About the title

"I just found out there's no such thing as the real world
Just a lie you've got to rise above" --John Mayer

"Crisis of faith" is a term that, so far as I can ascertain, has no hard-and-fast definition. Usually, it's used when one doubts their entire belief system--essentially, what the character of Satan was going for in the book of Job. I've heard some (admittedly, not too many) people argue, though, that any questioning of one's faith is a crisis of faith. If this is true, then many of us go through a constant crisis of faith. I'm of the mind that one's faith in anything or any concept must be constantly called into question, and withstand the self-scrutiny. Faith of any sort is a belief in something that cannot be empirically proved or disproved. If it cannot stand up to doubt, then it is weak faith.

Faith is also a crossover country artist who had some decent Shania Twain-esque hits, but is doomed to eternally burn in hell for what she did to "Piece of My Heart." (Okay, I joke, but I think there's a good chance Janis Joplin will kick her ass when she gets to the Pearly Gates.)

I don't claim to have infinite faith by any means. (I'm not even sure whether that'd be a good thing.) The title refers to a DC Comics 12-issue maxi-series from 1985 called Crisis on Infinite Earths. The premise was anything but simple. For about fifty years, characters like Superman and Batman had been running around in the DC Universe, and DC Comics had acquired other companies that owned other heroes (like Blue Beetle and Captain Marvel) who were in separate worlds. In the 1950s and 1960s, they had "created" a second world, where more modern versions of the characters existed. They could still hop over to "Earth I," where the "Golden Age" (1940s) versions of themselves lived. And there were other universes, such as a reverse world where good was evil, the universes where the non-DC heroes lived, and our own world. By the 1980s, it was confusing, especially when Batman had inexplicably gone from the Adam West TV version of himself to the more realistic, driven version almost overnight, or where Superman had learned that dozens of other survivors from Krypton lived, including Supergirl, Krypto the Superdog, Beppo the Supermonkey, and who knows what else.

To clean house, DC staged a huge crossover, where a superdupervillain was destroying all the worlds in existence, and, to save the remaining worlds (read: the ones we'd actually seen in comics previously), all these disparate realities had to be combined into one world with a new timeline and continuity. This meant some details that had become issues could be fixed: the second Robin could now be a reformed street punk instead of having the same circus origins as the first, and Superman could be "powered down" so that he no longer flew through the sun every Saturday to clean his cape. A lot of characters died. In most cases, this meant they had never existed in the new world. Supergirl was among those who fell, and George Perez's cover for issue #7 (Superman screaming while holding the body of his dead cousin) is probably the masterpiece by this giant in the field.

I think that's right, more or less. Truth be told, the story wasn't especially memorable. The series was more important for what it was than for the story it told. I don't feel like looking up a plot synopsis, because it made my head hurt years ago, and thinking about it makes my head hurt now.

Following Crisis, the late 1980s and 1990s were fertile ground for new exploration of these characters. Their past history may or may not have existed, and DC allowed the use of "retcons" (retroactive continuity) into the mix. If something that had come before didn't work, or needed to be changed, change or ignore it. (The Jason Todd Robin getting an entirely new backstory is an obvious example of this policy.) Bad for the people who sit in their parents' basements trying to write Wikipedia entries on a character's history, good for people who might wonder exactly how Robin could've fought in World War II and still be a teenager.

Unfortunately, as much as I love comics, and the superhero genre in particular, I don't read anything from DC anymore (aside from the occasional title from their non-DC Universe imprint for mature readers, Vertigo). Rising prices and an insistence upon "edgy" stories from both major publishers, as well as their all but cutting out any stores but dedicated comic shops, have led to the average reader being much older than he used to be. (I'm not going for a sexist term, but the average reader of superhero comics has always been male, which is unfortunate as well.) The industry is dominated by the so-called fanboy, who is more concerned with tight continuity, shock value, and the status quo than in reading a well-formed story with broad appeal. (Oh, and big guns. And boobs. Can't forget the boobs.) And, so, both DC and Marvel are made up of monthly ongoing titles that have become little more than filler in between the massive epic crossovers, of which there are usually at least two per publisher each year. DC has been especially loopy, spending the past three or four years (and who knows how far into the future) undoing Crisis on Infinite Earths in a neverending series of crossovers with names like Infinite Crisis and Countdown to Final Crisis. When the guys in charge don't realize what a moronic concept the Superhorse was in the first place and bring him back, it's time to get out of the pool.

(At this point, who cares anymore? Go back to stories about Batman beating thugs over the head or Superman foiling Lex Luthor's latest plot, and can the cosmic garbage. I hate when there are stories about these massively powerful godlike beings wreaking havoc with existence, yet, somehow, guys like Batman and Spider-Man can save the world.)

So, long story short, I was aiming for a cheap, hopefully catchy, pun. Though making sense out of many different, seemingly opposing, schools of thought wouldn't be a bad goal to shoot for.