CRISIS ON INFINITE EARTHS 127
Selected Bibliography: Benton, Mike. Th e Illustrated History of Crime Comics. Dallas:
Taylor Publishing, 1993; Hajdu, David. Th e Ten-Cent Plague. New York: Farrar, Straus,
and Giroux, 2008; Wright, Bradford. Comic Book Nation. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 2001.
John F. Weinzierl
CRISIS ON INFINITE EARTHS. A 12-issue maxi-series published by DC Comics in
1985, Crisis on Infi nite Earths was written by Marv Wolfman and penciled by George
Pérez (with inking by Mike DeCarlo, Dick Giordano and Jerry Ordway). Planned
earlier but released to mark the company’s 50th anniversary, the series sought to revise
and calibrate the entire fi ctional universe in which DC superhero comics took place,
streamlining the company’s previously confusing parallel universes and multiple earths.
By in eff ect starting over, DC rendered many of its “pre-Crisis” characters and storylines
“unoffi cial,” and sought to welcome new, presumably more mature readers to relaunched
narratives that no longer demanded extensive background knowledge. While the attempt
to erase or ask fans to simply forget decades of DC stories was perhaps always doomed
to failure, the popular success of the series ironically inspired subsequent company-wide
“crises” that would regularly shake things up at both DC and Marvel. Indeed, as Geoff
Klock emphasized, “Th e irony of Crisis was that its methodology, in simplifying conti-
nuity, was used to make superhero comics all the more complex, convoluted, and rich:
any attempt at simplifying continuity into something streamlined, clear, and direct...
only results in another layer of continuity.” As Klock’s study of mainstream comics in its
wake shows, the legacy of Crisis has been the exact opposite of its intentions: “Retroac-
tive changes, re-imaginings, reinterpretations, revisiting origins, and revisions became
major storytelling tools” of superhero comics only after DC’s attempt to control their
proliferation (21).
Th e roots of the ambitious Crisis project lay in a groundbreaking Silver Age
story, “Flash of Two Worlds,” written by Gardner Fox under infl uential editor Julius
Schwartz, for the Flash #123 (September 1961), which introduced the concept of the
“multiverse” to DC comics when Silver Age Flash, Barry Allen, met Golden Age Flash,
Jay Garrick, on the parallel world subsequently designated Earth-Two; the story thus
provided a narrative explanation for the publication history of the same character (with
diff erent identities) in two eras. Th e popularity of the story encouraged the revival of
other Golden Age characters for regular encounters with current characters, especially
in annual “crossovers” of the Silver Age Justice League of America and the Golden Age
Justice Society of America, starting in Justice League of America #21 and #22 (1963)
with “Crisis on Earth-One!” and the follow-up “Crisis on Earth-Two!” However, 20 years
later the proliferation of “infi nite” earths, populated by multiple versions of even major
fi gures like Superman, led to confusion and the need for clarifi cation, especially as com-
ics writers and long-term fans began to increasingly rely on the notion of “continuity”
(only loosely adhered to by earlier writers) to link most of the comics produced by the
company into a vast text of interconnected narratives.
