All-Star Comics - The Crisis As Novel!

In 2006 on the (gasp) twentieth anniversary of the Crisis On Infinite Earths Marv Wolfman concocted a novel version for IBooks. As you'd suspect it's at once the same and rather different.

For starters while there are still the same sprawling destructions of worlds, the story here is a much more personal one told from the tragic perspective of Barry Allen, the Flash of Earth-1 who realizes soon into the proceedings that he must be dead and subject to unknown powers he is shifting forward and backward in time getting glimpses of people he does not know and events he does not at first understand. It is from Barry's ghostly time-lost point of view that we see many of the events of the original story unfold and surprisingly he is able to interact with events at key points.

The death of the Flash in the original Crisis was handled most poignantly as he dies apart from his colleagues and mostly alone only to be mourned after the fact. That key reality remains, but for Flash fans  he is much more of a factor here and that adds to the luster of his heroic sacrifices.

The ending is a bit different, and many of the events are ignored or collapsed for the sake of unity. But nonetheless we do get to see the end of the multiverse and the birth of a new reality, which is at once the same and different. But this time there is the added advantage of knowing of what has developed since.

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