Millennium Index Of Death

In 1987, DC released an 8-part weekly event title called Millennium. As you'd expect, it involved cross-overs with many regular titles, 37 to be precise. The following year, they put out a handy 2 issue index guide to the series and all it's crossovers. Every single character appearance in every single comic is recorded in excruciating detail.

Here's the summary for Firestorm #67

It starts off innocently enough with the usual credits you'd expect from such a thing.

Then it covers the main character, in an interesting, if slightly disturbing, amount of detail.

It's the kind of thing I could imagine doing for a character that I was totally fanatical for, but keep in mind someone had to do this for 45 comics all up.

Then it's on to the guest stars, and given the scope of the series, it's a long list.

Good to know, but now things start to get scary:

Noting character appearances between pages seems like it would've been totally frustrating. But that's not all...

Yes, something that happens in Firestorm #67, actually takes place between panels on a page in Millennium. I don't know what's worse, the idea that they planned things with this much detail in advance, or the idea that they didn't, and someone had to piece it all together after all was said and done. But we're not quite done here:

"Behind The Scenes" means literally that. The characters do not appear in Firestorm #67, but they're still included in the index, because they obviously had to be doing something while Flame-top was doing his thing. That's pretty insane. They could basically have included "The Entire World" in that entry.

"Somewhere, behind the scenes, Darkseid is up to no good"

The question of how much planning actually went in to this is raised again near the end, with this:

OOOOPPPSS! CONTINUITY BREAKDOWN! Someone forgot to tell the artist Salakk wasn't at the meeting. Bugger. Nansi Hoolahan also gets a big neon sign over her head saying "I screwed up" for colouring Salakk white. The picture of Salakk is tiny, I'm sure noone would've noticed.