Crisis on Infinite Earths, Explained: Every Reboot DC Has Run Since

The problem Crisis was built to solve

By the early 1980s DC had roughly forty-five years of stories and a multiverse to accommodate them. Earth-Two held the Golden Age heroes who had aged in real time, Earth-One the Silver Age versions, Earth-Three the evil counterparts, and characters bought from other publishers lived on their own worlds — Captain Marvel on Earth-S, the Charlton heroes on Earth-Four.

That system was elegant for long-time readers and impenetrable for new ones. The stated aim of Crisis was to collapse it into a single history a newcomer could follow.

Marv Wolfman and George Pérez published it across twelve issues in 1985–86, and it remains the template every publisher-wide reboot has followed since.

• FactCrisis on Infinite Earths was a twelve-issue limited series published in 1985–86 by Marv Wolfman and George Pérez, intended to merge DC's multiverse into a single continuity.Source: Wikipedia

What actually changed

Five surviving Earths merged into one. Two headline deaths anchored it: Supergirl and Barry Allen, both of whom stayed dead for far longer than comics deaths usually do — roughly two decades each.

Superman lost his Superboy career and most of his Silver Age excess. Wonder Woman was restarted from scratch by George Pérez. Batman's history was tightened by Frank Miller's Year One. The Justice Society were awkwardly relocated into the past as the previous generation.

Some fixes created worse problems. Removing Superboy from continuity broke the Legion of Super-Heroes, whose entire premise was inspiration by a teenage Superman, and DC spent the next fifteen years patching that hole with increasingly baroque solutions.

• FactSupergirl and Barry Allen both died in Crisis on Infinite Earths and remained dead for roughly two decades — Barry returning in 2008's Final Crisis and Kara in 2004.Source: Wikipedia

Zero Hour, Infinite Crisis and the multiverse's return

Zero Hour (1994) was the first patch — a smaller event that adjusted timelines and reset the Legion again. It is mostly remembered as evidence that the single-continuity promise had already failed within a decade.

Infinite Crisis (2005) was Geoff Johns' direct sequel, using survivors of the original Crisis who had been watching from outside. It restored a bounded multiverse: 52 universes, deliberately finite, which gave writers alternate-Earth stories without the 1985 chaos.

Final Crisis (2008) by Grant Morrison sits alongside it and is the strangest of the three — less continuity housekeeping, more a story about the death of story. Read it last, or not at all if you value your patience.

• FactInfinite Crisis (2005–06) restored a finite DC multiverse of 52 parallel universes, reversing the single-Earth outcome of the original Crisis.Source: Wikipedia

Flashpoint and the New 52

Flashpoint (2011) ended with Barry Allen altering history and produced the New 52: every DC title relaunched at issue one with five years of in-universe superhero history, younger characters, and a substantially revised continuity.

Commercially it worked at first and then didn't. Creatively it removed relationships readers cared about — most notoriously the Superman/Lois marriage and much of the Bat-family's history — and the compressed five-year timeline made the older characters' careers implausible.

It also, unusually, was not framed as fixing anything. Crisis had a stated purpose. The New 52 was a sales strategy, and readers could tell.

• FactFlashpoint (2011) led directly into the New 52, in which DC relaunched its entire line with 52 new number-one issues and a revised continuity.Source: Wikipedia

Rebirth, Doomsday Clock and Infinite Frontier

DC Universe: Rebirth (2016) is the most interesting document in this whole chain, because it made the New 52's flaws into the plot: something had stolen ten years of history and love from the DC universe, and the returning Wally West is the one who notices.

That thread ran through Doomsday Clock, which folded in Watchmen and ended with a metafictional conceit — the DC universe repeatedly rebooting because a higher force keeps rewriting it, with each Crisis one of those rewrites.

Infinite Frontier and the current era resolved it by declaring everything canon. Every previous continuity happened, somewhere, and the multiverse — now Omniverse — holds all of it. That is either a cop-out or the only honest answer to eighty-five years of stories, depending on your temperament.

What this means for a reader in practice

You do not need to read any Crisis to start DC. That is the most important practical point and the opposite of what continuity-anxious newcomers assume. Pick a self-contained modern run and go.

You need Crisis lore only when a story references it, and the references are almost always explained in-panel. The events are best read as historical documents about the industry rather than as required homework.

If you do want them, the reading order is: Crisis on Infinite Earths, Infinite Crisis, Final Crisis, Flashpoint, DC Universe: Rebirth, Doomsday Clock. That is roughly forty years of publishing in six volumes.

The Arrowverse version

The CW adapted Crisis on Infinite Earths as a five-episode crossover in 2019–20, and it is a surprisingly faithful structural adaptation: the Anti-Monitor, the antimatter wave, a doomed Flash, and a merged Earth at the end.

It also did something the comic could not — it cast the multiverse with actors from earlier live-action DC productions, turning a continuity clean-up into a nostalgia event. For a lot of viewers, that crossover is the only Crisis they know.