Infinite Crisis "Novelization"

Pal Bombasticus threw down the gauntlet, challenging all comers to "novelize" Infinite Crisis. He sweetened the pot by offering up the treasury edition big format 1970s comic of each entrant's choice as an incentive. With such glory on the line, who could possibly resist.

So, without further ado (and with tremendous apologies [and most especially to Mr. Yeats] to all for the liberties taken, and the lines intentionally misinterpreted in the interest of appropriating a good image), I present:

The Infinite Coming

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;



The best lack all convictions,


while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.


Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight:


a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs,

while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?