Crisis on Infnite Earths?

Cafe Society
1

OK, I’m not at all a comics reader. As akid, I tried comics briefly, but they frustrated me because any given comic took about a minute to read, and then you had to wait for the next issue to move the story along. Too much waiting, too little story. Books were way better.

Several times, though, I’ve heard some reference to this “Criss on Infinite Earths” thin as some major events in the world of superhero comics.

Because of TV and movies, I’m familiar with many of the obvious superheros and their stories.

Can someone distill the “Crisis” explanation into something I can follow, given my paucity of background study?

2

Wikipedia has 12 million entires, 11 million of them on comic books. Start there.

Crisis on Infinite Earths.

That series was 23[!] years ago, though, and is as obsolete as the ether theory for today’s continuity.

3

The first DC super-hero comics arrived in the late 1930s, and were set in then-contemporary times. Superman, Batman, The Flash, Wonder Woman, Green Lantern, and many others date from this period.

By the late 1940s the popularity of super-hero comics had waned in favor of lurid crime and horror comics.

Super-heroes were revived in the mid-late 1950s, but many were updated. There was a new Flash, set in a different city, with a different costume, civilian name, and origin story. Same with Green Lantern and many other characters. Similar, but different, and this time set in the 1950s. Some kept their civilian name but were changed in other ways, like Clark Kent’s newspaper changing from the Daily Star to the Daily Planet.

In time these discrepancies were explained thusly: The 1930s heroes and the 1950s heroes both existed, but were in parallel dimensions. Earth-1, Earth-2, etc.

By the 1980s the parallel worlds had become a storytelling crutch, and there were several dozen of them. DC thought this was confusing people and preventing new readers from picking up their books (“What, there are two Batmen? One Superman is married to Lois but another one isn’t?!”), so in 1985-1986 a 12-issue miniseries was published, titled Crisis On Infinite Earths.

The story told by the miniseries collapsed the “multiverse” of infinite dimensions back into a single dimension preserving the most popular characters and story elements of the former regime. Some of the discarded characters were killed during the story (most notably, The Flash (Barry Allen’s version) and Supergirl); some of the characters were simply “unhappened.”

Then over the next few years Superman, Batman, etc. saw their comics “rebooted” and their mythologies reset.

4

And since then, DC has been falling all over themselves undoing as much of it as they possibly can.

Because, like many fandoms, it seems that a large number of comic book fans don’t like change. They want things to be like they were before the Crisis (e.g. Luthor, the criminal scientist who hates Superman because he blames him for the loss of his hair). Of course, they can’t do it all, but they’re doing as much as they can.

5

Real world stuff:

From the mid 60s, until 1986, DC comics had a multiverse - the main characters lived on Earth-1, the Golden Age characters on Earth-2, evil versions on Earth-3, Captain Marvel on Earth-S, the Nazis won WWII on Earth-X, etc.

In the 80s, they were flagging behind Marvel in sales, and decided that part of it was the Multiverse making it hard for new readers. (Whether this is the case or not is debatable, but DC believed it at the time.) Crisis (named for many of the crossovers using the Multiverse, which were often titled Crisis on Earth-Whatever) was an attempt to clean that up without just saying ‘we’re starting over’ and chucking everything.

Plot stuff:

The story of CoIE, simply stated, involved a villain named the Anti-Monitor attempting to destroy all of the matter universes and incorporate them into the anti-matter universe. His opposite number, the Monitor, recruits heroes and villains from multiple universes to prevent him from succeeding. Though Anti-Monitor recruited allies of his own - specifically the Psycho Pirate.

This involved two things - combining the five universes which hadn’t yet been destroyed (1, 2, 4 (home of the recently acquired Charlton characters), S and X) into one, which could be protected from the anti-Monitor, and, of course, defeating the anti-Monitor. The first task involves teams sent to various periods in time (the age of Atlantis, the old west, Kamandi’s future, the 30th century), to set up ‘tuning forks’ to allow the merger.

Both tasks were successful, but the Monitor’s group suffered casualties (including the Monitor himself) - Supergirl of Earth-1 and Barry Allen, the Silver Age Flash being the most famous.

In the end, there was one unified universe, but several characters - Superman and Lois Lane of Earth-2, Superboy of Earth-Prime and Alexander Luthor of Earth-3, found themselves with no place in this world, so they sealed themselves in an alternate dimension they perceived as heaven. (This would later be revealed to have been a major mistake on their part, but not for 20 years.)

Eventually, only one man, the Psycho Pirate, remembered the Multiverse.

Back to the real world:

It actually took some time for the post-Crisis universe to gel - Superman, who got the most thorough reboot, had a whole year before they stopped doing stories clearly (in hindsight) set on Earth-1, and other characters - Hawkman, Power Girl, the Legion of Super-heroes being the most glaring examples - would go for a decade or more before the wrinkles were ironed out. (It was so bad for Hawkman, he was declared ‘radioactive’ for a few years.)

But, the post-Crisis universe was as coherent as super-hero universes ever are, and made the universe more or less what DC wanted it to be at the time (jettisoning the sillier aspects of the Silver Age, and the multiverse, while maintaining some continuity with what came before), so, it was, at least at first, a success. And, hey, it gave them an excuse to retell some classic stories.

6

I enjoy reading about comic books more so than I enjoy reading them (in fact, the recent Whedon-sanctioned and -involved 8th and 6th seasons of Buffy and Angel, respectively, are the only comics I’ve ever really collected), so I was thrilled to find Scott Tipton’s Comics 101.

He gives a pretty good explanation of the Crisis in this article, parts one and two. After you read that, and when you get a chance, you should dig through the rest of the archives; he has some very interesting articles.

7

Awesome. Very clear.

Thanks!!

8

I actually did a comic summary of this a few months ago. It covers a bit more than just Crisis on Infinite Earths but it’s an overview of the changes that DC comics continuity went through.

9

Aww, I didn’t get to answer the COIE question…

10

A nerd question asked at the Dope? You must get up much, much earlier in the morning, my friend.

11

Of course, they then muddied things even further than the normal timeline of comic book continuity could with Infinite Crisis in 2005-2006.

Frankly, I thought the idea that all of the continuity problems since COIE were caused by Superboy pounding his fists on the dimensional bubble was sillier than pretty much anything they’d done in the Silver Age…

12

I quit reading comics years before that but I thought this notion was freakin’ hilarious. You gotta love a company that figures out the whackiest “Get Out of Jail Free” card imaginable.

13

jayjay:

I don’t know, “the Rainbow Batman” has to be up there.

14

I like it. It’s silly, sure, but it makes sense in context. For “a wizard did it” explanation of retcons, it serves fine.

And Superboy-Prime himself has become a really bitchslap to certain segments of the fan population. Whiny, angry, convinced that nothing since his childhood is worth saving and that no one but himself knows what’s right. Obsessed with these characters, yet seemingly despises them. Exactly like some fans, except for the fact that instead of writing angry flames on the internet, he dismembers Teen Titans.

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And really, isn’t that what we all want?

:smiley:

16

Raven and Beast Boy, sure.

I still miss Kole, though (to drag the thread kicking and screaming back to COIE). I thought she had a lot of potential and it was just wasted when she was.

17

I saw an interview with Geoff Jones about Legion of Three Worlds on, IIRC, Newsarama, where the interview turned to Prime (who Geoff insisted on calling Superboy, despite DC not being able to use that name, claiming it was because it’d piss Prime off), and the interviewer kept trying to get him to admit that.

It was a laugh, because he never could pin Geoff down and get him to say ‘yes, Prime is an avatar for wanky fanboys’, though he also never explicitly denied it, just dodged the question. It was a pretty obvious case of ‘oh, yes, exactly, but do you think I’m stupid enough to admit it and give them something else to wank about?’

(Given the reaction to Reflecto from Waid’s Legion, I can’t say I blame him on that.)

18

It’s ok. Will you feel better if I ask you to explain Hawkman’s continuity?* :slight_smile:

*Kidding. That thing’s a trainwreck. Fun character, though.