WTF?!? Or, Adventures with the Infinite Crisis Audio Book

Yeah, you read that right.  An Infinite Crisis AUDIO book.

I stumbled on it while trawling the internets the other day, and I couldn’t not download it.  I’ve since started listening on the way to and from work and I have to say, it’s pretty damn weird, as you’d expect.

For a start, let me get this out of the way: I’ve read Infinite Crisis, and if I’m honest I didn’t get it.  I filed it away in my mind as one of those silly DC stories that was a bit too convoluted for its own good.  This was a while ago and I have to say, the audio book version is much easier to understand.

This is how it works: it seems to be a sort of novelisation of the comic, complete with character descriptions and brief little backstories on the stuff that’s happening.  Trust me, as a novice DC reader, the backstories help a LOT to pull you into the story.  As a result, the audio book probably moves a bit slower than the comic (I don’t really remember it well enough to compare accurately), but it – so far – works better for it.  Decompression like this helps to establish the characters and their motivations and it’s actually doing a pretty decent job of building up the impending catastrophe.

But this is much more than a mere audio book.  This is a ‘movie in your mind’.  That’s right.  Like a movie, this thing has actors playing all the parts (Batman sounds like he’s got laryngitis and Superboy is a whiny little bitch), it has a musical score (like something from an early ‘90s cartoon series – especially the cringe-worthy tune I can only think of as the ‘Kent Farm Hoedown’) and it has – perhaps most importantly – SOUND EFFECTS.

The sound effects are cheesy and stupid, but awesome at the same time, and they make what could have been something really boring and ridiculous into something fun and ridiculous.  Whether it’s Nightwing’s near-sexual grunt as he hoists himself onto a building or Superboy-Prime’s bitchin’ heat vision whoosh, the sound effects make this thing.

I can imagine being enthralled by this as a kid, but I’m sure I’ll get bored pretty soon once the space-magic starts seeping in…

In the meantime, I’m going to thoroughly enjoy drunken Bill Cosby turning into an OMAC and the wooden narrator’s pervy descriptions of female characters.  Comedy gold.