Exclusive: Marc Guggenheim and Marv Wolfman Share a First Look at Crisis On Infinite Earths Tie-In Comic

The Plan

"We started talking to DC about doing this as we were breaking 'Crisis,'" Guggenheim told us. "I should have taken a note of when the first meeting was, but it was quite a while ago. This has been in the works for quite some time. As we were breaking the crossover, we knew that we were doing the comic, so the two were able to get generated in tandem with each other. A lot of teams you do a tie-in and it's an afterthought. Here it all went together in lockstep."

Wolfman added, "It allows for us to tell a much larger story. This is integral to the entire storyline."

And while reading 100-Page Giant will not necessarily be required for everyone watching the crossover at home, it is not just "here's now the crossover impacted people who you'll never see." There are appearances by The Flash, The Monitor, Lex Luthor, Batwoman, and other characters who will play key roles in the Crisis on the small screen.

In one of the preview pages, seen above, Pariah appears on a world that is about to be destroyed -- and it looks suspiciously like DC's "New 52" Earth -- the world created following the events of Flashpoint. That world is more or less the main DC continuity -- albeit with some significant tweaks following another couple of event series titled Convergence and DC Universe: Rebirth.

The inclusion of these characters in the one-shot, though, means fans get a canonical Arrowverse Wonder Woman, Aquaman, and Green Lantern -- even if it seems unlikely we will ever see them onscreen.

Earth-2a?

In another preview page, which you can see below, one of the worlds targeted for elimination appears to be the Earth inhabited by the Superman and Lois Lane from the Fleischer cartoons of the '40s. Not quite the Earth-2/"original" Superman from the pre-Crisis on Infinite Earths era of the comics, this is nevertheless a pretty close approximation, given that he's still "leaping tall buildings in a single bound" rather than flying.

Even the design of the Metropolis cityscape veers toward the art deco look that helped make those cartoons look so dynamic -- and here, we get to see a pre-Jimmy Olsen reality, where Lois used to take her own photos.

Of course, as you can see, Pariah (and the antimatter wave) were there too, apparently both linking the Arrowverse to the Fleischer cartoons and eradicating Earth-Fleischer in a fell swoop. Oof.

Pariah

This issue will explore a little bit of Pariah's sentence -- which seems to be a little more like the comics than anything we have seen so far from Nash Wells, the odds-on favorite to become Pariah within the TV miniseries, especially since every episode of the Arrowverse shows this week ended with Wells seemingly enveloped by energy while confronting The Monitor (or was it the Anti-Monitor? We will find out soon).

The designs for most of the characters are pretty spot-on, and while this looks more like comics Pariah than it does Tom Cavanagh, the costume tweaks made for TV are pretty well-represented in the art.

Pariah, like The Monitor, was created by Wolfman and artist George Perez for the original Crisis -- but the writer says that he knows better than to be precious about the changes made to the source material.

"Because of I've been doing comics, animation, and video games, I do versions f these characters -- some of which I created -- for totally different markets, and I write them in a totally different style," Wolfman explained. "When I'm plugged into the CW shows in my head, that's what I'm writing. I'm not even thinking of a character that I may have created. My job is to do their version of it, so I never even consider it."

Enter Felicity

A character he did not create, but who plays a key role in the comic, is Felicity Smoak. Since Emily Bett Rickards left Arrow at the end of season seven, the final season has been a balancing act -- mentioning and alluding to the main character's wife while skirting around the fact that we haven't seen her in months.

All that ends here -- but Felicity doesn't look happy about it. Just like the last time she saw The Monitor, she's not having any of his cryptic BS...and she isn't alone this time, with The Ray also not especially pleased with the situation he finds himself in.

Wolfman says that he has been following the Arrowverse from the very beginning and considers himself a big fan of the series. He was excited to co-write not just this comic book but also the Arrow hour of "Crisis on Infinite Earths" with Guggenheim.

"I've been a fan since the first one, and I've seen every episode of every show," Wolfman told ComicBook.com. "The CW is doing the characters that I grew up with, the way I love to see them, with a lot of fun and a lot of silliness and a lot of good storytelling and characters."

Earth-X

A trip to Earth-X, where the Freedom Fighters are still taking on Nazis and the skies are red, likely means that things are not going to go well for anybody there. The Ray will appear in the series, but apparently after being plucked from his natural habitat.

This probably means that, barring some kind of minor miracle, we won't get another season of Freedom Fighters: The Ray on CW Seed, and while that's a bummer, it's hard to mourn the end of "Earth-Nazi."

"I think you have to have the end of a bunch of universes in order for Crisis to be Crisis," Guggenheim admitted. "You can't do an adaptation of The Infinity Gauntlet without the Infinity Gauntlet. That being said, our endgame — no pun intended — didn't have to involve a rebooting or a restructuring or a 'fixing' of the Arrowverse. When I met with all the showrunners, I basically said listen, while we don't have work to do in terms of cleaning up continuity, we do have, because of the nature of the story that we're telling, an opportunity tot make whatever radical changes that we want to make. Think of this story as a magic ticket, and pretty much anything you ant to see coming out of Crisis we can probably narratively make happen. So it wasn't so much a burden of fixing something, it was the freedom of being able to change whatever we wanted to change. I don't think we went crazy, but the original Crisis comic apart from just rebooting the DC canon or the DC Universe, also put a lot of new toys in the toy chest. Doctor Light and Wildcat, Lady Quark. Even ultimately what became Superboy Prime. Crisis did more than just clean things up, it put new pieces in play, and that was something we were very interested in doing."

A classic cover

As previously announced, the two-issue miniseries will not just tell a new story set in the world of the Arrowverse Crisis, but it will also feature both reprint material from the comics and a backup story featuring Jon Cryer's Lex Luthor, who first appeared on Supergirl and will play a significant role in "Crisis on Infinite Earths" in the comics.

"Jon Cryer's Luthor basically gets the idea to do what he does in hour two of the crossover from that story, so it all ties together really neatly," Guggenheim said. "The Superman story is really so much fun. To see all those Luthors and all this Supermen together, it's fun for any comic book fan -- and knowing how impossible that would be in live action, this is a real treat."

On top of that, Guggenheim said, he was impressed with both how Wolfman handled Felicity Smoak and the Cryer Lex.

"I gotta tell you, Marv writes an incredible Jon Cryer Lex Luthor," Guggenheim teased. "Just has his voice completely nailed, and you'll see that also in the live action version as well."

"Crisis on Infinite Earths" kicks off on Sunday, December 8 on Supergirl, runs through a Monday episode of Batwoman and that Tuesday's episode of The Flash. That will be the midseason cliffhanger, as the shows go on hiatus for the holidays and return on January 14 to finish out the event with the midseason premiere of Arrow and a "special episode" of DC's Legends of Tomorrow, which launches as a midseason series this year and so will not have an episode on the air before the Crisis. Black Lightning's midseason finale will have a "Crisis" tie-in as well, although unofficially.