Spending Some Time in the Source Material

I spent some time going through my comic collection in the last month or two, sorting things and selling some older books on EBay. My collection includes Crisis on Infinite Earths #2-12; I am missing issue 1 for some reason (no idea if I ever owned it). This morning, I read through four or five issues and skimmed the rest and... wow. It's a lot. The pacing is really, really (really) fast, and worlds are just constantly getting wiped out. I get that it's the point, and I guess I'd have to put myself back in 1985 to appreciate the emotional weight of watching these worlds that you've read for decades get wiped out, but it's just a LOT. That, and a lot of it is redundant; I feel like it's the same emotional beats repeatedly, watching this hopeless battle play out. 

I'm saying I didn't love it. I was kinda hoping to be more impressed and inspired by it than I was. I understand that 2025 me is a bit more discriminating than 1985 me, but still. 40 years is a bit of time, and I obviously know a bit more about storytelling and pacing and those sorts of things than I did in middle school (you'd hope). All that said, it felt reading it more like an event than a story. It was trying to be a story, but it knew that it was an event. I recently sold the complete run of Secret Wars (same era) on EBay, and had paged through that as well before shipping it off - it wasn't quite this compressed. Secret Wars had a more manageable cast (of course), and a smaller scope, so it gets a pass for having to accomplish less with the same amount of room. It had more breathing space to tell a story.

I was expecting to get more I could beg/borrow/steal for Cataclysm Across the Cosmos, but it really didn't give me a lot. However, it did help me to decide that I'm going to go ahead and layer the Public Domain characters into my own world as well (and you can layer them into yours. Feel free). Ever since I moved backward from the 21st century to the 1980s as my default setting, I've known a few things are going to happen in Doc's future - one of these is that Echo City eventually becomes the main city of the game world. In previous iterations of the game, Meridian falls entirely during an alien invasion and becomes a toxic wasteland. I don't think I want to go there anymore, but I do like the idea that Echo City is directly impacted by the Cataclysm; the city is completely changed by the Cataclsym, its entire history and character changed. It's the more 'pulp' city anyway, and these characters largely have a pulp background, so just making it into a giant pulp action comics playground seems like a decent way to go. If Meridian is Metropolis (Doc's city, first and foremost), then Echo City becomes more like Marvel's NYC where everyone else just happens to be... and a place where I can maybe establish the next great team of heroes that includes a mix of my own original characters and PD characters as I've re-imagined them.