 The Death of Earth-3

20:41 Science, Antimatter, and Comic Book Physics

22:47 The Flash Across Time

24:35 The Monitor and Harbinger

28:10 The Incredible Density of Crisis

31:05 Crisis as a Snapshot of 1985 DC

33:21 The Death of Supergirl

36:19 Supergirl’s Legacy

40:47 The Death of Barry Allen

43:35 Lex Luthor, Brainiac, and the Villains

47:23 Superman Details and Earth-2 Continuity

50:20 The Two Supermen

53:42 Superboy-Prime

58:49 Superman After Supergirl’s Death

01:01:30 The Anti-Monitor and Time

01:03:51 George Pérez’s Impossible Page Layouts

01:05:09 Life on the Merged Earth

01:07:47 Who Survives the Crisis?

01:09:32 The New DC Universe Takes Shape

01:12:02 Casualties and Crisis Weirdness

01:14:46 The Final Battle with the Anti-Monitor

01:15:30 Earth-2 Superman’s Ending

01:16:16 Wally West Becomes the Flash

01:19:12 Power Girl and the Post-Crisis Status Quo

01:20:10 The Big Beats of Crisis

01:21:21 What Still Stands Out

01:25:14 Final Thoughts

01:26:21 The Messy Aftermath of Crisis

01:28:40 Did Crisis Work as a Reset?

01:33:28 Jmike’s Final Take

01:37:46 Wrapping Up

01:39:58 Ryan’s Plugs

01:43:21 Jmike and Case’s Plugs

01:45:42 Next Time and Sign-Off

01:46:23 Trade School Promo

01:46:56 CPOV Tag

Transcription

00:00
Dr Ryan Haupt
My desire to want to brag to literally nobody because I'm sitting on my couch in my house alone, and I'm being like, well, I'm pretty sure that's Mirror Master standing next to Dr. Polaris. And like, who cares, Ryan? It's like, well, my brain has the pattern in it, and so I'm going to. I'm going to make. Make note of it and be proud of myself for. For being able to tell that, like, no, that's Eclipso. That's.

00:52
Case Aiken
Hey, everyone, and welcome back to the Men of Steel podcast. I am Case Aiken, and as always, I am joined by my co host, Jmike Folson.

00:59
Jmike Folson
Hey, everybody. Welcome back to the show.

01:03
Case Aiken
J. Mike, you sound so, so glum. What's. What's wrong,.

01:07
Jmike Folson
Buddy? I'm, like, information overload today, Case.

01:10
Case Aiken
I. I think that is fair. We are. We are looking at a dense work today. Yes, very dense. In fact, as I was reading through today's work today, I just kept on looking at the panel layouts and. And just was taking in just what a masochist George Perez was. Was in this book. Because today we are talking about the comic series Crisis on Infinite Earths. And to have that conversation, we are joined yet again by Dr. Ryan Haupt.

01:37
Dr Ryan Haupt
Thank you so much for having me,.

01:38
Case Aiken
Ryan. Thank you for coming back on. I gotta be honest, your. Your proclamation on the Ifanboy podcast was one of the reasons why I wanted to do this. That you hadn't read this before, it was one of your gaps.

01:50
Dr Ryan Haupt
I think it's the biggest and most obvious gap in my comic reading history. I think as soon as the question came up on the Ifanboy show, I knew my answer right away was this book. And actually when I admitted to it, Conor Kilpatrick being the kind of person he is, there was a copy in my mailbox within a week. So he just corrected the error immediately. And then you all reached out and said, hey, do you want to read it and talk to us about it? And so I was like, well, the universe, the infinite multiverse, is telling me I need to consume this work. And so thank you to Connor for sending me the copy, and thank you for you all for nudging me to actually read the copy that he sent. And, man, what a delight.

02:29
Dr Ryan Haupt
I'm so excited to be here to talk about this book.

02:31
Case Aiken
Yeah, it just felt like one of those gaps that. That could not be. Could. Could not be allowed to exist in someone who is as professionally a comic book nerd as you Are. That just seemed. It seemed to be an error that we needed to correct.

02:43
Dr Ryan Haupt
I am here. I have come correct, as the kids say. Did the kids say that still?

02:47
Case Aiken
J. Mike, how about you? What was your experience with the Crisis on Infinite Earths?

02:51
Jmike Folson
I have seen a lot of these panels in passing, but I had never, like, sat down and actually read all. Is it 12. 12 Issues of this series back to back to back. And it's. It's always fun saying, like, oh, I know that person. I know that person, too. I've seen that shot before. Oh, that's how that person died. Oh, this is. Oh, that's kind of cool, too. I also came across, like, freaking Harbinger. Who. I did. I had no idea who was in Batman, Superman Apocalypse. That did not connect the dots with those. That character. And I was like, oh, that's where I've seen her before. She's the one who gets killed by Darkseid.

03:32
Case Aiken
Yep.

03:33
Jmike Folson
When he kidnaps Kara from the Amazons. And I was like, I get it now. Okay, cool. That's really funny.

03:39
Case Aiken
Yeah. Like the other notable Harbinger story besides this.

03:41
Jmike Folson
Yeah. So it was cool, like, finally sitting down and reading all those pages.

03:51
Case Aiken
I mean. Yes. But also behind the scenes, this has been rescheduled a couple of times so that we've had a lot of.

03:56
Jmike Folson
Time.

03:58
Case Aiken
So we.

03:58
Dr Ryan Haupt
Had some time to digest it. Yeah, no, it has that quality of, like, Peter Lorre movies or the Godfather, where it's like, if you've watched enough Looney Tunes and Simpsons, you've caught a lot of references to this thing that you couldn't really watch until you were older. And so, yeah, same as you, Jamaica. I definitely had a lot of this already programmed into my brain, but I never sat with it as, like, the narrative story as it was originally told. And so that was a really cool experience.

04:26
Jmike Folson
Yeah. All right. I'd never read the part where Supergirl dies. I'd always seen the shot of, like, Superman holding her before, and I was like, I know what happens. But I'd never sat on, like, Reddit. I was like, oh, okay. Cool, cool, cool. Now I understand.

04:41
Case Aiken
You know what's crazy? So. So I've told the story on the show a bunch of times, which was that growing up there, the beach that we would go to as. As kids, and even now, to this day, Bethany beach used to have this bookstore that had, like, a 50 cent bin for comics. And I picked up the I. The one issue of Crisis on Infinite Earths that I owned and still own, like, of the original run of it is the death of Supergirl. And that was my introduction to Crisis on Infinite Earths. And I would say that actually as an issue, and we'll talk about it more when we actually get to like, as an issue that encapsulates a lot of Crisis really well. It tells this, like, it gives the whole origin of the multiverse. It tells you about the central fight.

05:20
Case Aiken
And then we see like the big fight with the Anti Monitor in that. And then you just know that like, okay, well, eventually the heroes win for real. And this is the stakes. And it like recapped all the stakes of the series. So for a long time that was my sole snapshot for it until around like 2000 ish when they reprinted. I think they did it first as a hardcover, but I own the soft cover with the beautiful, also incredibly dense Alex Ross artwork on the outside. So for a long time it was just that one issue. And then, yeah, about 26 years ago, fuck, I was introduced to it in its totality. On that note, we should actually make sure that the listeners at home know what this massive story we're talking about basically covers.

06:08
Case Aiken
And so on that note, we need to do the special feature that everyone loves, which is J Mike tries to recount what we are actually talking about today.

06:17
Jmike Folson
Oh, man. Okay, I can do this. So in the beginning, was it matter and Antimatter, they all had separate universes. We learn later on is that somebody did a goof and split the split the thread between the universes and the Anti Monitor got stronger than the Monitor. We start off with the Monitor sending out the Harbinger to go get his band of superheroes together so he can stop the threat of the Anti Monitor. He goes, he gets Superman, he gets a group of. Who else? He pull people's. What's his name? Firestorm. He pulls a couple other heroes. He sends them out to go guard these towers that he created. It's like, hey, these guys will stop the Anti Monitor from taking over everything. They go to that, they find out really quickly that it's not going to happen.

07:12
Jmike Folson
And he was really just trying to like save two Earths and stave off the entire destruction of everything. We get to the Harbinger being mind controlled by the Anti Monitor, coming to find out he's got these plans of his own. He kidnaps one of the Monitor's bad villains that he was recreating. The psycho pirate, I think his name.

07:37
Case Aiken
Yep.

07:38
Jmike Folson
Who can control emotions. And he turns into his side, sends him out to play with everyone's emotions during a thing. A whole bunch of heroes get together. I'm explaining this very badly because there's a lot of stuff to cover.

07:53
Case Aiken
Yeah. It's a 12 issue maxi series. I'm not. I'm not.

07:55
Jmike Folson
Expecting, like,.

07:56
Case Aiken
Broad strokes.

07:57
Jmike Folson
Broad strokes. Like all the heroes kind of figure out what they're going on. The Harbinger, this guy named Pariah who can't die. He witnesses the end of every universe. And Alexander Luthor, who comes from Earth 3. Yeah. Where Ultraman is in the League of. Is it the.

08:14
Case Aiken
Crime Syndicate? Yeah,.

08:17
Jmike Folson
Yeah, the Crime Syndicate. And I lost my train of thought. I'm going through so much in my head. Brings them all together. They have this huge fight with the Anti Monitor. The first fight. A lot of casualties. Supergirl dies. Very sad. They think they beat him. He runs off like the joke. Or he runs off like Skeletor, like, I have to go fix my body. The Flash breaks free. Finally, he stops the Monitor by blowing up his laser. They have another fight with the Monitor. This time the Spectre gets involved as a huge climactic battle. They think they stopped everything. Come to find out, no, this is just a fake Earth. They have to go fight the Monitor again. And they fight him in space. They kind of beat him, but he refuses to die. Comes back like 16 times.

09:07
Jmike Folson
Wonder Woman somehow dies in a really cheap shot, which was very crazy Days. Kill off Wonder Woman like that. They finally beat him back. Darkseid shows up to help with Brainiac. They knock him back through again. Superman sacrifices himself to be the last one standing to fight him. They finally beat him. Everyone goes back to their respective universes. Kind of. They have a eulogy for the people who passed. A lot of people died. It's kind of over now. Kind of the end.

09:43
Case Aiken
Okay. So only one major correction needs to go there, which is you say they go back to their. Their respective universes, which is no longer possible because at the end of this, all the multiverse has been collapsed into one universe. And. And that is the big thing that this series was trying to do, which was that the. The General wisdom around DC Comics going into this in 1985, 1986 was that things had gotten too complicated by having different universes.

10:12
Jmike Folson
Yeah. Because there's like an Earth X. Like an Earth. Like, was it Earth X, Earth S? And a couple other ones they mentioned, like, along the side. And you're like, where did these come from?

10:24
Case Aiken
Yeah. So I tend to think of the DC Multiverse as it was originally conceived as a rather elegant solution. To the problem of continuity.

10:33
Dr Ryan Haupt
Okay, so I got to jump in here, though, because my understanding of the original conception of the multiverse was it was a complete accident, like a rant, like, in the publishing world, not in, like, the continuity of dc. So I want to hear your point, Case. But, like, the story I heard, and you might. You might be able to correct me if I'm getting some of this wrong, is they used to draw the covers to the issue before they knew what the issue itself was going to be about. And Carmine Infantino drew the Flash of Two Worlds covers as a joke, as a. Like, write your way out of this, bozos. And the solution they came up with was the multiverse.

11:13
Dr Ryan Haupt
And so, like, the entire thing started because Carmen Infantino wanted to make a joke where he put both of the flashes on the same cover of an issue.

11:22
Case Aiken
And I don't object to that as the like assuming that's true, because I haven't heard that story, but I also 100% believe it. I don't think that's an issue. The multiverse as it was originally conceived. What started off this whole thing is, of course, that when the Silver Age Flash was introduced, it was introduced as a fan of the comic books of the Golden Age Flash.

11:45
Dr Ryan Haupt
Right.

11:45
Case Aiken
And so that was then the thing that sort of meant that, oh, well, these are different canons. They're different continuities for the characters.

11:54
Dr Ryan Haupt
And at one point, the idea was the comic book creators in Barry Allen's world were psychically attuned to the actual events happening in Jay Garrick's world. And so the comics that Barry Allen was reading about Jay Garrick were real events that happened in the life of Jay Garrick being told as comic books in the world of Barry Allen through the psychic link between the universes.

12:17
Case Aiken
Yes, yes. That is the justification for why the comic books exist in that whole thing. For those millennials out there who remember Darkwing Duck, they did a parody episode of this where someone was at a helmet that allowed him to hack into the adventures of Darkwing Duck in a different reality. Anyway, regardless. So, yes, so they do the Flash of Two Worlds story where they reveal that it's actually a separate reality that is vibrationally attuned, which was their big fun toy that they would do for Flash superpowers, like, oh, he can just vibrate to the frequency of X thing he needs to do.

12:48
Jmike Folson
Well, they do it a lot here, too.

12:50
Case Aiken
Oh, for sure. Well, that becomes the foundation for how the multiverse works. And so at first, it was the introduction of Just the Golden Age characters. So the characters of the Justice Society and their contemporaries. And there was even some vagueness when it was first introduced if there was actually a Superman or a Batman of those eras because it wasn't really figured out how that was all going to work. Which is why I contend that while it is fair to put the reverence of the original Superman on the Superman of the of Earth 2, that I don't that I think he is still not 100% speaking the actual Golden Age Superman.

13:26
Case Aiken
But regardless, the multiverse then became a mechanism by way that D.C. could acquire other comic book companies or introduce other sort of concepts out there and have them be canon to their universe without, or rather to their multiverse without it having to be like explained away of being like, for example, Captain Marvel. The Shazam Family and so forth was just a different Earth. And so you could have a character who was in the same power category as Superman and have all his adventures be completely separate from the adventures of Superman. Same.

14:00
Dr Ryan Haupt
For the Charlton comics.

14:01
Case Aiken
Exactly. Yes. So yes. And that, and that's a big part here. Or if you want to just invent a new concept, it's also where they introduce via Earth3, the crime syndicate, which are the evil counterparts of the Justice League. Thus, I think it was a very rich and relatively straightforward way of explaining like timelines of things. It gets a little complicated in that at a certain point because comics don't have like a real break point. After the Silver Age, there was never a point to pivot to a new Earth, Even though I would have fucking loved if they had just pivoted to a new Earth rather than trying to like consolidate everything into one weird continuity. Because that would have been amazing. Like if we just said like, all right, this is the new Earth that we're going to be dealing with here.

14:45
Case Aiken
There was a Batman story where he got sent to prevent the death of Bruce Wayne's parents on a different Earth. And that would have been such a cool Batman to follow because at the end of the story it's revealed that Batman saving Bruce Wayne's parents actually inspires this Bruce Wayne to become Batman. Wouldn't that be dope? Anyway, get to 1985 or before that because this had a really long lead time. I think it was like three years of promotions and writing work going into this all they had basically decided that it was too complicated and it was would make more sense to be like Marvel Comics where the timeline was just one unified continuity of our Golden Age stuff. Was the stuff that precedes our Silver Age characters and they can have histories and so forth that interact with us all.

15:32
Case Aiken
So that was the thought going into this all it was decided, well, we are going to clean house with just a lot of D.C. stuff. We are going to make all this chaos that we have had going on for the past Jesus at this point, 40 some years, and we're going to clean it up. That is where that's the ethos going into this. But the people they tasked to do this, Marv Wolfman and George Perez, like a big story with a lot of stuff and pages that have so much fucking crap going on every single page. Oh my God, I forgot just how dense, George. Like even just the logo for Crisis on Infinite Earths with the tiny earths inside of it like that. That is an artist doing himself no favors. Like every goddamn page is just like, so rich.

16:24
Dr Ryan Haupt
Yeah. It is a testament to this era of storytelling. And you can tell these are, this is two guys, neither of them is phoning it in at all. They are bringing their A game to the nth, to the infinite degree. I mean, it's, yeah. So much, so much to drink in.

16:44
Case Aiken
Yes. Now, is this a perfect story?

16:46
Jmike Folson
No,.

16:47
Case Aiken
No, no. 100% Not. Like, for one thing, I have often accused Crisis on Infinite Earth of being the original sin of DC Comics, that the modern stance of its continuity and it's. And all the giant events, but especially its continuity is very difficult to. Or rather most of the problems of them stem back to this one really sort of fucking up their continuity. Does this all map cleanly with where the DC universe would be right after this? No. Like, like there's a bunch of time altering stuff that kind of happens off screen. Things like that results in the man of Steel, the John Byrne miniseries, the George Perez relaunch of Wonder Woman, at least that one is kind of justified by her being like zapped backwards through her history.

17:39
Dr Ryan Haupt
I mean, there's. And there's also connection to Alan Moore's Whatever Happened to the man of Tomorrow.

17:44
Case Aiken
Yes, yes. Yeah. And actually that's one that we're got to talk about because I think it's a fascinating book because it exists in the post. It exists post crisis, but not post crisis continuity. And there's not very many stories that really happen that way because. Because things just get changed. Like a lot of stuff get changed.

18:04
Dr Ryan Haupt
It's also, it's the Superman swan song for a guy named Swan, because it's Kurt Swan. Swan,.

18:10
Case Aiken
Yeah. Oh, God. I mean, we could pivot to talking about that book and we'd be here just as long as we would be talking about this one. And it's a sixth of the length, but we have a monster series to talk about. And so here's how I want to approach this for the listeners. We're not going to do an issue by issue. We're going to talk about some of the big characters and the big beats that I think are really interesting. And then we're going to talk about how you can look at this from the lens of being a Superman fan. Because I think there's a lot of stuff in this book that is very reverential to Superman as a character, as the foundation that the DC universe is built on.

18:49
Case Aiken
And so, and it starts right from the get go because we open with Earth 3 dying. And so one of the really crazy things about it that they do to set up just how great the stakes here are is that the crime syndicate, which is the Justice League just reversed, are powerless to stop it. You know, we get the last stand of Superwoman, we get the, you know, the failure of all these characters and you know, we get the heroic Alexander luthor of Earth 3 and then his son, Alexander Luthor Jr. But most importantly, we get like an incredible Superman send off right here where we get Ultraman saying, you know what I've done all my life to fight to the very end. You know, like he gives practically a Superman wink to the camera.

19:37
Jmike Folson
Han Solo, sign off. I'll see you in hell. He flies into oblivion.

19:45
Case Aiken
Yeah, I mean, what was he thinking he was doing? I'm not entirely sure.

19:48
Dr Ryan Haupt
I mean, I've always seen Ultraman as a much dimmer character than any of the Kal Els that we know and love. So I think he might not have, I think he might have thought he could take on antimatter, which any being made matter cannot do that. That's.

20:03
Case Aiken
Right.

20:03
Dr Ryan Haupt
It's just not how it works.

20:05
Case Aiken
But to be fair, Superman has punched lasers before.

20:09
Dr Ryan Haupt
To be fair,.

20:10
Jmike Folson
He punches a giant fireball in space at the end of this series.

20:16
Case Aiken
Who is antimatter?

20:19
Dr Ryan Haupt
Yeah, they're not totally consistent with the physics on how antimatter and matter interact in this.

20:24
Case Aiken
No,.

20:26
Dr Ryan Haupt
But that's okay. I mean, this book is like, it's so much dumb, fun sci fi and the way they bring in the sorcery characters to kind of patch the holes and where the sci fi doesn't quite work, like it's a delight. It's so much fun. You just got. You just. It's the roller coaster. You're just along for the ride.

20:41
Case Aiken
Yeah. Yeah. Actually, so that's a question for. For you, Ryan, as a more scientifically minded person here, were there any major spots that kind of like, really stuck out like a sore thumb to you?

20:53
Dr Ryan Haupt
No. If anything, I have a soft spot for sort of like stories that exist at the end of entropy. I don't know if that's like a. Even technically a thing, but, like, there's a sort of existential nihilism of, like, the end of everything and universe is merging and fighting against the inevitable, you know, decay of all that is that I have a. It overrides a lot of my science brain. And I mean, I'm a huge sci fi and fantasy fan. So, like, I've spent my life, you know, with a comfortable relationship between the science that informs my work and my research and the science fiction and fantasy stuff that I enjoy. And that's actually true for most scientists I know. Most scientists I know were inspired, at least in some part, by the science fiction we all consumed. Growing up.

21:41
Dr Ryan Haupt
My undergraduate mentor, who's like a giant in the field of vertebrate paleontology and paleoecology, straight up, told me he's like, oh, yeah. I read X Men comics growing up and I wanted to create my own team of mutants. That's why I became a scientist. So, you know, I always joke, like, there's a reason that flip phones existed when they existed. It's because all of the engineers working on the technology at the time grew up on Star Trek and saw the communicators. Like, that's not a coincidence. Like, that's what they were inspired by. So that's the stuff they tried to make when they got into a position to do it. So I think it's very much an Ouroboros relationship. The snake eats its tail. The science fiction inspires the scientists, which inspires the science fiction and so forth and so on.

22:27
Dr Ryan Haupt
I don't know if that's exactly what you were asking, but this book didn't. Other than the fact that anytime matter and antimatter interact, they should mutually annihilate each other instantly. Once you let go of that concept, everything else is just wacky sci fi. Good times.

22:45
Case Aiken
Yeah.

22:47
Dr Ryan Haupt
Actually, the thing that stood out for me is I think this must be one of the earliest examples of the fact that the flash appears in early issues and we don't find out what's happening. Like the time displacement where we later see The Flash breaking the time barrier and having those interactions from the Flash's perspective. But the characters in the book are seeing flashes of Barry Allen's Flash appear before them, giving them grave warnings. Clearly something is going wrong. They don't understand the full scope of it yet. That's got to be one of the first times that you have that sort of like, told out of sequence. Christopher Nolan esque storytelling. Right. I can't think of an earlier example where things from the future are interacting with past events before we as the audience fully know what's going on.

23:41
Case Aiken
Yeah, that's a good point. I am not sure myself,.

23:44
Jmike Folson
Maybe where they got it from.

23:46
Case Aiken
Yeah, Like, I mean, for one thing, the medium of comics, it makes it difficult to do something like that just because it's so, like, fly by the seat of your pants in terms of the writing process of it. It's only in more modern times where you have people who have like, really collected runs, as opposed to like in the 80s where like, there's more of the workman quality of this, of just like, yeah, we got to get the next issue out. So it's hard to imagine that. And then I'm just not sure off the top of my head. I mean, like, I'm sure there must be like some sci fi novel or something like that has like an out of sequence time character, but it is, it. It's certainly an interesting element and it's an element that has become now notorious about the Flash.

24:23
Case Aiken
You know, like the introduction of him and like the. And like the dcu, like, interpretation of him, like, had vestiges of this, like, that just became a part of the character.

24:35
Dr Ryan Haupt
Yep.

24:35
Case Aiken
I want to talk a little bit about the sort of bringing together of the. Of the heroes by the Monitor. I don't love the Monitor as a concept. Like, it's very much the Watcher, just like kind of, kind of modified. Do.

24:51
Dr Ryan Haupt
You not like the Watcher?

24:52
Case Aiken
No, I like the. I like the Watcher a lot. I just feel like the Monitor just feels like.

24:56
Dr Ryan Haupt
You're Pro 2 anti monitor, but on Anti Monitor. Anti the Monitor.

25:01
Case Aiken
Right. At least in the original interpretation of the character, he is a singular entity which separates him from the. From the Watcher. The more modern DC stuff where there's like multiple monitors, like one for each reality. I think it's really, like, really turns him just into being the Watcher. But that's. That, that's not a sin of this book. But like, that's a later thing. But. But I Do find it fun, like the. The weird collection of heroes that he and I like that this starts off. Like I said, there's this reverence for Superman that proceeds throughout this book. And specifically the Earth to Superman gets a lot of reference.

25:41
Dr Ryan Haupt
I do like I do in terms of the Monitor. I do like the idea of these primeval forces that have been at odds for a long time, but have to sort of use proxies to actually engage each other. Right. Of you guys, big Animorphs guys. Kids growing up.

25:58
Case Aiken
Not big Animorphs guys, but like what was into Animorphs a little bit.

26:01
Dr Ryan Haupt
I was a big Animor. Sky Kay Applegate was doing a book signing for like one of the kids books that she put out like within the last two years. And I was. It was a book signing I could have gone to. And I was too intimidated to go meet her. So I didn't go to the book signing. There's a character in those books called the Elmist. And it's a very similar relationship where there's like this. It's a, you know, positive and negative beings that would. If they. If they were to go in all out battle with each other, the entire universe would be imperiled. So they have to go. To go to battle through. Against each other through, you know, proxies like the Animorphs or like the Justice League. So I do like that concept.

26:38
Dr Ryan Haupt
I agree that the Monitor as a character kind of only serves to be a paternal control freak over Harbinger who kind of. I think you could have just Harbinger be the main person on that side of things. And the story doesn't change much other than her betrayal of Monitor. But you could have her betray the team in some other way. So.

27:02
Case Aiken
Yeah. And part of the problem is that they were retrofitting a character that they had already started to seed in DC comics at this point and then sort of elevated him to being this much more powerful figure trying to assemble all the good forces. Because initially when he was introduced, he was like arming villains. And so that's why there's some initial distrust of the character. But like I said, I think it's interesting that it's a good way of bringing in a lot of the different kind of worlds that we're dealing with. Like Earth 4, which is the Charlton world. I don't remember when exactly the purchase occurred. I feel like I.

27:35
Dr Ryan Haupt
The 70s, right? That was when they got both Wiz comics and Charlton.

27:40
Case Aiken
Was it that much before? Because I vaguely recall it being Like a. This is being sort of like a big tie in to actually bringing them into, like, the DC lore. But that. That could be. That could be wrong. Regardless, like, just reminding you of, like, here's the major characters from the. From these different worlds. And bringing them all over is cool. And starting to set up the. The forces of it. Like, this is a long comic. It's. It's 12 issues. And like I said, by the time you get to I believe it's issue seven,.

28:10
Dr Ryan Haupt
It was originally planned to be 10. Can you imagine them squeezing all this into 10?

28:17
Case Aiken
Well, what I imagine that they would do is that a few of these decompressed stories that are going on in here. Like, I realized.

28:23
Dr Ryan Haupt
That I don't feel like this is decompressed at all. I feel like every issue of this is jam packed and every issue of this is almost the.

28:30
Case Aiken
Anti Monitor comes back, like, three times. But.

28:32
Jmike Folson
That's.

28:33
Dr Ryan Haupt
Like, every issue of this is like a complete narrative arc in and of itself. It's a really. I get that the Anti Monitor comes back, but I like the rhythm of how often the heroes think that they've gotten some reprieve only to find out, no, the threat still exists and we still have to mount a defense against it and come up with a new tactic. I don't know. I kind of dug it. I agree with you. It was teetering on the edge of being a bit too much. But for whatever reason, and I think the reason is the quality of the storytelling, both by Wolfman and Perez, like, the team together just. It worked. I didn't dislike it. By the end,.

29:15
Case Aiken
Wasn't the deal that it was supposed to be 10? And then two issues of follow of, like, epilogue, Basically,.

29:20
Dr Ryan Haupt
I think they were supposed to do the new history of the DC Universe as the final two issues, and that ended up becoming its own project.

29:26
Case Aiken
Okay. Yeah. Because at the ten point is where you get this sort of, like, merged world and then you get sort of another round of combat with the Anti Monitor. It makes enough sense to me how you could have made it just 10. I think we'll hit those beats as we sort of talk about this a little bit.

29:43
Dr Ryan Haupt
Oh, you asked about. You asked. I'm flipping through this as we talk about stuff. You asked about things that messed with my science brain. The way that dinosaurs are depicted and prehistoric creatures are depicted. Accurate for the 1980s, but no longer accurate. So I'll let it slide because that's. We. We thought T Rex had that posture in the 1980s, that, like, upright posture. And then you Know Jurassic. The Jurassic park version where the T. Rex is vertebral column is basically parallel to the. To the ground. The hips are kind of the teeter totter pivot point is the more correct interpretation. So were getting close to figuring out how T. Rex walked around, but Perez hadn't gotten the memo yet.

30:18
Case Aiken
Well, he's doing a lot in these books.

30:20
Dr Ryan Haupt
Yeah, he is, man. I know we'll have probably time for just ephemera and random comments, but the dialogue and the way people think to themselves and just the. I get in comic book storytelling, you have to do this. But the way that characters refer to themselves both out loud and in their own heads. The number of times Blue Beetle says Mrs. Cord's boy didn't raise no fool. I'm like, the number of times you reference your own self in relation to your mother. It's so bizarre and dolt. I am going to start using the word dolt so much more often after reading this book because they say people are calling each other dolts left, right and center. And I can't remember the last time I called someone a dolt in real life, but I'm going to start doing it again.

31:05
Case Aiken
Yeah, there's some very 80s storytelling conventions in this book. There's also some snapshots of, like, DC Comics in the 80s that I kind of forgot how, like, every. Every major event is like a snapshot of, like, the comics of the time, you know, like, it's an opportunity for us to see, like, oh, this is the status quo for the moment. Like how, like in An Infinity War, for example, it's Eric Masterson as. As Thor during that story arc. But. But here, like, things like, oh, we've got the new Doom Patrol that they, like, constantly reference as being like, yeah, we got the new Doom Patrol here. I mean, obviously there's a lot of, like, the status quo of, like, the. The Teen Titans that are going to come up because it's the same team that had been doing that epic run of a book.

31:46
Case Aiken
Points where we have to, like, check in and be like, oh, right, like, we're gonna. We're gonna spend some time talking about Blue Devil, because Blue Devil had his book running concurrently at the. At this point. And it was a great goddamn book.

31:58
Dr Ryan Haupt
Someone. All right, I'm sorry, changeling, you're getting reported to hr. His behavior was completely unacceptable. This entire book. You cannot be a complete. You're on a team called the Teen Titans, and you're just a horn dog the entire book. And it is tiresome it is annoying. It's clear that you have no game. You need to stop.

32:21
Case Aiken
Yes. Yeah,.

32:25
Dr Ryan Haupt
It's funny. I've seen the Japanese version of Dr. Light in other things, and she's often portrayed as a jerk, and I always thought that was kind of an unfair representation of the character. I was like, oh, no, she was a jerk. She's not a pleasant person at all for most of this book until they magic her into speaking English and having sympathy for superhero. Those two things make her give her a big turnaround.

32:50
Jmike Folson
Yeah. Because I was like, okay, because, like, Superman understood her at first. Katana understood her.

32:54
Dr Ryan Haupt
Superman speaks Japanese.

32:55
Jmike Folson
Yeah. And I was like, okay, it's cool. Yeah, Katana is there, so it'll help her for a bit. But then, yeah, she, like, everyone automatically, like, understands her after a while. And I was like, oh, I guess I meant something.

33:05
Dr Ryan Haupt
Yeah, there's. There's one point where they get. They get zapped to some other world, and on that other world, she's just speaking English all of a sudden, and even she's like, I didn't know I spoke English. But they've just. Yeah, they. They waved their hands and made the magic happen.

33:20
Jmike Folson
Comic book magic. Hooray.

33:21
Case Aiken
Yeah. Well, I think by this point, we'd started to get used to, like, Professor X, like, filling people's brains with English over the X Men books, so. So audiences were primed to be like, yeah, no, I guess it's fine. So, speaking of Dr. Light and her sympathy post death of Supergirl, let's talk about the death of Supergirl, because this, like I said, is the big issue that I had for. For a long time with it. I think it's amazing, like, just, like, starting off with the COVID of that issue, like, it's, you know, this incredible epic shot of Superman holding the figure of Supergirl. This is definitely going to be the central image for the episode art for this. For this episode, because it's just fantastic. I think that the.

34:03
Case Aiken
The actual stakes of the battle that they go into is really cool, where we assemble so many of, like, the most powerful superheroes of. Throughout the Multiverse following us, getting the exposition for the whole origins of the. Of the Multiverse and the Monitor and so forth. This issue, like I said, like, really, if you only have one issue of the Crisis, I. I would argue that this is the issue to have. Like, it, like, it tells you all about the Crisis. It sets up all the story. It has this giant siege of the antimatter universe by way of Alexander Luther Jr. Opening up a portal through his body. And then we get such like awesome, powerful characters in combat, ultimately leading to Superman getting his ass whooped by the anti monitor and then Supergirl like rushing in to save his ass.

34:50
Case Aiken
And she has one of the best last stands of a superhero that I've ever seen in a comic. Like, the only thing that you can say that's bad about this is it has the stupid fucking movie costume that they tied in. And I like the overall, the costume, just not the headband, which they didn't even put in the goddamn movie.

35:08
Jmike Folson
I didn't mind the headband. I just wanted. She got taken up by a cheap shot and I was like, what is this, man? I.

35:15
Case Aiken
Mean, they did have to say like later, it's like, no, no, she was already dying.

35:19
Jmike Folson
She got hit by a cheap shot and I was like, boo. But that fight, I.

35:25
Case Aiken
Mean, like, it's an awesome fight. She even gets like a little bit of a send off there. We get all the characters and then like the funeral that they have for it, which is again, just incredibly dense information. But most importantly, the. The send off that Superman gives her is just incredibly well written. I could gush about this goddamn scene forever, but, like, it's one. It's like one of those comic pages that I go back to, like, when I actually like him. Like, really mournful. Like, like I remember, like, specifically, like when I have lost family members. Like this particular page of like Superman, like, you know, saying goodbye to his only family member. I, I have gone back to that issue or to that page and read it and it like, been like a source of solace for me.

36:09
Case Aiken
Like, it's an incredibly well written, like, sequence for a character that is, you know, pardon the phrase, super important to the DC universe.

36:19
Dr Ryan Haupt
Yeah, it's interesting. I, I can't help but read that issue and think about this version of Supergirl without also reflecting on, like, how they tried to bring her back in the 90s as like the weird morph alien version that then just got knocked to hell by doomsday. Right? So, like, this feels like this is like such a more important version of that character than what they eventually brought back. It's interesting. Yeah,.

36:46
Jmike Folson
I.

36:47
Dr Ryan Haupt
Really, I liked her relationship with Barbara Gordon a lot too. I thought they had some really good scenes together. I didn't think Barbara Gordon's eulogy was as good as Superman's.

36:55
Jmike Folson
At this.

36:56
Case Aiken
Yeah, they,.

36:57
Jmike Folson
At this point, they really.

36:57
Case Aiken
Love that Batman, Superman pairing. Like, they show off like Supergirl and Batgirl. They show off Power Girl and Huntress. Like they have scenes between Superman and Batman, that world's finest pairing. They really enjoy like playing within this. Sorry, J. Mike,.

37:12
Jmike Folson
I was asking, at this point in the comics lore, she was still technically stronger than Superman, quote unquote.

37:20
Case Aiken
So no, they generally would have said that Superman is the stronger of the two of them. Mostly attributed to him being a full grown adult male, as opposed to Supergirl being still like a younger girl.

37:31
Jmike Folson
And she technically was holding her own against the anti Monitor. And Superman got two shots. So I'm just saying.

37:38
Case Aiken
Oh, I'm not disagreeing that she does a great job. Like.

37:41
Jmike Folson
I'm just saying, you know, she put a beating on that dude. Superman got two shot. That's all I'm saying.

37:50
Case Aiken
I mean, like I said, it's an incredible fight. You know, she does really well with it. It's, it's a fantastic last stand for a character. I mean like in terms of, there's a lot of fatalities in this overall story, but in terms of the ones that really matter, in terms like they're the ones who matter to the publishing history of dc and the characters that have like weird deus ex machina, I can't believe they're still alive at the end of this book, are the ones who have such plot armor by virtue of being so important that they can't possibly die. And that's like the Earth 2 Lois Lane, like she's from 1st DC comic or you know, like not literally because, but from Action Comics number one. Like,.

38:34
Dr Ryan Haupt
But then on the other hand, on the other side of that coin, Guy Gardner survives.

38:40
Jmike Folson
And.

38:40
Dr Ryan Haupt
I learned, I learned in the back matter of the version that I read that in the original draft, even in like George Prez's original pencils, Guy Gardner is wearing a very standard Hal Jordanesque Green Lantern suit. And it was in between the scripting, penciling and then the inks and the like, it was in between the script and the pencils were done and it was in between that and the inks and the colors and the letters where they gave, they redesigned Guy Gardner and gave him his classic now classic sort of vest boot combo. That wasn't in the original draft of the original pages, which I thought was, that was, I thought that was a really fun little detail.

39:23
Case Aiken
Yeah, no, it's really fun when you get these behind the scenes details that they have the version that is available on the, on DC Online, which I'm assuming is the digital version of the print one you have has all that data. It has, like, extra material at the back.

39:39
Dr Ryan Haupt
Yeah, I didn't. I didn't. I didn't comb over the. All the extra material extensively, but I skimmed over it just to get a sense of what was there. That was the one thing that. That stood out to me, that I was like, oh, that's interesting.

39:50
Case Aiken
Yeah, that jumped out at me as well. It's really cool to see the amount of changes that can occur in post production,.

39:56
Dr Ryan Haupt
Basically. And Jamike, you mentioned the pages where there's just so many characters and the fun of just going through character by character, like, yep, I know who that is. I know who that is. I know who that is. I don't think I know who that is. I have a guess who that is. And it's like my desire to want to brag to literally nobody because I'm sitting on my couch in my house alone, and I'm being like, well, I'm pretty sure that's Mirror Master standing next to Dr. Dr. Polaris. And look, who cares, Ryan? I was like, well, my brain has the pattern in it, and so I'm going to. I'm going to make. Make note of it and be proud of myself for. For being able to tell that, like, no, that's Eclipso. That's not, you know.

40:33
Case Aiken
Right. Yeah. Especially when we get to the. The Villain issue. Then. Then that's where it's, like, just rife for, like, your nerd creds.

40:40
Dr Ryan Haupt
You need to be able to tell the difference between the. The Haunted Tank and the tank that the Sergeant Rock and the Losers use.

40:47
Case Aiken
So after the death of Supergirl, we get the other big death of this. And while it's not part of the super family, we can't not talk about the death of Barry Allen.

40:56
Jmike Folson
Yeah,.

40:57
Case Aiken
Barry Allen gets a different kind of death where he. He runs himself to death to destroy the process that is ultimately going to destroy reality. Because every. At this point now, every issue, the. The stakes are all reality. That's just each step of the way, and that they need to keep buying themselves some more time. And so, like we alluded to before, we get this very cool, asynchronous element of it all where we're finally seeing these appearances of where the Flash was earlier in the book, which is. Which is nice because he's been missing for a lot of the book because he's been captured this whole time. And so we're getting these fun details. You know, he disrupts the.

41:34
Case Aiken
The plans of the Anti Monitor a bit by using the Psycho Pirate as sort of a weapon that he runs from Thunderer to Thunder, you know, driving them crazy to attack the Anti Monitor.

41:45
Jmike Folson
It was like fear, loathing, and hate, like, dancing his face in front of everybody.

41:53
Dr Ryan Haupt
It's also funny because I knew that Psycho Pirate was a huge part of the story and because of the story has attained sort of a mythic status amongst DC villains that are like, their power set is obscure, but their ability to impact the universe is great. And I found it funny how often the Anti Monitor was like, I could replace you with someone with similar powers and, like, names other characters who have similar powers. It's like, I could have gotten Raven to do this psychopirate. You're lucky I chose you. And I kept kind of reflecting of like, huh, I guess you're right. I guess Psychopiric is not as unique and singular and individual as I. As I thought based on the myth of this story, but was just the one that got chosen for this particular assignment.

42:35
Case Aiken
Right? Yeah, that's the. The kind of crazy nature of comics, which is like, there are some characters that could just be plug and play,.

42:42
Dr Ryan Haupt
But. But to have another character in the story be like, I could have. I could have swapped you out with someone else if I'd chosen to, but. But here I'm stuck with you psychopirates to do your job.

42:51
Case Aiken
But, yeah, so we. We get Barry Allen literally running himself to death, and we get. We get all these, like, flashes to, like, the. The scene, no pun intended, all the flashes to the various moments that we've seen him before he ultimately just fades away from his costume, destroying this whole thing. And, you know, it. It's a cool sacrifice for the character. Like this book, for the big deaths. This is a series that knows when to. To do them, like, how to do them. And it's really cool. As the series continues, there are some more deaths that are, you know, a little bit more cheap shots kind of thing. But we continue here with the alliance of the villains, which is the next big story point that I want to talk about.

43:35
Case Aiken
One thing that I find fascinating is that the biggest players in this whole series as far as the villain components of it are Superman villains. It's Brainiac, it's Lex Luthor, and then it's Darkseid.

43:47
Jmike Folson
Yeah. Whoa. Is he.

43:49
Case Aiken
Darkseid is a Superman villain.

43:51
Jmike Folson
He's not really a villain. He's.

43:53
Dr Ryan Haupt
Not a villain in.

43:53
Jmike Folson
This.

43:54
Case Aiken
Story, though.

43:54
Jmike Folson
I.

43:55
Case Aiken
Mean,.

43:55
Jmike Folson
He's.

43:55
Case Aiken
Not a villain in the story. But. But I mean, especially at this point. Like, this is the 80s. Like, the dark side was introduced in the 70s, only been around for 10 years. Like, and he was introduced in a goddamn Jimmy Olsen book.

44:05
Dr Ryan Haupt
Because they wouldn't let Jack Kirby do Ragnarok in the Thor books.

44:10
Jmike Folson
We gotta put some respect on Jimmy Olsen, sir.

44:14
Case Aiken
I love Jimmy Olsen. I love that bit of trivia. But, like, the point is that Darkseid, I would argue, is a Superman villain.

44:22
Jmike Folson
Oh, yeah.

44:25
Dr Ryan Haupt
I would. I would push back on that. I would push back on the concept that he's a villain in this story. He's. He's. He's not allied with the other villains, and everything that he does is in service of saving the universe the same as the heroes are doing.

44:41
Case Aiken
I just mean. I. I just mean that of all the big players that are out there, besides the alliance of heroes that exist, Darkseid is. Is a Superman villain in the. The general sense of. Of it. And likewise, the big players are Lex Luthor and Brainiac. Like, yes, like, Joker has, like, a cool scene or two. Like, yes, Black Adam is probably the heaviest, like, the biggest gun that they have on, like, the. The villain alliance. Like, yes. There's, like, all kinds of other characters that are out there, but it's just interesting that ones that have, like, big story impact, like Lex Luthor and Brainiac both, like, ultimately assist the heroes in saving the world.

45:20
Dr Ryan Haupt
Well, I like. I like that Lex Luthor and Brainiac are purposefully using the team of villains as canon fodder. They're like, yeah, win, lose or draw, we. We're gonna take advantage of the situation.

45:31
Case Aiken
Oh, yeah.

45:33
Dr Ryan Haupt
Also didn't. Okay. As I flip through the book, we might find a few more science pet peeves that I will point out. Has George Perez not heard of the polar ice caps? Because not a single Earth this man draws includes ice at the poles. It is just a open the northern passage. The Titanic would have been fine on any. On any world map. George Perez drew not an iceberg in sight.

45:59
Case Aiken
I do want to call out that we. We get a very quick reference to the luthor of Earth 2 who just gets shot by Lexus or by Brandy.

46:06
Dr Ryan Haupt
That.

46:06
Case Aiken
Was.

46:07
Dr Ryan Haupt
Fantastic. That was great. Because, yeah, luther of Earth 2 does not appreciate being sidelined. And they're just like, oh, if you don't want to play ball, we'll just eliminate you. It's very much that energy of first day in prison. Find the biggest guy in the yard and take him out in front of all the other guys. Yeah. Good stuff.

46:30
Case Aiken
Yeah, because it's just a silent panel and then a second silent panel and then Luther, then Lex Luthor goes. Good. Okay, boys and girls, here's the plan. Smash Cut 2. Starfire being incredibly awkward in front of. With Nightwing in front of her family, where it's like, this is my lover.

46:48
Dr Ryan Haupt
Yeah, Corey. Forgot how open you all are about that. Okay. Which just like, all that does to remind me. All that scene did is remind me that, like, Dick Grayson canonically lost his virginity to a non human. There's just no way around that. I mean, you know, if you had to choose a non human core, he's not a bad choice. But, man, it's just a weird. A weird tidbit of D.C. history.

47:16
Case Aiken
Yeah. Again, not a bad choice, though, and also strong enough where, like, you better tell her that she's a good choice.

47:23
Dr Ryan Haupt
True, true.

47:23
Case Aiken
Yeah. Just flipping through on fun Superman details. I want to call out the attention that just a little bit later, we get a Superman change scene. And when we do, we see that Superman has a pinky ring.

47:33
Dr Ryan Haupt
I saw that. I caught that.

47:34
Case Aiken
On page 255. Just a fun detail right there.

47:39
Dr Ryan Haupt
I. I noticed it. It stood out to me because there was a. There was an issue in the late 90s, early 2000s, where, like, didn't. After Lois and Clark got married, wasn't there an issue where, like, he forgot to take his ring off and Jimmy snapped a photo of him and there was like a photo of Superman wearing a wedding ring and everybody's like, superman's married. But, yeah, the pinky ring. I wondered for a second. You know, the detail isn't quite there. I don't think it's a legion ring. And the legionnaires don't usually wear their ring on the flight ring on the pinky.

48:09
Case Aiken
No, it appears just to be like a decorative pinky ring that Clark Kent wears.

48:13
Dr Ryan Haupt
Yeah, that's. It's a strange touch.

48:15
Jmike Folson
Clark. I hear a bling. That's crazy.

48:18
Dr Ryan Haupt
Now, Case, is there. Is there a reason other than style choices? We haven't really talked about the Cal. Single L versus the Cal El much. But, like, some of those differences I don't know much about, like, the publishing history. Like, why is older Superman. Why does he have a different last name? Why does he have a different s. Why does he. Apparently, the way they draw his uniform, it looks like he's wearing a sweater.

48:44
Case Aiken
Yes. Yeah, they've got like the. The stitching on the.

48:47
Dr Ryan Haupt
Sleeves. Like, has that ever been explained or is that just all built in to Distinguish him from the. What I think of as, like, our Superman who's like the Earth 2 Superman.

49:00
Case Aiken
So basically, even for details that weren't around for very long for the Golden Age Superman, for the Earth 2 Superman, they sort of embrace those as the things. So like. Like Kal El just spelled with the l. No E. L, that's like the older spelling that. That appeared in the earliest comics and then very quickly became Kal El, spelled with E. Likewise, him being like an employee of the Daily Star was a detail that they sort of just went with like the older version of the. Of that element of the character. The S changed a lot over the first year or so of Superman. Like, it went.

49:34
Dr Ryan Haupt
From black, right. It was a triangle at one point.

49:36
Case Aiken
It was a triangle at one point. It was like in the. In the pre publishing ones that they had, like. It was like actually a shield design. So it had a bunch of different versions of it. And so they sort of settled one that, like, is, like, a little more retro, that looks a little bit more like a Joe Shuster version of the S versus, like the. The more codified stylized S that, like, the Earth one Superman would eventually adopt as being like, this is sort of the standard thing as far as the. The details on the sleeves. I think that's just to make it look like older in style because, like, I can't think of.

50:10
Dr Ryan Haupt
But it also feels like. It also just feels like. Like he's an old man. He gets a little chilly in the evenings.

50:15
Case Aiken
Yeah, I know, right?

50:15
Dr Ryan Haupt
Gotta put on a sweater. It's like Mr. Rogers Superman, you know,.

50:20
Case Aiken
But. But yeah, so, like, that. Those are. Are some of the details there. And you bring up a good point here, which is that I want to talk about the dynamic between the two Kal Els. They have, I think, a really good camaraderie throughout this whole book. I mean, being effectively the same person and they kind of, like, think alike. We see so many scenes with them. But, like,.

50:41
Dr Ryan Haupt
I think Wolfman does a good job of making the older Kal El. He's not overly paternalistic to the other Superman or really any other character. Like, he's not. He doesn't lord his age and experience over anybody. He's just a. Like, he's a solid team player, which I think is actually a nice. I think there's easily a way that this story could have been told where the older version of Superman is trying to dictate things to everybody and trying to say, like, well, in my day, or the way I would do it and they don't do that with this, like he's got. They maintain the humility and the working togetherness that I think is a core component of the Superman character. And I think it helps. I think it's to this book's benefit that they do that.

51:24
Case Aiken
Yeah, I mean, he even seems like kind of deferential to the Earth one Superman to a certain degree. And maybe that's just that he sees the Earth one Superman as being the one who is like in his prime and a little bit more ready to take carry.

51:37
Dr Ryan Haupt
The torch. Yeah,.

51:38
Case Aiken
Yeah. So there was this detail that existed in like Bronze Age Earth 2. Two Superman stories where his powers were starting to wane a little bit. And that seems to be totally gone by this point. And I don't know if there's a story reason for it or not. He seems to be just as powerful as the Earth one Superman, maybe a little less powerful just by virtue of like the Earth one Superman getting like the crazy feats to like back in the day kind of stuff. But I, I do, I, I just really dig that their dynamic. I really dig that we get a send off with him and Lois and then we'll get more stuff like after the worlds get merged, like we kind of open with the Earth to Superman and we follow that. That story there.

52:16
Case Aiken
Like, I think that that's all, you know, looking back at the fact that like we used to get Mr. And Mrs. Superman stories like that were the Earth two Superman and Lois like stories as them as a married couple. Like there's always been like a, A hunger for that kind of a role for Superman. This is the Superman and Lois, the TV show kind of model. Like where you are actually dealing with them as like an established older like family kind of dynamic. So I think there's an appetite for that kind of a story. And they used to have the mechanism to tell that by way of Earth 2.

52:53
Case Aiken
And, and so like this is a character that in addition to the, you know, I keep saying reverence, but like the weight that they put on the earth to Superman as supposed to be the golden age Superman as opposed to be the original super of all time. He has additional, like, it's not just the bonafides are not just from being the foundation of comics. It is a character that has persisted throughout.

53:16
Dr Ryan Haupt
Yeah, I agree with that.

53:17
Case Aiken
And then we get. Well,.

53:18
Jmike Folson
It was kind of cool to see like everyone like you said earlier, like mentioned like, oh, it's all right Superman and oh my gosh it's Earth 2 Superman. The man, the myth, the legend, the God amongst men, blah. Like even like Luther, Alexander Luther. Right. Who I didn't know would recognize him was like, oh, the great Superman, the legendary Superman from Earth 2, blah, blah. And was paying homage to him at numerous, multiple times throughout the series.

53:42
Case Aiken
Yeah, yeah. I mean, again, he's just a really important character and they treat him as such without him being. Being pompous about it. But then we get Superboy of Earth prime,.

53:57
Dr Ryan Haupt
Which I agree. So, you know, before we started recording, we mentioned that you're not the biggest fan. I agree. But I also don't think they. He didn't overstay his welcome in this. Like it was, he was used judiciously and there wasn't a huge, There wasn't ton of time spent. Like my understanding, if, correct me if I'm wrong, is that in this version of the continuity, Earth prime is our world.

54:25
Case Aiken
Right.

54:25
Dr Ryan Haupt
And so this is a kid who gets Kryptonian level powers from our world who then finds himself in the world of actual Kryptonians.

54:36
Case Aiken
Yes,.

54:37
Dr Ryan Haupt
That's. It's going to be hard not to be annoying. You and I would have a lot of questions if that happened. I know, I.

54:43
Case Aiken
Know. Because we'd be straight up Gwenpool at that point.

54:46
Dr Ryan Haupt
Yeah,.

54:47
Case Aiken
Yeah. So. So here's my thoughts on this one. One, I don't like the idea that like someone from Earth prime got superpowers. Like, tell.

54:53
Dr Ryan Haupt
That to Kurt Busick and Stuart Eminent because they.

54:57
Case Aiken
Well, no secret identity, I fucking love. That's not. That is a different.

55:02
Dr Ryan Haupt
That's Serpent Boy Prime. That is exactly what that is. They just did a really good job of it.

55:06
Case Aiken
No, they did a really good job with it, but there's.

55:08
Dr Ryan Haupt
Such a good job of it that Zack Snyder went and ruined it by trying to make it into a movie.

55:14
Jmike Folson
We don't mention those names here, sir.

55:17
Case Aiken
Okay. And.

55:17
Dr Ryan Haupt
I don't even dislike Zack Snyder. I'm just saying it was the wrong, like he clearly took Secret Identity and lifted huge parts of that for man of Steel. And it was the wrong choice in my.

55:29
Case Aiken
Okay, so let me clarify how I mean this. The idea of someone from the real world getting superpowers is not the thing that I, I find offensive about the concept of Superboy of Earth Prime. I, I find. What I find offensive is that if we are going to try to treat Earth prime as legitimately the real world, like the actual real world, to the point where we have characters leave other Realities go to Earth prime to harass the DC editors so that they can make changes in the comics. Like to do that. Those kind of like meta jokes and so forth. Like it's. It is incumbent on it to remain the actual Earth. I love Secret identity. It is one of my favorite Superman stories of all time. It is one of my go to recommendations for any sort of Superman story. It's fantastic.

56:11
Case Aiken
I don't think that's the problem. So there's that. Then the, the. Then there is the inelegant component of it being Superboy here for the sake of being Superboy. Superboy is also an incredibly important character in the D.C. pantheon. The problem is that Superboy as we understand him in this DC pantheon is young Superman of Earth 1. And the rules for time travel is that you can only have one person from a person's timeline at a specific point. So Superboy could not be here from timey wimey bullshit reasons because that's how DC time travel worked. And so they introduced the Superboy of Earth Prime. But then, and this is just like the immediate problems of the series. Then they tried to clean house of like Superboy continuity for the Legion of Superheroes. And then they introduced the pocket universe Superboy only two years later.

56:58
Case Aiken
And I really wish that it was the pocket universe Superboy just for consistency's sake because that would have been slightly more elegant there rather than introducing this Superboy who doesn't actually have the gravitas of being Superboy. But like is there for the sake of being, of having a Superboy at the end of the series because Superboy is so important to the DC lore. Those are my only real problems with him here. I think in the story he's fine. I think that like he can honestly have had more questions about comic books and it would have been like kind of fun to have this character here. Like those would all be fine. Then there's of course everything that they use the character afterwards. And I, that is the problem I have with the character. Like I don't really have a problem with him in Crisis.

57:36
Case Aiken
It is just that I don't like the character how he's wake. And I get the idea that he's an insufferable nerd. Like I understand that. It's just, I don't know.

57:49
Dr Ryan Haupt
You're saying you can't suffer this insufferable nerd.

57:52
Case Aiken
I know.

57:53
Dr Ryan Haupt
I didn't think he was as insufferable in this story as I've Seen him in others. Was it Infinite Crisis that had him punching the continuity wall?

58:04
Case Aiken
Yes, it was Infinite Crisis.

58:05
Dr Ryan Haupt
Yeah, that was bad. That I didn't like, that I found actively offensive. But this. He was just like, it's another ver of Superman that showed up.

58:13
Case Aiken
Yeah, like I said, totally fine. For the purpose of having a Superboy at the end of. At the end of the story, it would have been nice if it was the actual Superboy in some. Some capacity for. For the actual purposes of. Of we had. But it's. It's still nice to have him there being part of this whole thing.

58:28
Dr Ryan Haupt
And funny that there was never, like you mentioned earlier, that. That they. They liked leaning into the world's finest duo pairings. Funny that there's no scene with Super Boy prime and Robin or Red Robin or Nightwing. Like, they just kind of. I feel like you could have done something there where you paired up those. Those sort of legacy characters, but they didn't. They didn't do it.

58:49
Case Aiken
I want to call out the attitude Superman has towards the Anti Monitor following the death of Supergirl.

58:55
Dr Ryan Haupt
Yeah, he.

58:56
Case Aiken
Is very much ready to kill throughout this whole thing. Like, for example, at one point he says, as far as I'm concerned, you're already dead. Attack. When they all attack the Anti Monitor, he's. He's fairly bloodthirsty. In the wake of this and that strikes me as interesting. I'm not sure, because it. It makes sense, I.

59:15
Jmike Folson
Believe, to have him not be, like, angry and trigger happy after that event would kind of be like, oh, that's really boring. So, like, to have him have to, like, how they made him switch up his character after Cara dies, it seems like legit, reasonable.

59:32
Dr Ryan Haupt
Well,.

59:32
Case Aiken
Yeah, like I said, it makes sense. It's just interesting. It's just interesting, like, to. To take that step with some Superman.

59:39
Dr Ryan Haupt
The stakes, I mean, the stakes really are that high, though. Like, it's. What does it matter if Superman kills someone and then the universe ends anyway? Like, it. I don't know. I kind of. I thought this showed a clarity of purpose, clarity of what's the mission? What's the assignment here that you don't often get? Like, Superman's always about, like, you know, the most optimistic scenario is the one I will fight for and the one that I will make happen through sheer force of will. And so to put Superman in a situation where that's not an option, like, you cannot just power your way through antimatter universe threatening all of existence. You just have to eliminate the threat. I Thought that was interesting. I thought that was, like, a cool choice to put Superman in that position where he's just. Yeah.

01:00:26
Dr Ryan Haupt
He's just gotta buckle down and get the job done.

01:00:29
Jmike Folson
By that time, they've seen, like, how many universes get destroyed because he was one of them. Exactly. When they got. When it got vaporized.

01:00:37
Dr Ryan Haupt
Yep.

01:00:37
Jmike Folson
So he knows what, like you said, he knows what the stakes are. He knows there's no tomorrow that they screw up.

01:00:43
Dr Ryan Haupt
It's got to be tough when you're the man of tomorrow.

01:00:46
Jmike Folson
Yeah.

01:00:47
Dr Ryan Haupt
For there to be no.

01:00:48
Jmike Folson
Tomorrow. Yeah.

01:00:52
Case Aiken
Again, I. Like I said, it makes sense. It's just. It's an interesting detail. Like. Yeah,.

01:00:56
Dr Ryan Haupt
No, it's good observation.

01:00:57
Case Aiken
For the character here. He's just very bloodthirsty at those later points in the chapter. And. And like I said, it. It makes sense. And it is like, it's where I would be and where I would really hope a person would be emotionally, like, at this point. But like I said, it's Superman, so it's like, also just kind of an interesting way to write the character. Talking about the temporal nature of the story. One thing I really like here is the Establishment that the hand that we always see coming through Entropy at the beginning of time is actually the Anti Monitor's hand. And that's, like, kind of a fun detail.

01:01:30
Dr Ryan Haupt
Wait, it wasn't Cronus? I thought it was Corona. The Owens hand at first.

01:01:34
Case Aiken
Like, when. When Chronos, like, peers back in time, the hand that is rising out is the Anti Monitor.

01:01:41
Dr Ryan Haupt
Okay, gotcha. Now I was a little confused because the Anti Monitor tells Psychopirate and the Flash to call him the Monitor. So in his mind, is he not the Anti Monitor because he's.

01:01:59
Case Aiken
He's the monitor of his.

01:02:01
Jmike Folson
Yeah. Of.

01:02:01
Dr Ryan Haupt
His universe.

01:02:03
Case Aiken
Of Antimatter universe. And they. They, especially once the Monitor is dead, they, like, a lot of characters, refer to him as the Monitor.

01:02:09
Dr Ryan Haupt
Yeah,.

01:02:10
Case Aiken
Throughout this,.

01:02:11
Dr Ryan Haupt
I found that a little confusing, but, you know, not. Not so much that I couldn't get past it, but I. Yeah, I mean, again, it's. You know, I know Interstellar is a divisive movie, but, like, the idea of being able to, like, reach through time and have effects that are present the first time that they're observed by an outside observer. But you, again, with the Flash going back, you know, having flashbacks, literally. But, like, the idea that this thing that we see earlier in the book is explained by some timey wimey stuff that happens later in the book, but was always the case, like, the continuity doesn't change our perspective is what change. I love that kind of stuff. That was great. So, yeah, good. Yeah, good job.

01:02:53
Dr Ryan Haupt
The thing that I said, I was, you know, I, I was telling a buddy of mine that I was reading Crisis for the first time. He's like, you've never read Crisis. Like you had the same reaction you had Case.

01:03:01
Case Aiken
Right.

01:03:03
Dr Ryan Haupt
He's like, what are you thinking so far? And I was maybe a third of the way through and I was like, I think it's really good. He's like, yeah, it's really good, Ryan. Like, I can't believe you haven't read this. And it turns out Wolfman of Perez knew how to tell a story. Story. And the best part of this book is I was reading it last weekend before were recording and my son wanted to know what I was reading. He's 4, so he knows like the basics. He knows who Superman and Batman are. And so he's like, well, you know, can you read it to me? Knocked him unconscious. One of the best naps he's had in a long time. So Marv Wolfman, your dialogue. I enjoyed it. I thought it was a treat.

01:03:40
Dr Ryan Haupt
Reading it to a four year old was too dense and too much and it put him out. So it was just a win all around. I got to read more of the book. My son got a nap. Everyone was happy.

01:03:51
Case Aiken
Yeah, well, like, talk about density. Like the next issue after where were talking, which I think this issue 11, where we've got the Superman of Earth 2 being sucked into a black hole, being held on by Superman of Earth 1. The shot of all the different wonder characters on Paradise Island. We've got the Earth two, Huntress and Robin, along with like a whole bunch of other heroes like collected on the bottom. Long story short, this cover doesn't look like a cover. This cover looks like what a normal comic books like panel layout are, but a George Perez panel layout which is like 50 fucking panels on a page somehow. Like this is the aftershock one. Like, like turn to like just the page where we get the waking up of Earth 2 Superman. Like how many goddamn panels are on that page?

01:04:40
Dr Ryan Haupt
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 Panels.

01:04:45
Case Aiken
Yeah, like this is something I've becoming like much more aware of as I'm trying to get a comic book script that I wrote actually like drawn right now. And like the every comeback where it's just like you have more than six panels on this page is just like, yeah, like I will try to Reduce and keep it.

01:05:01
Dr Ryan Haupt
It's the Abe Simpson. I put an onion in my bell, which was the style at the time. Like, this was the style of the time. It is no longer the style of modern comic book storytelling.

01:05:09
Case Aiken
Right. But I do love that this is. I've alluded to this already. The wake up sequence. Us following the Earth two Superman and him clashing with the. The main cast of the. Of the regular Superman. One thing that's great about it is that you can only really do this with so many characters and have it not be like, we have to explain who all these characters are. Like, like everyone knows who the supporting cast of Superman is. So, like, you're not surprised that, like, okay, I know who Perry White is. I know who Jimmy Olsen is. I know who Lois Lane is in these scenes. There's, like I said, only so many characters where it wouldn't be like, kind of weird to do that.

01:05:43
Dr Ryan Haupt
It is also an objectively hilarious scene. The idea of Clark Kent walking into Perry White's office and thinking he's the editor in chief sitting at the desk, that's funny. That's like, if you know these characters, that's a laugh out loud scene of distracted Clark Kent not realizing the role he's supposed to be playing in his fake or real or whatever. Your interpretation of it is character of Clark Kent, the guy with X ray vision didn't notice the name on the doors. Right?

01:06:12
Case Aiken
Yeah. I like the little touches throughout. For example, we get this one low angle shot of Clark walking and you can see the gbs and Daily planets in the background. Like, that's really nice. Also talking about just like the incredible amount of detail that George Perez put in the word aftershock at the top of that page has the entire skyline of Metropolis, like, drawn into it. Like, what the fuck, man? Like, way too much work. Like, I hope he's getting rest now in heaven. Anyway, I do like after the supermen fly off that we get a nice little bit of Superman of Earth 2 being like, you should settle down with that Lois. She's a good girl.

01:06:50
Jmike Folson
Yeah, yeah.

01:06:53
Case Aiken
Nothing like a good marriage. I'll keep that in mind. But then we get the. The reveals of this fused reality. I like that they go to try to talk to the Flash and that's when they find out that Central City and Keystone City are now sister cities. And we see the Flash of Earth too. And also that Joan Allen doesn't actually recognize or Joan Garrick. Pardon me, doesn't recognize Superman. Verse 2. I like them taking I like them using super speed to try to pierce through the veil. And the fact that the Supermen are able to participate in this alongside the Flashes is rather nice because it's sort of a throwback to the races of the Flash in Superman. Like, I thought that's kind of a fun.

01:07:34
Dr Ryan Haupt
Well, and it also suggests that, mechanistically, the Cosmic Treadmill isn't powered by Speed Force. It's powered by pure speed. Like, if you can run fast enough, you can use the Cosmic Treadmill. You don't need access to the Speed Force.

01:07:47
Case Aiken
Right now. The Speed Force, of course, not a concept yet at this point, but still, like. But definitely indicates that, like, yeah, no, the Supermen are capable of participating in this whole thing. Then I want to call attention to the presence of Huntress and Robin in this as survivors of this all. For a long time, I didn't clock that they died at the end of the story. Like, it's left a little bit vague, but it's sort of spelled out that they are also, like, killed in action characters. And it's a detail that. That went from being. Oh, well, that's weird. We have, like, some. Some random extra people left over at the end of this whole story that. That shouldn't be. To it being. Oh, I. I guess were going to be kind of blunt with every character that we don't want.

01:08:31
Case Aiken
We're just gonna murder,.

01:08:32
Jmike Folson
Like, Blackest Night. These guys. Oh, my God. Oh, man. Okay. Because I was like, oh, I didn't know that they were like, left to the wind, basically. Because, like, you.

01:08:49
Case Aiken
Yeah. I.

01:08:49
Jmike Folson
Mean, you see, like, a lot of people die at the, like, the big fight at the end. Like, a lot of people. And I was like, okay, they might. They. They might have survived.

01:08:59
Dr Ryan Haupt
Well, it's. What. And also what's crazy is, like, when you think the book can't go any deeper into DC lore. You have Harvey Bullock wearing just about the loudest outfit I've ever seen Harvey Bullock wear, which is hilarious. But then standing next to him with a name tag is Christopher Chance. Doesn't do or say anything in the entire series. And you've got, like, a tiny little quick. There's the human target there. He, like, he's there too. Like, it just. Yeah. They left no stone unturned. It's just an incredible feat.

01:09:32
Case Aiken
Yes. A remarkably dense book. So many characters where it's just like, oh, right, Dr. Occult Man. Yeah. I love the weird connection of all the wonder characters when they go to Paradise Island. So the fact that the Wonder Woman of Earth one dies and is sort of sent back through her own continuity, which is I guess the setup for the George Perez. We're going to start over fresh Wonder Woman. Does that mean that the Wonder Woman that we see briefly in Whatever Happened to the man of Tomorrow who's like pounding on the force field that Brainiac set up, is that the Earth 2 Wonder Woman then?

01:10:07
Jmike Folson
Is it,.

01:10:10
Dr Ryan Haupt
Does she have on? Is her like, is the bottom of her outfit more of shorts or a bikini bottom? Because that's the main way I can tell them.

01:10:17
Case Aiken
Right? Yeah, like I, I, it's such a minor thing. Like I'm even like trying to remember the panel exactly. Because like it's like, because there is a captain. Captain Marvel's there. Superwoman from the future. Is there like the descendant. I forget her, I'm blanking on her name right now. But she's like Jimmy Olsen's the Senate from the future. And like, it's just like a weird collection. And I was pretty sure there was a Wonder Woman there, like pounding. But it's like, but that would mean that since whatever happens, whatever happened to the Man Tomorrow actually is like legitimately in the world, like post Crisis on infinite Earths, that is the Earth 2 Wonder Woman, which is just like a, kind of a weird detail there.

01:10:52
Dr Ryan Haupt
Yeah.

01:10:52
Case Aiken
But then we get yet another encounter with the Anti Monitor. In this case, Brainiac agrees to help the like the space heroes that we've had and they sort of uncover this whole situation. I do love the detail where like everything gets enveloped in this like blackness.

01:11:07
Dr Ryan Haupt
Yeah.

01:11:07
Case Aiken
And then it like comes apart and it's like, oh, they're all shadow demons. There just was a fuckton of them.

01:11:13
Dr Ryan Haupt
No, that was great.

01:11:14
Case Aiken
Really cool stuff there. Yeah, we get so many interesting characters. One thing I noted when were seeing like superheroes from around the world in this post period was that a lot of them seem to have similar themes. Like all of the Japanese superheroes were like sun themed superheroes. And then when they show in Vietnam, it was like a, like it was thunder and lightning combine their forces with Thunderlord from Taiwan and it's like, are all the Asian characters like storm based characters? Like what, like, what's going on, dc?

01:11:44
Dr Ryan Haupt
Well, and there was a lot of communism talk for certain. Like anytime a character from that part of the world showed up, they're like, well, is the communist even going to bother to help us? And they're like, yes, I'm a superhero, I'm going to help. It was very, they Just kept hammering that point home over and over again.

01:12:02
Case Aiken
Yeah, I found it really funny when they recap. It's like, no, you don't understand. Your histories are now fused together. Most of your histories now work like this. It's like there's a lot of America talk here. Like, like there's way more big bullet. Bullet points that you should hit in terms of like how your earths have diverged, like, or converged in this scenario. But of course we get. Get a bunch of casualties. We get the death of Dove.

01:12:26
Jmike Folson
Again.

01:12:28
Case Aiken
Right.

01:12:29
Dr Ryan Haupt
Gee, a superhero committed to peace can't ever seem to fight off the inevitability of death. What are the odds.

01:12:36
Case Aiken
Lori Lemoris dies? Which that was one that I forgot about.

01:12:40
Dr Ryan Haupt
Still. Lamaris.

01:12:42
Case Aiken
Yeah. I don't know.

01:12:44
Dr Ryan Haupt
I always thought it was Laurie Lemuris.

01:12:46
Case Aiken
You're probably right.

01:12:47
Dr Ryan Haupt
No, I don't. I've never heard it said out loud before. It's just we've only ever read it.

01:12:51
Case Aiken
Yeah,.

01:12:51
Dr Ryan Haupt
I really liked that George Perez figured out how to make it look like characters were crying underwater. I thought that was like, I actually noticed it. I was like, that's a nice touch. Good job, George. Like, not that all of his pages aren't amazing, but that in particular the. The scene where Laurie was dying. Like characters are crying underwater. And it reads like I'm like, I understand what is happening here. Which I guess now my science brain is being like, is the saline density of tears the same as the saline density of the ocean? So they might not be instantly missable solutions, but I'm guessing our tears are pretty close to seawater since our blood, human blood is basically the same salinity as seawater.

01:13:27
Case Aiken
Right. We're basically seawater bags being held together by. By a flesh balloon.

01:13:31
Dr Ryan Haupt
Which is why whenever, whenever an Italian cook tells you that you should salt your pasta water to be the salinity of the sea, you can always respond with or the salinity of blood and freak them out.

01:13:42
Jmike Folson
Yeah, that freak them out really badly. Should I report you to somebody or.

01:13:49
Case Aiken
I want my pasta with the seawater or with the salinity of seawater. For the. There.

01:13:53
Dr Ryan Haupt
Are plenty of cultures that make. Most cultures make a blood sausage. Their blood is a culinary tool, just not usually human blood.

01:14:02
Jmike Folson
Yeah.

01:14:03
Dr Ryan Haupt
Although I did hear about a chef. This is a complete tangent for your listeners. I apologize. I did hear about a chef who made a meal with human blood, but all the diners had to donate blood before the meal because it wasn't illegal. If you're eating your own blood. So it's like. It's not cannibalism if it's your blood that you're eating,.

01:14:27
Case Aiken
Because it's your blood, man.

01:14:29
Dr Ryan Haupt
Each diner was served blood sausage made with their own blood. Good night, everyone. Have fun with that night.

01:14:42
Case Aiken
Anyway, so we get.

01:14:45
Dr Ryan Haupt
Resist that one.

01:14:46
Case Aiken
No, no. I just don't know how to follow that one up. So we get to the last stand of the. Of the Anti Monitor. Like the last, last stand.

01:14:54
Jmike Folson
Of the Anti Monitor.

01:14:56
Case Aiken
Yeah. And Superman of Earth 2 knocks out the Superman of Earth 1 and sends him away. And then makes his final stand against. Against this now like, destroyed body of the Anti Monitor who is. Is barely holding his together. We get this really epic. I have had enough punch where he punches out anti Monitor antimatter thing and doesn't get destroyed because Superman. But. But then because this is the Superman of Earth 2 and he's supposed to be the Golden Age Superman. The Golden Age. Lois Lane is revealed to not have been destroyed by the fusion of things.

01:15:30
Case Aiken
The Alexander Luthor Jr. Of Earth 3, he preserved her and is now opening up a space kind of inside of him into a paradise dimension that they say Superman and his wife and then a young alternate reality version of himself all go into a paradise dimension by themselves. And it's just like, yeah, this will be fine. No one's gonna go crazy in here. And so we see a little bit of the fallout. We see Wonder Woman transition backwards through her moments of creation. Meanwhile, the Wonder Woman of Earth 2 is welcomed as a goddess among the pantheons of Olympus. We get a little bit of fallout for all the characters that are going on. We get the new status quo for the Flash.

01:16:16
Case Aiken
We get Wally taking up the mantle and them establishing that his super speed is reduced down to the speed of sound, basically, which is a thing that D.C. was also trying to push. They were trying to get away from so many speedsters being speed of Light characters.

01:16:27
Dr Ryan Haupt
Bad science on that speed of light is a fundamental fact of the Universe. It does. The speed of light does vary slightly with the medium that it's traveling through. So speed of light in a vacuum is, you know, the ultimate speed limit in the universe. The speed of light does slow down in atmosphere. It slows down more in water. So it's density dependent. The speed of sound is highly variable. Like as you go up in the atmosphere, the speed of sound gets lower and lower because sound has. Sound is a longitudinal wave, not an electromagnetic wave. So electromagnetic waves can travel through vacuum and obey, you know, sort of the fundamental forces of the universe. Whereas longitudinal waves like sound are the vibration of the atoms present in the medium that the sound is traveling through.

01:17:10
Dr Ryan Haupt
So as you go up in the atmosphere, there are fewer and fewer atoms. So there's fewer, less and less media for the sound to travel through. It's actually why sound travels faster underwater than in the air, because water is denser. So the sound actually travels faster and further. Which is why whales can talk to each other across the planet without having an Internet. And we have to have silly wires going across things for us to talk across great distance.

01:17:33
Case Aiken
Yeah, many of those wires going underwater.

01:17:36
Dr Ryan Haupt
Exactly. Messing up whale talk.

01:17:39
Case Aiken
Yeah. But like the speed of sound was, is typically sort of like Marvel speedsters. Like Quicksilver is roughly like, just like a little bit faster than the speed of sound is like usually how they pitch him as.

01:17:48
Dr Ryan Haupt
A.

01:17:48
Case Aiken
Character.

01:17:49
Dr Ryan Haupt
Don't like it. Conceptually. Don't like it. For the Flash. Don't like it. It way was explained here. Don't like it. Not a fan.

01:17:55
Case Aiken
I, I. My big objection is that usually people just see it's like, oh, well, you got the speed of sound and the speed of light, and those are like the two stages right there. Not, not recognizing the gulf of distance between those.

01:18:06
Dr Ryan Haupt
Big distance. Big gulf.

01:18:08
Case Aiken
Yeah. Like I, if you were the Flash because you were known for going the speed of light and then all of a sudden you were reduced to, you know, say 750 miles per hour just to give something like kind of roughly around.

01:18:18
Dr Ryan Haupt
Yeah, yeah, I can, I can live with that as an number.

01:18:21
Case Aiken
Like that. That's a big drop. Like you people would say, what the man? You're not really doing what you used to do. But this was also kind of in keeping with the power down that was going on for Superman at the time. When we did our Superman versus the Flash Races episode, we talked about the one that they did between Wally and Superman because all of a sudden the two characters were just way less powerful than they used to be. It used to be that they could just fly. It was super fast across the world. And it was. And it was done. We get a few more status quo's here. I totally forgot about the period where Jonah Hex was a man.

01:18:55
Dr Ryan Haupt
In the.

01:18:55
Case Aiken
Future for the.

01:18:56
Dr Ryan Haupt
Future, which they kind of did with Green Arrow recently. And it also didn't work in my opinion. But yeah, I think I know that that was the thing they tried to do and forgotten about it until but as soon as I saw it, I was like, oh yeah, that was a thing, wasn't it?

01:19:12
Case Aiken
I, I do like the panel that we get of Superman and Power Girl going towards the Fortress of Solitude together. Like, I think that's a, a nice nod to the relationship that they should have had and that DC editors were cowards during the 80s and 90s about.

01:19:27
Dr Ryan Haupt
Whoa, shots fired.

01:19:29
Case Aiken
Yeah, like we could like, if they wanted the death of Supergirl to stick, they should have just like embraced Power Girl as a character instead of trying to like be like, oh no, she's Atlantean. No, like anything artificial her up. Like, what the fuck, man? And then we get the conclusion of this, all that we alluded to, which is that Psycho Pirate is the only person left remembering the actual crisis or seeming to obviously the characters who were present at the beginning of time, like kind of remember the crisis, but a lot of their memories are going to get real jumbly and the official editorial stance is going to be that a crisis occurred that we can reference, but we're not going to talk about details for a good long while coming out of this whole thing.

01:20:10
Case Aiken
But yeah, so that's the big beats of Crisis on Infinite Earths. Not trying to turn this into a five hour maxi series.

01:20:21
Jmike Folson
Going to Snyderverse this.

01:20:23
Case Aiken
No, we're not doing that today. So yeah, I do really enjoy this and it is without a doubt it a testament to comic book making. Like the craft of comic book making is so like just on display here as being so fantastic. Like obviously the art of Perez is without a doubt just like, just amazing. But to wrangle such disparate elements of DC continuity and to act as things that are springboarding for upcoming stories that are trying to consolidate, trying to show off the station status quo of stories that are probably not doing so hot like the new Doom Patrol and shit like that. This is them having a great old time with a massive multiverse of concepts and somehow keeping it together enough that it isn't incomprehensible. It's just a fantastic work in that regard.

01:21:21
Case Aiken
So what kind of stands out to like, I, I'm looking at this as someone who has lived with this book for, for 26 years. Christ. And, and before that had familiarity with it all. Like it. You know, I, I was pretty familiar with the crisis from the time I was around like eight or nine, I think is when I got that issue of, with the death of Supergirl. So. And then I was like 16, 17 when I got the trade. So like, in terms of, like, I had spent a lot of time like living with this whole thing. What stands out to the two of you that we haven't talked about?

01:21:58
Jmike Folson
One of my favorite panels for this is always going to be the specter screaming. Oh, he's screaming out in pain.

01:22:05
Dr Ryan Haupt
Yeah, there's some good specter stuff for sure.

01:22:07
Case Aiken
Yeah.

01:22:08
Jmike Folson
Dr. Fate is one of my favorite characters. I was like, oh, stop. Dr. Fate sightings here, man. It's always going to be the death of Supergirl. That one panel of Superman, Holdinger and like screaming is one of the most influential panels in DC Comics history, if not comics history. Like it's, it's that good.

01:22:28
Dr Ryan Haupt
And I think for me it was. You have to give up a little bit of your modern sensibility as a comic book reader to get through this. Like it's a denser, more dialogue laden work than the modern comic book reader is used to reading on a week to week basically basis. But once you lean in and accept sort of the silliness and the overwrought soap opera esque, operatic tone, not just soap opera, but actual opera, like it's got both, right? It's got both the soap and the opera. It's just such a joy. And we've used the phrase tour de force multiple times already. I mean, I read a little bit about how much research George Perez did to be able to just draw all these different characters.

01:23:16
Dr Ryan Haupt
Like it's a huge undertaking to draw this many different characters, to make them visually distinct, to give them.

01:23:24
Case Aiken
With no Internet, with no Internet, like no ability just to like pull an image.

01:23:28
Dr Ryan Haupt
Yep, yep. And so to pull it off and just to pull it off for like every single minor player that the DC Universe, the DC Multiverse, had to offer at the that time and tell a compelling, and still tell a compelling story panel to panel. Yeah, just triumph. Just a triumph.

01:23:49
Case Aiken
Yeah. And they weren't playing nice too. Like it's not just the multiverse, they were spanning time. Like the legion of superheroes is present here. They have characters from like literally from the golden age that are present. Like not just like there are two versions, but like characters from like the World War II era. They've got characters from like, they've got Kamandi and like all these like characters from like weird stories that are like other time points that the DCU has played.

01:24:13
Dr Ryan Haupt
You've got Solar and all the ape characters. You. Yeah, I mean, you've got the prehistoric parts of the dcu. You've got the metal men. You've got every. Every stretchy character the DC has to offer. You got Elongated man, you got Plastic man, you got Mercury from the Metal Men. You got Winged Wig and Knight. Right. Or shining. Shining Knight.

01:24:32
Case Aiken
Right.

01:24:33
Dr Ryan Haupt
Got, like, the. We didn't even talk about, like, the Merlin universe.

01:24:37
Case Aiken
I know. Like, there's. There's just so much fucking stuff on here.

01:24:39
Dr Ryan Haupt
Yeah. Original flavor. Captain Adam. It's. Yeah. Just goes and goes and goes. It's so cool.

01:24:46
Case Aiken
Yeah. And then they had the audacity to introduce Lady Quark.

01:24:50
Jmike Folson
We had Vandal Savage just hanging out in the background, too.

01:24:54
Dr Ryan Haupt
It. It was only reading this book again, My science. My science brain was only reading this book that I realized Alan Scott named his kids after two different. Different rocks. One of jade and obsidian.

01:25:07
Case Aiken
Obsidian. I had never thought about that. That's great.

01:25:11
Dr Ryan Haupt
Yep. So, yeah, I loved it. I was so.

01:25:13
Case Aiken
Damned. Yeah.

01:25:14
Dr Ryan Haupt
So. So, yeah. In terms of wrapping things up in Final Thoughts, I love this. I. I had so much fun reading this. It was such a joy. I can't believe I. I put it off for this long, you know, it easily could have. I was nervous it was gonna be a homework book. I was nervous it's gonna be, like, comics from that era that can be really hard to get through even a single issue of just because they're so clunky. These guys are just master craftsmen and storytellers. And so this was. It's a slower read than a modern comic, but, like, not at the expense of it being super enjoyable.

01:25:47
Jmike Folson
Also.

01:25:47
Case Aiken
Yeah. Yeah. I think that's a really good summation, J. Mike. Sorry.

01:25:51
Jmike Folson
Also. Also shout out to, like, seven legit panels of the challengers of the unknown.

01:25:58
Dr Ryan Haupt
Heck, yeah.

01:25:59
Case Aiken
Yeah.

01:26:00
Jmike Folson
I was like, oh, my gosh. They got more than one panel. Oh, my God.

01:26:06
Dr Ryan Haupt
And good RIP Hunter stuff, too. Yeah,.

01:26:09
Case Aiken
Yeah. Captain Comet, who they remind us multiple times, is from a hundred thousand years in the future.

01:26:13
Dr Ryan Haupt
10,000. I.

01:26:16
Case Aiken
Thought it was 100,000.

01:26:18
Dr Ryan Haupt
But anyway, yeah. No big Captain Comet fan over here.

01:26:21
Case Aiken
Yeah. I mean, just tons of love for all this lore of the DC universe. So many characters like, represented throughout. Like, I said, different. Different time points, different, like, all kinds of things. Yeah. Well, there's clunky points because they didn't know what they were ultimately going to have the DC universe be in. In all ways. Like, they didn't have it fully planned out, like, because they. There were still just debates about, like, what is John Byrne, Superman gonna look like? What, you know, what things are going to be different in meaningful ways and the decision to not. Not fully wipe the board and, or wipe the slate clean they wanted to save. Like, Green Lantern doesn't really get changed that much, which is weird because Green Lantern actually, like, the nature of Oa gets changed so much in this book.

01:27:07
Case Aiken
Side note, prior to the crisis on Infinite Earths, Oa only existed on Earth one, or like in the universe of Earth one, the other. That's why. That's why Alan Scott was a different kind of Green Lantern and why power ring had the weird, like, demon thing going on for its ring. Like that there. There wasn't an equivalent to Oa in other realities for Green Lantern cores. So, like, they're, you know, like, Batman doesn't wildly change as a result of this. Like, there are changes like Jason Todd's. They like, reset the clock for a couple stories and then like, Jason Todd's, like, backstory changes. It's still like, many of these books are just ongoing.

01:27:39
Case Aiken
This is, this is why all the shit with Wonder Girl becomes so confusing after, like, after the crisis and end for the Earth's happen, where they have to explain that she's actually like, the child of Titans as opposed to like, the Greek gods, and that explains, like, her weird fucking powers. So, yeah, like, there's repercussions of this book not being as clean as it could have been. That will have.

01:28:04
Dr Ryan Haupt
People. The Hawk people definitely got muddled in this process.

01:28:07
Case Aiken
Oh my God. Well, the biggest problem is that they did hawkworld like, in 1988. So like, and had Hawkman just appearing regularly. And then they were like, now we're going to start over from scratch the same way that the Perez one Wonder Woman book started. And so they had to explain what happened to the previous Hawkman. And then so just like, again, they just, like. I'm not saying it was possible for them to have all their ducks in the row, but they didn't have all their ducks in a row going into this. And so there's. At the end of this, all they have, like, an idea of what the DC universe is going to look like going forward, but it's not complete.

01:28:40
Case Aiken
And I guess the final thing to talk about is, is did this work as a, a, as a reset, and then did that reset actually, like, work for. For comics? Because again, I think that the multiverse was a really elegant solution to the, the series of time periods and other properties that they had brought into their. Their whole pantheon. And that it was fine. And then, like, then a unified continuity also was fine. Like, I. I'm a millennial. I grew up in the. In the era of comic book that DC put out, was trying to be like, yeah, no, things are better now that our history is unified into a consistent form. But it's still. It got reset after a certain amount of time, like now. Now we've got the.

01:29:30
Jmike Folson
Rebirth.

01:29:32
Dr Ryan Haupt
Okay,.

01:29:33
Case Aiken
So.

01:29:33
Dr Ryan Haupt
So in terms of success, you know, we're looking at this 40 years out from when it was published. I mean, look at what. I mean, think about what was going on around the same time this was being published. Dark Knight Returns, Watchmen. Right. Two of the most pivotal books. I don't know that those, like Watchmen probably doesn't exist in the same form. It does, if not for this, because of the way that they had to fold in all the Charlton comics. I think the DC universe is such a richer place with the Marvel family, with the Charlton characters. I can't imagine a DC universe without those characters being incorporated in some capacity. So. So if this is the way to do that, then I'm glad they did. And I also think about some of the immediate aftermath of this story.

01:30:21
Dr Ryan Haupt
A long run of Wally west as Flash, which I think are some excellent comics. You got some great Grant Morrison, some great Mark Wade, some great Geoff Johns comics that came out of Wally West's turn at the Flash helm before Jeff Johns brought Barry Allen back in the Flash rebirth. I think the John Byrne man of Steel comics are some of my favorite Superman comics. I think they're just absolutely fantastic in resetting the character into a modern, for the time, 1980s aesthetic. And I think even today, I still get turned around. And when we can throw out, we can say, oh, this was the Earth two Superman, not the Earth one Superman, man. I have a pretty strong grasp on which ones we're talking about when we get into that nitty gritty. But even still, I sometimes get turned around.

01:31:10
Dr Ryan Haupt
And so I can't imagine trying to keep track of all that pre Internet. So I think merging it all into a single continuity, trying to make that work for as long as they did. And then you have the new 52 where they blew it back out into 52 different multiverses. Like, they've kind of. They've kind of blown this concept up and collapsed it back down multiple times since then. And it's just part of the fun of comics. And I think this, in terms of what it was trying to accomplish then, was a success and led to some really Great stories and led to the sort of incarnation of the DC universe that I have known and loved for a really long time. So yeah, I would give it a thumbs up as being a success.

01:31:48
Case Aiken
Yeah. I mean I do enjoy the history of some characters being interwoven by virtue of them all existing on the same world. Things like Wildcat training, Batman, how to box are like the kind of details that like could only exist by way of their. The shared continuity being merged together. Things like Black Canary somehow being less confusing post crisis where it's just like, no, she's just the daughter. Like she, like that's it. We don't have to deal with like any of this brain swapping stuff and world split switching that occurred with like the pre crisis Black Canary. Like we don't need to deal with that. We. It's just, she's the daughter, she's just been around. It's fine. Moving on. All good. Does it also create like some weird stuff like, like I really like the Mark Wade JLA Year one story.

01:32:31
Case Aiken
But like having to explain like, oh yeah, that's why Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman aren't part of the founding members of the Justice League in this version of the continuity. Like weird choices that they made coming off of this. Like, so I, I think it's mixed successes for me. Like, like the fact that they had to reset it is indicative of that there are good ideas of the multiverse that they, that people wanted to play with. I, I think that they reset it in ways that have made like this multiverse of multiverses that exist in D.C. i think is like too much. But that's just also just like DC takes good ideas and will I go way too far with them sometimes. But, but I, I do like the story.

01:33:14
Case Aiken
I do, I do understand why that premise was to sort of simplify the timeline. And, and like I said, there's a lot of threads that work really well with that unified timeline, but it is also kind of messy. J Mike, your thoughts?

01:33:28
Jmike Folson
I think I'm kind of in between you guys hits and misses. I do now that I finally sat down and read this entire behemoth from front or cover to cover. I do appreciate like them trying to simplify everything because there were a lot of cooks in the kitchen pre crisis and there are a lot of random stories, a lot of things happening here there after that. Because I wasn't a big comic book fan, I got most of my stuff from like the DC Animated shows. So I only knew Wally west as the Flash, like, through all the. The Justice League Unlimited, all that stuff. Stuff. He was my Flash forever. And then I found out there, oh, it was Barry and it was Jay Garrett. And they're like, oh, okay, that's kind of cool.

01:34:18
Jmike Folson
I think was good that they simplified everything for the common person like me, who wasn't really deep into it. But I kind of wish they were. They had let some of the things slip through. I kind of wish that we didn't have that abomination of Supergirl that came later. Even though you love it so much. Case.

01:34:35
Case Aiken
The Matrix entity, Supergirl. You find.

01:34:38
Jmike Folson
Abomination, Supergirl. Like, I was. Was while I was reading this, I was kind of like, oh, they couldn't just let Supergirl's body float off towards the sun and let her get revived. And I was like, oh, wait, that only happened Death of Superman. I was like, oh, I guess they hadn't figured it out yet. Also, I was laughing at the end of the story where, like, Wonder Woman survived until, like, the last five panels of the story, Even though she didn't really do a lot of stuff. She was kind of around most of the time, but she survived until she got blasted back into, like, creation. I was. I was laughing when. I admit I started laughing when I read that because I was like, that's just so absurd. But it's. It's. I like that they simplified things. I wish they would let some.

01:35:22
Jmike Folson
Some, like you said, some of the strands go and let be more creative with things later on.

01:35:27
Case Aiken
Yeah. I mean, again, like, I think that in terms of how creative they could be. Like, also, it's the realities of putting together a thing like this. This is a true testament to the work of the creative team, like, putting it all together. But there are limitations. Like, you can only have so much spotlight for so many characters. And so, yeah, like, kind of sucks that Wonder Woman doesn't get more spotlight throughout this, but we do get moments with her, at least. Again, I think this is a masterclass in comic book construction that has a few messy components. And part of that is just the realities of, like, a lot of masters, like, creating comics. Like, it's a collaborative medium that is lots of editors, lots of writers lots of people putting stuff together.

01:36:10
Case Aiken
There's only so much you can be a perfect master of. And even then, like, market forces are going to affect.

01:36:16
Jmike Folson
It all.

01:36:16
Case Aiken
Like, there's.

01:36:17
Jmike Folson
I don't think it's really messy, though. It's just a lot of stuff going on here the entire time. It's a lot. A lot of stuff. Like, a lot of, like a lot of storytelling is going on and it can be a lot to take in. End. I don't really know if that was really messy or not.

01:36:32
Case Aiken
Yeah, maybe messy is the wrong word, but I'm. I'm going to stick by it just because like, comics. Comics have a lot of mess and it's. Some of that mess is beautiful. And this is a. A fun, beautiful work that is shockingly readable for how much stuff you need to know.

01:36:49
Dr Ryan Haupt
Yeah.

01:36:49
Case Aiken
Going into. Or. Or not need to know. Like, that they explain sufficiently for you to understand. Like, and the fact that they continue to do it throughout the book. Book. It's not just like, the first issue gives you an info dump and then they expect you to be.

01:37:00
Jmike Folson
On board.

01:37:01
Case Aiken
Like, many issues give. Give expositions of, like, what is. What are the stakes? Like, where are we in the story? Like, they. They catch you up several times throughout this so that, like, if you weren't paying attention, you're good. Hence me saying that the death of Supergirl issue is a really good issue by itself. It's fucking halfway through the book, but it by itself explains all the stakes going into it and then all the stakes coming out of it. It. And. And you're good. The next issue, same deal with. Just from the Flash's perspective this time. Like. Like we. We are. We. We get the details of why it matters constantly and. And thus we are. Are primed every time something really big happens to understand the gravity of it all. And I think that it. Like I said, it's. It's a.

01:37:46
Case Aiken
Just a masterclass of comic book construction. I'm really glad that we had the chance to talk about this. This is really fun. Ryan, I'm so glad that you shared this moment of vulnerability, like what your gaffe was and then got berated by the entire Internet for it.

01:38:01
Dr Ryan Haupt
Hardly a moment of vulnerability for me. It's just. I'm a believer in radical transparency, so I had nothing to hide. This was a known gap in my reading and comics canon. And so I just. When confronted with the truth, I just. I had no choice but to admit it and take my lashings and actually sit down and read the book. So I appreciate the opportunity to read it and discuss it in such a holistic and insightful way with the two of you. So thanks for having me.

01:38:27
Case Aiken
Yeah, it's always a pleasure. It's been too long since we've had you on, so I'm really glad that we got a chance to chat again so that I can take move on from the parasocial relationship of listening to Ifanboy and just have the social relationship of having you as a guest.

01:38:40
Dr Ryan Haupt
Love it. Thanks.

01:38:41
Case Aiken
Yeah. J Mike, thank you for letting me subject you to this monolith of a book.

01:38:46
Jmike Folson
Oh, it was fun. I enjoyed it. It was. It was a lot of fun, like actually sitting out here and reading everything for a change for this one instead of just seeing panels from a distance.

01:38:56
Case Aiken
Yeah, it certainly puts a lot of context behind this all. One thing we could have done, which would have been crazy, is to look at all the tie ins, which.

01:39:03
Jmike Folson
We did not,.

01:39:08
Case Aiken
But Lord knows there were plenty. I own a couple random ones. I've got the Blue Devil crossover with it where he goes to a world where World War I didn't end for an extra 15 years and as a result, the film industry has dominated everything on their world. Yeah, no weird fucking books that were going on simultaneously with us all because despite the fact that this is such a huge maxi series crossover, it is very much an early example of the modern crossover with all these tie in issues and so forth, connecting the various books and really pushing people to buy, sell, sell comics. So, yeah. So again, thank you for letting me subject you, J Mike listeners. Thank you for letting us ramble to you about this goddamn book for two hours. It's a blast.

01:39:58
Case Aiken
And I'm really glad that we had the chance to do this. So, Ryan, where can people find you and follow you?

01:40:03
Dr Ryan Haupt
I don't have the Internet presence that I once did. I am a regular contributor to the ifanboy Pick of the Week podcast. I'm on there about once a month. Don't really do much with social media these days. I've mentioned that, you know, I have a background as a scientist. I'm currently working for an educational nonprofit called the National Science Academy. We focus on providing steam educational experiences for kids in Appalachia, but also nationally with a program called the National Youth Science Camp, which brings kids from all 50 states plus DC plus some international countries to West Virginia for a multi week residential STEM camp. So if that's something that sounds worthy of your support, you can go check that out@nysacademy.org and I'm really excited to announce that me and my buds, the Paleo pals, are bringing back our science podcast, science. Sort of.

01:40:51
Dr Ryan Haupt
So that was what got me into podcasting in the first place, back in the year of our Lord 2009, back when we might have Been closer to Crisis of Heritage than we are today. Who can say? No one can calculate the math on that. So we've been recording new episodes. We have a backlog of over 350 episodes that people can go check out. So plenty of stuff to listen to. But if you're interested in some silly science content that often includes a lot of like, imagine this conversation where if you flipped all of the pop culture content with science content, but then the amount of science content that I forced into the conversation is the pop culture. It's sort of that. So if you're interested in that's me and my buddies over@scienceortive.com where you can find that.

01:41:33
Dr Ryan Haupt
So I fanboy National Youth Science Academy and Science sort of are sort of the three places online where I'm the most active these days. And yeah, thanks for giving me the opportunity to plug that and for the opportunity to come on the show and talk to you both.

01:41:46
Case Aiken
Yeah, I'm so excited to hear Science sort of is coming back. I love the show. I think one of your last episodes was actually a deep dive into Project Hail Mary, the book.

01:41:53
Dr Ryan Haupt
It was, yeah.

01:41:56
Case Aiken
Which had saved me from having to be like, spoiled by people because I already had like a great explanation of what happened in the book. Or I could have read it, but I didn't.

01:42:04
Dr Ryan Haupt
You should.

01:42:05
Case Aiken
It's.

01:42:05
Dr Ryan Haupt
A good. It's a good.

01:42:06
Case Aiken
Book. I know, I know,.

01:42:09
Dr Ryan Haupt
I.

01:42:09
Case Aiken
Know. I also need to see the movie too, but.

01:42:11
Dr Ryan Haupt
And we had Andy Ware on the podcast back in the day as well. So there's. There's an episode where we interview. Oh, man. That was one of those where like, were using one of the nascent, you know, browser based podcast recording platforms. And I think Andy closed the browser before all the files were uploaded. So were literally like dealing with tech support in New Zealand to try to recover on the back end from the server. It was either that or I was going to have to go to Andy Ware and be like, can we rerecord your interview? Because we lost it entirely. It was one of the closest we've come to losing an episode completely with a big guest. That would have been really embarrassing. So.

01:42:51
Case Aiken
Well, we had a very similar moment with Derek Robertson.

01:42:56
Dr Ryan Haupt
You know the drill.

01:42:59
Case Aiken
We ended up having to record it.

01:43:02
Dr Ryan Haupt
I've been there. Fortunately, I didn't. Fortunately it didn't come to that with Andywhere, but I've been in the hot seat on that as well. So I hear you.

01:43:09
Case Aiken
Yeah. Well, anyway, so I'm super excited to hear about science sort of coming back. Everyone should also check out Ifanboy just yeah just check you out because you're awesome and thank you for coming on.

01:43:20
Dr Ryan Haupt
Thanks for having me.

01:43:21
Case Aiken
J Mike where can people find you and follow you?

01:43:23
Jmike Folson
Yeah, mostly on the Discord server but if you feel so inclined you can find me over on bluesky5 bluesky social. I'm usually over there chit chatting with Case whenever he tags me in something.

01:43:36
Case Aiken
That is true. That is true. As for me, you can find me on most social media platforms Aiken with the exception of Instagram where I'm holding on four dear life to my aimed screen name from high school which is quetzalcoatl5q u e t Z A L C o a T L5 because I was pretentious in fucking high school. Otherwise you can find me on the Discord. That is a great place to find us. You can find a link on our website or in our show notes to the CPOV Discord. You should also check out our Patreon. We have a Patreon going now that is helping keep the lights on. I've got two kids now. It's really nice to.

01:44:09
Case Aiken
It's really nice to actually get some support from people that that's helpful and so if you even just join at the free tier we'd really appreciate it. We're trying to kinds of value even at the free tier. I write two essays a week, one on a nerdy topic of my choice, one on a D and D topic of my choice because I'm a giant D and D nerd. And so you can find those on our patreon which is patreon.com certainpov media but if you want to be super awesome and support us at the higher paid tiers, you can join at the executive producer tier and get a shout out at the end of every episode. And that includes Micah Macaw, Carter Hallett, Sean Meera Lee, Gregor Memento Young, Logan Crowley, Joe Master, Piero Casey and Nancy Aiken, Adam Sampter and Keith Lettinen.

01:44:51
Case Aiken
You could be an awesome person like them and join at the executive producer tier on our Patreon and join in the shoutouts and we will launch you with praise and that and other promotional things that we'll outline in our Patreon explanation of things but that would be really appreciated and otherwise the free tier would be cool too. Like we just appreciate you listening thing that's really what this is all about. It's just nice to know you're out there. Internet anyway, so this has been our conversation on Crisis on Infinite Earths. I can't believe that we did this in under three hours. Like that is frankly an amazing testament to us growing and maturing as podcasters. And also me having to get back up to a crying toddler. My wife has been furiously texting me this whole time. So anyway, thanks so much.

01:45:42
Case Aiken
Tune in next time where we will be continuing our conversation about Superman topics. I forget which thing we're talking about next time, but in the meantime you should check out the shows@ certainpow.com and then circle back here. And until then, stay Super Man.

01:46:03
Jmike Folson
Men of Steel is a Spirit Certain POV Production Our hosts are J. Mike Folson and Case Aiken. The show is edited by Sophia Ricciardi. Our logo is by Chris Batista and episode art is by Case Aiken. Our theme is by Jen Moonan.

01:46:23
Case Aiken
Do you have a comic book you just can't stop thinking about? One that stuck with you years later On Trade School, guest hosts get the money to talk about a graphic novel that changed the way they see the world or just made them fall in love with comics all over again. In just five to 15 minutes, you'll hear stories about the stories that real people love the most. Trade School, a short form ongoing series about the comic book trade paperbacks we love and why we love them. Find it wherever you get your podcasts.

01:46:56
Speaker 4
CPOV certainpov.com.