Bear with me: There’s a story before the story to this one.
1985: DC Comics publishes Crisis on Infinite Earths. Before the series is even over, DC announces a follow-up: Crisis on Captive Earth (note the singular). CCE is slated to be drawn by Jerry Ordway and written by my favorite comic book writer, Paul Levitz. Needless to say, I’m psyched!
1986: Crisis on Captive Earth never happens. Instead, DC publishes Legends, written by Len Wein and John Ostrander, with art by new Marvel expat John Byrne. What happened to CCE? Who knows?1
Now, look — if you don’t know anything about the original Crisis series, it’s beyond the purview of this humble BLog to educate you. Hie thee to Wikipedia, if you must. Suffice it to say, while I loved the series itself, I was less sanguine about the repercussions, which winnowed down the incredible DC multiverse to a single universe and timeline. This, I did not like.
Thus, in 1986, at the tender age of 15 and disappointed both in the ending of the original Crisis and the lack of a Levitz follow-up, I conjured…Crisis on Captive Earths (note, this time, the plural).
And now, decades later, I’ve found my notes for it.
It appears that I kept adding to the notes, probably through college, when I got my first Mac and committed it all to disk.
I’ve cleaned up what follows because in many cases the notes were scattered throughout the document and while I could follow the story that way because I know how my brain works (sort of), I figured a more linear presentation would be best for public consumption. I tried to present an honest version of what I wrote back then, but inevitably, some of present-day me will creep in.
I will also occasionally drop in via footnote to give context if I think it’s interesting, needed, or just amusing. There are bits of dialogue I wrote (forgive me) and I will reproduce them as-is (again, forgive me).
There are seven issues in total (and, thus, there will be seven posts): a prologue and epilogue, with five issues in between.
On Twitter, I referred to this story as a sequel to the original Crisis, but it’s more accurately something like half a reboot.
Let me explain.
In Crisis, the infinite earths are whittled down to five, and then those five are merged into one.
In my Captive Earths, I imagine instead that the five earths remained extant. That in the battle at the Dawn of Time seen in Crisis on Infinite Earths #10, the Spectre is able to defeat the Anti-Monitor decisively and protect the remaining earths, though at the expense of his very existence. Thus, the status quo when my series opens: Five parallel worlds, wracked by the horrors of the Crisis, trying to recover from a universes-shattering event, still partly connected and suffering from the overlap.
Here you go, from my fevered teen brain to you; I present…
Prologue — The World to Come
The thirtieth century2 is devastated from the events of the Crisis on Infinite Earths, including the critical moments at the Dawn of Time when the Spectre wrestled with the Anti-Monitor for the fate of the multiverse. In the aftermath of that battle, the Anti-Monitor was defeated, though at the expense of the Spectre’s existence. The heroes present at the Dawn of Time — including the members of the Legion of Super-Heroes — have found themselves flung back to their home eras and dimensions.
At the thirtieth century’s Time Institute, Rond Vidar attempts to catalog and quantify the massive changes to the time/space continuum created by the Crisis and its multi-pronged temporal attack. Vidar was not present at the Dawn of Time, but his research and discussion with the Legionnaires has filled in many of the details. He has learned that the remaining parallel worlds — Earths 1, 2, S, X, and 4 — are still interlocked, though their merging has halted and the time glitches that plagued them seem to have stopped.
For now.
While the devastation to the thirtieth century has been horrific, it pales in comparison to the rest of the timestream, thanks mainly to the existence of the Time Beacon and the Infinite Man (as chronicled in Legion of Super-Heroes Volume III, #173). Rond’s efforts to piece together a chronology of the Crisis are hampered by the havoc along the timestream and also by the absence of Brainiac 5, who is in mourning for the death of Supergirl.
Hoping to comfort his friend and also to get Brainy back to work on the problem of quantifying the changes to the timestream and their implications for Rond’s ongoing time travel research, Rond goes to Legion headquarters, where he and Mon-El discuss the Crisis and potential ways to get Brainiac 5 “back on board.” Rond enlists Mon-El in his efforts, since Mon is a veritable treasure-trove of first-hand historical experience, having personally witnessed an entire millennium.4
It’s also, Rond figures, a good way to keep Mon-El’s mind off of the death of Supergirl, which is bothering all Legionnaires, but hitting Mon-El particularly hard.
As the two begin their research (commandeering Brainy’s lab), they begin to find strange temporal glitches. Are these “bleed-throughs” from the other alternate earths, or the result of permanent damage to the timestream? One such glitch is in the form of an image preserved from the late twentieth century, purporting to show a gathering of super-heroes, including members of the Justice League…and an old Coluan.
Rond and Mon-El figure that the mysterious Coluan is the perfect way to get Brainiac 5 interested again. There are no previous records of Coluan contact with Earth so early in history (save for the original Brainiac robot), and this is just the sort of thing that should jump-start Brainiac 5’s curiosity.
To their chagrin, Brainy seems completely uninterested in the old image, dismissing it and them.
Later, Rond returns to the Time Institute…only to discover that his work has been destroyed, his records ransacked. Even his Time Cube — outdated and obsolete, kept around purely for nostalgia — has been destroyed.
At the same time, Mon-El comes upon Brainiac 5 in the Legion lab, where he is packing equipment into one of the time bubbles. Mon-El asks what Brainy is up to.
BRAINIAC 5: Mon-El, you’re aware of the serum I created that keeps you alive.
MON-EL: That’s a stupid— Of course I am…
BRAINIAC 5 (tapping buttons on his belt): I built in a deactivation mechanism, just in case.
MON-EL: I don’t—
BRAINIAC 5: And I just activated it.5
Mon-El collapses in agony. Just before he falls into a coma from massive lead poisoning, he sees Brainy hop into one of the time bubbles. Then, as the bubble fades into the timestream, the other time bubbles all explode, along with the rest of the lab, leaving Mon-El dying amid the wreckage.
End Prologue
More soon!
(BTW: Look, the only reward I will ever get for this thing that I’ve carried in my brain since childhood is people looking at it. So if you have friends you think might get a kick out of it, please point them in this direction! Teen Barry thanks you, and so do I.)
- Actually, I kinda know. And somewhere around here, I have Levitz and Ordway’s pitch documents for the series, which someone smuggled out of DC for me years ago…
- Well, duh, of course I was going to start this whole thing with the Legion…
- Yes, I actually included this citation in the original document. Wow. What a nerd!
- Mon-El was stuck in the Phantom Zone for 1,000 years. Yeah, it sucked.
- Yes, this is incredibly clumsy dialogue! And the use of “activate” to describe something that deactivates something else is just… 🤦♂️