Crisis on Infinite Earths
I recently re-read the classic mid-1980s comic maxi-series: Crisis on Infinite Earths. What I am going to talk about here is this comic series and not the recent animated movies (which I have not seen) or the Arrowverse crossover (which I have seen).
It is difficult to overestimate the impact of Crisis. The original purpose of the series was to clean up the continuity of the DC Universe but while many of those changes have been reversed, in another way it changed comic book stories forever.
This really was the first real company-wide crossover series and it was that series every crossover since then has tried to imitate. They brought in more heroes and villains and supporting characters than most people have heard of.
The story was written by Marv Wolfman and drawn by George Perez. This was the team that had reinvented the Teen Titans into one of the most popular series at the time. If anyone could reinvent the DC Universe, it was Wolfman and Perez.
The story starts with a problem. Ever since the silver age Flash met the golden age Flash, DC has had a series of multiple earths, It began with Earth One and Earth Two. But it expanded with an evil version of the Justice League on Earth Three. Then they gave earths to the heroes from companies such as Quality and Fawcett and most recently at that time, Charlton.
That’s fine but then we have multiple versions of Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, and many others. It got kind of confusing. So Crisis was designed to simplify things.
The story revolves around a conflict between two cosmic entities named the Monitor and the Anti-Monitor. The Anti-Monitor was seeking to destroy all of the positive matter universes, while the Monitor was trying to save the five final universes. Heroes and villains participate and there are all kinds of wild battles.
Was Crisis successful? Not really.
Part of the reason is that it offered an opportunity for a full reboot of the DC Universe but it really only became a partial reboot. Both Superman and Wonder Woman were reimagined but Superman was still placed as one of the first silver age heroes, while Wonder Woman was made a newly appearing hero. This was confusing as there was an already existing Wonder Girl, who was completely unrelated. Batman was not restarted at all. And don’t even get me started on Hawkman…
It did create the opportunity for some new and entertaining stories but eventually, everything the Crisis did was undone. Even the major deaths of Supergirl and Flash were eventually reversed.
The biggest change, as I have already mentioned, was the scope of stories that were seen as possible. The most lasting impact of Crisis on Infinite Earths was the breaking of the limits that companies thought possible for crossovers. Unfortunately, some of the attempts to create something bigger than last year’s crossover have fallen flat.
Still, what Marv Wolfman and George Perez gave us was something special. It is a story that can stand on its own and no amount of retconning can take away from that gift.
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