In this thread, references are made to DC comics, long after I stopped reading comics several decades ago. (I stopped reading DC comics in the early sixties, and stopped reading Marvel around the end of that decade, after having bought the first few dozen issues of Spiderman and Fantastic Four, and having had them thrown away for me as a courtesy by helpful adults, but that’s another story). In any case, I don’t understand all this talk about Hamburger-Prime, alternate universes, characters who died reviving themselves, or any of this stuff. I suppose this is covered in some Wiki articles, but that’s just too much trivia for me to absorb in one reading, so can someone sum up all this hocus-pocus, and explain the major concepts I would have to absorb to understand what’s been going on in the conceptions of DC comics since the 1960s? I think I left off reading around the time Batman got shrunk and started cleaning up Kandor under a pseudonym–or was that Superman?
Short (ha!) version:
Super-Hero comics pretty much died at the end of the '40s. Superman/Batman/Wonder Woman where pretty much all that were left.
In the mid/late '50s, DC decided to start super-heroes again. They started with Flash, but rather than reviving the old character (Jay Garrick), they created a new guy (Barry Allen) and said that Barry had grown up reading all the adventures of the old guy in comic books. The new Flash was a mega-hit, a new Green Lantern (who was patterned on the Lensman books by Doc Smith, unlike the old Green Lantern who was based on Aladdin), a new Hawkman (space-cop, old Hawkman was a reincarnated Egyptian prince) and so on. Meanwhile, Superman was getting revamped and the whole Kryptonian mythology was being created (prior to this, Krypton was a planet of “super-science” and “advanced people”. Nothing else.)
These revamped titles were huge and issued in the “Silver Age” of comics. Turns out, though, that DC started getting letters from fans (and they were unaware that there WERE fans who cared about the characters, rather than treating the books as disposable–Roy Thomas, who went on to be a major writer for DC was one) started asking about the “old” Flash.
About 4 years after the new Flash got his own book, the new Flash while entertaining orphans, “vibrated his atoms to a new frequency” so he could become invisible. Turns out, he actually changed his “vibrational frequency” and ended up on a parallel world–where the adventures of the “old” Flash actually happened. The two Flashes teamed up and the book sold out. Since the first trip was from the new-Flash’s world to the old-Flash’s world, the new guy’s world was called “Earth-1” and the old guy’s world “Earth-2”. They teamed up again about 8 issues later and in the back, the editors published a picture of a bunch of the old golden age characters. Reader interest was so high, that they brought back a bunch more Earth-2 characters and started having yearly team ups.
continued…
part 2…
About 3 years after the first crossover, a third world was “discovered” (they discovered us, actually)–Earth-3: it was a world where everything was backwards: Europe, with the help of noble Benedict Arnold freed itself from the tyrannical rule of the United States. Failed politician Abe Lincoln shot noted orater John Wilkes Booth. And all the super-heroes were evil. A big fight ensued between the evil Earth-3 characters and the good guys from Earths 1 & 2. Earth-3 wouldn’t show up again for about 18 years.
Another Earth showed up in the late '60s–ours. “Earth Prime” was where WE live. The conceit was that Flash (earth-1) was able to get here–to OUR world–and no-one believes it’s him. It was a nifty story and should have been left at that. It showed up for two more decent stories and after that, two more terrible stories from a yutz of a writer who Didn’t Get It. (He complained that Earth-Prime wasn’t really us since Flash never was REALLY here. We, he said, were Earth “Real” and Earth-Prime was just a world that looks exactly like us, except that Flash went there. :rolleyes: )
In the early '70s, DC began buying other companies that had gone out of business in the '50s. They acquired the “Quality Comics” (Uncle Sam, The Ray, Doll Man, The Human Bomb, Phantom Lady, Plastic Man) line and set them on Earth-X. The reason we’d stopped reading their adventures after WWII is that on Earth-X, the Nazis won. The Earth-1 and Earth-2 characters helped the Earth-X characters finally beat the Nazis in the '70s and Earth-X wasn’t mentioned again until the mid '80s.
Earth-S was for the Fawcett Comics characters (Captain Marvel). This one showed up fairly regularly.
There were other earths that showed up from time to time, or were obvious errors, but really there were only 6 earths that showed up with any frequency: 1,2,3,S,X and Prime. And of those, only Earth 2 showed up on anything approaching a once-a-year basis.
Continued…
Part 3 (I told you “HA!” when I said this was short, didn’t I? 
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Despite only having to worry about 6 Earths at most, and all with distinct characters (despite the characters on Earths 1 and 2 having the same names, most of them had dramatically different costumes and many of them had different powers–only Superman 1 & 2 and Wonder Woman 1 & 2 could be confused–also the naming scheme made it easy–if the world was numbered 1/2/3, there was a Superman/Batman/Wonder Woman parallel character. If the world was lettered S/X/Prime, there weren’t parallel characters.) there were a few problems:
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Some writers (Bob Haney) Didn’t Get It and would do stories with say, Batman (Earth 1) teaming up with Wildcat (Earth 2) with no explanation. But he’d also do stories with Batman (Earth 1) fighting alongside Sgt. Rock (Earth 2) against the Nazis in 1942. Eventually, fans and DC comics came to an unspoken agreement that most of Bob Haney’s stories were set on “Earth-B”–not a “real” parallel earth, just a dumping ground for his stories that made no sense.
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Another writer (Gerry Conway) couldn’t keep them all straight and hated the concept of Earth-Prime. He bitched and moaned and made a case that everything was just too confusing for new readers. A number of other DC staffers voiced the same concern. This was early '80s and Marvel was kicking DC’s ass in terms of sales and the Powers That Be at DC were desperate enough to listen. They decided they’d set up a 4 year plan to simplify/clean-up their universe (I still say it wasn’t that complicated, but…they didn’t ask me
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They set a guy up to read every comic DC had ever published (along with the companies they’d acquired) and make a list of every single character. Meanwhile, about 4 years before they set the start of their clean-up project, they had a character named The Monitor show up all over the place…he’d appear everywhere–even the westerns/cowboy books, the WWII books, etc. Since this was before the internet, no one knew what the hell was going on. It was really pretty cool.
A month or so before the big event (now called “The Crisis On Infinite Earths” (and referred to as “The Crisis”)), the sky in all the books turned red–with no explanation.
Until the first issue of Crisis was published. Turns out a wall of anti-matter was eating it’s way through the parallel universes, destroying them. The book opens with Lex Luthor of Earth-3 (the backwards evil=good Earth) and his wife, Lois Lane-Luthor shooting their infant son off in a rocket ship to another parallel universe before their world is destroyed. The Monitor grabbed the Luthor baby and explained that the evil Anti-Monitor was destroying all the positive matter universes. The short (HA!!!) version was that to save the remaining universes, the Monitor squooshed them into one single universe with a new history.
It was a gutsty series. They killed off Supergirl and Flash (Earth-1) along with a bunch of secondary characters—and made major players of some minor characters. They weren’t afraid to shake up the status quo.
This rebooted the DC universe. Everything before this event was pre-Crisis, everything after was post-Crisis. And with a few exceptions, no-one remembered the pre-Crisis history or universe and no-one survived the Crisis untouched*
And DC had a fresh, clean start in a shiny new universe. Right?
Wrong…
Continued…
*Except the Superman of Earth-2 (who is the guy who first appeared in Action Comics #1), Superboy of Earth-Prime (don’t ask), Lois Lane of Earth 2 and the Luthor baby (Alex) who all went to heaven…or so we thought…
I don’t read comics all that often these days. When I do I sometimes have a hard time figuring out which panel is supposed to come next so I read them out of order and things don’t make sense. This most commonly happens with textless action panels but it happens with word bubbles too.
The Post-Crisis universe should have been a clean, fresh new start. The problem was that DC’s best selling book was Teen Titans–and so DC couldn’t start at “year 0” with the first appearance of Superman (which had been the original intention). Robin was a key part of the Teen Titans and Robin didn’t join Batman until about 3 years after Batman started being Batman. The other Titans didn’t show up until after that–so if they started with “Year 0”, they’d have to wait 4 or 5 years to start publishing their hottest selling book.
So instead, they decided to just say "It’s been 8(?) years since “Year 0” and did a few short series to fill you in on the revised history. Which might have worked if the editorial department had forced everyone to collaborate. But they didn’t.
So—over in Justice League, there were flashbacks and stories about how Batman was a founding member, but in Batman, the editors were saying that Batman had not only never been a member of the Justice League, but that everyone thought he was an urban legend(? yeah, pretty dumb idea to me too).
In Teen Titans, the second Robin (don’t ask) was an 9-year old circus performer (which is who he was, pre-Crisis) but in Batman, he was a really dumb street-punk who stole the hubcaps from the Batmobile and had a violent temper).
To make things even worse, they allowed writers to retroactively change the history of characters: about 5 years after the Crisis, Hawkman changed from being a space-cop from another planet to an alien drug-addict…and always had been. So stories that had been published after the Crisis suddenly made no sense.
They also darkened the universe beyond all recognition. In addition to Hawkman being an alien drug-addict, Robin was a street punk who the Joker beat to death, Green Lantern became a murdering psychopath, Batman got his back broken, etc…
They tried to mitigate some of the damage by having another Crisis (Zero-Hour: Crisis In Time) and doing a mini-reboot where Green Lantern (murdering psychopath, remember) tried to restart time and bring back all the parallel earths–it was never really clear why this was a bad thing and why the heroes were so opposed to it—but none of the changes (Catwoman’s history was revamped, Batman’s history was slightly revamped) stuck, except that they killed off another bunch of characters from the '40s.
Things kept getting worse and more confusing.
Continued (last one! Honest!)
I have this problem sometimes as well. The conclusion I came up with is that it’s the artist’s way of saying, “Hey! Slow down! Pay attention and soak this up!” If the conclusion you come to is that the artist is not good at storytelling and blocking the story, then find another title/artist that you enjoy.
Edit: Great recap, Fenris. Everything leading up to and including the Crisis really does seem well intentioned and interesting (though I do remember there being a lot of BS Crisis tie-in stories that were put in just to boost sales). Unfortunately, it seems to all have led to bigger and more convoluted Event story arcs.
Goooo Fenris. Finding your updates very informative.
Finally, about 6 years back, they had a third Crisis: Infinite Crisis. This one was FINALLY done right. A strong editor in chief said “We’re gonna fix things once and for all. Participation is NOT optional”.
The characters who’d escaped the original Crisis (Superman & Lois E-2, Alex Luthor E-3 and Superboy Earth Prime) didn’t actually go to heaven. They were stuck in a crystal prison that showed them all the stuff that happened on the new, post-Crisis earth. And they weren’t happy–it was so damned dark and miserable and they sacrificed everything for THIS?!
Superboy-Prime, in frustration, started pounding on the crystal walls of the prison and whenever he did, he altered time/history/reality–which is why all those changes (Hawkman’s origin constantly changing, etc) kept happening. These “reality punches” were used to explain all the continuity errors that had been made since the original Crisis and in general, the fans that loved the more absurd aspects of comics love that explaination, and the ones who wanted more serious comics hated it. I loved it. But then, I’m ok with “invisible yellow auras”, hidden cities of super-advanced gorillas, etc.
Eventually, Alex Luthor and Superboy Prime (now insane) hatched a scheme whereby they, along with Superman would escape their prison and reboot things one last time. There was a ton of set-up and I found it an excellent story with a great climax–it ended with one last reboot that fixed the worst screw-ups: Batman was no longer an urban legend and wasn’t spending all his time hunting his parent’s killer (one of his first missions was to find his parent’s killer–the editor prior to all this had decided that Batman wouldn’t be ‘motivated’ if he found his parent’s killer) , Wonder Woman was no longer a newbie who started 10 years after Batman and Superman, Superman was no longer a moron who had to kill several people to realize “Dur…killing is bad!”
And as a result of this (almost) last reboot, some parallel earths came back–but instead of an infinity of them, there were now only 52 (including the current earth).
A bunch of the parallel earths showed up in several (forgettable) series since (allegedly) it was planned in advance that there was going to be one last Crisis.
Final Crisis had the (alleged) final Reboot–other than reshuffling the remaining 51 universes, we don’t know what it did. It wasn’t (IMO) a very good series but the current status is that there are 52 parallel universes, of which New Earth, the one that showed up after Infinite Crisis, is one.
Does that help, or did I make things worse? 
The reason for the BS Crisis Crossovers was that when Marv Wolfman (who wrote Crisis) first asked everyone to participate, a bunch of writers said “Not in MY book, you’re not”* and the editorial staff didn’t make them. After the first issue of Crisis came out and was the biggest selling book of the year (or decade? It was huge in any case), and sales doubled or tripled on any book with a Crisis-Cross Over label, everyone wanted in and demanded that Wolfman write their character into Crisis. They also slapped “Crisis Cross-Over” on any book with a hint of a tie-in, even if it was only that the sky was red–just to get a piece of the sales. In large part, this is what started the trend of meaningless tie-ins.
Remember, this was the first huge cross-over ever* and no-one thought it would sell.
**Secret Wars was rushed out first, but it wasn’t planned in advance, and some stories (which I believe) have Shooter making it up as he went along–also there weren’t any real crossovers in Secret Wars. Characters disappeared in the last panel of their book and reappeared after the Secret Wars in the first panel of the next book.
Thanks Fenris, am also enjoying your posts.
And then there’s Marvel. But before we get to that, let’s do some differential equations in Urdu just to get warmed up.
It was my impression that Marvel was actually somewhat simpler as they didn’t have the multiple Earths interacting with each other. They use(d) separate universes that are discrete from each other in continuity along with a sprinkling of “what if” stories.
(Sorry, always wanted to head a post with those two words) this “Now Biggger! and More Convoluted!” seems geared at the wrong audience, if I understand comic-book readers–people NOT into difficult, complex, heavily demanding, abstract concepts. I mean, if someone said “That’s what I’d like, some serious difficult shit to process” would they be reading comics in the first place? The idea of parallel universes is way too demanding of serious brain-matter for me (to take it seriously, anyway) and I like dense, complicated novels. Is there a point where fans discuss the more subtle points of what’s being implied by a series of parallel universes where they get a response “Ahh, shaddddup wit’ dat, awready. It’s all about colored picture of imaginary figures, it ain’t supposed to stand up by itself.”?
Hypertime. i.e. “It’s all true.” Why they didn’t just run with this, I’ll never know.
Bolding mine. No, you don’t understand at all.
Ok–I’m going on my own memory of what complexity I was ready to process when I was a DC reader–I was easily the most intellectual kid on my block, and I would have found these abstract concepts too far removed from what I was looking for–a clear, exciting narrative, mysterious yet believable characters, cool action sequences etc. Is this of low interest to contempory fans?
PRR-From your own admission, you WERE the fans they were writing for. Early '60s, the parallel world concept should have been something you’d have gobbled up–certainly the fans of the time did–the annual Earth-1/Earth-2 crossover (in the summertime, when the “wall between dimensions was the weakest” (and when kids had the most spare money)" was the comic-book event of the year for about 15 years. Fans eagerly looked forward to the once-a-year crossover–it was DC’s best selling issues for years.
How abstract is it to say “Earth-1=Flash wears a cowl, Batman has a yellow circle around his chest emblem, Green Lantern is a cop and doesn’t wear a cape, none of them fought in WWII” vs “Earth-2=Flash wears a bowl on his head, Batman doesn’t have a yellow circle on his chest, Green Lantern has a magic ring and wears a cape, they ALL fought in WWII”?
Hell, 4 or 5 years after the concept was dealt with in comics (after being a staple for years in Science Fiction), Star Trek did the Mirror/Mirror story and it’s in just about everyone’s “Top 5 episodes” list. And it’s just an “Earth-3” story.
Really, it wasn’t all that complicated back then. (Now, yeah, it kinda is, although they’re trying to fix that.)
Darn, that’s complicated! In my comic book days, we thought Bizarro World was pretty far out.
Very interesting…
Earth-2 = boxers. Earth-1 = briefs.