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Has Crisis on Infinite Earths Been Undone?

A lot of genies have been let out of the bottle.

    Worlds lived, worlds died...
 Worlds lived, worlds died...

When I first got into reading comics as a kid, there were certain stories that everybody agreed that we’d never, ever see, like...

And look where we are, today, in spite of all those "certainties" - - though that last one's going to be a little debatable.

Maybe the planets were aligned, but a lot of important stuff seemed to happen in comics in the mid 80s; and CRISIS was one of the biggest. It wasn't only meant to be the ultimate DCU story - - a celebration of the company's 50 anniversary -  - it was also intended to do some much-needed housecleaning on continuity that had grown quite Byzantine over those five decades. Vestigial concepts and characters would be pruned while the main heroes would be streamlined to face the future.  

 You could sum up the goals of the crossover and its follow-ups as such… == TEASER ==

  • Do away with the multiverse in favor of one singular Earth.
  • Re-establish Superman as the last surviving Kryptonian.
  • Update and simplify all the major heroes' origins, Supes' in particular.
  • Replace older characters with new ones, like the Flash.
    23 years later.
 23 years later.

At that the time, all of that seemed incontrovertibly irreversible, but the recent resurrection and continued career of Barry Allen seems to be the last “genie that’s been let out of its bottle.” Prior to that, we’ve seen the re-introduction (and expansion) of the multiverse in 52; the revival of the Crime Syndicate, who were famously the first to be bite it in CRISIS; the return of Supes' extended Kryptonian family and most of his Silver Age mythos (including Superboy's existence); and the Anti-Monitor's even become a semi-regular villain in the cosmology. There's probably a lot of big changes I'm missing, too.

The long-used nomenclature of “pre-Crisis” and “post-Crisis” might not even apply anymore . In a lot of ways, the DCU’s back to the way it was before that epic maxi-series.  This multiverse, however, exists by design instead of being the result of accumulation, and perhaps that's been the key all this time.

    You've got the one world AND the multiple worlds at the same time.
 You've got the one world AND the multiple worlds at the same time.

The appeal of a multiverse in fictional continuum like this is that allows readers to have their cake and eat it, too. If you like stories where Batman’s career started in the 30s as much as you like stories where he "began" todays, then you don’t have to worry about reconciling them. You enjoy both and never be concerned about them intersecting - - unless there's a story in that, too. By having two Earths and two possibilities existing at the same time, you really don’t have to choose.  Oddly enough, I suppose the same principle applies to the merits of pre and post CRISIS continuity. On the one hand, there’s something refreshing about a streamlining that keeps things simple. On the other, is it unnecessarily limiting to block off such a deep pool of stories? That's what Hypertime was getting at, after all, wasn't it?

Much like the earlier question about who's Spider-Man’s definitive girlfriend, I figure your take on whether this is a good or bad thing depends on when you started reading and what milieu you’re used to. Since we’ve got a broad swarth of readers - - dare I say, it's a multiverse of ages, sizes and nationalities - - I’d like to hand you all the mic and ask for your opinions on what era’s best. Pre-Crisis? Post-Crisis? Or Post-Infinite Crisis? Post-Final Criss? There's surely a boundless continuum of answers.

Tom Pinchuk’s the writer of    HYBRID BASTARDS!  &   UNIMAGINABLE . Order them on Amazon   here   &     here .