Crisis on Infinite Earths

Back in the day, comic books were straightforward things. Superman or Batman would fight crime, tie up the bad guys and finish the story in twenty or so colourful pages. However, it wasn’t long before the writers realised that these characters lived in the same universe and so they could boost sales by having characters show up in each others comics as crossover stories. They would also reboot characters from time to time, to reset the numbering and retell the origin stories for a new generation of readers as well as moving the time period forward so they wouldn’t have to explain why the characters had been around since the 1940s with getting any older.

By the sixties and seventies things got even more complicated with multiple versions of characters running around, explained away by convenient parallel universes that could be visited by the super speedster Flash running fast enough to jump between them. Thus the original Golden age characters could co-exist on one Earth, with the newer versions on another, as well as multiple other alternate realities (including one where the Nazis won the war). To say it was a convoluted mess is something of an understatement.

In 1985 writer Marv Wolfman pitched the idea of collapsing the multiverse into a single Earth to give a fresh start, as well as writing the ultimate crossover featuring just about every version of every DC character, even if just for a single panel background cameo.

The high concept is that a character called the Monitor has been watching the multiverse from the beginning of time in anticipation of the moment where he needs to summon a band of heroes (and villains) to counter the ultimate threat of his opposite number - the Anti-Monitor from an anti-matter universe.

Needless to say say there are plenty of fights and twists as the multiverse collapses, with many characters meeting their doom including the iconic cover picture of the death of Supergirl although presumably she got better in time for the recently released film. This is an essential series for comics nerds with great artwork by George Perez showing hundreds of different characters ranging from cavemen to cowboys, and super beings of every variety.