Everything You Should Know About Crisis On Infinite Earths

With a story that runs across five hours of television in December 2019 and January 2020, Crisis on Infinite Earths is set to include not just all of the current DC shows, but also a roster of heroes drawn from a long history of television. It's exciting stuff, but it raises a question: just how did we get here?

The CW's version of Crisis on Infinite Earths is notable for being the first event of its kind to take place on television, but the comic book history that leads up to it starts all the way back in 1961, or, depending on how you look at it, maybe even before then.

Back in the '40s, after Superman was introduced to the public and proved to be wildly popular and extremely profitable for its publishers, he inspired a whole wave of brand-new superhero comics. Eventually, the company that would become DC Comics decided to put a few of them in the same book, creating the Justice Society of America and the first shared universe in comics. By the late '40s and early '50s, however, superheroes fell out of popularity. Only the most consistently successful heroes stuck around, while the rest, like the original Golden Age versions of the Flash and Green Lantern, were canceled and seemingly condemned to obscurity.

But then, a decade later, DC decided to dust off a few of those pulpy concepts and reboot them in a slightly more sci-fi direction, kicking off the Silver Age of Comics with an all-new, mostly different version of the Flash. Right from the start, though, there was something weird: in that first story, Barry Allen was inspired to take the name "The Flash" because he'd read comics about Jay Garrick, the Golden Age Flash. With that, DC began to flirt with the idea of a multiverse, where different versions of their characters existed in different realities. This all came together in 1961's famous "The Flash of Two Worlds," where Barry and Jay met up for a single adventure. It turned out that this was just the beginning.

By 1964, DC had a multiverse centered on Earth-One, the somewhat arrogantly named primary DC universe that featured the ongoing adventures of the present-day heroes. Meanwhile, the Golden Age versions politely allowed themselves to be called Earth-Two despite the fact that they came first. Clearly, there was only one thing left to do: a crossover!

Justice League of America #21 and 22 featured "Crisis on Earth-One" and "Crisis on Earth-Two," in which the Justice League teamed up with their Golden Age counterparts in the Justice Society to battle for the fate of two universes. This kicked off two important DC traditions. First was the idea of an annual JLA/JSA crossover, which continued for the next 20 years. The second was that almost all of these crossovers, which spread out throughout the DC Multiverse, were called a "Crisis," making that the shorthand word for a threat that went beyond the scale of a single universe. Eventually, though, things spiraled to the point of being as big as they possibly could. Keep watching the video to see everything you should know about Crisis on Infinite Earths!

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The 60-year Crisis | 0:20
Crises on Too Many Earths | 1:49
Crisis on Infinite Earths | 2:45
Arrow becomes the Arrowverse | 4:05
Elseworlds | 5:46
The state of the Multiverse | 7:20
What do we know? | 9:03
Death in the multiverse? | 10:44

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