So, generally, when I want to celebrate an anniversary, I make an effort to post pretty close to the actual date of the anniversary. In this case, I wasn't back up to speed on blogging when the anniversary of the first issue took place in January, but since it was a year-long event, I'm going to assume this is still a timely discussion.If you're a fan of comic books (or even if you've only read my post about the Justice Society of America for #JSApril a couple of months back), you already know the basics: DC Comics created a multiverse to explain their use, over time, of different characters sharing the same basic superheroic name and powers. They later decided to streamline things on the occasion of their own 50th anniversary in 1985, and the result was Crisis on Infinite Earths.
The legacy of Crisis on Infinite Earths is beyond dispute. Comics historians have discussed DC's output in terms of "pre-Crisis" and "post-Crisis" ever since. What's perhaps less well-known to more casual fans is that the word "Crisis" had already been in semi-frequent use to title crossover events for at least 20 years at that point, beginning with "Crisis on Earth-One!" in 1963, bringing the Justice Society and the better-known Justice League together for the first time. That said, uses of the word "Crisis" in the decades since have tended to be references to the 1985 series: Infinite Crisis, Final Crisis, Dark Crisis, etc.*
Besides serving as an excuse to set up DC's new reality (at least for the next couple of decades), it really was a celebration of their history thus far, as Marv Wolfman (who wrote the script) and George Pérez (who penciled the art) crammed as many of the hundreds of characters in DC's roster into the mix as possible. Sometimes, this came only in the form of a non-speaking cameo appearance, but the effort was clearly there.
The legacy of Crisis on Infinite Earths is beyond dispute. Comics historians have discussed DC's output in terms of "pre-Crisis" and "post-Crisis" ever since. What's perhaps less well-known to more casual fans is that the word "Crisis" had already been in semi-frequent use to title crossover events for at least 20 years at that point, beginning with "Crisis on Earth-One!" in 1963, bringing the Justice Society and the better-known Justice League together for the first time. That said, uses of the word "Crisis" in the decades since have tended to be references to the 1985 series: Infinite Crisis, Final Crisis, Dark Crisis, etc.*
Besides serving as an excuse to set up DC's new reality (at least for the next couple of decades), it really was a celebration of their history thus far, as Marv Wolfman (who wrote the script) and George Pérez (who penciled the art) crammed as many of the hundreds of characters in DC's roster into the mix as possible. Sometimes, this came only in the form of a non-speaking cameo appearance, but the effort was clearly there.There's plenty of debate in fan circles about whether or not it was necessary to eliminate the multiverse, and it seems to me that the fact that the multiverse was re-established 20 years later would suggest that it wasn't, but there's little denying that the crossover event did give DC Comics a lot of publicity and generated sales, if for no other reason then that it gave new readers places to jump on to new (or perhaps rebooted) storylines. More by coincidence than by design, it certainly came along at the perfect time for me, having turned 11 in 1985. Although Marvel's Transformers comic was certainly the main driver into my interest in comic books, it remains the truth that I've otherwise followed DC's titles much more consistently.
*I really should at least name drop Identity Crisis in this mix, which undeniably traded on the "Crisis" language, but unlike the other stories mentioned in this post, had nothing whatsoever to do with Crisis on Infinite Earths nor the multiverse. Honorable mention goes to Zero Hour, which had the subtitle "Crisis in Time," and acknowledged that its story played off of events in Crisis on Infinite Earths, although Zero Hour also didn't really acknowledge the (then-former) existence of the multiverse.
*I really should at least name drop Identity Crisis in this mix, which undeniably traded on the "Crisis" language, but unlike the other stories mentioned in this post, had nothing whatsoever to do with Crisis on Infinite Earths nor the multiverse. Honorable mention goes to Zero Hour, which had the subtitle "Crisis in Time," and acknowledged that its story played off of events in Crisis on Infinite Earths, although Zero Hour also didn't really acknowledge the (then-former) existence of the multiverse.
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