Alan Kistler's Intro to the First Crisis

 

Hello there. Comic historian and general continuity nerd Alan Kistler here.

Several of you readers are comic fans. Some of you, like me, own The Crisis in separate issue form. Others of you picked up the collected edition or read the novelization by Marv Wolfman. But several of you, although you know the basics of the story, never actually bought it. And some of you who did buy it didn't understand major parts of it because you're unfamiliar with the Pre-Crisis continuity of DC Comics or you just didn't get who some of the characters were. And some of you may have read it way back when but are foggy on the details now or simply never knew about some of the events that led into it and/or happened on the sidelines

So for all of you folks, here is a play-by-play recap of The Crisis On Infinite Earths, as well as some of its tie-ins.

First, a basic question.

Why Did the Crisis Have to Happen?

You're all comic fans. You know how hard it is to explain some things to non-comic fans you want to convert without seeming silly or overly complicated. Well, if you were a DC Comics fan trying to explain the basic super-heroes to a newbie back in 1984, this is how it may have sounded like:

"So this is Justice League of America and it has a lot of heroes in it, including Superman. And this is Infinity, Inc., which is a bunch of heroes who are the children or proteges of the Justice Society of America. Hmm? ... no, no, the Justice Society is different from the Justice League. They're older and fought in World War II and they exist on Earth-2 whereas the JLA exist on Earth-1. And the JSA also has their own version Superman, only he's older and not quite as powerful and he's married. He started fighting crime when he was an adult, but the Earth-1 Superman originally started crime-fighting when he was a teenager and called himself Superboy and then became Superman later. And Earth-1 Superman hang out with other Kryptonian survivors his a flying dog named Krypto and his cousin Supergirl, who has a flying Earth-cat with powers named Streaky the Super-Cat. Earth-2 Superman also has a cousin but her name is Power Girl and the two of them are the only survivors of their version of Krypton (which I guess should be called Krypton-2, but no one's ever mentioned it). And sometimes Superman (that's Earth-1 Superman, not Earth-2 Superman) has fought Captain Marvel who's the biggest hero on Earth-S where only he and his "Marvel family" are super-heroes. And, oh, did I mention Black Canary? She used to live on Earth-2, but then had her mind transplanted into the body of her own daughter and now she lives on Earth-1, but she still sometimes sees her friends from Earth-2 when the JLA and JSA team-up. They team-up every year, you see, cuz it's really easy to jump from one world to another."

Yeah. My head hurts a little bit. Yes, if you were a reader for a few months or years, you got it and you understood it and it was generally okay. But the problem was that DC had a harder and harder time attracting new readers into their comics when newbies basically needed a map of the universes to keep things straight, especially when their competition at Marvel Comics had a much easier time getting fans into their stories. All Marvel had to say was "we have a lot of super-heroes, most of them live in or nearby New York City, on rare occasions they meet people from another universe but those folks never stay for too long or have much bearing on the status quo."

DC was trying to figure out a way to ease the confusion for new readers. On top of that, after many decades of story-telling, they were faced with the fact that some ideas seemed a bit played out or silly now (perhaps an unfair belief, but that was the feeling). Many (though not all) readers and writers felt some serious house-cleaning was in order.

It had all started when DC rebooted their super-hero comics in 1956, starting with the Flash. There had been a hero called Flash years before, Jay Garrick of Keystone City, Kansas who wore a red shirt, jeans and a Mercury-like helmet. But like many other Golden Age heroes, his stories were cancelled and he wasn't seen for years.

By '56, DC wanted super-heroes again, but decided they would start fresh. Same names and sometimes same powers, but different origins and characters so that no one would have to know the previous continuity to get into it. The new Flash was Barry Allen of Central City, Missouri. He wore a different looking costume that was basically a body-suit with a full mask.

In his first appearance, Barry was seen holding a Flash comic book that showcased adventures of a character named Jay Garrick. So any reader old enough to remember that name realized that these new DC Comics considered the Golden Age characters and stories "not real." In the case of guys like Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman, it was just decided that any stories they'd been in previous to this new "Silver Age" of comics were now out of continuity and didn't need to be mentioned ever again

  

During the Golden Age, DC's major heroes had been in a team called the Justice Society of America. In 1960, they decided to create a new team for their new heroes, but this time with a name that had a little more punch. And so, the new modern-day A-list heroes joined forces as the Justice League of America.

Later, writer Gardner Fox thought it would be fun to have the Golden Age heroes meet up with the present day heroes. So he wrote a story where Barry Allen discovered that by attuning his molecules to a precise super-speed vibration, he could actually shift himself into a parallel universe. It was another Earth, much like our own, inhabiting the same space but existing on a different vibrational frequency (this concept is actually a bit like string theory).

  

 

Since he was the first person to discover this multiverse and travel from one parallel Earth to another, Barry dubbed his home Earth-1 and this new place Earth-2. And he discovered that the comic book hero Jay Garrick he'd read about as a boy was a real person on Earth-2. And so, DC Comics revealed that all their Golden Age heroes lived on this place called Earth-2. Barry theorized that certain writers on Earth-1 must have somehow gotten glimpses of Earth-2 in their dreams and subconscious and that's how Barry was able to read comic books about people who actually lived in a parallel dimension.

Fine, except that occasionally some story gaffs would cause a problem here or there and continuity would get a bit confused. And then, as time went on, we were also introduced to other worlds such as Earth-3, a mirror-world where heroes were evil and vice versa, or Earth-A (yet another alternate Earth). As years passed, DC also bought smaller comic book companies such as Fawcett Comics and Quality Comics and Charlton Comics. Rather than just keep these other comics separate or integrate them fully with their modern-day characters who lived on Earth-1, DC decided to simply say the characters of each small company existed on yet other Earths as well. So the Fawcett Comics characters were said to live on Earth-S (a joke on the fact that many of their heroes owed their powers to the wizard Shazam) and the Quality Comics heroes lived on Earth-X. To confuse matter further, it was later written that the heroes of Earth-X (a world where World War II ended quite differently) had originally been inhabitants of Earth-2.

Time went on. 1985 was going to mark the 50th anniversary of DC Comics and the DC gods wanted a story that featured just about every one of their characters. And the idea came, why not use this event as an excuse to clean house? The multiverse would be in danger and in the end the result would be that a new unified universe with only one Earth and a streamlined history would remain. They could get rid stories that involved heroes constantly finding/needing ways to travel between universes. And since time and space were being rebooted, the writers could also throw out parts of continuity they thought were outdated or simply didn't care for anymore (such as the fact that Batman had once teamed up with a Batwoman, who used a utility purse, and had owned a masked canine reffered to as the "Bat-Hound").

The job was given to Marv Wolfman and George Perez, who were wowing people with their work on The New Teen Titans. You had a writer with a great flair for characterization and conflict and an artist who could draw crowd scenes and fight scenes like nobody's business.

The First JLA / JSA Team-Up!

In the past, whenever the JLA and JSA had teamed up, the story had almost always had a title like "Crisis On Two Earths" or "Crisis On Earths 1 and 2" or something similar. In honor of this, the story of the death of the multiverse would be called the "Crisis on INFINITE Earths."

And now, to help you out ... 

A map of the Pre-Crisis Multiverse.

Or if you just want a short summary of the whole event, go ahead to The First Crisis In A Nutshell.