Infinite odds and ends

Suprising dearth of reactions to Infinite Crisis itself across the blogosphere today (or am I just looking in the wrong place?). I won't get to read a copy for a few days-to-a-few weeks now, but in response to a challenge Jeffrey posed a little while back, I'm going to read the first issue of Infinite Crisis having read nearly none of the lead-in, and see how much of it I can understand. A little test of DC's Infinite Crisis accessibility, if you will.

To that end, I'm going to list at the bottom of this post all the things I do know about Infinite Crisis already, so as to weigh against what I don't know when I read the first issue. So, if you're a true wait-for-trader, and you know absolutely nothing about the DC Universe in the past couple of years, don't read the bottom of this post — SPOILERS ABOUND!

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Meanwhile, I've updated the DC Comics trade paperback timeline to include the forthcoming January and Feburary 2006 DC trades. The whole OMAC Project/Superman: Sacrifice/Superman: Strange Attractors/Wonder Woman: The Land of the Dead interconnectedness was a puzzle all in its own.

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Without further ado ... What Collected Editions Already Knows about Infinite Crisis:

• Maxwell Lord restarted Checkmate, used OMACs, created by Batman, to spy on heroes (why, I'm not sure), and killed Blue Beetle when he found out about it.
• Wonder Woman killed Maxwell Lord when he took over Superman's mind; Superman got mad at Wonder Woman for it.
• Booster Gold went up against Maxwell Lord, and then went back to the future.
• Sasha Bordeaux, who worked for Checkmate, might be dead.
• There's a while lot of OMACs out there.
• Rocket Red got killed somehow, maybe by an OMAC.
• Jean Loring became the new Eclipso, and teamed up with the Spectre to rid the world of magic; a group of heroes called the Shadowpact — including Blue Devil, Ragman, and Detective Chimp — tried to stop them.
• Rann and Thanagar had a war, and Omar Synn (or something like that — a Hawkman villain) was the cause.
• I think the Rann/Thanagar War caused some cosmic event that a newly-returned Donna Troy and some other heroes (Supergirl, Green Lantern, Firestorm, Starfire) are going in to space to deal with.
• Hawkman died, but apparently he's back.
• Green Arrow had some trouble with Dr. Light.
• A bunch of villains got together — they're either called the Cabal or the Secret Society. Maybe the Cabal and the Secret Society fought (this list is getting more and more punchy as I go on). There's someone pulling the strings called Mockingbird, who might be Lex Luthor, the Joker, or maybe the alternate-Earth Alexander Luthor.
• Some figures from Crisis on Infinite Earths have returned, including the Psycho Pirate.
• Power Girl learned her true origin; she might have been brought from Earth-2 by the Psycho Pirate.
• Batman knows about the JLA mind-wiping him.
• The JLA fought Despero, the Watchtower was destroyed, something happened to J'onn J'onzz, and the JLA has been disbanded.
• The Kryptonite remnants from Supergirl's asteroid are now in the possession of Jason Todd, the Red Hood.
• The Teen Titans and the Outsiders fought Superboy, controlled by Lex Luthor; Superboy came out of it OK, but I think Indigo is gone now.
• The Birds of Prey left Gotham (maybe they've gone to an island?); I think Barbara Gordon regained a little bit of feeling in her legs.
• The Flash got his kids back (and maybe Barry Allen came back for a while?).
• Catwoman may have had her personality altered by Zatanna.

OK, I think that's it. Now PLEASE, don't tell me if I'm right or wrong. I'm going to go into reading Infinite Crisis with this knowledge (admitedly, substantially more than I'd like), and I'll let you know what I understand and what I don't in the first issue. There may be some reviews here on Collected Editions in the meantime, but I'll get to Infinite Crisis eventually, I promise.

Hey, have an infinite day!