128 CRISIS ON INFINITE EARTHS
While DC had frequently employed “team-ups” and “cross-overs” to link characters
and storylines (and to increase sales of less popular titles through “guest appearances” by
more popular characters), the plan to clean up decades of increasingly convoluted expla-
nations and narrative contradictions demanded a story that would fi x the chronology of
dozens of titles, including hundreds of characters, published by the company over the
past half century. Wolfman’s considerable achievement was to trace a coherent narrative
thread centered around new characters (free of the weight of past stories)—the Monitor
and Anti-Monitor, representatives of cosmic order and chaos; Harbinger, the Monitor’s
space-and-time-traveling aide; and Pariah, a scientist from a doomed parallel universe
forced to witness the destruction of subsequent universes—through what might have
simply been an encyclopedic summary of the fates of major and minor characters. As
the Anti-Monitor begins to destroy earths (an act that resembles blank pages, the ulti-
mate horror in a comic book), Harbinger recruits DC’s pantheon of heroes to help save
at least one of these, and at least one incarnation of major characters. Recognizing that
the collapse of the multiverse into a single Earth would require the elimination of many
older storylines, Wolfman made the most of what was then a relatively rare decision
in mainstream comics: to kill prominent, popular characters. Most boldly, the deaths
of Barry Allen, the Silver Age Flash (in #8) and Supergirl Kara Zor-El (in #7) made
good on the promise to dramatically alter the DC universe, and genuinely shocked and
moved fans, who were not yet jaded by the regular killing and resurrection of characters
in mainstream comics. Wolfman’s ability to locate such moments within a sweeping
tour through the entire DC universe was perfectly matched by the drawings of Pérez,
who was already known for his ability to pack dozens of recognizable characters into
single panels, and to weave telling details into graphic representations of epic battles.
Despite DC’s best eff orts to impose and maintain order on its creations, subtle
resistance to the revised narrative arose quickly: DC launched the series Secret Origins
(1986) with the well-known story of “the original” Golden Age Superman, which it
claimed had passed “from the collective memory of virtually all mankind,” whereas the
problem was of course exactly the opposite. Alan Brennert’s poignant Deadman story
“Should Auld Acquaintance Be Forgot,” which slipped quietly into the holiday special
Christmas with the Super-Heroes 2 (1988), dared to suggest that the demand to sim-
ply forget the existence of Supergirl might be unenforceable. By 1990, when, in issue
#24 of his radical revision of Animal Man, Grant Morrison retrieved the banished
Psycho Pirate, “the only character in the DC universe who remembers the multiverse
that existed before the events of Crisis on Infi nite Earths,” the “pre-Crisis” DC universe
had roared back with a vengeance, as writers increasingly made continuity and its crea-
tive possibilities a central narrative device rather than a guiding rule for organizing
their stories. By the time of the miniseries Zero Hour: Crisis in Time (1994) a renewed
attempt by the company to simplify its narratives seemed desperate, and fodder for later
writers to undermine. Later DC series have also echoed Crisis on Infi nite Earths in style
and title: Identity Crisis (2004), Infi nite Crisis (2005–6), and Final Crisis (2008) all
echo the original series even as they undermine its eff orts. Indeed, writers like Morrison,
