h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Hello, there! Saw that you didn't get the joke. Quite frankly, I don't blame you. Part of my surprise in seeing all those votes for Christmas On Infinite Earths was the fact that I didn't expect many people to get it at all.

Anyway, I'm directly stealing the name, and aspects of the plot, from a twenty year old comic book story called Crisis On Infinite Earths. It was the first "mega crossover" to ever come out of any major comic book company (after all the work that people like Stan Lee and Jack Kirby did for comics, Crisis On Infinite Earths is probably the single most influential event in the history of the medium).

The long and short of it was this: DC Comics had too much history, much of it disconnected. Old time readers had no problem with this: they understood perfectly well that there were two different people called Superman on two different Earths (one of them was old enough to battle the Nazis, and this is pretty much why Clark Kent hasn't aged more than about a decade since his debut in 1939), and they understood that Captain Marvel lived on a world outside of all the other super heroes, and they knew that these different realities could occasionally interact with each other, providing that someone would be able to breach the vibrational hindrances between worlds.

New readers didn't understand it at all.

So, DC Comics decided to condense its history to one single Universe with only one continuity behind it. They did this in the "Crisis On Infinite Earths" storyline, a story which used a villain called "The Anti-Monitor" a monstrous life form from parallel realities composed entirely of antimatter. The Anti-Monitor wanted to destroy all of the positive matter Universes so that his universe could expand and fill the void, thus increasing his own power. But the positive matter Universes had The Anti-Monitor's twin, The Monitor, helping to rally the forces.

In the end, The Anti-Monitor almost succeeded in destroying all positive matter and recreating reality in his own image. However, he was stopped right before being able to destroy the last Universe, and a few well-placed explosions at the beginning of time were able to put pretty much the entire history of all the different realities (or, at least the five realities that were able to hold off the longest) into one single, easy to understand thread.

Having said all that, My "Christmas On Infinite Earths" title is meant to convey the same type of Earth-Shattering epic battles, but for some reason concentrated to Christmas time. I imagine that I'll have my main character, Dr. James Fate, trying to save Christmas from some menace ("The Anti-Marketer"? Nah, that's too obvious...), and rallying forces from all the different Christmas stories to do so. Ralphie can use his Red Rider BB Gun to hold off the forces, Jack Skelington can lend aid from Halloweentown, The Ghosts Of Christmas Past/Present/Future can use their time travelling abilities to help place troops where they need to be, I might as well incorporated all four dozen versions of Santa Claus into the same story just for the sake of ludicrous completeness, etc.

And that's the explanation. Probably more than you'd care to know, but I've always enjoyed rambling on about meaningless things.

Hi Affy

I enjoyed that.

I have a void in my comic knowledge. When I was a kid I enjoyed The Fanthom (?) the guy with a skeleton ring, Captain Mickey and Davey Crocket. Then came the times when one 'had' to read political books and comics (from the US) were decadent materialism. As a grown up I went for the European comics, the funny, the beautiful, the fantastic, the adventurous, the political, the social realistic - I skipped the superheroes. And only got to know them in my forties, when the two youngest kids got interested - in the cartoons on tv - the fab four(?) and comic books - Spiderman, Batman and Superman.

On our way home from Italy this autumn my daugther 18 showed me a book about the Marvel Universe and the history behind it. Interesting - but not really a part of the culture in Denmark. At least not in the circles I have moved in. When I was young and later on youngsters reading superhero comics were considered geeks or loosers as far as I remember.

Funny that, eh?

I'd say that the "geek/nerd" label is still applied these days, but it's not applied as strenuously. That's probably due to the work of people like Frank Miller (who I don't care for, but the world seems to love) in his works like Sin City, and Neil Gaiman (who I thoroughly enjoy) for showing that comics don't need to be about crimefighting and superpowers (something that the US understood in the early days of the medium, but was largely lost between the fifties and early eighties....coincidentally, about the same time that the geek/nerd label was most strenuously applied.

And I'm also a fan of the Davey Crocket books, though the name "Captain Mickey" only sounds vaguely familiar....Is The Fanthom a character who later became The Phantom? Kind of like a modern-age Zorro figure or something?

I think you would enjoy especially the French, Belgian and Italian comic artist. Very artistic drawings and good storylines. The adventures of Corto Maltese for instance (Italian).

Captain Mickey came in a small booklet like Davey Crocket, H 5 cm. W 13 (or something like that) - fits into a back pocket. A real 'goody' ranger of some sort in the US when a man was a man and a horse the best friend with a gun at second place. Cowboy-stuff really.

The Fanthom is the Phantom - I got the spelling wrong. The wandering spirit with dog and horse: http://www.tegneseriemuseet.dk/emner/fantomet.htm

The link is for the Danish Museum of Comics - if you scroll a bit down you can press the Union Jack and get some stuff in English.

Me. I like Modesty Blaise the best - not because of the drawing but of the stories. The books even better. They are very well written suspense novels with unique characters.

I like storylines as well, which is probably why I enjoy some of Neil Gaiman's work. It's probably also why I enjoy the science fiction stories out there as there's always an expansive amount of territory and a large list of characters for such stories to take place in.

It's probably also why I read Sluggy Freelance, but that's another issue entirely.

*Goes to check Neil Gaiman and figure out what Sluggy Freelance is*

I'll keep an eye out for Neil Gaiman - I know some of the artists works - the artists who have illustrated the stories all starting with a D.

I found Sluggy Freelance translated into Norvegian. I think I have to see more than one strip to get into the story.

The daily strip of Doonesbury is sent to my mail every day. I've been reading collections since I was 25-30 I think. It is fun to follow the developement of types I know from my life (student hippies etc.) - from young to above middleaged

Neil Gaiman's work is an aquired taste. He's capable of writing these fantastic, epic fairy tales. Unfortunately, he (or his artists) can often add gratuitous elements of language, violence or other such stuff that don't add to the story at all.

They might not necessarily detract, but it's still the type of thing that I wish he didn't include.

Sluggy Freelance is absolutely the kind of comic strip that you can't read just a single one of. If possible, start from the very beginning. That's the only way that you can be sure to know everything that's coming at you, and even then it might be difficult.

Although, the current story really isn't as connected to his other stories as possible, so you might potentially be able to just start from the beginning of this story (the beginning was better than this part, anyway).